Following Two-Week Hospice Hootenanny, Beloved Cleveland Folksinger Tim Wallace Dies

Northeast Ohio folksinger Tim Wallace, who died Sunday March 29 age the age of 65, wasn’t one of the best-known musicians in the acoustic music scene. But he was one of the most loved.

He went into hospice a month ago, expected to die momentarily from the lymphoma that was diagnosed early last summer. But dozens of his friends flocked to his side, performing music in his room daily for two weeks in what came to be known as “Timstock.” Among the musicians who played with him were Gary Hall, Jim Schafer, Jim Stone, Andy Allan, Bob Sammon, Gusti Krauss, Alex Bevan, Charlie Wiener, Robin Stratton, Brian Henke, Jen Maurer and many more.

“Tim was nearly dead, and he came back and was lucid for nearly three weeks so everyone who wanted to see him got to see him,” said Schafer, his close friend and collaborator of almost 40 years. He began to fade for the last time just before the weekend after Elyria mayor Holly Brinda dropped by to present him with a plaque declaring it Tim Wallace Day in the town where he lived and grew up.

Wallace first hit the local music scene playing Scottish and Irish music with a band called the Hooligans, which included Allan, a high school friend from Elyria who is the executor of his estate. But it was his own songs that started to attract attention and admiration from both listeners and fellow songwriters when he became a regular at folk hub, the Red Horse Hollow Tavern on Madison and W. 117th in the late ’70s.

“In the Red Horse Hollow days, he was writing those wonderfully funny songs,” says Schafer. “He could turn a phrase better than even Steve Goodman’s funny stuff. Tim’s stuff was really, really good, very clever and very well crafted, and he only got better at that when he got older.”

In the ’80s, he was part of the crowd that formed around the Wildcat Ranch folk scene in Navarre, Ohio, where he was part of an ensemble called Too Sexy for Folk, along with Hall, Ken Metz and Steve Cobb.

“I’ve thought he was the best songwriter I knew in this area,” says Hall, himself no slouch in that department. Like Schafer, he got to know Wallace in the Red Horse Hollow days where, he said, Wallace was one of the most popular performers. “He wrote songs that made sense. You understood them on the first listen, they were very funny, and he wrote a lot of them. I learned four of his songs, all of which have been hugely effectively in my career.”

One of those songs was “Bigfoot Boogie,” which was also recorded by one of Cleveland’s best-known folksingers Alex Bevan.

Like many outgoing acoustic performers with a knack for entertaining, Wallace was active hosting open mics at places ranging from the Southwest Tavern in Parma to Brothers Lounge on the Cleveland/Lakewood border. He was a regular at the long-running Kent State Folk Festivals where he performed and hosted workshops. In the late ’90s, he was part of a group that launched the current Mountain Rose concert series in Kent, and he co-hosted a radio show on Akron’s WAPS with fellow musician Jim Stone called “Just Plain Folk.”

It was with Stone that he formed his final project, the jug band Smokin Fez Monkeys.

“I ran into him one at a Mountain Rose festival,” said Stone. “I told him his material was perfect for a jug band, and by the way, I’m learning to play upright bass and if you ever need upright bass, give me a call.” “Several months later, I was talking to him on the phone and he said, remember that conversation about jug band — what would you think about a band called Smokin Fez Monkeys,” recalls Stone. “I said, I’m in. Everything fell together quickly, and in a few weeks, we started playing out.”

As Bullfrog Willie Plunkett, Wallace played guitar, banjo and slide whistle, sang bass and contributed much of the band’s repertoire.

The band’s slogan was “Like Cartoons for Your Ears,” which perfectly fit Wallace’s sensibility. His songs, which Stone describes as “intelligent humor, not stupid funny songs” were indeed perfect for jugband treatment. But it also fit Wallace’s visual sensiblity. He was a talented graphic artist with a knack for cartoon-style art, which he deployed on behalf of not only the Smokin Fez Monkeys but fellow musicians like Bevan for whom he did album cover art.

Tim continued to feed his love for Irish music in with a series of post-2000 bands, including Malachi Bend, TriSpiral and Emerald Heart, that played pub songs, ballads, jig and reels.

“Although we played Irish music, regulars would often request Tim’s funny songs which he performed solo—especially “Sacred Chicken,” a favorite of some our followers over those years,” says Pat McGuire, who played with Tim in all three bands. “Tim was bawdy. Tim was tender. Tim took time to be kind and helpful. He didn’t look past people struggling musically. He stopped, he shared, he gave and gave and gave.”

That seems to be the consensus of everyone who knew Tim. Robin Stratton, who, along with Schafer, Stone and Allan helped to coordinate his care in his final days and rally friends to his side, called him “our hero,” and she explains why:

“Because he was so smart, so clever, but kind,” she says. “Never had a bad word to say about anyone, treated everyone not only with dignity and respect, but made each individual feel special. He wrote funny songs that are so intelligent and well-crafted that the audience laughed and sang along. He is our hero for doing all that, plus fighting the battle of his life against the lymphoma that rendered him unable to sit or stand for the seven months he was in the hospital and nursing home. He is our hero for touching it out and never complaining. He never blamed God or himself, never asked, ‘Why me?’ and always was kind and welcoming to friends and medical staff. That sounds like a hero to me.”

Wallace played his last show with the Smokin Fez Monkeys in July. He was fading rapidly by the end of the year but rallied for one last long hootenanny in hospice. “If you’re going to have a wake, why not have one while you’re alive?” says Stone. “Tim was an amazing person in so many ways. I hope people remember him as an amazing person, not just as someone who died.”

One of the ways his friends plan to keep his music and spirit live is through the Tim Wallace Memorial Troubadour Festival. Schafer says he and Wallace had been trying to start such a festival for acoustic singer-songwriters for years. Wallace’s songs will become the intellectual property of the nonprofit they’re working to create. You can make a donation here. They hope to launch the festival in 2016.

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