Talking Ash Grove
"I knew...that there was a folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove. I'd seen posters of folk shows at the Ash Grove and used to dream about playing there." – Bob Dylan, Chronicles
"Ed Pearl is one of the most creative and thoughtful people who ever presented folk music in U.S.A."
–Pete Seeger
"At this place in West L.A. at that time you could have this education and not go wrong. People say, 'How did you learn this music?' I said, 'that's how, by being at the Ash Grove, with Ed, by the bar at my chair."
– Ry Cooder.
"The Ash Grove. Yeah, well, that's where it all started really happening. I hung out there so much I eventually moved in....Being around people like Albert (King) and Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' made me eager to keep the authentic music alive."
– Taj Mahal, Autobiography
"Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys did much to popularize bluegrass music.... An appearance at the Hollywood folk club The Ash Grove caught the ear of the producer of The Beverly Hillbillies and led to “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” their only single to reach #1 on the country charts."
– Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
"I remember a show we played at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles in 1962. This was the premier folk club on the West Coast, and these were big shows for us. We were getting our name out there to a new audience, college students and young people. It was the crowd Flatt and Scruggs had tapped into, and we were getting a piece of the pie...and this was the Ash Grove, where some of the people in the audience were Hollywood stars."
– Ralph Stanley
"If we expected a brief audience with the master (Bill Monroe), what we got was as warm a welcome as if we'd been to see him at the Opry. Part of the reason...(was) the relationship between him and Ash Grove founder Ed Pearl, certainly the most significant bluegrass advocate in California during the Sixties... Pearl's private office had become a kind of receiving area for Bill and the Boys. One night I knocked on the office door and went in with Butch Waller....Bill got his mandolin out and sat with Butch for what seemed like hours, painstakingly showing him how to play "Raw Hide."
– Sandy Rothman
"I got my improvisational approach from Scotty Stoneman... the first guy to set me on fire.... I went down to hear him the first time at the Ash Grove in L.A. in 1965.... The place was transfixed."
– Jerry Garcia
"I ran into Arlo Guthrie at the Troubadour and he said: "You want to go play and sing? " And I said, "Sure, man" And he said we were going over to the Ash Grove, Ramblin' Jack Elliott was there.. And I had never even met Jack Elliott. I don't have a guitar to play or anything....But Arlo dragged us up there and we just had one of the best evenings I've ever had in my life. It just all fell into place. I sang songs that I hadn't heard since I was eight years old. All the harmonies fell into place and everybody was on each others' side, nobody was trying to upstage anybody."
– Linda Ronstadt
"It looms large in my history because that is where I met Roger McGuinn. If there had been no Ash Grove, there would have been no Byrds."
- David Crosby, NPR interview
"My first show there was in 1969 - T-Bone Walker and Big Joe Turner backed by Johnny Otis,....That was it for me. My path was set in life after that show....The thing about the Ash Grove was it was run by a guy who had a vision about what American music was and where it came from - and that's what he was going to present. There was a social and political edge, too, and that's something we could all use more of today."
– Dave Alvin
"On his way out of the club one night, Mick Jagger, a frequent visitor to the Ash Grove, shook Pearl's hand in gratitude. He simply wanted to thank Pearl for all the entertainment—and no doubt musical education—the club had given him"
– Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times Dec. 15, 1973