He influenced Tom Rush, with whom he revived and arranged the traditional song "Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm?" about the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas. Von Schmidt shared his large repertory of traditional music, passing them along to new performers who were developing a more modern version of folk music. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1957, where he painted and became part of the coffeehouse scene. Following a stint in the army, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study art in Florence.
Von Schmidt began selling his own artwork while he was still a teenager. Von Schmidt's father, Harold von Schmidt, was a Western painter who did illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Von Schmidt co-authored with Jim Rooney Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years.
As a singer and guitarist, he was considered to be the leading specialist in country blues in Cambridge at the time, the counterpart of Greenwich Village's Dave Van Ronk. He was associated with the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s and a key part of the Cambridge folk music scene. Eric Von Schmidt (– February 2, 2007) was an American singer and guitarist, songwriter, painter and illustrator, and Grammy Award recipient.
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