When Ron Pen was 4 years old, his mother told him if he took piano lessons he could skip his naps.
“I hated taking naps, as any active youngster does, so the notion of taking piano lessons instead appealed to me,” Pen recalled, with a twinkle in his eye that appears whenever music is the topic.
As a youngster, Pen, who was born and reared in Chicago, said he took the bait from his mother, dragging himself to a 6 a.m. piano lesson every Wednesday until he graduated high school. Noting that the disciplined classical piano regimen “wasn’t always the most cherished part of [his] life,” he augmented his piano playing with electric guitar after discovering rock ’n’ roll and played in a rock band called Children of the Scorn, which he says became the center of his social and musical universe throughout high school.
Those two instruments might have been the gateway to a life and career revolving around music, but Pen, a treasured regional musician, musicologist, scholar of American music and recently instated professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, says genetics and family history were just as influential in the irreplaceable and inescapable role music has played in his life. His grandmother sang, played ukulele and performed dialogues with Chautauqua, a cultural, social and entertainment movement popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his mother left high school early to go on the road as a professional singer and dancer. His sister Polly took up professional acting as a child and now writes and teaches musical theater in New York City. Though Pen initially tried to avoid a career in music – to “escape the legacy,” as he says – its pull was stronger than his sense of rebellion. In recalling one of the first times the tides of music and academia collided around him, pulling him in, Pen pointed to an instance during his undergraduate career at Washington and Lee University, where he and a peer were procrastinating on a term paper for their English class.
“We had found various ways of procrastinating, so we were up against the deadline,” Pen recalled. “In desperation, we decided to do a musical interpretation of it rather than write the dreaded essay.”
With Pen on piano and his friend Monk on guitar, they recorded their interpretation on a cassette that they handed the teacher the next morning. Skeptical but intrigued, his teacher consulted with a music professor at the school, who was quite impressed with the piece and asked to learn more about the student composers. (They received an A.)
The incident “forever cemented in my mind the virtues of procrastination and escaping work through music,” Pen recalled, laughing at the memory. He started taking music composition, got back into piano lessons and joined the college chorus. That spring, he completed his first large-scale composition, a complex multi-media piece called “Water Music” that included recorded poetry readings, interpretive dance performances and recordings of found sounds, including the waterfall behind his “hippie farmhouse.”
“As the piece began, it started raining, and as the composition concluded, it ceased raining,” Pen recalled about the performance. “Sound effects by god and nature. I knew at that moment that I was going to become a musician.”
As a longtime musicology professor and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music, Pen has dedicated much of his life to studying and preserving music history, but he has said that little compares to learning traditional music from actual people. Photo by Mick Jeffries
In the years that have followed, Pen has continued to balance tradition and innovation in his illustrious musical and academic path, which has fused exploration, adventure and an ultimate embracing of his roots. During his decades-long teaching career at the University of Kentucky’s School of Music, he taught various music history and other musicology courses, in addition to serving as the founder and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music. Like any good scholar, Pen never confined his education to the walls of a classroom, participating instead in what he calls “engaged musicology,” consistently seeking opportunities to connect with people, music traditions and instruments across the globe, exploring differences and commonalities alike. Through a variety of cultural exchange programs, he has studied and explored music culture in China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Puerto Rico, in addition to studying the Gwichi’in Indian music of Alaska, the music of Ecuador and the Sufi music of Lancashire, England. As a young adult, he spent time traveling the Mississippi and Ohio rivers while working on the Delta Queen steamboat, playing the calliope and “reading every word of Twain”; he later traveled from New Orleans to Lexington, Virginia, on a three-wheeled bicycle, embarking on a summer-long cultural journey along American backroads that proved revelatory in many ways.
“In the adventures that summer, I learned that there was such a thing as American music, and that it was more than Aaron Copland – it was the rich diversity of advertising jingles, rock music, sacred musical styles, fiddle tunes, ballads and popular song that have always been part of our American experience but were never respected or taught previously because the musical canon reinforced by education has historically looked to Europe as the source of our culture,” Pen said.
“These experiences have left me with a guiding principle: Music that is closest to the soil has the most power to affect us,” he added. “Music can be portable, but it loses power when it strays from the source.”
After years of writing and editing for various music publications and teaching for 30 years, Pen is enjoying a slower pace these days as professor emeritus in the University of Kentucky School of Music. He still works with doctoral students but now finds himself with the freedom and time to take on new projects, like an upcoming biography of Jeanne Ritchie, the famous Kentucky singer/songwriter and dulcimer player considered the “Mother of Folk” and a dear friend of Pen’s during her lifetime. The book is to be published by University Press of Kentucky.
Another project close to Pen’s heart is a Monday night open jam that he hosts at Rock House Brewing on Lexington’s north side, where he meets with fellow musicians and plays fiddle to his heart’s content. Local musicians gather weekly at 6:30 p.m. and spend the next couple of hours in the wonderful fellowship of music. The jams are open to the public, and Pen enthusiastically invites pickers, listeners and revelers alike.
“Playing music with my friends has enriched my life beyond measure,” he said. “I love nothing more than the community that binds humans to one another through shared music.”
Ron Pen recently sat for a chat with Smiley Pete writer Celeste Lewis.
What instruments do you play?
I started playing piano at age 4 and continued throughout my life. I expanded my involvement with keyboard instruments when I began graduate school in Chicago, taking organ and carillon lessons. At graduate school, I took organ and harpsichord with Schuyler Robinson and have served as a church organist since the early 1970s, with a tenure of 20 years at Holy Trinity Episcopal in Georgetown. The other odd keyboard instrument I have had some experience with is calliope. I love the way that it sounds on a steamboat, bouncing off river banks for miles. At night, every tone you produce issues a great cloud of differently colored steam. Shortly after graduating from college, I took up various ‘folk’ instruments and continue to play dulcimer, banjo and fiddle. Fiddle is now my primary instrument.
How did you come to love and focus on old-time and mountain music? The most important moment that led to my embrace of Appalachian culture was clearly the week I spent at Appalachian Family Folk at the Hindman Settlement School in 1983. Spending a week in the company of master musicians, such as Edna and Jean Ritchie, Lee Sexton and Marion Sumner, Rich Kirby, Tommy Bledsoe and John McCutcheon, transformed my life, and I consistently returned to Hindman and East Kentucky, seeking out traditional musicians from whom I learned. It was so very different learning music from people rather than from notes on a page. The music becomes part of you, along with the stories about the music and the people themselves from whom you learned it. I encountered a host of musicians, such as Snake Chapman, Uncle Charlie Osborne, Estill Bingham, Hiram and Art Stamper, Jimmy McCown, Ray Slone, Nick Stump, Morgan Sexton, J. P. and Annadeen Fraley, Paul David Smith, Phil Jamison and so many others from whom I received the gift of music and friendship. Playing music with my friends, particularly the Red State Ramblers, with whom I traveled the world, has enriched my life beyond measure. I love nothing more than the community that binds humans to one another.
Though he has dabbled in many instruments, from piano and electric guitar to the calliope, organ and dulcimer, Ron Pen considers fiddle to be his primary instrument of choice. The musician and musicologist has dedicated much of his life and career to studying and preserving American music. Photo by Mick Jeffries
As the author of a biography of Kentucky composer, folklorist and music collector John Jacob Niles and the founder and former director of the University of Kentucky’s John Jacob Niles Center, you have played a strong role in carrying forth Niles’ legacy. How did you first discover John Jacob Niles, and what led you to dedicate so much of your career to preserving his legacy? After teaching and chairing fine arts departments at schools in Chicago and New Orleans, I decided to go on and receive a doctorate. The University of Kentucky attracted me and was interested in having me. Kentucky was home to my mother’s side of the family [Greensburg] so it was a bit like returning and reconnecting. As I began my graduate studies, Don Ivey, my advisor and mentor, suggested a thesis on John Jacob Niles. My life in academia convinced me that the best scholarship was personal — that one was looking at one’s own life through the objective lens of another subject. In my case, the life and career of John Jacob Niles reflected my own career and interests that married both art music and folk music in composition and performance. His passionate interest and folk collecting in Appalachia mirrored my own. I had the very great pleasure and privilege of the friendship of Niles’ widow, Rena Niles, who was simply extraordinary in her own right. My life became entangled in the Niles’ story; I wrote the dissertation, and 20 years later I completed the biography “I Wonder As I Wander” for the University Press of Kentucky. I followed in his footsteps by moving to Clark County within a mile of his home, Boot Hill, located on Boone Creek. I joined the Iroquois Hunt Club because the Nileses had relished that social facet of their lives. I joined the choir and congregation of Saint Hubert’s Episcopal Church, where Niles carved the front doors and where he and Rena were buried. And I have had a grave marker placed on the plot at Saint Hubert’s Cemetery right next to Rena and John Jacob Niles. We will be neighbors into eternity.
Tell me about some of your favorite local music in Lexington. My favorite local music now consists of the old time jam at Rock House Brewing every Monday evening. I love the community and I love the music. The music is not a wall but a door through which we get to know one another in friendship. I love the Woodsongs shows – they are always engaging and vibrant. I loved going to the Henry Clay Public House to see Nick Stump. I love the monthly Sacred Harp Singing at the Niles Gallery. Again, this is a passionate music that binds us as a community.
What is a favorite piece of music or record – something you’ll never get tired of listening to? The music I am listening to at the moment is always my favorite song. I guess, if I have to quantify this somewhat, I would have to mention Bach’s “Art of Fugue” or “Saint Mathews Passion,” “Idumea” in the Kentucky Harmony, Jean Ritchie’s “Cool of the Day” Miles Davis’ “So What” … but this is an impossible task, and I shall keep writing all day to answer this.
What’s the weirdest food you encountered in your travels? I was in China at a feast that demonstrated the power of generosity that Chinese people display. We were treated to a parade of dishes, and in order to be polite, I sampled some of the never-ceasing rounds of dishes, despite growing uncomfortably stuffed by overindulgence. They passed me a tureen, and the host ladled some of the contents into a bowl before me. “Ah, what is this?” I asked, to which he responded, “drunken shrimp.” I innocently spooned a mouthful of the broth and shrimp into my mouth, and then my mouth came alive. The shrimp were still alive and squirming as they saw the esophagus looming before them. They were “drunk,” having been marinated in liquor, but they were still plenty frisky going down. One serving of that was more than enough.
We are deeply saddened by to share that between the time this article was written and published, Ron Pen’s beloved wife and life partner, Helen “Hooey” Pen, passed away. He has shared this touching excerpt from a letter she wrote to him in the early days of their courtship:
“Nothing short of an earthquake could possibly stop me from being with you—and even an earthquake could be dealt with—I feel that I may not be with you in body, but my dearest Ronald, my spirit will be with you always.” Photo furnished