E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dear as folk For nearly half a century, Club Passim has nurtured talent, launched stars, and tended the flame of traditional music. Betsy Siggins Schmidt, now executive director, was there at the beginning. BY TAMARA WIEDER

IF YOU’VE NEVER been to Club Passim, chances are you don’t even know it’s there. Tucked away in a basement on a side street in Harvard Square, the tiny venue doesn’t attract much attention from the lines of hungry diners waiting for tables at the adjacent Border Café, or from the tourists shortcutting down Palmer Street to get to the Harvard Coop.

But then again, if you know anything about the local music scene, you may well know a little about Passim’s storied history. What began in 1958 as a jazz joint called Club 47 has gone on to become one of the country’s premier venues for traditional, folk, and acoustic music, helping launch the careers of such luminaries as Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Rush, Nanci Griffith, Taj Mahal, and Shawn Colvin.

And if anyone knows Passim’s story, it’s Betsy Siggins Schmidt. One of its founding members, Schmidt returned to the club in 1997 as its executive director. As Club Passim prepares to celebrate its now-legendary Cutting Edge of the Campfire event over Memorial Day weekend, Schmidt takes some time to talk about her long and fruitful affiliation with the local institution.

Q: How’d you end up at Club 47 to begin with?

A: I was a freshman at Boston University’s School of Fine Arts — as was Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin, and a few other renegades. One of the first jobs I had, and I think it was totally, totally accidental, was I was the classic waitress in a coffee shop, and it was called the Café Yana, and it was just outside Kenmore Square. Somehow people who had come out of high school and were just drawn to traditional music — the Weavers, Pete Seeger, maybe Odetta — they’d already, sort of like homing pigeons, gone to this place where they could play that. Jim Kweskin was a brilliant guitarist as a freshman at BU, and he already, I think, was dedicated and just a great producer of old-timey music. So I started as a waitress there, and then Joan began singing at Club 47. I hadn’t started to work at Club 47, but another place opened where the Mass Pike runs through Kenmore Square. There were big old factories down there, and there were train lines down there, and the Golden Vanity opened. It was sort of the next magnet for people who began to build the folk community. I was a waitress there for a long time. That was where I met Bob Siggins and later married him; he was with the Charles River Valley Boys. My house soon became filled with musicians either needing to continue to play day in and day out, or needing a floor to sleep on.

In 1960, Bob and I married, and we all went to Europe for a year. Everybody sort of migrated out; people went to Tangiers, people went to Rome, people went to Berlin. It was a very interesting time. We spent most of the year in Rome and then spent a memorable summer in London, where bluegrass was really taking off. That summer I met some people who are still friends of ours, who played music back then. And I have to say that part of the attraction was that those of us who came from less-than-perfect families were looking for family. And I must guess that there are about 40 of us across the country still in touch. We would all drop anything for anyone in that community of friends. It’s a wonderful feeling.

Q: So you started working at Club 47 when you got back from Europe?

A: Yeah. I got on the board of directors. It was small, and we struggled about money then as we struggle about money now. Then I became sort of one of the bookers. I mean, everybody took turns doing everything, but I was sort of in charge of the scheduling for a while, and worked on booking and worked nights, and after I had a daughter, I was then doing the gallery in the afternoons, and I worked in the kitchen. So everybody did everything for the next eight or nine years. Honestly, I don’t know quite how to describe that experience, but one night Doc Watson was there, and then for the next four nights B.B. King was there, and the next weekend Mother Maybelle Carter was there, and sprinkled in among that was Joan and Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur, Jackie Washington, Tom Rush. That was like going to night school. And we didn’t know it as profoundly as we do now, because that’s what youth is about, but I think my civil rights were learned there on that doorstep, and I think the kind of person I became was strikingly marked by that community.

Q: In the 1970s, you worked for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, in Washington, and then you moved to New York. What did you do there?

A: I fell into the Reagan years, and people being extraordinarily hungry, and I ended up [spending] 18 years running soup kitchens, food pantries, and some of the very first multi programs for people with AIDS, primarily homeless people. I loved that work; I wouldn’t have traded it for one day doing something else. I learned humility, I learned what unbelievable bravery is for people who have absolutely nothing in a world of absolute material things, and how they struggle.

I still would be doing that if I hadn’t left Manhattan; I felt it was just my way of giving back, and I needed that. It helped me enormously to grow, and I was able to call on my musician friends — this was in the days before everybody did a benefit for everything — and I was able to say to James Taylor and Joan Baez and Taj Mahal and Geoff Muldaur and Maria Muldaur, "I need your help." And they were there. And so that family circle got closed again in that nice, wonderful way. I tell you, those people got it long before it was there to get. They understood the power of music.