Rominger West

The Putah Creek Crawdads are a Yolo County acoustic vocal and string band playing folk, Americana, gospel and bluegrass music. For more than 40 years, the Crawdads have been performing throughout Yolo County and Solano County.  The Putah Creek Crawdads are Ray Coppock, guitar, harmonica and baritone harmony; Marc Faye, bass and harmonies, Wayne Ginsburg, mandolin and bass harmony, Kate Laddish, fiddle and harmonies, Chip Northup, guitar and lead vocals; Cap Thomson, banjo and tenor harmony. They frequently play at Ludy’s Mainstreet BBQ in downtown Woodland. Don’t miss out on this old time acoustic folk music.

For Ray Coppock, (baritone harmony, guitar and harmonica) folk-singing in public started unexpectedly when the Crawdads rose out of the muck of Putah Creek 40 years ago, dripping with old-fashioned harmony. (Well, actually, they were just friends who liked to sing.) Old-timey songs are Ray’s favorites, but he likes almost anything with a tinge of folk that gives a chance to harmonize. And he enjoys an occasional lick with the harmonica.
 
On upright bass, Marc Faye was happy to get back to four strings, having started on ukulele following his Hawaiian Islands youth. College days and the next 15 years, he played a 0-18 Martin influenced by the likes of Burl Ives, the Weavers, and Josh White. In the Hootenany revival days of the 1970's when many others were playing guitars, he tried the bass at the urging of a friend and was hooked. In between he has been part of a family farming operation in the Knights Landing area of Yolo, Sutter and Colusa Counties, an adventure he has shared with wife, Gerda, and sons Eric and Olen.

Wayne Ginsburg (mandolin and bass vocals) having survived the sixties, parenting and teaching teenagers, picked up the mandolin two years before retirement to have something to do after telling STRS to start sending those checks. Inspired by the jazz stylings of the Dawg, David Grisman, in the 80s, the mando seemed right. Sometime after starting to play with the Crawdads, he was encouraged to sing (isn’t everybody in a Hootenanny?). It has been a blast and uphill from there.

Kate Laddish (fiddle and harmony vocals) joined the Putah Creek Crawdads as the result of a fortuitous mistake: A mutual friend told one of the “original four” Crawdads that she played fiddled and they asked her to join them for a gig or two. The one catch, however, was that Kate did not actually play fiddle at the time. When trying to explain that she played mostly guitar, Marc countered with, “Well, you HAVE a fiddle, right?” As a result of this exchange, the instrument that heretofore had been Kate’s violin (with which she hadn’t had lesson since age 13) became rechristened a “fiddle” and Kate embarked on the adventure of being a Crawdad.

Within the Crawdads, Kate enjoys exploring the harmony and rhythm roles available for the fiddle as well as the more obvious chances to step out front with an instrumental lead. Every now and then, when she doesn’t have the fiddle under her chin, Kate has fun getting to do a little singing as well.

Chip Northup,(lead vocals and guitar) besides being a charter member of the Davis Unitarian Universalist Church where the Crawdads got their start, is one of the "founding four" of the Putah Creek Crawdads.His folk singing career got its start when, around 1961, he took a few (a very, very few) group folk guitar lessons through the Davis Arts Center. 

Cap Thomson (tenor harmony, 6-string banjo) has been singing and playing the banjo-guitar since 1952 with the San Francisco Folk Music Club and an earlier group of Crawdads in medical school.   He co-directed the Midnight Special, a live folk music radio program on KPFA in Berkeley in 1959-60.  After psychiatric residency at the MGH in Boston (l960-64) and a year teaching psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, he and wife Helen moved to Davis, California to start the Yolo County Community Mental Health program in l965.  He soon met three other future Putah Creek Crawdads through the Davis Unitarian Church.  They are still playing together joyfully after 43 years.  Cap retired from the county after 27 years but still enjoys seeing the odd patient and belting out an old-time tune with his friends.