School board member makes music, teaches history |
On Board Online • Board Member Profile • January 19, 2008
My other side
Name: Christopher Shaw
Age: 54
School District: Averill Park, Rensselaer County
Years on school board: Five
Occupation: Musician
His other side: Mixing music and history
Like his father and his grandfather before him, Christopher Shaw worked as a steamboat pilot. But it was his guitar that took him around the world.
Shaw, who has spent the last five years on the school board in Averill Park just east of Albany, grew up on Lake George where his family ran one of the sightseeing boat tour businesses. They also offered speedboat rides, operated a marina and even sold float planes.
“It was a picture-book childhood,” he recalled recently during an interview with On Board.
He left Lake George in 1972 to attend Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. His roommate was into guitars and it wasn’t long before Shaw was also strumming.
“Acoustic guitar music was what was on the radio,” he explained.
Shaw, who studied to become a paramedic, began working in the emergency room at the Albany Medical Center in 1977. But by then, his life was increasingly revolving around music gigs. There were appearances at the bars around Albany, but also at one of the high holy places of folk music, the Café Lena in Saratoga Springs. The proprietress was famous for taking promising young musicians, including Bob Dylan, under her wing.
“Thank God for Lena Spencer,” Shaw said.
Shaw’s last day in the emergency room was Christmas 1980. It was the year he decided to pursue a music career full time. In 1987, Shaw released his first album, Adirondack.
“They put it in the Library of Con-gress’ Folk Archives which gave my career a jump start,” he said. “That got me an endorsement deal with Taylor Guitars and they made me their international clinician. I went all over the world.”
Now Shaw spends a good deal of his time visiting New York schools, something he began doing 20 years ago as an Arts in Education presenter who brought his music and Adirondack storyteller skills into the classroom.
“In that first year, I saw about 30,000 kids,” he said.
About a half dozen years ago, Shaw expanded his school-based offerings, donning garb straight out of the French and Indian War era. It was a natural progression given he had worked as a guide at Fort William Henry in Lake George and that one of his ancestors had been a member of Rogers’ Rangers, the Green Berets of the time.
“It’s a way for them to deal with that whole time period kind of in the first person,” Shaw said.
In 1980, the same year he decided to pursue music full-time, he met another struggling young musician, Bridget Ball, at an after-hours musician’s party. Four years later, they were married.
She has five solo albums and he has seven. The couple has two children.
In addition to her music career, Ball is a financial planner who counts among her clients a number of families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers.
Shaw has taken a break from the constant touring. But he still performs regularly, including “Mountain Snow and Mistletoe,” an annual winter concert in the Albany area staged by Shaw, his wife and some musician friends.
Shaw’s music career has landed him in some interesting places, including being a guest at a lavish Adirondack Great Camp named Topridge, where he shared a dinner table with federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, among others.
Once the playground of Marjorie Merriweather Post, Topridge is now a retreat for Texas mega-developer Harlan Crow, a major campaign contributor for President George W. Bush and for conservative Republican causes.
“I wear my politics on my sleeve. I’m a folksinger, for crying out loud. So it was like being in the belly of the beast for me,” Shaw said.
But it was also fun, he said.
“I taught Clarence Thomas’s son, Jamal, to fly fish,” Shaw recalled.
“My son pelted Clarence Thomas with a water balloon in a water balloon fight,” he added.
Shaw said he ran for his local school board five years ago because supporters felt he would be a calming influence. His term is up next year and he is not certain if he will seek re-election.
“Five years before the mast is a long time,” said the former steamboat pilot. “It really does take a tremendous amount of time if you do it right.”
Amid the current financial crisis, Shaw said people must not forget the arts are a critical element in a person’s development.
“And, we’ve got to remember there are students out there whose only exposure to the arts is going to be through their school experience,” Shaw said. “That is a little scary, but it is nonetheless the truth.”