Influencing each other

another in my craft genealogy series

I sometimes get encouraging comments from people thanking me for “keeping the craft alive.” I’m always flattered and grateful (for any positive comments, really) - but that concept is not really something I think about much. I guess when I do give it any thought, I assume the “craft” - whatever that term might cover, will carry on. In this shape or that - but people will keep making stuff from wood. Unless I’m wrong.

But most of the readers here will have seen my posts about what I call my “craft genealogy” project. And that’s where I focus my efforts for the craft - I want to capture how some of us got to where we are today - the intertwined stories of a small group of people who were delving into the broad subject of woodworking and specifically the subset of green woodworking. There’s no way I can write it all - a history of green woodworking in America in the 20th century is beyond me. Right from the start I knew I would only concentrate on a small group of people that I was directly involved with, there’s one exception - Dave Sawyer I never met, but we had a slew of mutual friends and I regularly use techniques that I know came from Sawyer. 

My family was one of the thousands who got turned onto the musical Hamilton during the lockdown a few years ago. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” is a line that struck me right between the eyes. As I read all the notes left by Jennie Alexander and Daniel O’Hagan I kept thinking that this is a story that needs to be told, to be recorded and put down for when all of us who knew/know these craftspeople are gone - the stories will still be there. If I pull it off. 

When I wrote a week-plus ago about Rich Starr, I quoted some letters back and forth between Jennie Alexander and Dave Sawyer where JA asked Sawyer if he knew Starr. Dave’s response was worded in a very interesting way - “Richie Starr and I have been influencing each other for several years.” That concept of influence is what I’m mulling over lately. Sawyer’s skills and design sense are legendary. But Rich is no slouch either and I’m sure what Sawyer wrote was accurate - that it went both ways. 

I like that notion of them influencing each other. It’s a significant concept in the interactions between most of these people I’m writing about. I’m sure there was teaching of this or that from one to another - but more often it was about inspiring each other, trading ideas and techniques then expanding upon them. When Jennie Alexander first introduced herself to Dave Sawyer she had maybe only ever met two chairmakers - the brothers Walter and Arval Woody of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. In her introduction to the second edition of Make a Chair from a Tree, (Astragal Press, 1994) Alexander wrote:

“...I wrote MACFAT in virtual isolation. Before I emerged from my basement shop, I knew few others who made chairs and I had taught no one.” After the first edition was published, she began teaching and speaking/lecturing about chairmaking. Fifteen years passed between the first and second editions, in that time JA “learned most from hands-on teaching and from the growing group of chairmakers.” The bulk of that teaching was at Country Workshops with Drew Langsner. After retiring from her law practice in the mid-to-late 1990s, JA set up to teach students at home for a few years as well.