Richard Harrington has been writing about music for more than 40 years, many of them at the Washington Post, starting in the late 1970s as a freelancer, then as a staff writer in Style, and eventually as pop-music critic. In 1999 or so—“Can’t remember exactly,” he says—he moved to the Weekend section, where he continued to write about area bands and songwriters. He retired last May.

“Washington has an amazingly rich musical history,” says Harrington, 62. When the acoustic-folk revival swept the country in the 1960s, he was playing the local hootenanny circuit, opening at such DC clubs as Basin’s Top of the Lounge for people including Dave Van Ronk, the singer/songwriter who shared Greenwich Village stages with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. “But I wasn’t very good,” Harrington says. “An average guitar player and singer at best.”

Harrington was born in Switzerland—his dad was in the Foreign Service—and moved to Washington as a boy. He attended private schools, including the Harvey School in New York, where he played in a folk group with fellow student Loudon Wainwright. “I taught him how to play guitar, which is probably why he’s not very good at it,” Harrington says.

Harrington attended Wilson High School in DC but never made it to college. “It being the ’60s, the streets of Washington were much more interesting than any college could be,” he says. The streets pulsed with the rhythms of an array of live music—from folk, country, and rock to jazz and blues—and Harrington started spending more time writing about the scene than playing on it.

I sat down with Harrington at his home in Takoma Park, where he is at work on a book about controversy in the music industry, to find out what lasting impressions the local music scene has made on him.

What was the caliber of talent here in the ’60s?

The band Claude Jones was sort of our Grateful Dead. They weren’t really a jam band—those didn’t come until later—but they had a farm down in Virginia, and when the big countercultural music festival Medicine Ball Caravan was touring, they’d set up their teepees there. Crank was a really good rock-’n’-roll band. The acoustic guitarist John Fahey used to work at a gas station around the corner from where I live now, and in many ways he was a seminal musician. You could see him playing at coffeehouses or in the basements of churches. The Cherry People, the Fallen Angels—so many really good groups. And Washington was considered the bluegrass capital of America.

There were a lot of really good musicians. The challenge has always been that while a city like Washington really does produce a lot of fine musicians, it’s not an industry town like New York or Nashville or LA. So it’s the old story, that people often feel they have to leave here. But that doesn’t mean the people who stayed aren’t of the same quality.

Jazz great Buck Hill could’ve gone to New York, and he could have killed there with his sax. Killed. But he chose to stay here. Shirley Horn had gone to New York and had her moment recording with Miles Davis, and she got a label deal. But they really didn’t know what to do with her. She was a singer/piano player who did her own amazing thing. So she came back and raised a family, then made a comeback. She was not a Carmen McRae or a Dinah Washington or an Ella, but she was fabulous. You can’t imagine singers today like Diana Krall or Norah Jones without her influence, and they’ve said as much.

You once observed that this area seems to produce an incredible number of really good guitarists.

Starting with the recently deceased Chick Hall, who in many ways was a precursor of Danny Gatton in that he was an amazing guitar player who, like Danny and a lot of others, chose to stay home. Chick decided that family and friends—and in Danny’s case, add cars—were more important than chasing a particular dream. But you start with Chick, you then go to Roy Clark, an incredible country player, then to Roy Buchanan, an incredible blues guitarist, then to Danny, who was incredible in every style. Now there are so many good guitarists, it’s ridiculous.