Bob Gibson: I Come for to Sing

By: Carole Bender and Bob Gibson

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Synopsis: Inspired by a meeting with Pete Seeger, a young Bob Gibson left behind a successful job to collect folk songs. His arrangements, songwriting, and musical innovations took his audiences by storm, lighting the fire that led to the full-blown folk-music revival of the late 1950s. He introduced Joan Baez in 1959, Judy Collins in 1960, and his songs have been recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, The Kingston Trio, and many others. The book follows Bob Gibson through his meteoric rise to fame, his twenty-year struggle with drug addiction, and his never-ending process of reinventing himself to find new expressions for his art. Two years after his life-changing meeting with Pete Seeger, Gibson burst onto the music scene with an unprecedented joy for his music. He not only changed public perception of what folk music was, but he helped introduce a new format for the presentation of music, which became the coffeehouse circuit. His own arrangements of folk music, coupled with his original songs, began the trend of the 1950s and 1960s in which songwriters created their own modern day folk songs, giving expression to that turbulent era. Bob Gibson: I Come For To Sing includes the reminiscences and interviews with many musicians and songwriters including Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, George Carlin, Judy Collins, and Odetta, as well as many others instrumental to the formulation of the folk-music revival of the 1960s.