Peter Walker

Peter Walker’s two mid-’60s albums introduced modal drone explorations of Eastern forms together with raga and flamenco experiments that later shaped numerous guitarists. The title track of his 1966 Vanguard debut, “Rainy Day Raga,” documents lessons from Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan while also capturing his role supplying music for Dr. Timothy Leary’s acid celebrations at Millbrook. Although frequently grouped with American primitive players such as John Fahey and Peter Lang, Walker is a formally trained experimentalist whose decades-long immersion in both Eastern and Western traditions places him nearer to Sandy Bull, whom he met alongside Karen Dalton in the early ’60s. A lifelong traveler, he absorbed flamenco fundamentals in Franco’s Spain and also spent extended periods in South America, India, Vietnam, and Europe. His second Vanguard release, 1968’s Second Poem to Karmela, or Gypsies Are Important, appears on the U.K.’s Guardian list of the strangest albums currently streamable. Despite a modest discography of fewer than ten titles, he remains a formative influence on contemporary players including Jack Rose and Ben Chasny. Millennial listeners have prompted fresh pressings of his catalog, and several publications named his 2015 solo date Live at Third Man (Detroit) folk album of the year.

Born into a musical Boston household in 1937—his father played guitar, his mother piano—Walker began the instrument early yet waited until roughly 1959 before performing publicly. While living in San Francisco he attended a Ravi Shankar concert that ignited lifelong passions for both Eastern raga and flamenco; he later studied with Shankar in Los Angeles and with Ali Akbar Khan in San Francisco. Back in the Boston area he became a fixture on the Cambridge and Greenwich Village folk circuits of the ’60s, forming close friendships with Sandy Bull and Karen Dalton, at whose side he was present when she died of AIDS. He issued the influential Rainy Day Raga on Vanguard in 1966, followed two years later by the label’s Second Poem to Karmela, or Gypsies Are Important, then withdrew to raise his family in upstate New York. Private study continued, however, and he traveled to Spain to embed himself in its insular flamenco community.

Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records brought Walker back into view; the guitarist supplied four new pieces for the 2008 Tompkins Square collection A Raga for Peter Walker, which also included tribute performances by Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Thurston Moore, and Greg Davis. Delmore Recordings released his previously unheard early-’70s album Has Anybody Seen Our Freedoms? in November 2013. During a 2015 tour, an invitation from Jack White led to the widely praised Live at Third Man in Detroit. In 2018 Walker recorded the full-length Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos with the Woodstock-based ensemble Harmony Rockets for Tompkins Square; Nels Cline and Steve Shelley appeared as guests on the three extended instrumental improvisations.