A hit song leads to life in Saugerties
Dick and Diane married in 1969. While living in Queens, they decided to buy a house and raise their kids in the country. The house would have to provide proximity to an airport, though, since Dick went out on the road so often. They found their new home in Saugerties in 1974, and as Diane relates, they put the down payment on the house with Dick’s first royalty check from “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” Diane had been “a little familiar” with the area, she says, from having had an aunt and uncle with a home in the region when she was a kid. “We found the house first,” Diane says, “and then realized how much we liked the immediate area. We came here when our older son was a year and a half old, and we never looked back. We just always loved being here.”
Saugerties provided a reasonable proximity to the Albany airport, and Dick enjoyed the conveniences of not having to fly out of Kennedy or LaGuardia airports. “Dick would put the bass in the back of the truck and go up there,” Diane says, “and the skycaps would know him by name or by sight when he pulled up with the instrument.” Flying with a large stand-up bass had its challenges, though. Back when the airlines had a reduced fare for children, the bass would get strapped into its own seat next to Kniss. But when the airlines eliminated the children’s fare, the price of a separate seat for the bass got a little pricey, so the instrument had to start travelling in the luggage hold.
Despite the difficulties of transporting the large instrument, Dick always preferred the upright bass to the electric. The only time he played the electric bass on tour was when he first went on the road with John Denver. Diane remembers that Denver couldn’t afford that extra ticket for the upright bass to sit on the airplane at that time, “so he asked Dick to play the electric because that could go in the closet of the airplane,” she says. “He said to Dick, ‘as soon as we get some money, we’re going to take “Harry” on the road,’ and [eventually] they did.” (Dick’s bass acquired the name “Harry” in the sixties when Peter, Paul and Mary’s tour manager was named Tom, and Tom and Dick would fly together and play golf, and, well, you see where this is going.)
Although Dick travelled a lot, Diane says, “the great thing about his job was that when he was away, he was just away, and when he was home, he was home 24/7.”
At Dick’s memorial service, she says, their sons Jonathan and Peter related that they never felt their lives were different than anyone else’s, or even remembered their father as having been away for any length of time. Dick coached his sons’ Little League team, the Mt. Marion Tigers, and the family has fond memories of spending summers at Zena Recreation Park with extended family and friends. “When I look back, I think about what a wonderful ride it’s been,” says Diane. “We got to go places and do things that we never would have done otherwise. When Dick was on the road with John [Denver] and our kids were younger, we would always take them out to Colorado, or California, if it was something that was a long enough trip and the kids didn’t have school.”
When the boys were attending Mt. Marion Elementary, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary came out to Saugerties and joined Dick in “Puff the Magic Dragon” benefit concerts that raised money, Diane says, that built the first playground that any of the Saugerties schools had. The boys attended Saugerties Junior and Senior High Schools, and went on to college. “Both now have wonderful families and careers,” says Diane, and although both sons have moved out of the area, “they love coming home to Saugerties” to visit, she says.
As the boys grew up and left home, Diane was able to go out on the road more with Dick, although she has her own career doing freelance work with cookbook authors like Rick Rodgers, doing recipe testing and development.
Early days
Dick Kniss was born in Portland, Oregon on April 24, 1937. The first musical instrument he took up was the guitar, but apparently he wasn’t very good at it. According to his wife Diane, “somebody suggested he try the bass, because it had less strings.” His musical career as a bass player began in San Francisco, and then Dick moved to Troy, New York, before going on to New York City. His musical roots were in jazz, and early on in his career, he was sideman to such notables as Herbie Hancock and Woody Herman. He was on the road with Herman, says Diane, when he got a call from a friend telling him that Peter, Paul and Mary were looking for a bass player. “He knew that [working with Woody Herman] wasn’t going to be forever,” she recalls, “so he figured he would try it out with Peter, Paul and Mary and see what happened.”
Dick’s jazz background brought something different to folk music, she says, and Dick was known to be “much more of a performing musician as opposed to a studio musician.” On the website for Peter, Paul and Mary, Noel (Paul) Stookey of the trio says of Kniss, “I can’t think of another bass player who improvises so tastefully within the framework of folk music.” After Dick’s passing, Stookey told the New York Times that Kniss “had this capacity to weave countermelodies. He was the master of when to answer. In folk music, we’re telling a story. The guitars would begin it, but Dick was an orchestrator, and his entry often signified a particular turning point in a song.”
Peter Yarrow of the trio released a statement saying that Dick “was a dear and beloved part of our closest family circle and his bass playing was always a great fourth voice in our music as well as, conceptually, an original and delightfully surprising new statement added to our vocal arrangements.”
