Music like Folsom’s, brackish and mystical, is always going to be sought after. It’s naïve, lo-fi, and needfully sincere—a compelling part of the Great American Songbook, whether recognized or not.
In the middle of Cook County, Georgia, is the city of Adel. But it didn’t always have that name. Folks called it Puddleville for a long time, until postmaster Uncle Jack Parrish saw “Philadelphia” written on a croaker sack and scratched out eight of the letters. Most of Adel is farmland and swamp, with pieces of Interstate 75 and Highway 41 cutting through it. 40 miles south of town is the Florida-Georgia line. 90 minutes north is Macon. Whitetail deer, diamondback terrapins, and fox squirrels make noise in nearby pine flatwoods and salt marshes. About 5,000 people live in Adel in 2026, about as many people that lived there when cult singer-songwriter Robert Lester Folsom was born in 1955.
Folsom was raised by kind people who worshipped at a Southern Baptist church. His dad played in a garage-bluegrass band and filled the family home with records and local radio music. “You’d wake up to country music. An hour before you go to school, they played pop, rock, rhythm and blues, Motown. While you’re at school, they play gospel,” Folsom recalls, sitting at his dining room table with a tapestry of ceramic plates and Tupperware containers behind him. I ask, “Did you need to call out sick or play hooky to find out when the gospel music played?” But Folsom, grinning, leaves it up to the imagination. “After lunch, they played country again, and then they went to pop when school was out. They’d end the day with classical music.”
His mom and dad were progressive types, Folsom says. They’d bring him along to their church parties, where older folks played Beatles, Elvis, Platters, and Chubby Checker albums, though Folsom always liked Fats Domino best. He didn’t care too much about “The Twist” as long as “Blueberry Hill” was a place he could get to. Johnny Cash songs were nearby too. He remembers hearing “Suppertime” and “Big River” a lot, because his dad would wake up early for work and listen to the radio. “My bedroom was right beside the kitchen where they were sitting.” When he traded his record player for a friend’s stringless guitar, Folsom’s dad cleaned and restrung it for him. They went to bluegrass festivals together, especially Coney Grove in Cordele, Georgia. Folsom calls it a “hillbilly Woodstock,” because it was one of the few places in America where longhairs could play fiddle music on the same showcard as a figure like Doc Watson, whom Folsom met years later in an Atlanta shopping center. “He was a real gentleman. When he would start picking, it was overwhelming.”
Across the street lived Don Fleming, who’d later become a behind-the-scenes player in the alt-rock world. He was briefly in Dinosaur Jr. in 1990 and, a year later, his band Gumball signed to Columbia Records and recorded with Butch Vig right before the producer worked on Nevermind. Fleming produced too, working on tapes by Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, Hole, Screaming Trees, and Pete Yorn. Before all that, however, his mother and Folsom’s mother graduated high school together, though Fleming was a couple of years younger than Folsom, which was a big difference if you were in grade school in the sixties. He was a part of the Beatles’ record club and would let Folsom borrow his Christmas albums. Tucked away in a photobook someplace, there are snapshots of the two boys together at birthday parties and summer hangs. Fleming was Folsom’s “shadow,” studying his guitar-playing whenever he could, and got into music himself before enlisting in the Air Force, moving to D.C., and sending Folsom cassettes of his bands’ stuff.
IN THE MEANTIME, FOLSOM made tapesof his own. He and his high-school buddy Roger Sumner picked and sang together, playing Neil Young songs and bluegrass standards. One evening, Sumner’s pickup rolled into Folsom’s driveway. “Getcher guitar,” he said, and they sped off into the country, to a tobacco farm Sumner had been working at. Farmer Henley greeted them at the doorway. “Where’s the reel-to-reel?” Roger asked. “It’s back there,” Henley said, pointing down the hallway, “in Patricia’s room.” Folsom doesn’t know how Henley got a Sears reel-to-reel recorder, or why it was stored in his daughter’s bedroom, but he didn’t question it.
Every so often, the Henleys would peer into the room, ask the boys if they wanted some sweet tea, and return to the living room to watch television. “Roger, we can’t just keep coming over here and recording,” Folsom told Sumner, who agreed. They went to Sears, found a 3440 two-track reel-to-reel recorder in a catalog, and split the cost halfway, spending about $75 a piece. It was a small tape deck that came with detachable speakers and a cheap microphone. Folsom borrowed his dad’s chrome-plated Shure 55SH, the same mic Elvis liked to use. When Sumner got involved with a girl and quit recording demos, Folsom made his friend an offer. “Roger, this doesn’t seem fair,” he said to Sumner. “Could I buy out your share?” And Sumner let him. Finally the recorder was Folsom’s, and he took it everywhere.
Folsom recorded on the left side of the reel-to-reel and overdubbed himself on the right side. He made bedroom music before anyone had a name for it. But, back then, it was the only way Folsom could put down the sounds he was hearing in his head. He and a friend, Hans VanBrackle (whose first name Folsom pronounces with an “æ” not an “/eɪ/” sound), would record songs together. Folsom played guitar, keys, and sang. VanBrackle did the bass and lead lines. Sometimes there were drum parts, if a drummer was around to play them. They mixed the tapes in mono, which gave the recordings “a cool separation,” as Folsom puts it. He still has the recorder but it doesn’t work too well. “If I could buy a brand new one just like it, I would do it in a heartbeat. Just start all over again.”
He and VanBrackle started a prog-rock band together in high school, naming themselves Abacus so their albums would be alphabetized first on the shelf in any record shop. Folsom was like any other musical upstart his age: he wanted to have a band because of the Beatles. What he wound up with, however, was four guitarists, a drummer, and a bassist, so he played keys and sang “because no one else would,” even though his bandmates criticized his drawl. This was when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were peeling off and doing their own solo albums, which lit a fire under Folsom’s ass. “Next time I go to band practice, even though I’m playing organ, I’m gonna take my acoustic guitar and, on breaks, go outside and play,” he told himself. That’s when he started getting into songwriting.
In 1973, when Folsom was just 17 years old, his parents let him take a bus alone to Nashville with a guitar strapped to his back, a sack of clothes hiked over his shoulder, and a stack of demos in hand. Up until then, Atlanta was the biggest place he’d ever seen. Someone, maybe a few people, warned him to never go to downtown Nashville, because it wasn’t always the Disney World that it is now. After greeting the city, he went looking for Music Row, a dark and unique and strange place where all the great storytellers supposedly were. He found 16th Avenue South, in-between Belmont College and Vanderbilt and parallel to 17th. He was face-to-face with the big time, as labels like RCA, Columbia, and MCA set up rehearsal rooms and recording spaces in old neighborhood houses. Folsom had no industry connections, no recommendations, no promises. Imagine linebacker Jim Griffith walking on at the University of Georgia. A friend of Folsom’s booked him a room at a nearby boarding house. It wasn’t bigger than a closet. Most of the record executives on Music Row brushed him off, but Combine Music happily let him loiter around the office.
Fred Foster, Jack Kirby, and a Baltimore disc-jockey named Buddy Deane founded Monument Records (named after the Washington Monument) and the Combine Music publishing company in 1958. They got biggish a few years later after Roy Orbison had a string of hits, which gave them enough resources to sign up-and-comers like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Ray Stevens. Combine loved Folsom’s story, him being a south Georgian teenager hitching it to the music capital of the USA to make it as a songwriter. Who knows if they thought he’d actually be the next Kris Kristofferson or Billy Swan or Chris Etheridge. They didn’t see any harm in letting a kid hang around and learn a thing or two about the music business.
So Folsom stuck with it for two weeks, going home to his closet only at dusk. During work days, he’d sit in rooms with the decision-makers—guys telling wannabe singers “we’re not interested”—and listen to tons of demo tapes from starry-eyed hopefuls like himself and give opinions on them. Gratitude and guilt played tug-a-war within Folsom, as kids his age got rejected left and right. Not everyone could be the next James Taylor, the Eagles, Gram Parsons, or Jim Croce, but the hippies were starting to take over in abundance, because they were “appreciating the country music and the country artists were accepting the hippies.” It’s a strange image to consider today, but old and young folks were getting along then, and they were mingling on Music Row. When Folsom’s stay was over, Combine Music told him to go back to Adel, finish high school, and bring more tapes to Nashville. Folsom never stepped foot in the Combine building again.
INSTEAD, FOLSOM ENROLLED at South Georgia College. He spent summers working part-time gigs, waterskiing at Reed Bingham State Park, camping, and making music with friends every hour between. At school, a professor let him “own the music suite” on campus. Security would walk by, wink at Folsom, and say, “Have a good day.” His neighbors were equally encouraging, even patting him on the back a time or two. If he went to the drugstore to buy new strings or picks, they’d ask if he’d written a song that day. “People could have just said, ‘You’re never gonna write a hit song, get a real job.’ They could have given me a hard time, but they didn’t,” Folsom recalls. “People were just really kind to me. I seemed to be able to do what I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it.” He wrote about what he knew—sunsets, moon pie pulls, Heaven, broken hearts, crying rain, rhyming, and love, love, love—filling songs with postcard lyrics and pastoral doo-wah-ditties. Folsom recorded his poppy, hazy charmers anywhere he could, even at a local hog parlor, because his vocabulary could remedy any listless town. “Every far is a new,” he beckons in “Super See.”
Folsom wrote “I Don’t Know” and “What Are You Thinking Of?” for a Savannah girl he was seeing in college, a girl he gifted a copy of Goat’s Head Soup to for Christmas because she sent him Mind Games by John Lennon. “I was the hopeless romantic,” he beams. The songs were sunny tunes about their relationship going to shit without explanation. She and him are both happily married to other people but still talk on the phone now and then. South Georgia College was about 60 minutes northeast of Adel, so Folsom would come by on weekends to wash clothes and see his high school buddies. If VanBrackle was home, Folsom would call him up. “Let’s get together,” he’d say. “I got some new songs.” They’d rehearse during the day and lay down the tracks at night, sometimes with Folsom’s sisters doing background vocals. One weekend in particular, Folsom brought home a friend from the Philippines, José, and introduced him to the crew. That was the weekend they recorded “I Don’t Know,” “April Suzanne,” and “See You Later, I’m Gone”: on a whim during one of those hardscrabble Adel nights.
Folsom was inspired by the “hippie bluegrass shakes” of his time. He even invited a few of his dad’s friends to jam with him at the family home and captured a few instrumental takes of “Mountain Air Rag,” “And God Made the Pine Trees Too,” and “Gene Autry” on the reel-to-reel. He showed them to fiddler Red Lindsey. “Now, what do you call this music?” Folsom asked. “Well,” Red said back, “it sure as hell ain’t bluegrass!” They laughed then, but Folsom felt good about what he’d made. “To me, it was as bluegrass as I could be.” I say to Folsom that the South’s bluegrass revival might have made him a penny or two and ask, “Did you ever consider chasing down a living like that beyond these four songs?” “Probably not truly,” he says back, “but that’s because I would always want to do other things.”
Abacus kept going throughout the mid-1970s, playing at colleges across the Bible Belt and even briefly relocating to Auburn where VanBrackle was a student. It’s too bad that disco started to take over, because bar bands became an endangered species, even in the Deep South. Folsom went back to Georgia with his tail between his legs. But Folsom caught a break when his band wound up in Atlanta cutting a promo at LeFevre Studios. That’s how most working bands got gigs back then. All of the tracked songs were Folsom originals, marking a slight detour from Abacus’ usual set, which always included a handful of covers. The studio engineer, Stan Davis, liked Folsom’s ideas. “If you ever get a chance, you ought to try to come back and record some songs,” Davis told him.
Four, maybe five months later, in June 1976, Folsom brought Davis a reel of songs. It was an easy process: Folsom pushed for the songs he liked best, Davis picked out the ones worth attempting, and Abacus came to the studio to lay them down, per Folsom’s request. The guys were happy to go into a studio, despite at one point only wanting to play with Folsom if they were doing cover songs. “Fair enough, you guys are good and know half my songs already,” Folsom told his bandmates. Davis brought in a couple session players to add bits and bobs, like synthesizer solos.
Folsom and Abacus came out with Music and Dreams, and Davis thought “My Stove’s On Fire” was going to be a huge hit, because of its disco beat. As far as Folsom is concerned, the song’s a novelty. “I was kind of putting down disco music,” he admits. “But, recently, I discovered that I think it’s a really good song.” He took out a loan from the bank to press 1,000 vinyl, 200 8-tracks, and 500 singles of “My Stove’s On Fire.” The fast-moving, 2.5-minute track sounds like it was made by a fan of Something/Anything?. It got marginal AM radio airplay in the southeast and sold a few copies, mostly because Folsom hand-delivered the record to every DJ within earshot of the Florida-Georgia line. He also sent it to labels like Capricorn and Dark Horse, but never heard a word back from either. A second Robert Lester Folsom album was planned for 1977/78 but never finished. He was going to call it Warm Horizons, having cut the title track and “Blues Stay Away” by himself at home and then with Davis in Nashville.
YET SOON ENOUGH, FOLSOM took a swig of rock and roll’s most potent antidote: domesticity. Abacus had ended and Folsom’s solo music just wasn’t successful enough to keep him from meeting a girl, falling in love, and getting married. When Folsom’s first wife finished college, she got offered a marketing job in Jacksonville. Folsom wanted to go to Nashville but he didn’t have any guarantees there. He’d only been to Jacksonville as a kid, for beach days and concerts, and he wasn’t too crazy about living there full-time—that’s how he remembers it, at least. And when they finally did move, Folsom learned quickly that his music didn’t fit in too well with the Molly Hatchet, Lynyrd Skynyrd crowd there. “I don’t think they really accepted me,” he admits. “I’d go and sit in [on sessions] with my guitar and I’d say, ‘What am I doing here? This is not me.’ Eventually I just gave up on that.” He wasn’t into New Wave music, either, though he concedes that a few of the songs he wrote during the ‘80s, which were sometimes only heard by his young daughters, would have fit in nicely with what Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello were making at the time.
Folsom worked at a record shop in town and kept up on Brian Wilson’s solo stuff, Jackson Browne, and Bob Dylan, “of course.” He also liked Aimee Mann’s singing in ‘Til Tuesday. But when the recession hit in 1980, the record shop closed and Folsom depended on odd jobs until he landed on a gig as a painter’s helper. After Monument Records co-founder Fred Foster went into financial ruin after a failed banking venture, the label filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1983 and sold Combine Music in 1985. His Nashville “in” had evaporated, but he stayed busy with a “little boat rock trio” called Shadow Box so he could play apartment complex parties. (That’s Folsom’s way of saying “yacht rock.”)
He kept performing in churches, eventually starting a contemporary Christian rock band named Revolution Friday while holding down a day job as a house painter. “I’m not gonna say I was the best or the fastest,” he laughs, “but people enjoyed me painting their houses.” Folsom did that for 40 years and earned a good reputation doing so. He calls the time between Music and Dreams and now “the big void”: decades spent raising a family, writing songs at home, and running a profitable business. Folsom’s first marriage eventually ended right around the turn of the century, but he met his second wife at church and they had a daughter together. “If the music had only happened like it’s happened recently, it would have been awesome,” Folsom chuckles. “I don’t know how long it would have lasted, though. I’d probably end up being a painter instead of being a rock star anyway.” He says that with a sense of humor, because he’s living the dream and loving it. “The kids relate to the songs I wrote when I was their age. I’m performing them now with the same feeling.”
AT THE END OF THE 2000s, Folsom’s music started to resurface, even though he never stopped writing songs. Douglas Mcgowan, head of Yoga Records, discovered Music and Dreams in an obscure psychedelic music book, which called the Georgian a “second-rate Michael Angelo or a less stringent John Scroggins,” though Folsom was always more of an All Things Must Pass guy. Other Music, a record store in New York City, put out a newsletter issue that mentioned Music and Dreams, catching the eye of Mexican Summer founder Keith Abrahamsson, who re-issued the album on vinyl and pressed way more than 1,000 copies. In 2010, Panda Bear mentioned liking the album in several interviews. Mark Richardson used that recommendation as a launching point for a 2011 Pitchfork feature about “lost” folk projects. Folsom snagged an invite to play the CMJ convention in Brooklyn but hadn’t been to the city before, so he reached out to the only New Yorker he knew: Don Fleming, who’d taken a job in Manhattan as an archivist at the Alan Lomax Foundation. “Do you still have those reel-to-reel tapes?” Fleming asked his old neighbor as they caught up. “Yeah,” Folsom replied. “Well, I can transfer them to digital here.”
So Folsom delivered to him a box of tapes (including songs Fleming played on, like “Super See”) and, soon enough, a bunch of CDs showed up at his door. Fleming showed the recordings to Abrahamsson, who compiled a bunch of them into Ode to a Rainy Day, one of the first releases on Mexican Summer’s Anthology Recordings reissue imprint in 2014. Abrahamsson even reissued Green and Yellow, a Stroke Band record that Fleming and Bruce Joyner recorded (with contributions from Folsom) and released in 1978. The songs on Ode to a Rainy Day were heavily inspired by Merseybeat and British folk music. The collection featured “See You Later, I’m Gone,” Folsom’s signature tune, and “Heaven on the Beach With You,” which recently made some headway on TikTok. In 2015 Mexican Summer made a documentary about Folsom and captured an Abacus reunion. Seven years later, Anthology put out Sunshine Only Sometimes, a collection of Folsom’s best AM-ready efforts. The music was sensible, timeless, and catching on with crate diggers and playlist makers alike. After all, I discovered Folsom when, out of nowhere, three different friends sent me mixes with “Ease My Mind” on them.
In 2023, Folsom brought his songs to the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan and, a year later, to the Hideout in Chicago. People came to both shows and sang all of his songs, even the ones that had been “lost.” Folsom was ready to quit painting then, figuring he could live off his retirement and play gigs here and there. Friends of his daughter encouraged him to tour, so he did, sincerely hitting the road for the first time at the age of 70 and sharing stages with the likes of Babehoven and Lily Seabird. He still wears painter pants when he performs, but now without the paint splatter. And he didn’t need to agree to some Faustian bargain to get here. Sure, Folsom’s oracle singing isn’t as woolly as the Laurel Canyon singers he once looked up to—his songs instead come with touches of Still Crazy After All These Years relatability, Bread’s mellow harmonies,Todd Rundgren’s melodic ear, and Robert Hunter’s cosmic, sophisticated telepathy—but the music is a simple, sweet style that’s never flashy yet spans generations. Just press play on a tune like “Sitting on the Moon.” I can think of about a half-dozen indie bands that employed a similar “wee-oo” harmony style ten years ago.
Saying that Folsom’s music fell through the cracks of history, however, would be a misnomer. Folsom was never close to breaking out and he’d never suggest that he was, even if he did have a two-week seat at Combine Music’s table 53 years ago. I’m glad he’s come around to “My Stove’s On Fire,” because it really is a whip-smart, youthful glance into an old-soul’s inner sanctum all this time later. Music like Folsom’s, brackish and mystical, is always going to be sought after. It’s naïve, lo-fi, and needfully sincere—a compelling part of the Great American Songbook, whether recognized or not. Ethan Hawke said it best recently: “The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, it just keeps on shining.” Folsom, with his white beard touching his chest and his eyes shaded by the brim of a red-as-clay Georgia Bulldogs ballcap, plays music that’s become church for many.
But Robert Lester Folsom doesn’t go to church anymore. Not in the conventional, liturgical sense, at least. Before COVID hit, he attended Rise Church in Jacksonville, a non-denominational “rock and roll church.” He liked the preacher’s sermons and how diverse the convent was. But the pandemic made it impossible to gather for prayer, so Folsom started making his own peace at home on Sundays, taking bicycle rides in the morning and evening. I could fib and say the stage is his church, but that wouldn’t be true. No, his “quiet times” come when he loops around a few miles of flatlands near his house. That’s how he talks to God: while flanked by the Ortega River and its canopy of Spanish moss and gator sunbeams. He tells me, candidly, that formal worship isn’t for him right now. “My mother would not like to hear that,” he grins, “because she’s 89 and a faithful church member.” But he loves that she’s given her life to God, because God is still special to him, too. He’s proudly Christian, but is wary of the weird ones. Before the rest of the world wakes up, Folsom sits down with his guitar and plays the choruses of hymns he used to sing in church 60 years ago. The words roll off his tongue so eloquently now, even if those classical melodies, he reckons, sounded real old-timey to him as a kid. Folsom laughs. “Now, they’re treasures.”
If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes is out March 20 on Anthology Recordings.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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