Troubadours: One-Man Peace Corps

The troubadours of old were asking for it. One of them, typically, made passionate love to various broad-royals until an angry count cut the blackguard’s heart out, had it roasted and served to his unfaithful countess. Others sang such outrageous satires against the papacy that they helped provoke the ruinous Albigensian Crusade. Small wonder they died out. During the two centuries in which they flourished, there were about 400 of these minstrels. Today there is roughly one.

His name is Buddy Bohn. He is 23. He graduated from Illinois’ Principia College and took off to stroll the earth with a guitar in one hand and a rucksack over his shoulder. He has traveled through 43 countries, and his accounts of his travels are as fabulous as any folk singer could ask.

With the exception of a tenth-class nonsked air fare from Idlewild to Ice land, he has paid for nothing—singing instead for his supper, breakfast, lunch, transportation and lodging. There should be 400 of him. A one-man Peace Corps, he has replaced the ancient vices of the troubadours with glistening virtues. He is a lanky, 6-ft. 4-in., clean-cut, blue-jeaned, All-American youth tying the world together with a one-man thread.

Strolling Plastiqueur. His odyssey started in Reno, where he sang for $5 in a cafe. Twanging through Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and India, he did not always do so well. He slipped into the kitchen at the Royal Palace in Copenhagen and strummed away to the delight of three scullery maids. But Denmark’s King Frederick IX came to see what the noise was, listened for a while in amusement, then returned to his throne, leaving a hungry Bohn behind. Arriving in Algeria at the wrong time (November 1961), he strum-a-strum-strummed through the streets of Oran. Who else would do that but a spy? The S.A.O. grabbed him. He laughed at them, saying he was just a troubadour—vigorously playing and singing for his life. They gave him money and let him go. Then the French army arrested him as an S.A.O. man, suspecting that his 20 spare guitar strings were really intended as parts for plastic bombs.

Lapland Lapps lapped up When the

Saints Go Marching In. Grenadine gypsies taught him the primary skills of flamenco. Arabian Bedouins took him into their camps, listened to On Top of Old Smoky in a semitrance beneath the desert stars, and fed him sheep’s eyeballs in glorious reward. He swallowed hard and fast.

Fragility & Philosophy. Everywhere he practices what he calls his “direct and musical approach.” In Bangkok last spring, he walked up to Chitra Lada Palace, took out his 100-year-old handmade guitar (picked up in London for $112) and said he wanted to entertain the King of Thailand. He was invited to tea, where a group of high-ranking officials were stiffly collected. He started with some flamenco. Queen Sirikit asked if he wouldn’t play something from his own country, like Danny Boy. He played Danny Boy as if it were a New London dairy air. The Thais loosened up and then went crazy for John Henry and Springfield Mountain. King Bhumibol could contain himself no longer. He produced his own saxophone and ended the evening noodling away at various Dixieland selections while Buddy Bohn supplied the obbligato. Bohn invited Bhumibol to renounce his throne and hit the road too. Bhumibol paid Buddy’s passage to Hong Kong instead.

Soon he plied his way to Tokyo, where he walked into the vestibule of a small nightclub, smiled at the manager and burst into a ringing, ball-peen rendition of John Henry. He was boffo. He got a square meal and a bed. In Australia a few months later, members of the New South Wales Lawn Tennis Association looked up from an outdoor luncheon to see one of their members approaching followed by “a wandering Yank who sort of popped in and wants to sing us a song.” Buddy gave them up-tempo renderings of Waltzing Matilda and Seven Old Ladies. The N.S.W.T.A. members responded with For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and a gift of a tennis racket and a pair of sneakers. While in Australia Buddy even acquired an agent—as the price of playing on television in Sydney. When he was singing at a hotel one night for bed and breakfast, the puzzled manager asked, “What does your agent get out of it, an egg?”

Agent’s Despair. Buddy Bohn has such a healthy, wash-and-wear body that he looks amazingly fresh after all his travels. He always puts on a clean shirt before singing for his sukiyaki. His baritone is fragile and breaks frequently. But he makes up for it with enthusiasm and philosophy: “The very artlessness of folk songs,” he points out, “amounts to eternal and universal art in capturing the hearts of peoples.”

Last week he lingered in Australia, so in demand that he was becoming something of a local celebrity. The only man anxious to see him ship out for his next scheduled port of call, New Zealand, was his agent, who tore up their contract in despair over the low fees Buddy was asking. But then pressagents and wandering minstrels belong to different worlds.