Peter “Madcat” Ruth was fifteen when he first heard blues duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry on the radio.
“Terry was the harmonica player,” Ruth recalls. He had been practicing guitar, but he thought, “‘That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
“I went out, got a record that had some Sonny Terry, and it was a collection of folk music. I fell in love with it. And I thought I had to learn how to do that.”
That was in 1964 in Evanston, Illinois. Ruth bought a harmonica and taught himself to play, first listening to records and then studying with Chicago blues harmonica player Big Walter Horton.
Ruth moved to Ann Arbor in 1971 to join the progressive rock band New Heavenly Blue. His first apartment was just two blocks from The Ark, then located behind the First Presbyterian church on Hill St. It was “the place I wanted to be,” he says.
Just six years old, the club was already “one of the primary folk music places in the United States. “I met so many traveling musicians coming through The Ark, and I got a reputation of being able to talk and sit in with those musicians.” He credits singer-songwriters Rosalie Sorrels and David Bromberg in particular for connecting him with “some of the most famous traveling folk musicians.”
Ruth has since played on more than 130 recordings, collaborating with legends ranging from jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to funk master George Clinton and U-M composer Bill Bolcom on his Grammy-winning Songs of Innocence and of Experience. For more than twenty years he toured alongside singer-guitarist Shari Kane in the duo Madcat & Kane.
Since he turned fifty, The Ark has functioned as a birthday milestone tradition for Ruth, with his sixtieth birthday earning citywide recognition as “Peter Madcat Ruth Day” from the Ann Arbor City Council. On April 2 (see Nightspots), he’ll celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday with his band the C.A.R.Ma. Quartet and three guest musicians: singer-songwriter Seth Bernard, multi-instrumentalist Rachael Davis, and Nashville harmonica specialist Buddy Greene.
“It’s always a joyous event,” says Ruth. “I’ve played music in forty-nine of fifty states and fourteen foreign countries. Still, The Ark is my number one favorite place to play in the world.”
