Lifelong Passion for Music Drives Leader of Arts Charity

I was born in Boston in 1939. My father was a naval architect and my mother was a concert pianist,

Betsy Siggins Schmidt Age: 68 First professional job: Executive director, Yorkville Common Pantry, New York Current job: Executive director, Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center, Cambridge, Mass.

so our lives revolved around music and sailing. When I was a child I listened to classical music downstairs, and in my bedroom, I could listen to the Wheeling, W.Va., country-music station.

But when I was young I really didn’t know how much my love of music would change my life.

When I went to Boston University, I thought I’d be a theater-arts major, but I discovered I didn’t want to memorize lots and lots of dialogue, and I dropped out of college.

Eventually I ended up getting my degree at Empire State College, just before I turned 50, with a bachelor’s degree in women in poverty and community development.

My best friend at Boston University was Joan Baez, whose father was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We used to ride her Vespa from classes to her house in Belmont. At this time, Joan was just beginning to sing in the community.

I was also waitressing at Club 47, a nonprofit organization that had a manager and a board of directors. Here was a community art gallery as well as a place for live folk performances. In those days coffeehouses didn’t serve alcohol, and they were great places to discuss a variety of topics.

Club 47 started bringing in musicians from Chicago and the Deep South whose music we had only heard on records or performed by someone else. Now we were able to hear live music by Doc Watson, Muddy Waters, Mimi and Richard Farina, Judy Collins, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, among others. No one stayed in hotels then. After the club closed for the evening, the musicians, like Mississippi John Hurt, would come home with us and end up sleeping on our couch.

In 1960, I married Bob Siggins, a neuro-pharmacologist who graduated from Harvard and who also played banjo with the Charles River Valley Boys, which was a bluegrass band whose members were Harvard and MIT students. After we were married, I volunteered full time at Club 47. Every day there was something exciting happening. But we had no money, no system in place for obtaining grants, or for getting money from wealthy individuals, or any experience with foundations.

Because of Club 47, many Northerners, who now knew more about these great Southern musicians, were traveling to the South to be as close to the original music as possible. The club had been a great source of information about traditional music and gave younger artists the inspiration to see if they could write a song, but we just didn’t have the money to continue.

We knew that we’d had a fabulous run, but nevertheless, in 1968, we had to shut down.

That year I went with my husband to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he was pursuing a doctorate. One of our friends, Ralph Rinzler, who played bluegrass mandolin, had just been assigned a new job at the Smithsonian Institution to organize and run the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall. I worked for him for four years as a volunteer and arranged for performances by Native Americans, as well as people like Muddy Waters. We ended up doing a lot of traveling, and we were able to introduce these musicians to people who had never heard this kind of music before.

Then I went to New York, where I was the executive director of the Yorkville Common Pantry for 18 years. This was the first time I had a paying job. Here I ran the first soup kitchen that provided multiple services for people with AIDS. I then went to work at the Food and Hunger Hotline and did a lot of fund raising through concerts, as I had done at the Yorkville Common Pantry.

I ended up becoming a leader in the antihunger, antihomeless movement. My life has been very much shaped by my commitment to civil rights for everyone, adequate housing for all Americans, and my antiwar efforts.

When I received an offer from a similar program in Boston, I took it. I had been divorced, and at the time of the job offer, my daughter was living in Boston. In addition, my partner, Hugh McGraw, with whom I was living in New York, came from Fall River, which is near Boston, and we both wanted to return home. However, when we got there, the organization and I turned out not to have the same view and we parted ways.

Shortly thereafter, in 1997, I got a call from the Passim Center, which today is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the cultivation and preservation of folk music. It was in deep financial trouble and owed Harvard University rent money, and it was at the request of Harvard that the center reorganized itself as a nonprofit. When I got on the board, I realized that the board did not have the necessary experience to successfully run a nonprofit.

I knew we had to have people who had a great love for the community and for the music before we could approach the bankers. After a year, I left the board and worked for a year — with no salary — as the executive director of the center. I brought five new people onto the board. One of our most important board members was Bill Nowlin, who was president of Rounder Records, an independent record label in Boston.

By 2003, we were financially sound — although things did become more difficult money-wise after September 11, 2001 — and today we have an annual operating budget of $800,000, which comes from the ticket sales to some 400 performances a year, as well as membership dues, money from foundations, individual contributions, and special events. I have a staff of eight full-time employees.

Passim — the name comes from a couple of Latin words that put together translate into “a little here, a little there” — has three programs.

The first is a music school that offers traditional instrument lessons, as well as traditional singing and songwriting classes.

We also sponsor Culture for Kids, a free after-school program for low-income children. The program brings musicians from different cultures to perform their music at the schools. Bringing in people from different cultures gives children the opportunity to learn about their neighbors in a nonthreatening way.

Finally we have our Archive Project, which has 50 years of correspondence and memories from myself and others. I’m trying to raise money to hire a folklorist, but we will need an organizational grant to do this. My dream is to have a museum that will archive the items in those boxes and be an important source of scholarship for academics, musicians, and the public.

I’m always struck by how unique folk music and the folk community is. The Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center and other places like us help to make a home for a variety of talented people who would otherwise kind of feel they don’t fit in anywhere else because they are so creative.