Robert Lester Folsom weaves “Music and Dreams” at Johnny Brenda’s

The night began with a Philly tradition: a run up the Art Museum steps. But I suppose everything really started in 1976, when a 21-year-old Robert Lester Folsom recorded his first studio album, Music and Dreams.

Born in Adel, Georgia, Folsom spent his high school years consumed by music, compulsively recording on a Sears 3440 reel-to-reel. At 17, he traveled to Nashville with tapes in hand, hoping to catch the attention of label executives. They were impressed, and encouraged him to come back once he’d finished high school. After college, armed with a bank loan, Folsom recorded Music and Dreams, self-releasing 1,000 copies. He hit the road again, doling out records and tapes and gained modest traction. By the mid ’80s, Folsom stepped away from his ambitions of becoming a famous singer-songwriter. He started a residential house painting business and though music remained part of his life, through church bands and continued songwriting, the prospect of stardom faded.

Music and Dreams found a second life in 2010, when Brooklyn-based label Mexican Summer reissued the mythologized soft rock/psychedelic curiosity. What followed was a gradual unearthing of Folsom’s home-recordings, with dozens finding their way on to three archival releases to date. Fifty years after recording his debut album, he was about to perform it in its entirety to a sold out show at Johnny Brenda’s.

At 71, donning a chest-length silver beard, his signature Georgia Bulldogs ball cap and white Carhartts, Folsom resembled a southern garden gnome with swagger. He was charming and playful, telling the crowd that he and the band had run up the Rocky Steps earlier. “I burnt those steps up, baby,” he flexed. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a man singing songs he’d written half a century earlier. As he sang, I heard him not as a septuagenarian revisiting his youth, but as the young lad who wrote these songs in the first place. Like the players in his band, Folsom was, in my ears, a twenty-something, singing the particularities of a young man’s world: a girl who had moved to his high school from Argentina in “Spanish Lady,” or his first love who broke his heart, inspiring “Weeping Willow Tree,” a song he wrote beneath a tree in his yard. 

I should probably mention that despite being a Music Fan, my usual patience level at a live show is abysmal. That said, I could have watched this band for hours. They were tight and groovy, with loose-limbed confidence matched by impressive precision. Guitar licks moved between honky-tonk, yacht rock, and soul stylings while pedal steel, glockenspiel, flute, and a freaking saxophone (!) added their own shades of magic. The set moved seamlessly between sweetness, longing, and something heavier. Tender and soulful tracks like “April Suzanne” and “Love Is” gave way to thicker swells in “Blue Velvet” and “Written In Your Hair.”  Arrangements felt both dialed in and entirely unforced, and the crowd swayed in the pocket.

Folsom dedicated a few songs to people in the crowd, including a couple visiting from Europe who requested “Biding My Time,” a favorite of his mother’s. During “Sitting on the Moon,” after some jokes about a staged moon landing in ’69, he tossed MoonPies into the audience, making sure to throw some to the folks in the upper balcony. By the time he returned for an encore, Folsom seemed genuinely chuffed before closing with “See You Later, I’m Gone.” Then came his parting words: “Follow your dreams, mine came true!”

As the audience slowly poured out through the bottlenecked hallway, Folsom stationed himself beside the exit, shaking hands with each person as they left.

After spending decades believing he’d left his musical ambitions behind, here he was, meeting the people who had found their way to his songs. Dreams never die, it seems. Sometimes they just take the long way.