[1] Clayton earned a master's degree in folklore at the University of Virginia in 1957, where he specialized in traditional music, primarily New England sea shanties and ballads as well as Appalachian songs.
[2] As much a scholar as a musician, Clayton began collecting songs at a young age in his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
In making field recordings, he "discovered" Etta Baker and Hobart Smith, homespun musicians who have come to be regarded as all-time greats.
[5] Clayton was beset with personal problems in his mid-30s, including frustrations with his career, doubts arising from his homosexuality, manic depression, drug abuse, and a related arrest.
Despite the hard economic times, his father was comfortably employed as a salesman with a national company, where he eventually would become an executive.
Paul's parents, however, were both highly charged, Adah especially, and they fought whenever her husband returned home after days on the road.
[10] Clayton and his mother continued to live with her parents, Charles and Elizabeth Hardy, and his introduction to music came early.
[12] He also hunted down standards from collections available at school and in his explorations, chanced upon a trove of original manuscripts of seafaring songs on a visit one day to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
[13] Intrigued by the possibilities of using radio to bring traditional music to larger audiences, Clayton landed a weekly series of 15-minute folk programs on New Bedford's WFMR and later on WBSM.
[16] Davis took three students under his wing, including Clayton, encouraging them to transcribe songs, write commentary, and tape the university's collection of deteriorating aluminum recordings.
[19] Seeking out traditional players in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia, he learned a variety of styles, becoming more proficient on dulcimer than he was on guitar.
He reported his research in a quarterly journal, Southern Folklore, and for a time planned a book of his own, also on traditional Virginian songs, though the work never materialized.
Folkways, led by Moe Asch, later recognized as the father of World Music,[citation needed] specialized in traditional material of a wide range, from Inuit and Patagonian songs to ballads sung by Serbo-Croats and Bulgarians.
[25] Refocusing his attentions on the basics, he issued a series of albums for Folkways that brought together his grandfather's ballads and shanties with the rarities uncovered through his scholarly pursuits in Virginia.
The next year, Folkways put out two more Clayton releases, American Broadside Ballads in Popular Tradition and Dulcimer Songs and Solos.
His stay at Elektra was short, and following his second release with the label, he joined Monument Records, a smaller outfit, where he issued an EP, a series of singles and his final album, Paul Clayton, Folk Singer!, in 1965.
As a means to mend fences, Dylan traveled cross-country with Clayton and two other friends in 1964, during which they visited poet Carl Sandburg in North Carolina, attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans and rendezvoused with Joan Baez in California.
Although the raid produced an ounce of marijuana, the charges were dropped on March 14, 1967, against the 36-year-old Folklorist on the grounds of illegally obtained search warrants.
[35] Just a few days after his drug charge was dropped, on March 30, 1967, Clayton died by suicide at his apartment in New York, using an electric heater into his bathtub.