Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 4, 1994 TAG: 9410050038
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FERRUM LENGTH: Medium
He dresses simple to match his personality - call it folksy.
Sky, 54, has a white beard that's got more miles on it than all three of the van motors put together.
And there are plenty of stories the owner of that beard can tell.
Here's just a smidgen of the life and times of Pat Sky:
He has two friends named Paul Simon and Bob Dylan who have kept in contact over the years, Sky says.
Dylan, in fact, lived about a guitar chord away from Sky in New York City during the folk music revival of the late 1960s.
Sky is one of the most accomplished bagpipe players in the United States and once operated a business making bagpipe parts.
He's recorded six folk music albums over the years.
He owns a recording company that specializes in Irish music.
Rocker George Thorogood included an acoustic version of a song Sky wrote - "My Friend Robert" - on his latest album. Thorogood called Sky to ask him what he thought of the song.
"I told him I liked it," the songwriter said.
So with a music background like his, what the heck was Sky doing over the past 12 months baking tapes in an oven at Ferrum College's Blue Ridge Institute?
For the answer, another story must be told.
After making a living as a folk singer for 25 years, Sky decided to go back to school at the University of North Carolina to get a master's degree in folklore. It was there in 1989 that Sky learned how to fix "sticky tape syndrome" - which resulted when one of the most popular brands of reel-to-reel tape on the market began to break down, absorbing moisture and rendering the recordings useless.
It is a widespread problem that threatens to ruin a large percentage of master tape recordings, Sky said.
Enter the Blue Ridge Institute, whose archives of valuable folk music recordings and historical interviews slowly were dying, a victim of the sticky tape syndrome.
Using a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sky restored the institute's archives that include Dutch ancestral folk tales and secular blues music.
Of 600 tapes that were in danger, only two were lost.
"We're the first archive to fully restore our collection," said Roddy Moore, the institute's director.
Sky realizes the importance of his work.
"A lot of the recordings can never be redone. If they're lost, they're lost forever."
Sky's restoration process starts with baking the tapes in a small wood oven at 138 degrees for three to four hours to remove the moisture.
He then re-records the music onto new tapes and throws the old ones away.
"The key to the whole thing is the temperature and the time," Sky says. "There's nothing that complicated about it. But you have to know how long to bake 'em."
He also has used the technique to save taped interviews that were being used to write a book.
Ted Rosengarden, a Charleston, S.C., writer who had heard of Sky's ability to bring tapes back to life, hoped the folk singer could recover hundreds of hours of recorded interviews he was using to write the book. The recordings were buried under a basement full of mud, sand and water left by Hurricane Hugo.
Sky went to work. He built a makeshift machine to clean the tapes, baked them and re-recorded them. It took more than a year to do it, but Sky saved Rosengarden's work.
Because of the problems he's seen with tapes, Sky says the 33 rpm vinyl record is still the best way to store music and interviews.
"There's been problems with tape and with compact discs," he says. "I've got vinyl records that go back to the 1950s that are just like new."
But Sky - a Louisiana native - has tape recordings, too. Among his favorites is one he made in 1960. It's Bob Dylan singing in a small New York night club. Three people were in the audience.
"It's really great stuff to listen to," Sky says. "It was like a community then. We played songs and wrote them, and there was a social aspect to it. Those small clubs were everywhere. But by 1972, the revival was dead as a doornail."
Sky now says he's at the age "that I've got to do something."
He completed his work at the institute in late September and said he planned to return to his home in Chapel Hill where his wife and son live.
He said he'll go where the most promising job offer takes him.
If his life to this point is any indication, it'll probably be somewhere interesting.
by CNB