The Late Marshall Brickman’s Wild Ride from Hootenanny to Hollywood

Before taking pen in hand to write jokes for “The Tonight Show,” Oscar-winning scripts and Tony-winning Broadway shows, the late Marshall Brickman had made his bones in the folk music world on stage, on television, and even on one of the most famous movie soundtrack albums ever. A skilled banjo, fiddle, and guitar player, he followed a bluegrass path from Brooklyn to Wisconsin and around the world before heading to Hollywood and returning to New York via the Great White Way.

Born August 25, 1939, in Rio de Janeiro to American parents Pauline and Abram Brickman—his father an immigrant from Poland—Marshall moved with his family to Flatbush, Brooklyn, at age four. He grew up in a postwar neighborhood where kids played stickball in the street and folk music thrived in the parks. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1956, made the honor roll, and ran audio for WNYE. By then, his weekends were filled with bluegrass jams in Washington Square Park, often with childhood friend Eric Weissberg.

At 18, Brickman traveled to Moscow for the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship in 1957. “For 30 bucks, you got to fly to Russia, stay in a hotel,” he recalled. “For two weeks, eat a lot of caviar. And if you had a little talent or a skill other than a scam, they let you do it. I played ‘Earl’s Breakdown,’ [on banjo] which is a tune by Earl Scruggs. I won a prize. I won a gold medal because they had never seen or heard anything like this.” That gold medal still sat years later “on my father’s television set in Miami Beach next to the Oscar.”

Brickman and Weissberg would cross musical paths for decades as they attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brickman studied science and music and, for a time, considered a career in medicine.

“Actually, I'm proud to say I had the highest-grade point of anybody who was ever suspended for political reasons from the University of Wisconsin for a semester,” Brickman said with trademark deadpan during an interview for The Writers Guild Foundation in 2020, also noting that he briefly worked in the pathology department at Wisconsin General Hospital. This job promptly ended his medical ambitions. “That's what cured me of ever wanting to be a doctor,” he said. “I did steal, however, a lot of linen for my friends.”

Despite that early detour, Madison was where Brickman’s musical life ramped up to full speed. “Our apartment was a magnet for the folk music scene in Madison,” he recalled. “We would play Saturday night at the local bar in Madison, but mainly it was just for our own amusement.” When a teenage Robert Zimmerman passed through town en route from Hibbing, Minnesota, to New York City to become Bob Dylan, he stayed at Brickman’s place. “He came in his suit in a thin tie and didn't play the guitar. He played the piano. He was a taciturn young man.”

After graduation, Weissberg—already playing with the well-known folk trio The Tarriers—asked Brickman to join. The Tarriers had once featured actor Alan Arkin, along with original members Eric Darling and Bob Carey. Their 1956 hit “The Banana Boat Song” (released just before the Harry Belafonte version) had made them household names. By the time Brickman joined, the lineup had evolved, with Weissberg now on banjo. “The Tarriers were like the Ink Spots,” he quipped. “The name remained the same, but people went through it like a car wash.” Besides Weissberg, Brickman was a bandmate with Clarence Cooper, who had appeared in the award-winning docudrama The Quiet One.

Brickman toured with The Tarriers on the circuit, appearing at clubs like The Bitter End in New York, playing colleges, and even performing live on the landmark TV show Hootenanny. “Remember the fifties and the early sixties when by act of Congress everyone around 18 years old had to have a guitar?” he joked on Late Night with David Letterman in 1983 about the folk explosion of that time. “I did that instead of real work.”

After The Tarriers disbanded in 1965, Brickman joined another short-lived folk supergroup — The New Journeymen, formed by John Phillips with his new partner Michelle Phillips. “He wanted to put together a group… and did I wanna join? And I said, sure, why not? I didn’t have an offer from Goldman Sachs.” The group dissolved within the year, with John and Michelle forming the multiplatinum group The Mamas & The Papas. At the same time, Brickman, citing the couple’s anger management issues, moved on, content and grateful to have “escaped that burning building.”

Though his folk career had ended, his banjo playing would reemerge unexpectedly. Brickman and Weissberg had recorded an instrumental album titled New Dimension in Banjo and Bluegrass for Vanguard Records in the early 1960s. When Weissberg got an unexpected hit with “Dueling Banjos” from the film Deliverance in 1972, New Dimensions was repackaged with “Dueling Banjos” and another song added and re-released in 1973. Titled Dueling Banjos From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Deliverance And Additional Music, Brickman’s playing suddenly had a new audience, even though he was already onto his career’s next chapter as a successful humorist who led the writer’s room for “The Tonight Show.”

Another track from those sessions found a second life sixteen years later when the Beastie Boys hooted and hollered over a 30-second sample of “Shuckin’ the Corn” for their “5-Piece Chicken Dinner” track on 1989’s hip-hop masterpiece album Paul’s Boutique.

Reflecting on the folk boom years later, Brickman marveled at the movement’s cultural reach. “I think people don't realize what a phenomenon folk music was in the early sixties,” he said. “It was a big movement. Quite discrete and distinct from the early rock and roll stuff.”

Of course, it’s the screenwriting career that ultimately defined his fame. He wrote Annie Hall and Manhattan with Woody Allen, wrote and directed Simon (coincidentally starring his Tarriers predecessor Alan Arkin), Lovesick and The Manhattan Project, and then, nearly 20 years later, co-wrote the book for the Broadway smash, Jersey Boys. Despite the accolades, Brickman always clarified that music lit his creative fire first.

“I keep telling my kids that my life is no example of how to plan a life,” he said. “I wanted to go to a populist college where they had banjo playing.”

Marshall Brickman died November 29, 2024, but left a legacy that echoes like a high lonesome harmony. Long before his Hollywood life, he embodied the very soul of bluegrass—unpredictable, unpretentious, and utterly alive in the moment. From Flatbush to Madison, from Moscow to the movie screen, Brickman followed the strings wherever they led, trusting the tune over the map. In the most authentic bluegrass tradition, he forged a path with no plan but plenty of heart, proving that playing what’s true to you can put you on the road to an incredible life.