Trending
Stokes
ELKINS -- Royal Stokes, at the age of 90, is having a career-defining moment.
Stokes, who moved to Elkins with his wife Erika in 2007, is a celebrated jazz writer and novelist who was profiled in The Washington Post last month. The article, which was the cover story for The Post's Weekend section on Feb. 26, details his long and varied career.
"It is super gratifying" to receive such recognition at this point in his life, Stokes said in an email to The Inter-Mountain.
He began the long, winding road of his professional career as a professor of Greek and Latin languages, literature and ancient history at four different universities in the 1960s.
In 1969, when he was teaching at the University of Colorado, Stokes decided to change paths.
He had met his wife-to-be, Erika Hartmann, at the university, and they both decided to, as he put it, "drop out together."
Stokes sold his Volkswagen Bug and and upgraded to a Corvair van, similar to a VW bus, and he and Erika hit the road.
"I was on a visit to the campus of the University of Colorado in October of 1968 and I met up with the Hog Farm, who I hung out with for the week they were on campus," Stokes told The Inter-Mountain this week. "They were a hippie commune and a big influence on me. So we dropped out into the hippie circuit and traveled all across the country for the next two years."
The Hog Farm was a performance group and traveling commune, which is perhaps best known for its involvement with the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969, when it hired to provide festival security. Peace activist and clown Hugh Romney, aka Wavy Gravy, and his wife Jahanara were among the founders of the Hog Farm.
"I did not drop out of the academic life to become a jazz writer and a jazz DJ, I dropped out to become a hippie," Stokes said. "The DJ and jazz writing came after that."
After two years on the road Stokes landed in Washington, D.C. In addition to being a jazz DJ for a radio station, he also worked other gigs at first, such as a dishwashing job at a vegetarian restaurant in Georgetown. His wife took a job as a librarian upon their arrival and continued in the same profession at different locations until her retirement in 2007.
"My love of jazz began in my very early teens, so I went back to my first love," he said. "I had two cultural loves in my life, jazz beginning in my early teens and the classics beginning in my early 20s. And they are both still with me."
Stokes was eventually hired as the main jazz writer and critic for The Washington Post, and held that position from the late 1970s through the 1980s. He also later worked for DownBeat Magazine and Jazz Times, where he was the editor in the late 1980s.
Stokes reviewed more than 1,500 performances and interviewed more than 1,000 musicians during his career. He said if he had to pick a favorite jazz musician, or as he puts it his "main man," it would be the late pianist Earl Hines, and he also thought very highly of pianist Mary Lou Williams,
"I strongly supported female instrumentalists in jazz during my career," he said. "I was known in the jazz community for being a strong supporter of women's instrumentalists and that's something I'm proud of."
Stokes also attended jazz festivals in Europe, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Once he was even sent to Bangkok, Thailand with a combo of two jazz singers and a dance troop from D.C. He covered the 10-day excursion as a journalist.
Stokes continues to write. His latest book, "The Essential Royal Stokes, Jazz, Blues and Beyond Reader," is his ninth publication, and books 10 and 11 are already in the works.
"My 10th book is going to be a memoir," he said. "No. 11 will be the fourth volume of the 'Backwards Over' novels, which is sort of an epic from the 1960s until the 1990s. It follows the adventures of a dropped-out professor and his companion as they cruise around here and there in the country."
When asked if "Backwards Over" was based on his life, he replied, "Most fiction is inspired to one degree or another by the life of the writer. You have to write what you know, at least I believe that. But it's not an autobiographical book. On the copyright page it states that while some of the locations and so forth and so on, seem to fit the writer's actual life, they are much expanded upon … it is a work of fiction."
Moving to Elkins was the result of an extensive search for the spot where Stokes and his wife would spend the rest of their lives.
"My wife Erika was going to retire so we started cruising around in Virginia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia looking for a retirement community, as they describe them," he said. "We came back to Elkins several times and it had a very strong appeal for us in terms of its setting here in the mountains. And we had learned that it had a very strong arts community. So we just decided that Elkins was the place for us. So we moved here and bought a house."
He is the father of Sutton Stokes, who is the external affairs specialist for the City of Elkins.
All of Royal Stokes' books are available for purchase at amazon.com.