How would you like to be invited to a party at Adlai Stevensonâs house, with such fellow guests as John McCloy, Archibald MacLeish, Aaron Copeland and Lauren Bacall?
Itâs easy. All you have to do is get yourself a banjo and start practicing up on folk songs.
Well, itâs not really all that easy. Youâve got to nip around the world, spreading good will for the U.S.A., and singing in 27 languages. It also helps to catch dysentery, worms and a touch of hepatitis.
A man who chose this long and devious route to get invited to a party is Bill Crofut, young, upcoming folk-singer who has been visiting in Pittsfield over the holidays. Heâs the brother of Mrs. William A. Whittlesey III of 380 Holmes Road. Crofut comes from Cleveland, Ohio, where his father is president of a medical supply company. Young Crofut started veering away from medical supplies while a student at Putney School in Vermont, where he studied the French horn with a view to becoming a music teacher. But while a student in Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, he began plinking and plunking and raising his voice in song. Next thing, he was in the Army, which gave him the MOS of folk-singer, and there he was in Korea, with a banjo as his basic weapon.