Steve Gillette: A card-carrying folkie with a sense of humor. Photo: Photo by Irene Young

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Several times a day, from oldies radio stations around the globe, the Sunshine Company’s 1967 hit “Back On The Street Again” travels through time and the airwaves and into cars, homes and businesses.

For its composer, 64-year-old Steve Gillette, that song was his one, and only, AM-radio pop hit. It was also the title of his 1968 Vanguard Records folk album, his second. Other artists have recorded that song over the years, too.

“I think for the time I got a wonderful ride from it. It was a great thing. It also seemed to express my own kind of teenage angst, although I was in my twenties at the time,” says Gillette from the Bennington home that he shares with his wife and musical partner of 18 years, Cindy Mangsen. “It was my rejoinder to the songs that I had grown up loving in high school — you know, the Buddy Holly and the Everlys, my passionate, young, unfulfilled thing,” he says with a laugh.

In fact, he’s laughing all the way to the bank: Forty years later, Gillette still receives a royalty payment each time “Back on the Street Again” is played, or recorded. The amount isn’t much, but when combined with royalty payments from Gillette’s other songs, of which there are plenty, it’s a fair chunk of change.

Though Gillette’s name may not be as familiar as those of say, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan, he is well-known to the graying over-50 crowd and, increasingly, to a new generation of folk-and-roots musicians, many of whom have taken one of his songwriting workshops or jammed with him around campfires at the annual Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival, which he attends religiously.

Gillette’s musical pedigree is impressive: He grew up in Southern California and was a founding member of the area’s emerging folk scene, sharing bills with such folk luminaries as Bud and Travis, The New Lost City Ramblers, The Greenbriar Boys, Ian & Sylvia and Judy Collins to name a few.

Of those days, says Gillette, “I was fortunate to be a part of a community of folks in Southern California but don’t have much contact with that scene these days. But I do run into some of these people at music festivals and at the Folk Alliance conferences. I also make an effort to send copies of new releases and songs I think might be interesting to old friends who are still recording.”

Folk music came to the young Gillette, as it did many of his generation, by way of the squeaky-clean Kingston Trio. “As collegiate as they were with their striped shirts and the whole thing, they were doing songs that opened the door to me.”

And Gillette’s been a card-carrying folkie since, but one with a keen sense of humor. Case in point: the movie “A Mighty Wind,” which pokes fun at the folk-music scene of the early to mid-60s.

“Cindy and I really enjoyed the movie. We thought it was a gentle and loving send-up of a time and a movement that we were very immersed in. I was surprised that it avoided any mention of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. That’s kind of like asking Mary Todd Lincoln how she liked the play.”

To Gillette folk music is “the music you play at home for fun when you pull the guitar out from under the bed, get the old banjo out, as opposed to the corporate music, which is what you do as a business.”

He is well-versed in both. As a working songwriter, Gillette turned his sites early on to Nashville. Many of his songs, largely album cuts, he says, have been recorded by dozens of prominent country stars, including Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers and Garth Brooks.

“To write successfully for Nashville, you sort of have to adopt kind of a coded language. Not to be pejorative, but it’s a little more paternalistic, a little more fundamentalist Christian, a little more masculine dominant. In my years of working in that area I’ve picked up a lot. You know, I can sort of fake it, but the whole idea (of songwriting) is not faking it.”

As a successful songwriter, Gillette knows the business can also be lucrative. “We make a million dollars – just about every eight years,” Gillette says with another laugh. “Having Garth Brooks do one of our songs (on his Christmas album) enabled Cindy and me to buy our little house in Bennington; not for cash, but we were able to save a downpayment. It wasn’t a hit; it was just on an album – that happened to sell five million copies,” he says, deadpan.

Sometimes, he says, an old song can resurface unexpectedly. Better yet, it can bring with it a financial windfall. “Something really funny happened last year, which kind of threw us into a little tailspin. I wrote a song years ago, a song called “Gamblin’ Man,” that was sung by these two brothers, the Hager Brothers, who were regulars on “Hee Haw.” All of a sudden here’s this statement that Cindy opened up. She said: ‘This doesn’t look right; there are too many numbers here.’ It was for $13,000! We looked at it, and we realized that they had put out a DVD of the best of “Hee Haw,” a reunion or compilation.”

Though the royalty checks are a nice sideline, Gillette hasn’t been resting on his laurels for the past four decades. Far from it. He and Cindy tour many months out of the year and are just now gearing up for a West Coast tour. And they are constantly writing new songs.

“I’m just so glad to have survived into this sixth decade and be able to just kind of relax. I still feel the best songs are ahead of us, and I’m ready to write a standard, a song that everybody knows,” says Gillette. “I’m ready to write my ‘Mr. Bojangles’ or my ‘Fly Me To The Moon.’ ”

Then again, perhaps he has already.


Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for The Sunday Magazine and is an editor at The Times Argus.