Tucson guitar whiz Peter McLaughlin compares The Folk Shop in Tucson to an old-time Southern “pickin’ parlor.”
Musicians stroll into the North Campbell Avenue shop, grab a guitar, ukelele or banjo off the wall and start playing.
“You can walk in there and jam like you’re sitting on someone’s porch,” said McLaughlin, a national flatpicking champion who has widely toured and recorded with bluegrass superstar Laurie Lewis. “It’s like you kind of walk back in time a little bit. I don’t know of any place in the Southwest like that.”
But by early next year, the Folk Shop could become another chapter of Tucson’s music history. Its longtime owner Paul Blumentritt says he wants to retire by March or early summer, and if he can’t find a buyer for the shop, he might convert the business to a fully online enterprise. Or he could open it a few hours a week, by appointment only, he said last Wednesday after showing a couple of men who looked barely out of their teens how to shake one of his unique percussion instruments to create a sound that resembled a whistling drum.
“I’m 73 years old. I should have retired a long time ago, but I’m going to now,” Blumentritt said as an older couple wandered around the shop looking at his collection of vintage used guitars, ukeleles, dulcimers, banjos and all manner of acoustic instruments and memorabilia.
Blumentritt has not listed the store with any real estate broker, nor widely advertised that it’s for sale. But he has had a few tentative prospects that later fizzled since he and his wife and business partner Brenda first broached the idea of retiring three years ago.
“It’s going to be difficult to leave because I like it so much, but now I’m ready,” said the father of two, who said he would like to spend more time getting to know his six grandchildren.
The Blumentritts bought The Folk Shop in 1991 from founder B.L. Anderson. They had been to Tucson a number of times in the six years that they traversed the country in the late 1980s, visiting relatives in California and setting up temporary stakes from Florida to the West Coast in a post-retirement travel binge. Blumentritt retired in 1986 from selling consumer electronics for a manufacturer in his native Minneapolis, and he and Brenda sold their antiques-filled lakeside home and hit the road.
They stayed in some cities for months at a time, including one in Florida where Brenda got a temp job in the mayor’s office. But after a few months, they would pack up and head back down the road.
They swung into Tucson several times during their travels and Blumentritt, who was enamored by old banjos and acoustic music, found his way to the downtown Chicago Store.
He would explore all three floors of the store, taking mental note of the inventory of Fender and Martin guitars, hulking Hohner accordions, brass and woodwind instruments and drums. He became friendly with the store’s cast of prominent Tucson musicians including the late Rainer Ptacek, who he said was “just incredible and one of the nicest guys.”
That’s also where Blumentritt met Anderson, who was ready to call it quits in 1991 with his then-5-year-old used music store on hipster North Fourth Avenue.
Blumentritt said Anderson asked him if he wanted to buy it and Blumentritt made him a deal: let him run the shop for a few days to see if it was worth the asking price. He came into the shop, rearranged it a bit, added to the inventory some of his own instruments collected in his travels, and opened the doors. Unlike Anderson, who kept the shop open for five hours each on Fridays and Saturdays, Blumentritt opened in the morning and stayed there until the evening. With the doors open, customers came, and it didn’t take much for Blumentritt, a born salesman with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, to persuade them to buy.
At the end of the trial run, the Blumentritts decided to buy the store.
“We had a ball on the road, and then I came here and got settled in,” Blumentritt said. “Right from the start, I loved it.”
The couple ran the store and repair shop in its 598-square-foot space on North Fourth Avenue from 1991 until 1995. By the end of ’95, they moved to the 1,800-square-foot storefront at 2525 N. Campbell Ave., across the street from the behemoth Rainbow Guitars shop.
“We wanted to be the little guy next to the big guy, and that’s how we ended up here,” he said.
The Folk Shop specializes in repairing instruments and selling hard to find and rare acoustic instruments that Blumentritt has collected over the years. He has amassed 400 banjos, “which is idiotic,” he said.
“I think I’ve got more banjos in my inventory than most of the stores in the West combined,” he said.
The shop also sells new instruments, but it is the treasures behind a locked glass case at the front of the store that catch many people’s eyes. The case contains some of the store’s most prized and unique items, including an eight-string Hardanger fiddle, a 120-year-old bowl-back mandolin and an antique Jewsaphone.
Ukeleles and banjo ukeleles — they look like mini-banjos and in the early part of the 20th century it was popular to paint or draw on the heads — are displayed on one wall. Used guitars, many of them vintage, are hung on another. A cubbyhole Blumentritt has dubbed “Debris du Jour” is home to a collection of international instruments including an Indian sitar and Russian balalaika. It also is where you will find Blumentritt’s so-called “commodaphone” — a guitar crafted from a wooden toilet seat.
A small room next door is filled with some of those 400 banjos. They are neatly hung from the walls with prices starting at several hundred dollars, their tags occasionally fluttering in the breeze from the air conditioner. When the price tags tap the banjo strings, they create a wonderful tingle as if the room is about to break out in song.
Blumentritt said the business has been consistently good over the years. He’s made a nice post-retirement living off the shop, he said. When he amped up his online business about a year ago, it got even better. Last week, he sold two banjos to a buyer in Germany and a $7,000 guitar to someone in California, he said.
But with an online store, he said, you lose that personal contact. Online, you can’t touch the guitar you’re buying or strum it to hear the ghosts of players past.
“It would be really sad” if The Folk Shop went entirely online, said Jim Lipson, a member of the Tucson Kitchen Musicians Association that produces the annual Tucson Folk Festival. “It would make it certainly just another place.
“There is something about The Folk Shop … there is a warmth in there,” he added. “It’s the place where you go in and you feel like you’re talking to somebody you know.”
Wally Lawder has worked at The Folk Shop for two years and he said he hates the idea of Blumentritt retiring.
But “I think it’s overdue,” he conceded.
“We all want to see The Folk Shop continue,” said Lawder, a singer-songwriter whose folk-fusion band Acoustic Sky performs throughout Tucson. “It would be a loss if it closed, not just a personal loss because I work here but ... there are not many acoustic music shops.”
“I hope that someone will continue it,” McLaughlin said. “It won’t be the same without Paul and Brenda and all the employees, but if someone could keep it going that would be great.”
