In the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Vegas knew how to swing. In fact, that was what Las Vegas was all about. The lounges and the skills of the players on their stages were every bit as important as the casinos. Music gave that town life. It injected it with a jazz sensibility that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Jazz was evolving into all the things it was to become, and Chicago and New York were its most notable home bases. But it was the swinging jazz from its own birthplace of New Orleans that took on another life all its own just a few states over to the west.

Two men came up in New Orleans, developed their skills there and elsewhere, and took their music to Las Vegas, where they could swing, man.

Louis Prima was the reigning King of Vegas Swing. He still is, actually, even a quarter century after his death. Nobody ever replaced him, and besides, entertainment there is different now, with magic shows and stage spectaculars.

It’s the other man from New Orleans who is doing his best to keep the sound alive, the sound that he created with Prima, his mentor and partner. Sam Butera is still at it, wailing away on the saxophone wherever and whenever he can.

For decades, he and the Witnesses, and Keely Smith, and later on, Gia Maione Prima, supported Louis Prima for his wild shows, all integral parts of the show and the hits, like “That Ol’ Black Magic,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody/Just A Gigolo.” Together, they were the greatest live musical attraction in the country. Sam Butera was Clarence Clemons to Prima’s Springsteen, fulfilling an important personal role as Energetic Stage Sidekick and an even greater role as Sax Player Extraordinaire.

Butera still calls Vegas home, but he knows it for what it is now. “It’s not entertainment anymore. It’s slot machines. Remember this used to be called the Entertainment Capital of the World? Ain’t no more now, man. It’s the Magician’s Capital of the World.”

He does manage to find some stages to play, though, mostly in casino towns like Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi and Yuma, Arizona. He also recently opened a series of shows in Europe for one of his great admirers, Van Morrison. Wherever he plays, he keeps the sound alive, the one that he and Prima created together. He does it in the format of a classic Vegas show, and it’s as close as any audience member will get to the real thing from a bygone era. Sam interacts with the audience, tells jokes, improvises with all the members of his band, The Wildest, and swings with high energy. The whole show is up, fun, and positive-just like it was with Louis.

In fact, very little has changed since those days with Louis. “People want to hear the music that they know us for; ‘Gigolo,’ ‘Jump, Jive, and Wail,’ ‘Oh Babe,’ ‘Night Train,’ all those things,” says Butera. “I do a medley of all the things that Louis did in the Forties. People love it.”

Fan, friend, and promoter, Ron Cannatella has experienced that old black magic of a Sam Butera show. “I was just recently watching a tape of Sam with Louis, then [went] to see Sam right after that, and nothing has changed. He still looks the same and still sounds the same. He’s an ageless kind of guy. He can get out there and deliver a show, and deliver those songs, and play that saxophone. At the end of his shows, he does ‘When The Saints Go Marching In.’ Just like Louis did, he parades out into the audience and while he’s playing the saxophone, he’s shaking hands, smiling at the people. And he makes people happy.”

It’s fortuitous enough that the younger man of the two can keep their special brand of Hot Swing going into the Twenty First century (Butera is 77; Prima would have been 93 by now), but it’s even more fortunate that they found each other in the first place.

Though perhaps not too surprising. Years before joining Prima, Butera had his own hit records, “Easy Rockin’” and “Chicken Scratch.” They appeared as dance tunes on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show Of Shows.” In 1946, he was honored by Look magazine as the number one teenage musician in America, which landed him onstage at Carnegie Hall.

Did such prestigious early musical experiences put him on Easy Street? “No! I just kept working, man. Listen, the music business is a very tough business, man. Nobody gives you nothin’. You get out there and you fight. That’s why I never got my kids interested in music.”

The scrappy horn player found lots of work in a big band setting right there in his New Orleans hometown. It was the big band era, and there was plenty of opportunity for someone who could play the saxophone and the clarinet equally well.

At one point, Sam was offered the chance to join the great Louis Armstrong, and an offer from Louis Prima came at virtually the same time. Armstrong wanted him to play the clarinet, and Prima wanted him to play the saxophone. He went with Louis Prima because he was more driven to play the saxophone. It’s where his passion was.

Prima’s widow and musical partner, Gia Maione Prima, explains the story of how her husband first found the man who would share the stage with him over the next several decades: “Leon Prima [brother of Louis] owned the 500 Club in New Orleans on Bourbon Street and he had some of the world’s greatest strippers that performed there, so he had a house band that played behind his strippers. Sam was in that band. When Louis was in town and visiting Leon at the 500 Club, he heard Sam. So when he got to Vegas and put together the Witnesses he felt as though he really needed a strong front man with him. He called Leon, and Leon put him in touch with Sam. It was the night before Christmas Eve and Louis said, ‘Sam I need you. I want you here tonight!’ And Sam said, ‘Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve!’ [Louis] said, ‘That’s good enough!’ Sure enough,1954, Sam joined Louis Christmas Eve.”

Spontaneous as that first performing encounter was, it was also part of a grander plan that Louis Prima had been developing. He had already had great success with his own orchestra and then his own big band during the previous few decades.

Prima had achieved all had wanted to in those ensembles. It was time to create a swinging Wall Of Sound. And Big Band had run its course. “That era was gone, man,” remembers Butera. “That was history. They were trying to hang on with the big band, but it was costly. He knew that that era was gone. He knew it was a thing of the past. And thank God the thing we put together right quick happened.”

The thing they put together was magic-and the best reason for a trip to Vegas. “Louis and I, Keely, it happened, man. At one time we were the greatest attraction in the world, bar none.” The new sound was a new genre unto itself, based on Louis’ shuffle beat, accompanied by Sam’s rock and roll backgrounds.

For years, they let the world come to them, as they traveled back and forth between Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. When “That Ol’ Black Magic” became a huge national hit, Los Angeles and New York were incorporated into the schedule. Prima had a personal reason to limit their travel. “Louis wouldn’t fly,” says Sam. “I told Louis one time, ‘When we gonna go to Europe?’ You know what he told me? ‘When they build a bridge!’”

The lounges outside the big rooms and the casinos featured free performances, allowing patrons to wander in and out while gambling. “If a guy came in to gamble, his wife didn’t want to stand at the table, so they’d put her in the lounge. Nobody would bother her. That’s what the lounges were for at first.”

When Prima, Smith, Butera, and the Witnesses took the stage up to five times a night in those lounges, it was electrifying, and the spontaneity is what guaranteed its high energy.

Prima presided over the musical mayhem. “Nothin’ was set. You’d get on stage and you’d go,” remembers Sam. In the jazz tradition, Prima would entrust every musician onstage with his own improvisational turn at the spotlight. “He didn’t turn his back on anyone.”

It was all still intact when the Prima/Smith era came to an end, and Prima’s new wife, Gia Maione, took on the vocalist and sidekick duties in the early Sixties. Sam and Louis had been at it for a decade by then, and Gia confirms that it was still fresh and new, thanks largely to the talents of the sax man. “I have a lot of wonderful things to say about Sam, and just how skilled and how seriously he took his instrument. People don’t really know that, but every night I’d hear him running scales and fingering for a couple of hours before the show. He’d be back there warming up and making sure all of these reeds were perfect. He was a stickler on that instrument. I really believe that he’s the greatest tenor sax player that ever lived. And how he could move like he moved and play at the same time and play extremely well. I don’t think I ever heard him play a bad note, not ever.”

Sam Butera has fantastic memories of some of the most exciting, spontaneous moments of their show, which sometimes involved the headlining acts from the big rooms, who would check out the lounge show when their own was finished. “When they’d get off work they had to come see us. One night we were working on stage, and Sammy Davis comes in. ‘Louis, stop the show! Stop the show! I got a song for Sam!’ Louis says, ‘What does he want?’ I said, ‘He said he’s got a song for me.’ And Louis said, ‘What is it, Sam?’ And he said, [singing] ‘Chantilly lace and a pretty face, and a pony tail, hangin’ down.’ Remember that one? Well, he stopped the show and he started singing that. You never knew what he was gonna do!”

Davis saw Butera as Prima did, as a musician’s musician. Which is how the two Sams came together to make a swinging classic of their own, an album called When The Feeling Hits You, which captured a feeling that hit both entertainers on just one particular night. “We did that record after we both got off of work. It was about four hours and we were done. You don’t hear that no more! We didn’t start ‘til about three o’clock. After the session was over, the sunshine was on, early in the morning.”

Butera went on to work with other major acts who respected his talent, one of whom was the Chairman of the Board. “He called me, he said, ‘Sam, we’re gonna record.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, we’re gonna record.’ He flew me into LA, to Reprise Records, and we recorded two tunes. He was wonderful.”

Sam also toured with Sinatra as his opening act. “Only thing you had to do, if he told you to do thirteen minutes, don’t do thirteen and a half. That’s right, man, I’m telling ya. But he was great to me, too. I lived a charmed life, at times tough, but most of the time, these great entertainers who I worked with were wonderful people, great people who had a lot of feeling.”

The greatest person with whom he played, of course, was the one who stuck by him through thick and thin, from the Fifties to the Seventies. His fondest memories and his greatest admiration are reserved for Louis. “Louis Prima was the greatest, man. I got nothin’ but praise for him. I’ve never seen a man write lyrics the way he did, right off the top of his head. You know the ‘Greenback Dollar Bill’? You know who did ‘Greenback Dollar Bill’ before me? Ray Charles. Louis stretched it out, he added lyrics to it, to make it a story. Same thing with ‘Next Time,’ and the same thing with ‘How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around.’ That’s true man. He wrote all those lyrics. He was incredible.”

The wonderful years with Louis Prima came to an end in 1975, when Prima went into a coma, in which he would remain until his death in 1978. Before and since, Sam kept swinging, with shows and recordings of his own. He still has his own version of The Witnesses, called The Wildest, with whom he can take any song and turn it into an up-tempo, big band, swinging jazz experience. On one of his CDs, The Whole World Loves Italians, he took Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and made it swing. That’s what Louis would have done.

Sam Butera doesn’t analyze his musical career too much; he’s just a workingman who has always loved his job. The fact that his talent became part of such an important piece of American music history was a fortunate accident, as he sees it. “It just happened. Boom. It was great. It was the thrill of my life. I wish I could do it again, Lord knows I do. The only thing I can say is I’ve had a ball.”

Vegas, 1958. A place and time of slot machines, fancy hotels, high class restaurants, dancing girls, wild entertainment, and music that swung. The slot machines are still doing fine in the twenty first century, so are the hotels and the stage shows, but they’re different. Real different. The original Sands Hotel, the Sahara, the Desert Inn, all gone, and the shows are dominated by magic and gymnastic circuses. The music is still a big deal, with major acts that have set up shop there, like Barry Manilow and Elton John. But their work is in Vegas, not of Vegas.

Louis Prima and Keely Smith were of Vegas. Theirs was the hottest show in town, and it wasn’t even in the big rooms where Frank and Sammy and Dean performed. Prima, Smith, and Sam Butera and the Witnesses played the lounges for free, the small rooms with a big band you could reach out and touch–if it would only stand still long enough.

Safely into her seventies now, Keely Smith is doing what she can to keep the Las Vegas of the 1950s alive. She still has something to sing and swing, which she delivers with the same voice that first brought her fame and fortune half a century ago.

On her new live CD, the title alone says it all: Vegas ‘58-Today. “I never realized how much energy Louis had to have to do that,” she says on the album, after singing a medley of Prima songs, recorded live in New York City at Feinstein’s. “Louis was amazing. I truly believe that he was the best performer that ever walked on a stage.”

In a telephone interview, she further illustrates the point about her former husband and singing partner. “He did everything with his voice, his hands, his trumpet. His personality came through with his showmanship, and the shuffle rhythm, that was the secret of everything. He could stand on stage and change keys with his fingers and go from one song to another and nobody knew where he was going. He was just a master on stage.”

Smith’s own personality came through in her elegant voice, along with her low-key on-stage disposition, the polar opposite of the unrestrained Prima. It was that combination of personal differences that created a stellar, musical partnership. And nobody had a better time in Vegas than the king and queen of Vegas entertainment. But their story had actually begun far away from the Las Vegas strip.

THE WILDEST

By the fifties, Louis Prima was already a seasoned pro. He had fronted a Dixieland jazz band in the thirties and a big band in the forties, in his native New Orleans and on New York’s swinging 52nd Street. He’d enjoyed radio hits like “Robin Hood” and he’d written what would become one of the most important compositions of American jazz, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which Benny Goodman had recorded into music history.

It was the stage where Prima was best known and where he was most at home. To music lovers in the vibrant clubs of Manhattan, he was simply the best, the buzz-worthy live act whose race was as uncertain as his musical category. That worked out just fine for Louis Prima. He loved white and black audiences, they loved him, and he cared not one bit about whether they called him swing or jazz. It was music, it was fun, and he was there to sing, swing, jump, jive, and wail.

Prima liked to try new sounds periodically, and by the late forties, he was looking for a permanent girl singer to add to the lineup (having worked with several over the preceding years). Little did he know at the time that a teenaged fan (then named Dorothy Keely) at a 1947 New Jersey gig would soon fill the position. “We had seen Louis Prima in Atlantic City on the Steel Pier,” Smith says. “When we went back home, we had a place in Virginia Beach called the Surf Club that brought in big bands each summer, it was an outdoor dance floor. We told [the manager] that if he would bring in Louis Prima the following year, we would guarantee that the club would be packed. He’d never heard of Louis. Anyway, he listened to my brother and I and brought Louis in the following year. When he came in, he had a singer with him named Tangerine who was extremely nervous and he announced he was looking for a singer. My brother told Louis’ wife that I sang. Louis called me up to sing and I told him no. I got very nervous. He talked me into it, I sang two songs, and he hired me on the spot.”

From such spontaneous beginnings, a partnership was forged, launching the girl singer’s career and taking the middle-aged swing star to the next level. The chemistry between the vivacious, uncontrollable Prima and the staid, immobile Smith was magical. A beautiful woman with a beautiful voice was exactly what Prima had needed, bringing a musical and comedic balance to the act. And having a woman for a straight man was a whole new thing.

Together, they made music with personality and vitality, and their biggest hit as a duo, a rousing rendition of “That Old Black Magic,” captured it all. The jumping and thumping track rocked and rolled while scat-singing Louis traded lines with the more restrained but strong Keely. Their new twist breathed celebratory life into the romantic standard, with the swinging support of sax man sidekick Sam Butera and the Witnesses, and it would win them a Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group in 1958, the first year that the awards were presented. Elvis Presley wasn’t the only recording artist injecting rocking rhythm into an older tune (as he had on “Blue Moon of Kentucky”).

Funny novelty songs like “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” and “Banana Split for My Baby” became their trademark, but the collective talent shining through on each of the records was serious business. Keely’s stylish contribution to the mix ran the vocal gamut from torch to jazz. Take for instance her stylish take on “Autumn Leaves.” Her voice was as elegant and haunting on the recording as anything by Julie London or Billie Holiday, but when The Witnesses’ frenetic beat kicked in halfway through at twice the tempo, she scatted and swung, Prima style. A medley of “Embraceable You / I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” showcased Smith at her sultry best, with Prima tossing in his raspy comic commentary between vocal lines (”I got it good and it ain’t bad!”).

The much older Prima was happily married when Smith joined his show, but after the birth of his first child, the marriage fell apart. Soon thereafter, a romantic relationship developed between the two, which only made sense when considering their musical compatibility on stage and in the studio.

The records of Prima, Smith, and company didn’t sound like anything else coming out at the time, but this music was interactive, and it needed an audience to laugh and dance and sing along.

SWINGING THE SAHARA

After some record sales and television successes, the New York based team had exhausted viable night club demand and it was time to start anew, and the driven crazy cat Louis Prima hadn’t yet used up his nine lives.

Keely remembers well how they came to head west. “I was pregnant, we had a group, and we were broke. We needed a job. Louis called Bill Miller, [who] had a huge night club called Bill Miller’s Riviera in New Jersey. He played all the top stars. He became the entertainment director of the Sahara [in Las Vegas], and Louis called him. He said, ‘We’re broke, my wife is pregnant, we need a job.’ Bill said, ‘I can give you two weeks in the lounge.’ Louis said, ‘I’ll take it.’ Bill said, ‘Louis I just said two weeks in the lounge. You’re used to headlining these rooms.’ Louis said, ‘No, man, we need this job. We’ll take the lounge.’ We jumped in cars, all of our guys, and drove across the country and there we opened.”

The Vegas lounge was just that: a room smaller than the big one, a place where wives passed the time while their husbands gambled, before and after the big room shows. Singers and comedians entertained in the lounges with no cover charge, so audience members wandered in and out freely. Often times they were great entertainers (Don Rickles, Peter Nero, even Ella Fitzgerald all spent time in the lounges), but nobody was paying much attention.

Louis Prima was accustomed to putting on a real show, and he saw no reason to change that for a lounge setting. He was going to turn it into a real showroom. “It was the first time that the lounge was considered as anything other than a place to go kill time,” says Smith. “When we went there, we actually put on shows. No one had done that before. It got to the point where they had to hire a maitre d’, they had to enclose it with curtains, and you just couldn’t get in the place.”

Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Sam Butera, and the Witnesses filled the stage and filled the rooms for years to come, in what became the best job of Prima’s long career. The brilliant yet unlikely concept had been born out of necessity, and, even then, opening night nearly didn’t happen because of an encounter with a musical peer the night before. “Louis and I went in the lounge and Cab Calloway was working there and at the end of one of his shows,” Keely recalls. “Calloway came over to say hello and Louis invited him to sit down and have a drink. He told Louis, ‘I can’t do that.’ Louis said, ‘Why not, you gotta go on again?’ And he said, ‘No, we’re not allowed to sit in the lounge.’ Louis said, ‘What do you mean we’re not allowed to sit?’ He said, ‘We’re colored.’ Louis was furious.” So furious, in fact, that he tried to reach Miller to cancel the first show because of the racist policy. Miller was out of town and unreachable, so opening night went on as planned.

Prima had dealt with this before back east, as he had been the first white musician to integrate the stages of the famed 52nd Street in New York, the home of swing and jazz in the thirties and forties.

With popularity came the power to change things, and Prima and Smith did just that in Las Vegas, even at a time when its other biggest performer, Sammy Davis, Jr., was forbidden to stay at the Sands Hotel where he worked, simply because of his color. “We were the first ones to get the hotels to allow blacks in there and the first one was Pearl Bailey,” Smith says. “We got permission for Pearl to come in and see the show. We were friends with Louie Belson, Pearl was married to Louie at the time. They wanted to come see the show and we had to get permission for her to walk in that lounge. Then, when we graduated to the big room at the Desert Inn, we’re rehearsing one day and one of the bosses comes in the room and listens to some of the rehearsal. Next thing I know, the entertainment director comes in and [tells] Louis, ‘You gotta get those black people off stage.’ We had a singing group of eight singers called the Evelyn Freeman Singers out of Hollywood who were absolutely wonderful and they were part of the show. Louis says, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said the bosses don’t want any blacks on stage. Louis says, ‘If they go, we go.’ We opened up. We had our singers.”

On a different memorable night, Prima had to ensure that another show biz friend was able to come and see the show. “Nat Cole was gonna come,” says Smith. “The Desert Inn had someone call the Sands Hotel and tell Nat’s people, ‘If Mr. Cole doesn’t want to be embarrassed, don’t let him come to this hotel.’ Louis found out about it and went crazy. Needless to say, Nat Cole came to that show.”

FAMILY LIFE

Such righteous indignation and principled stances reveal a little of Louis Prima, the man–but only a little. As outgoing as he was professionally, he was something of a loner in his personal life. And Louis and Keely were opposites off stage as well, but in a very different way. “He was basically quiet. He was nothing at home like he was on stage. He didn’t jump around, he wasn’t crazy. He just lived a normal life. He loved golf. He played golf every day and that was it. He didn’t have any friends. His friend was me in those days.”

That worked out pretty good, since his friend was both his wife and professional partner, and the only other person with the unusual schedule of a night club performer. They performed five forty-five minute shows a night, starting at midnight, working until six in the morning. And somehow, it worked, even with two little girls. “We were home by six thirty, we were in bed by a quarter to seven. We’d sleep until noon, get up, Louis would go play golf. I’d spend all day with the children, we’d have dinner with the kids, put them to bed. After they went to bed we’d catch a couple hours sleep before we had to go to work again at midnight. It worked out great, really. There was no problem.”

There was no problem on stage, either. Doing five shows a night will make a group tight, especially when the two up front are married to each other. But that doesn’t mean that their show was predictable. Even Keely never knew what her husband would do next during the show. “The only thing that we knew when we walked out on stage was that the opening song would be ‘When You’re Smiling’ and the closing song would be ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ We never knew what was gonna be in between. Louis called out the songs as we went along.”

Along the way, there would be high profile television appearances on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town and other variety shows, and even movies, like 1959’s Hey Boy! Hey Girl!, a fun excuse to commit to film some of the pair’s performances with Butera and the Witnesses. (Keely had turned in a more serious acting performance one year earlier in Thunder Road, costarring with Robert Mitchum). Louis and Keely even performed for the inaugural festivities of John F. Kennedy (who had seen a Vegas performance a few years earlier, thanks to mutual friend, Frank Sinatra).

Through it all, Smith was the perfect deadpan foil for her much wilder husband, and the formula that they created would inspire another musical husband and wife team a few decades later. When Sonny and Cher got their own television show in the seventies, their comical banter had been directly lifted from the Vegas version of Louis and Keely. And once again, the formula worked like a charm. Cher Bono even looked a little like Smith, with her beautiful black hair, Mona Lisa smile, and Native American complexion. Smith can vouch for the fact that the Bonos’ shtick came right out of that Vegas lounge. “My best friend today is named Jonah Carlo. He drove me to the hospital for the birth of both my babies. He [later] became the manager for Sonny and Cher, and he told them after Louis and Keely broke up, ‘Why don’t you do Louis and Keely?’ And they did!”

THE BEAT GOES ON

Like the Bonos a decade later, the Smith/Prima marriage would not survive the showbiz life. Smith attributes the end of the relationship to personal changes on Louis’ part-gambling, smoking, drinking, and fooling around, all new behaviors for him in the early sixties. Before that, he had been an ideal husband in his wife’s eyes. Louis Prima’s hit making heyday came to an end, but he would remain one of the best lounge showmen in Vegas for the rest of his life. He hired another young woman to replace Smith, Gia Maione, whose vocal style had more in common with Broadway than it did with Smith’s smooth, smoky delivery. And again, Prima would marry his lead singer and have another family.

Keely Smith continued to sing and perform. She had been releasing solo albums before the breakup anyway, and there was no reason to stop. All along, her Louis-less recordings allowed her to focus on more serious songs, with a few interesting diversions. When the Beatles were first taking over American music from across the pond, Smith released her own tribute album, Keely Smith Sings the John Lennon Paul McCartney Songbook, on which she threw some swing into “And I Love Her” (which had also been revised for a woman’s point of view: “And I Love Him”). It was a top ten album in London, and she was told that “Paul loved it.”

When The Twist was all the rage, it only made sense for the king and queen of swing to weigh in on the subject. Prima and Smith, completely independent of one another, released albums on Dot Records including songs only on the subject of, well, twisting (Prima even starred in a movie called The Continental Twist in 1962). Keely’s Twist with Keely Smith album had been the suggestion of producer Jimmy Bowen, who had also produced Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Bowen would also become Smith’s second husband. After the end of their marriage, he would move to Nashville and produce everyone from Garth Brooks to Reba McEntire. “My girls still call him daddy,” she says of Bowen. “He was a wonderful stepfather to my girls.”

Unfortunately, the girls’ biological father remained absent from their lives for a number of years, until their mother took control of the situation. “I took my daughters to see him. I was headlining in a hotel and he was in the lounge at another hotel. He didn’t talk to me for ten years; he didn’t talk to my youngest daughter for over ten years. But I finally decided, ‘This is crazy.’ I went to see him and forced my kid to go backstage and say hello to him. Then he came over and from then on we started talking. And it turned out to be okay.”

Beyond consideration for their daughters, Smith and Prima occasionally crossed performance paths, and on one occasion in Reno, Nevada, the pair reunited on stage. “I had gone to see Eddy Arnold, who was appearing in the big room; Louis was working in the lounge. We went in to see him after Eddy’s show, and I got up and sang with him.” They revived their old black magic together just long enough to sing their signature song.

But there was another lounge encounter that she remembers more clearly. “We had gone to see him in Vegas and afterwards he came over [to my table]. He introduced me but I didn’t get up and sing with him. I was sitting down the whole time on a stool during the show. And afterwards he came over and he started crying and he said, ‘Babe, my head is just killing me.’ I guess that was either the beginning of the tumor or he already had it to the point where it was hurting him. And that was very sad.”

The tumor in his head turned out to be benign, but the surgery to remove it and kill the pain put Louis Prima into a coma in 1975. He never came out of it, and he passed away in 1978.

CONCORD SWING

A good portion of the Vegas Sound and Vegas Swing died with Prima, as pop radio was taken over by rock and roll, and even Ed Sullivan-styled television gave way to other styles of entertainment. Keely Smith continued to work and occasionally record, but she was far out of the limelight. But when the lounge craze of the nineties kicked in (which included a Gap Jeans TV commercial featuring Louis Prima’s “Jump,Jive, and Wail”), Smith began a relationship with Concord Records, a jazz label with a sense of history and an awareness of some startling good news: At the turn of the century as the age of seventy approached, Keely Smith could still sing. In fact, she sounded almost exactly like she had in the forties and fifties. It’s no surprise to her though. “I am a very positive thinker. I don’t smoke, I’ve never been into drugs. I don’t drink. I’m basically very, very healthy and I enjoy what I do.”

That fact is clearly apparent in all four of her Concord releases thus far. For 2000’s Swing, Swing, Swing, she did just that, with swinging nods to Mr. Prima, including “Robin Hood,” “When You’re Smiling / The Sheik of Araby,” and a vocal version of the title track, her ex-husband’s most important composition (released instrumentally as “Sing, Sing, Sing” for Goodman’s famous version).

In 2001, Keely Sings Sinatra remembered another departed friend, who was very much alive when the album was recorded. Sinatra, with whom Smith once had a post-Louis romance, even got to hear an advance copy. He shared his thoughts with Keely, invoking a term of endearment that he’d always used when addressing his part-Native American friend. “He loved it. He thought I wasn’t gonna hit some of those high notes. He said to me, ‘Injun, when did you start singing like that?’ I said, ‘Frank, I always did, you just never listened!’” Keely delivers “Angel Eyes” with the same sad blues that Frank had, and for “It Was a Very Good Year” she injects Sinatra swing into a Sinatra ballad to great effect.

For 2002’s Keely Swings Basie-style, she remembered another legendary friend, with a smooth “You Go to My Head,” a smoky “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” and a big band “Some of These Days.” With that same voice, an unmistakable Basie beat, and pictures of Smith and Basie sharing a stage in the fifties, it’s hard to believe that these recordings were made since the millennium.

With the newly released Vegas ‘58-Today, she recreates the lounges of fifty years ago with her current live show, turning in more respectable covers of Prima tunes like “Jump, Jive, and Wail” and “Just a Gigolo.” Listening to her show that honors her late husband, one can only hear the joy and admiration that Keely Smith has for what she and Louis Prima created together. The work ultimately eclipses any painful memories that come with divorce. “You go through stages in being disappointed in the man as a man, as a father, as a husband, and a little bitterness in there. Then you grow out of it, and you realize why this man was excellent and an important part of your life.”

Keely Smith still sings with great joy and reverence for the wildest musical performer Vegas ever knew, the larger-than-life character that changed her life forever. “No matter where I work or what I do, people always ask me about Louis. I know that I will never lose the image of Louis Prima. Nor do I want to.”

‘I’m not the one to tell this world how to get along / I only know that peace will come when all hate is gone / I’ve been searching for the dolphins in the sea / And sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me.’ — from ‘The Dolphins’

Fame is a funny thing. The average American in 2001 could easily spot and identify Jennifer Lopez walking down the street, though most over the age of 21 would be hard pressed to name one of her hit songs. Pop culture, marketing, and pervasive electronic media have done their jobs, ensuring that we all can, at the very least, identify Miss Lopez as she walks down the street.

On the other hand, the average American in 2001 could very easily identify the classic pop song, ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, though most would be completely unable to name or identify the composer of the seventh most-played song on the radio over the past three decades. Fred Neil has spent those three decades walking down the street unrecognized, unknown, and completely detached from the world of popular music and culture.

That’s apparently how he wanted it. So when the 64-year-old songwriting legend (in its most literal, mythic meaning) passed away in July at his home in Florida, a number of folks who lived near and knew the reclusive and quiet man were unaware of his important musical contribution. For whatever personal reasons, Neil walked away from the life of an iconic folksinger, one who was idolized by hopeful young musicians like Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village, New York in the early 1960s.

But composing a standard and influencing Bob Dylan were not Neil’s only musical accomplishments. The young Floridian headed to Memphis in the 1950s, immersing himself in the developing world of recorded music. With a gospel background, the young man with a resonant baritone as memorable and powerful as Paul Robeson’s recorded several rockabilly singles and even played session guitar in the studio for Paul Anka and Bobby Darin.

He became acquainted with other up-and-comers in the business like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Sam Phillips, even Elvis, and before long, he had written rock and roll songs that would be recorded by none other than Buddy Holly (‘Come Back Baby’) and Roy Orbison (‘Candy Man’). But by the early 1960s, Neil’s compositions would become more reflective, more philosophical, more poetic, with depth to suit a voice of even greater depth. For a singer/songwriter with something to say, he would have to go to the artistic center of New York City to be heard.

Dylan wasn’t the only aspiring performer to occasionally share a stage with Neil. John Sebastian, Odetta, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Richie Havens were among the many friends, contemporaries, and admirers of Neil during those heady days at The Bitter End, Cafe Wha?, and the Gaslight.
By all accounts, Neil was the best performer of the bunch during that period. Among his fellow folk song purists, Neil stood out, with his mournful and emotional voice adding experience far beyond his years. And Fred not only kept the classic folk songs alive (his interpretation of the traditional, ‘Cocaine’, was bone-chilling), he was writing his own songs. Few of the Village performers were contributing new material in their efforts to carry forward the folk tradition. In Fred’s case, you couldn’t really tell that he was. His songs sounded as old and road-weary as his voice did.

In his 2000 autobiography, Havens told the story of how Neil and his first musical partner, Dino Valente, would bring the house down: “Fred and Dino blew the room out completely. They closed their set with ‘What’d I Say’, which was a strange move for the typical folk singer. But neither Fred nore Dino were typical anything. They extended the tune with a call-and-response, like gospel singers. Then they left the stage and worked their way through the crowd, their guitars in the air, still shouting the song as they marched out the back door. The crowd was in an uproar. Then after a minute their voices could be heard again, still singing as they came around the building, in through the front door and back onto the stage. The audience was driven beyond nuts.”

Neil’s first album was released with then-partner, Vince Martin, 1964′s Tear Down The Walls, but Neil’s blues-based folk was first truly captured on 1965′s Bleecker And MacDougal, aptly named for the spiritual and actual crossroads in the city where music of conscience and meaning was being practiced. The cover showed Neil with guitar standing awkwardly in the middle of the famed intersection on a cold New York night, an urban folkster whose heart and soul resided someplace far South of the chaos in the city .

The displacement and ambivalence would come through in the words of the songs, and in the way in which they were sung, with blues felt as deeply as Robert Johnson’s at his crossroads. ‘Would you like to know a secret, just between you and me/I don’t know where I’m going next, I don’t know where I’m gonna be/But that’s the other side of this life, I’ve been leading/That’s the other side to this life.’ (‘Other Side Of This Life’ would be covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Youngbloods, The Lovin’ Spoonful, and, the most widely-known version, Jefferson Airplane.)

The title track of that first solo album was clearly not a celebration of the city, it was a thinly-veiled declaration of disgust for the crowded island. Neil would return home to Florida shortly thereafter, only occasionally performing New York club gigs, which constituted the whole of his legendary live performances. At home, he limited to thoughtful and exploratory guitar playing to performances for the dolphins at the Miami Seaquarium; the beginning of what would later become his truest vocation.
In 1967, Fred Neil was released, which included a song that captured the longing and the isolationism that seemed to run through all of Neilís recordings. “Everybody’s talkin’ at me/ I don’t hear a word they’re saying/Only the echoes of my mind/People stoppin, starin’/I don’t see their faces/Only the shadows of their eyes.” “Everybody’s Talkin’” would become familiar to the world as the major hit sung by Harry Nilsson, another vocalist capable of carrying the song’s sense of sadness and hope. The song was a perfect fit for Midnight Cowboy, the Best Picture for 1969, itself a study of misfits in a tough and disturbing urban world. “Everybody’s Talkin’” has gone on to be recorded by over one hundred artists.

Another album, Sessions, would take Neil’s unique vision of the blues into a rambling, Indian-inspired exploration of the twelve-string guitar, another important element of the sound created by the influential artist. The raga-like songs that ran seven and eight minutes seemed to also be representative of Neil’s wild nature, and refusal to be reigned in by any of society’s conventions, especially the musical ones. And in California recording the album, his antisocial behavior continued: while at a party at Cass Elliott’s house, he and Jimi Hendrix retreated upstairs to indulge in their growing mutual interest in mind alteration.

Sessions was not an accessible record by pop music standards, but then, neither was Neil, who was utterly disinterested in interviews and tours to support his recordings. He declined when offered opportunities to perform on the Tonight Show, Johnny Cash’s television series, and a tour with Harry Belafonte. He only granted one interview ever, for Hit Parader magazine in 1966 (which didn’t stop this writer from requesting an interview in a letter just last year; as expected, no reply).

By the time Other Side Of This Life was released, Neil’s musical ambition seemed to have run out of steam. In the interest of contract fulfillment, half the album was a stellar live set of songs, mostly from previous records. The studio tracks included a duet on ‘Ya Donít Miss Your Water’ with another artist who would leave behind an equally influential body of work, Gram Parsons.

On the album’s cover, Neil is smiling, shirtless, sitting on a boat against a blue sky, seeming to have found the other side of his life and the contentment that the reassurance in his singing had always implied. It’s an appropriate image for what became his final album, released some thirty years before his death (several more albums were recorded but remain unreleased, including sessions with Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and John Stewart).

The album opened with perhaps his most powerful and autobiographical song, “The Dolphins.” “This old world may never change the way it’s been/And all the ways of war can’t change it back again/I’ve been searchin’for the dolphins in the sea/And sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me.”

Fred Neil really did go searching for the dolphins in the sea. He retreated to Coconut Grove, Florida and dedicated the rest of his life to dolphin research and preservation. He helped to found the Dolphin Project, an organization dedicated to preventing the capture and exploitation of dolphins worldwide. His interest in dolphins had been there all along, as some years earlier, he had even befriended Cathy, the central character on the television series, Flipper.

On only a few occasions did he resurface to perform music in the years since 1971, and those were benefit concerts for dolphin research (including performances in 1975 with John Sebastian, 1976 with Joni Mitchell, and 1977 with Jackson Browne in Japan). In 2000, he contributed music to a documentary videotape released by the Dophin Project. All of his royalties for “The Dolphins” (covered by many, most notably Tim Buckley, Richie Havens, and Billy Bragg) have been donated to the organization for some time.

In 2000, Mojo magazine published a lengthy and thorough article detailing his role in those early years, his influence on others, and his remote and frequently drug-induced temperament. Neil himself wrote a letter to Mojo after the article’s publication, commenting only on his beloved Dolphin Project. He made no references to his life or his music.

His preference for the beautiful and intelligent creatures of the sea and disinterest in his own species do not, however, fully account for his absence. Apparently, a personal tragedy of some sort also played a part in Neil’s withdrawal, but that, of course, only contributes further to the mystery of Fred Neil. To analyze it too deeply would be to invade the privacy that he cherished so deeply. Jerry Jeff Walker, a kindred musical soul (and himself the author of a standard, “Mr. Bojangles”), was among those from the music years who maintained contact with their retired friend. He said of Neil, for Mojo, “Fred’s an endangered species. Like his dolphins, he’s just trying to keep from getting caught and made to perform at Sea World.”

As is the case with most great artists, the songs speak for themselves, whether they do or don’t have the inevitable starmaking machinery behind them, supporting whoever may be the current or next Jennifer Lopez. Even before his long silence, Fred Neil rejected the publicity and promotion that would have delivered his remarkable talents to the world. But when you compose a song like “Everybody’s Talkin’” that reaches and touches so many, the trappings of fame and pop culture are irrelevant. It, like the other songs and the inspiring voice of Fred Neil, will endure.

“I’m goiní where the sun keeps shinin’, through the pourin’ rain/Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes/Bankin’ off of the northeast wind/Sailin’ on a summer breeze/Skippin’ over the ocean, like a stone.”–from “Everybody’s Talkin”’

Discoveries magazine,
September 2001 issue.
Rush Evans
Austin, TX

“I love Maine, I used to live up here. I got to visit my brother last night. He’s got a little house in the woods about a hundred miles south of here.” Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has traveled everywhere and met everybody, from cowboys to presidents. And right now, from a hotel room just an hour before he hits the stage in Maine, he’s mostly interested in talking about the place where he is and the person he just saw. I’ve learned quickly that trying to harness Jack Elliott is like trying tame a bucking brahma bull (which, incidentally, is something he knows how to do), so I figure my best bet as his interviewer, is to let him say what he wants to say. It’s all interesting.

“He was gonna be a doctor like our father,” he says of brother, David. “But he decided he was more interested in drama so he became an actor. He kinda lost interest in that, too, so he decided to be a writer instead. He was a writer most of his life.” We’ve got plenty else to talk about, but Jack is proud of his brother, and he’s quite enthusiastic about having just seen him. When he tells me that his brother was a screenwriter, I want to know what films he might have written.

“I wouldn’t know because my brother and I have been almost like total strangers since I was fifteen and he was ten. He’s going on seventy now and I’m going on seventy-five. We’ve been trying to reconnect and get to know one another for quite a few years now. We’re still workin’ on it.”

What happened sixty years ago was that fifteen-year-old Elliott Adnopoz of Brooklyn, New York, son of a prominent physician, ran away from home. To be a cowboy.

It sounds like the stuff of legend, but it’s true. Elliott had grown up with fantastic dreams of the Wild West and the cowboys who tamed it. Listening to the Grand Ol’ Opry on the radio, broadcast from the distant land of Nashville, Tennessee, only heightened the romanticism for the imaginative teen. His first real encounter with horses, steers, and singing cowboys was, logically enough, at a rodeo. And illogically enough, he saw that rodeo in the heart of Manhattan, at Madison Square Garden.

That one taste was all it took. He soon hitched a ride to Washington, DC, where he saw a poster advertising Colonel Jim Eskew’s Rodeo. The traveling outfit of rodeo cowboys let the teen join up as a groomer. When the Missing Persons poster with a five hundred dollar reward first appeared, it included his picture, a physical description, and a clue as to his likely whereabouts: “Probable destination a ranch. (Parents not opposed to his staying on ranch).”

Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz didn’t know what to make of their child’s fascination with a culture so far away, literally and figuratively, from the one that they had raised him in. In fact, they had other plans. “I knew that they had a great big strong desire for me to grow up in a more civilized manner and be a doctor like my dad, and I never really wanted to be a doctor. I admired him, I was proud of him. I used to go on house calls with him when I was a kid, and it didn’t make me ever wanna become one, although I became sort of interested in the healing arts. And I like to think that what I do with the guitar is of a healing nature.”

A rodeo clown named Brahmer Rogers had played hillbilly songs on the guitar and banjo for the rodeo hands while they worked, feeding the horses. When Elliott returned home, he got a guitar so he could do what Rogers did. He had gone back to his normal life to finish school and finish growing up, and the guitar provided a powerful connection to that other world that had captured his imagination. His aunt had given him some piano lessons earlier on, but they never took hold, not even enough to read music (he still doesn’t), but a musician he would be, going his own way and learning by ear and experiences. Lots of experiences.

He disposed of his cumbersome last name and created a new persona, placing his small yet sturdy frame in western boots and a giant cowboy hat. This was no costume. Elliott really was a cowboy, a singing one like Gene Autry, but his was a voice that owed more to the real cowboys than the ones from the movies. His casual, conversational phrasing and unadorned, informal singing revealed a rugged honesty, already world-weary by the age of twenty.

And that’s when he met Woody Guthrie. Guthrie had been the voice of the American underdog and laborer for many years, already recognized as one of the most significant songwriters of his time. In Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (going by Buck Elliott at the time they first met), he found a kindred spirit and a perfect match.

Guthrie wrote songs of immigrants, migrant workers, and despots, the folks from life’s other side. He also wrote and sang about the majestic beauty of the country in which they toiled. When Guthrie first heard Jack sing, he said, “He sounds more like me than I do.” Spiritually speaking, it was true. Ramblin’ Jack could sing the songs with an empathetic understanding, breathing life into the characters and giving color to the places.

Together, they played and sang their way across the land that was made for you and me. It’s called busking, playing for donations to get by; it comes from the Spanish word buscar (“to seek”). Elliott even lived with the Guthrie family for several years. But Woody was to grow old at a very young age, as a neurological disease, Huntington’s chorea, took over the last years of his life. Guthrie’s mind never stopped creating, but as the disease progressed, Elliott would become the voice of Guthrie’s songs.

From that point, Elliott’s life became that of a traveling musician, ramblin’ ‘round from town to town, singing and playing and leaving a mark at the Forrest Gump level. A young Bob Dylan became Elliott’s protégé in the clubs of Greenwich Village, just as Elliott had been Guthrie’s. He spent years building an audience in England, where a British teen name Mick Jagger would hear him busking on a London railroad platform (Jagger went and bought a guitar right after). His rhythmic playing helped to spark Britain’s American folk craze of the fifties (Jack’s version of “San Francisco Bay Blues” was one of the first songs that Paul McCartney ever learned to play). He hung out with other countercultural creative minds, like Jack Kerouac who read aloud to him his new novel, On the Road, which would become the mind-opening catalyst for a generation. In the seventies, he traveled with Dylan on the historic Rolling Thunder Revue tour. He sang and played on television when his friend Johnny Cash had the opportunity to showcase his favorite musicians for the viewing public.

Throughout it all, he continued to be a collector and singer of songs, living out of a suitcase and a guitar case. He’s written only a handful of songs himself, but the ownership he takes of every song he sings shines through, revealing the authenticity of his interpretive ability. He made a lot of records, but he took a few decades off from recording, after much disenchantment with the record business.

For the past decade, Elliott has enjoyed a renewed life as a prolific recording artist, as the recipient of the National Medal of Arts Award from President Clinton, and as the subject of an award-winning 2000 documentary film, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, directed by his filmmaker daughter, Aiyana Elliott.

The countless performances of songs like “Pastures of Plenty,” “Deportee,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” (which he recorded before Janis Joplin) have taken him down every road in North America and the world, ultimately landing him in a hotel room in Maine, just an hour before getting back on stage, alone with his guitar, sixty years on.

Ramblin’ Jack comes by the name honest. He doesn’t just ramble from town to town, he rambles on in one giant run-on sentence, weaving in and out of conversational subjects with tangential enthusiasm, intertwining stories in a way that makes sense when you’re in it. But you gotta keep up with him. Lost luggage in a London hotel and meeting Cisco Houston get equal billing in his stream-of-consciousness soliloquy (Houston, by the way, was another founding father of American folk music; “He was Woody Guthrie’s pal before me. I was trying to fill his shoes, which was impossible, of course,” says Jack).

He’s happy to talk about how his new album came about, the aptly title, I Stand Alone, a project conceived and instigated by daughter Aiyana. I could write all about it, how good it is and how it includes so many songs he’s never recorded. But Jack tells it better than me, in his uniquely ramblin’ way. “One day she said, ‘Daddy, do you have some songs that you do that you don’t do very much, or that you do ‘em in the show and I’ve never heard ‘em, some old songs perhaps?’ Yeah, I suppose I do. She said, ‘Well sing me one of them. So I remembered something of that nature and I sang it to her. I think it was ‘Call Me a Dog When I’m Gone, Gone, Gone,’ I love that thing. Then I did a couple more, and she said, ‘Why don’t you do those songs, Daddy?’ I said, ‘They’re not for the tourists,’ and she said ‘That’s a good title for the record.’ I said, ‘What record?’ I didn’t know she was sincerely plotting and planning to make a record, she was gonna produce a record for me and with me, we went in the studio and started recording, she needed a producer who was familiar with the music because she’s in the film business and never the twain shall meet. Film people and music people are very basically different and they don’t even seem to understand each other. She’s got me booked on a tour in England right after this grueling tour that I’m just playing the last concert of the tour tonight, concert number six, spread out over a two week period, I like to do it that way because every day that we’re off between gigs, we are driving two or three hundred miles. One day we drive, the next day we sing. In England, she’s got me booked four consecutive nights work. I’m gonna fly over there tomorrow with her to England. We’ve got eight shows in about eight or nine days. Last year, Aiyana and I did the same thing in England in the dead of winter. We did nine shows in ten days, so that’s why she thinks I can do it, but I’m a year older now. She’s traveled with daddy before in various travel modes. When she was a little girl, we traveled together in my land rover. That was my motor home of choice at the time.”

In our precious time together on the phone, I get snatches of stories randomly sprinkled throughout, like how he still loves to ride horses (“I was roping calves on a ranch just three weeks ago up in Idaho”), how he quit riding bulls when he was forty-seven, how he taught a song called “Mr. Garfield” to Johnny Cash who had the song published in Elliott’s name, even though Elliott hadn’t written it (“John said, ‘I learned it from you and all I know is you wrote it,’ [so] I’m the author of that, legally. Not truly, but legally”). Throughout the whirlwind conversation, Jack prepares for his show, bathing and dressing, and more than happy to talk about the songs he didn’t write and the bulls he no longer rides.

I try to get philosophical and talk about the symmetry and zen of the appearance of a great song on I Stand Alone about a dog, “Old Blue,” some fifty years after he first recorded it (recently released on one of the two outstanding Lost Topic Tapes discs, from Hightone Records). My earnest attempt to go deep in this telephone conversation is met with classic Ramblin’ Jack. “Keep talkin’, I’m about to get in the bathtub, I may get electrocuted, if I do I’ll probably say something. Okay, one second, gettin’ in the tub, yessiree. What song is that? ‘Old Blue’?” He tells me how he learned it, how he feels about it now, how his audiences enjoy that song more than he does these days.

The high-brow analysis I was going for is for pointy-headed music journalist nerds to figure out. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s job is to go sing about Old Blue for the people. And that’s what he needs to do right now.

I let him know that I don’t want to make him late for his own concert, but I do want to share one quick funny moment from the first time we met several years ago. Standing ahead of me in the line for an autographed CD was a teenager with boots and a buckle and big musical aspirations, a fan of Jack’s, and maybe, just maybe, the kind of kid who would run away from home to work in a rodeo. I watched the elder cowboy stare deeply into the young man’s eyes, and with great sincerity, impart his only words of wisdom. “Drive a truck, don’t go into the music business, and don’t smoke cigarettes.”

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott laughs big. He doesn’t remember saying it, but he knows it was him. It sounds just like him, three things he feels strongly about. “Can I quote you on stage?” he asks. “If I can remember what it is that I allegedly said? It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Great talking with you! Good luck with the story. I may not have an opportunity to purchase a copy of the magazine. Could you mail me a copy?” Sure, Jack. Just give me the address of your next hotel.

The reunion show was simply something the band had wanted to do, to bring Buddy and Randle for one more night of inspired musical mayhem. So they made it happen in Springfield, Missouri, where the band members had first found one another a decade earlier.

But one more night just wasn’t enough. The second show three weeks later in Kansas City was an afterthought, a fun excuse to celebrate a new year in the city that had been their second home. Only recently did band manager Paul Peterson come across the tape, unearthed from the depths of a storage closet and miraculously intact. Almost every Daredevil had forgotten about the gig, and they had all forgotten that it had been committed to tape. When they listened to it, the memories came flooding back.

The Daredevils had first connected quite randomly in 1971, at a time when John Dillon was living in an Ozark Mountain cabin. “We all met at the cabin one day to play songs, and then we realized that everybody played different instruments. Then we discovered that our harmonies worked, and we became this sort of unit to showcase these songs. It all became a magical thing.”

The free-wheeling crew of rural bohemians drew their influence from each other and from their uniquely isolated mountainous terrain. Mountain music had been an authentic American craft for decades, but these guys lived at a time when The Beatles came through loud and clear on the radio, as did contemporary country music and classic jazz. They began mixing it all together without any conscious effort. They just liked to write and sing songs.

“From the first time we ever played together to the time we got on a jet to fly to London and record our first album was eighteen months,” remembers Larry Lee, the spooky falsetto behind “Jackie Blue,” the Daredevils’ biggest hit. “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”

Neither does having a Top Forty hit (“If You Wanna Get to Heaven”) and a Gold Record six months after a first album is released. “It just blew our minds,” says Dillon, “And we had yet to meet a record executive! Now, those were the good old days.” By year two, they had a second album and a second major chart hit (“Jackie Blue” went all the way to Number Two on Billboard charts, Number One on Record World charts). Of this accomplishment, Chowning says, “Things like that don’t happen anymore.” Those two hits featured different vocalists and somewhat different sounds, “Heaven” being a country-fueled, rousing sing-along, and “Jackie Blue” the haunting, swampy rocker. The common denominator in those songs, of course, was the great band playing them.

What set the Daredevils apart was their communal spirit that included five, count ‘em, five, songwriters and lead singers in the original lineup: Dillon, Lee, Chowning, harmonica player Steve Cash, and iconoclastic bass player, Michael “Supe” Granda. There were other later members, some of whom also played the New Year’s Eve gig: guitarist Terry Wilson, Bill Jones on sax and flute, the Darelicks on backup vocals. Most notable, though, was Steve Canaday, in whom they found a sixth creative force, a writer and singer who would spend many of the years to come as a latter-day Daredevil.

For the Daredevils, the careful development of each song was the driving force for becoming better players. The playing was, in fact, quite secondary to the craft of songwriting. And ultimately, it was all about the practical business of friendship: They learned to play each other’s songs because, well, the songs had to be played.

When big time producer Glyn Johns (already famous for his work with the Rolling Stones) was brought in to work on their first album and lend some cohesion to their mountain charm, he was struck by the quality of their songs but under-whelmed with their mastery of their instruments. “Glyn Johns said early on, ‘You guys aren’t a band, you haven’t even learned to play together yet,’” says Cash, laughing. “He said that like it was a revelation. Really, it’s true. We were just raw players. We did anything we wanted to. So basically we were a songwriter’s jam band, more than just playing big long solos, which we weren’t very good at. We wrote songs.”

By the end of 1980, they were plenty good. Their performance skill had become tight, polished, and experienced—but not at the expense of their gloriously ragged mountain grunge.

Cash’s harp-playing became an integral part of the trademark sound, but so extreme was his absence of training that he virtually invented his own sound by fortuitous default (being left handed and holding the harp backwards will do that). “I’m not a virtuoso. I’m just a country player. I don’t know what I’m doing. I play a lot of rhythm. Mine’s a unique mountain style; real harp players can’t do it.”

When the young Cash and his friends were inadvertently becoming the Daredevils, they crossed paths with the great blind harp player, Sonny Terry, whose recordings with Brownie McGhee became some of the most important tracks in blues history. Terry offered Cash the best advice one could get: “The best way to learn harmonica is just to buy one, put it in your pocket, play it when you feel good, play it when you feel bad.”

Terry’s straightforward mentality is equally applicable to the unadorned beauty that permeated the entire career of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. At the end of the day, they were guys who liked to make music when they felt good and when they felt bad. But mostly good.

That’s how the songs felt on New Year’s Eve for the performers and their energized audience. Dillon’s “Standing on the Rock” serves as the country rock greeting (“I’d rather be called hick rock,” says Cash). “Country Girl” owes as much to The Band as it does Nashville. “Look Away” gets room to breathe in this spirited live version. And both “Durty Gurl” (written and sung by Canaday) and Cash’s “One More Night” appear for the first time anywhere. “Arroyo” and “Noah” prove that “Jackie Blue” wasn’t the only funky groove that the guys were responsible for. “Walking Down the Road” offers imagery and feel straight out of Robert Johnson’s southern American experience (“Lord, I made it to the station with my suitcase in my hand / Walked up to the window like a nat’ral born man / Said I sure do hope that choo-choo train runs on time”). “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” closes out the set in hillbilly glory.

Chowning remembers the show and the organic meeting of musical minds that he and his friends enjoyed. “A phenomenon really does happen when we’re together. Individually, we’re us, but when we get together we become them. And it takes on kind of an energy thing of its own.”

After Kansas City, Chowning returned to the solo career for which he’d first left the band, also working in the music publishing world. Brayfield had left the band with medical aspirations, and was already a practicing osteopath by the time of the New Year’s Eve reunion, and that’s what he still does today.

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils would continue making music throughout the eighties and nineties, with various other talented musicians contributing in the same democratic fashion that the six originals had done when they accidentally came together in the beginning (Dillon, Cash, and Granda continued to serve as the band’s core of founding fathers). All the writers have continued to write, which has resulted in some big name artists covering their songs. Lee and Chowning have had great success as producers and recording artists, Granda has carved out a cult-status solo career (Supe and the Sandwiches among his many incarnations), Dillon has entered the advertising industry as his unique creative outlet, and Cash has become a respected science fiction novelist.

But on the last day of 1980, the band that had come together by chance revealed how much they’d grown over the previous decade. It was all just for fun, really, always had been, and it showed. A quarter century later, that special night can still be experienced. And nights like that don’t happen anymore.

In the beginning, it was just about free beer and pizza. A loose affiliation of pickers and friends would gather to share songs at the pizza joint where one of them worked. Eighteen months later, they were all on a jet flying to London to record their first album, with producer Glyn Johns, who’d already worked with The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore,” says Larry Lee of the improbable launch of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the groovy country, rural folk, rock and roll band from the mountainous Midwest. Lee would write and sing the group’s biggest hit, the spooky rocker called “Jackie Blue,” but he was no front man. The Daredevils (they didn’t even have a name until that record deal came up) was a democratic unit of six guys (five of whom wrote and sang lead) that magically came together quite by accident, with much more humble motivating forces than gold records.

“John [Dillon] was playing in a pizza house and I was living in the attic of a friend’s house,” remembers Lee. “I had no money, and when John said, ‘Look, I’m playing in a pizza parlor, they’re not paying me anything but I get to eat and drink all I want.’ I’d go, ‘Well, I’ll play with you!’ It was food, you know? That was the reality of it.”

In the communal spirit of the time (1971), the grizzled Springfield, Missouri hippies were actually interested in something that did go beyond beer and pizza: the development of each others’ songs. The six players noticed that their combination of instrumental skills accidentally formed a band, and they all had an uncanny knack for getting the feel of each song that was shared. As Lee recalls it, they were playing in the round before the phrase existed. “After a few weeks of playing together, I would sing a song and all of a sudden I’d realize that John had learned my chords and he was playing and singing, too. We just sort of learned each other’s songs, not really thinking about being a band.”

What they were thinking about was remaining true to the songs that each brought to the proverbial pizza table. There was no thought of a lead singer, a style, or a certain type of presentation. Springfield may have been the unlikeliest of places for the creation of a cool rock and roll band, but Route 66 cut straight through it, making it a cultural crossroads of sorts, an oasis in the middle of America. All of the kindred musical spirits shared a common feel, but they had a diverse array of influences.

Guitarist Dillon brought a country blues feel from the Arkansas Delta, Drummer Lee brought a passion for jazz, bassist Supe Granda loved the roots of rock and roll, especially Chuck Berry, his fellow native of St. Louis. Guitarist Randle Chowning and harmonica man Steve Cash had already grown up right there in Springfield, both attuned to the indigenous Ozark mountain sound. Buddy Brayfield was the only one who didn’t write songs, but his contribution on the keyboard provided a warm support to the natural sound that each song required.

The guys didn’t much think of themselves as players, they were a collection of songwriters that came together as a unit out of necessity. They were there to showcase the songs. “Glyn Johns said early on, ‘You guys aren’t a band!’ He just said that like it was a revelation,” remembers Cash with a laugh. “He said, ‘You haven’t even learned to play together yet!’ Really, it’s true. We were just raw players.”

The raw playing was actually part of their charm, and it fit well with their sometimes raw vocals. But they were also capable of much more sophisticated vocals and heartfelt harmonies. A live tape found its way to John Hammond (he who had literally launched the career of Bob Dylan, and would soon do the same for Bruce Springsteen). The tape got around, and it is what sent Glyn Johns in to the mountainous Midwest to check out this band of bearded hippies.

Johns had already been working with The Eagles, but they represented a specific California sound. He was looking for a project with another American band that sounded, well, American. “He wanted a group that came out of the wilds of the country somewhere,” says John Dillon. “He came here, produced us on an old farm. We brought in Record Plant’s mobile truck. He lived in a trailer, wore overalls, and just loved it.”

Johns told A&M Records of his find, and the label basically took him at his word and signed the band with no history, no flashy outfits, no pretense, and no name. “We had called ourselves Family Tree at one time, Burlap Socks, just stupid names,” remembers Lee. “A&M said, ‘You gotta come up with a name.’ So we sent them a list of ten or fifteen, and one of them was Cosmic Corncob and his Amazing Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They liked the Ozark Mountain Daredevil part, because it was real regional and pointed to an area of the country. We just said, ‘Fine, whatever.’”

That’s when things started to happen fast. For Dillon, the culture shock was extreme. “I was living in a cabin with a canoe, on the river. I thought, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this!’ Before we knew it, we were on a plane to London, we had cut our first album, we had a hit single. The album was almost gold out of the chute, and it just blew our minds. And we had yet to meet a record executive! Now those were the good old days.”

That hit single was an infectious harp driven rocker called “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” (the solution in the Dillon/Cash song: “You got to raise a little hell”). The song had a country feel with Cash’s harmonica and Dillon’s vocal, but it was truly a rock and roll rhythm. That first album had no picture of the band members on the cover. Again, there was no front man, and they looked like pretty regular guys, hardly the rock stars they were quickly becoming.

But as Dillon points out, it was okay for rock stars to look and act like the unpolished regular guys they truly were. There was an honesty in the music and an honesty in the men behind it. “Back in those days, it wasn’t necessarily about the money and about the career. It was about the music and what the music had to say and what it meant. It was almost like a cultural phenomenon. It had so much to do with the politics of the day and the spiritual quests of the day. That time in history was so special, and music was such a big part of that. It was almost like a vehicle that drove everything forward. Luckily for us, record companies were hip enough to allow acts at the time that came on board with a message.”

Just a year later in 1974, they released their second album, It’ll Shine When It Shines. This one had a person on the cover, but it wasn’t one of the guys. It was the image of an elderly woman in the center of a china plate, an unusual cover for an album with one of the biggest hits of the year. The song sailed quickly into the Top Ten, a swampy falsetto track with an eerie lead guitar and a murky bass rhythm underneath.

The mysterious story of “Jackie Blue,” who lives her life from inside of her room and hides a smile when she’s wearing a frown, was written by Lee and Cash, sung by Lee, and it would prove to be one of the most recognizable, memorable, and durable songs of its decade. “Jackie Blue” didn’t sound like anything else on the radio. It still doesn’t, though it does enjoy a life of its own on oldies radio. If it were to be released today, it would likely be played on Americana stations, a format that didn’t exist in the freewheeling seventies.

Americana is a good word for the sound that the group generated, just as Ozark Mountain Daredevils was an appropriate name. It truly was American music, with just enough mountain charm and hillbilly harmonica to reflect the beautiful, unpopulated territory from which they had sprung.

“It’s pop but it has a regional twist to it that’s undeniable,” says Randle Chowning of the band’s trademark sound. “With Nirvana, they always talked about grunge and Seattle, but you wouldn’t know that unless somebody told you. It was punk rock kinda slowed down; why would you think Seattle? The music doesn’t sound like you would relate to the region. I think that we were one of the last groups that had a definite identity to a region and a time period. You can say it about the Tex-Mex thing, they’re regionalized, too. But to have a mass appeal like that, and sell in Europe, and to be regionalized like that at the same time, it’s pretty phenomenal.”

Chowning’s contribution to the group’s sound was that of a strong melodic sensibility, a commercial feel that didn’t sacrifice their mountain authenticity. Songs like “Country Girl” and the rolling rocker “Look Away” balanced the more country-influenced songs of Dillon (“Standing on the Rock”), the sweet pop of Lee (“Giving It All to the Wind”), the hillbilly blues of Cash (“Chicken Train”), and the folk rock of Granda (“It Probably Always Will”). Put together, the songs constituted a body of work with the same character and depth that more widely-known peers like The Band and the Eagles had created.

Chowning would leave the group after their third release (The Car Over the Lake Album) and Brayfield after their fourth (Men from Earth), but the Daredevils continued to record and tour for many years to come. There were other personnel changes over time, with Dillon, Cash, and Granda serving as the ongoing core members. In one particular latter-day Daredevil and longtime friend, the late Steve Canaday, they found yet another contributing songwriter and lead vocalist (Canaday had been the one responsible for getting that first tape to John Hammond).

Throughout the rest of the seventies and beyond, they grew creatively, but never strayed too far from the regional sound that they had created. Neither did they stray from the region itself: Dillon, Cash, and Granda still live in Missouri, and Lee has recently returned to the Ozarks after several decades in Nashville.

Daredevils past and present have continued in their creative lives, penning songs for contemporary country artists (Chowning for Billy Gilman, Granda for Chet Atkins, Lee for Alabama), and in Cash’s case, penning a series of successful science fiction novels.

The Daredevils have retained an underground cult status to this day, with a loyal fan base that heard a rock and roll spirit with warmth and raw energy. The loyalty to each other has remained equally strong, as their lives and careers continue to overlap. In November, the Dillon/Cash/Granda incarnation of the group will perform a three-night stand with old friends Lee and Chowning, who have released a duo album this year called Beyond Reach. Logically enough, the shows will take place at the historic Wildwood Springs Lodge, nestled among the mountains and rivers of Steelville, Missouri. For the Ozark Mountain Daredevils in 2006, it’s a time warp back to the mountains, that’s where they all came from.

Chowning has a pretty good idea what will happen when they share the stage again. “Individually, we’re us, but when we get together we become them. And it takes on kind of an energy thing of its own. And it is powerful.”

It was a voice of purity and clarity, strength and vulnerability, humanity and otherworldliness that somehow, amazingly, found its way onto the stage of popular music in 1968. It was fortunate that the simple beauty of Mary Hopkin’s voice was heard at all among the angry, raucous, and impassioned sounds of the time. It was a voice that rang like a bell, simple and subtle, without gratuitous vocal acrobatics. And just as mysteriously as this haunting voice had arrived, it disappeared from the musical landscape.

“My first year in the music biz was very exciting,” Hopkin says of that thrilling period. “I was meeting people who were my childhood idols – The Beatles, Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, etc. I didn’t take it at all seriously, as I didn’t expect it to last. However, after the first year, when things settled down a little, I realized that I was going in the wrong direction. The following two years or more were spent in fulfilling my commitments, and after that I was determined to take control and called a complete halt.”

Mary Hopkin only wanted to sing. Even at eighteen, when her evocative chart-topping song was everywhere, she knew that she wanted solitude. It was a solitude designed not to fuel her mystique or to wrestle with creative demons away from the limelight a la Brian Wilson or Syd Barrett. On the contrary, Mary Hopkin’s disinterest in public life was simply that. She was and is a normal woman intent on living life on her own terms with her own family and friends. And she still loves music.

Though she has in many ways achieved the simple life she sought, she maintains one extraordinary characteristic: an angelic voice, her understated instrument made of passion and technique in equal parts, only enhanced by her love of using it. This was true even back in the beginning, as she had to be coerced as a teen to pursue an appearance on Opportunity Knocks, the British television talent program in 1968. Her story from that point moves rather quickly: Famous model Twiggy was so moved by her performance on TV that she called her friend Beatle Paul McCartney, who was looking for new talent for the Beatles’ new homegrown label, Apple Records. That is how an ordinary Welsh girl received a phone call from the most famous musician on the planet at the time. McCartney signed Hopkin to Apple, wrote a song for her (“Goodbye”), produced her album, and recorded a single for her that would soon knock his own “Hey Jude” right out of the Number One slot on the charts. “Those Were the Days” was an old Ukranian folk tune with a nostalgic feel set to new lyrics that were themselves about nostalgia. The song was an instant and memorable hit, catapulting the shy young woman to the fame that she so did not long for.

Forty years later, Paul McCartney is still the most famous musician alive, and Mary Hopkin is still content away from the public eye.

Mary long ago retired from live performances, and she grants no interviews—excepting this one only, by email, to discuss her music. Just this year, she has released Valentine, a collection of previously un-issued tracks from the seventies, and two years ago, she issued a live set, Live at the Royal Festival Hall 1972, which is as close as anyone will ever get hearing her perform live.

She has no desire to talk about her personal life or her Beatle memories from a time when she was a key player in the greatest show on earth, for what it was worth. That’s okay, as there is plenty to be said about her body of work.

That Royal Festival Hall performance represents a crucial turning point in what was to become a rather unconventional life in popular music. “After I gave up the music business in 1972, after the Royal Festival Hall concert,” she says, “I occasionally got involved in what I considered ‘one-off’ projects, with no intention of making a full-time commitment. However, the newspapers (apparently short of good stories) would report each project as a ‘comeback’, so it seemed as though I was interested in resuming my career. I have enjoyed these sporadic ventures, as it’s fun to try new things, but my disillusionment with the music business remained and I had no intention of getting involved again.”

Among the many one-off projects were brief periods as lead singer of two bands, Oasis and Sundance, and many songs for film soundtracks, including a noteworthy wordless vocal performance for the cult classic, Blade Runner.

In the late eighties, she recorded an album with limited release, Spirit, consisting of classical pieces that showcased her voice in a more sophisticated setting, that which it had always deserved, as a number of her Apple recordings were more lightweight than her personal tastes.

Among the early Apple recordings, she is most proud of Earth Song, Ocean Song, a tasteful collection of intimate folk arrangements produced by Tony Visconti, who would become her (now ex) husband and father of their two children. “It is one I could play today without embarrassment, and I feel it represents me (or at least a good part of me) perfectly. I still love all the songs, and the whole experience of making the album was wonderful.”

The newly released Valentine collection consists of songs (including three originals) recorded around the same time as (and in the same spirit of) Earth Song, and Hopkin had both creative and practical reasons for sharing them with the world. “There were about thirty hefty 2-inch tapes weighing heavily on my mind, and also on my bedroom ceiling. They had been gathering dust in my loft for many years, and one morning I woke up to an ominous creaking sound, as a huge crack appeared in the ceiling. So, with some prodding from my daughter, we decided to release them from their dusty boxes before the ceiling fell in.”

Another interesting recent project is a vocal contribution to Dolly Parton’s respectable remake of Mary’s timeless hit. “I was really pleased to hear that Dolly was recording ‘Those Were the Days’ and I was happy to do some background vocals for her. Her version is more robust and lively than mine, altogether a different interpretation, which was interesting. I’ve been a Dolly fan since I heard ‘Jolene’ on the radio many years ago. I love her more understated ‘grass roots’ music. We haven’t met, but she sends me lovely messages.”

Her personal fondness for the song with which she is forever associated makes for a providential legacy. “If one has to be eternally linked with any one song, then I’m relieved that it is ‘Those Were the Days’ and not one of my later singles. Although I’m flattered that Paul wrote ‘Goodbye’ especially for me, it was, I believe, a step in the wrong direction for me. I’m so grateful that he chose ‘Those Were the Days’ as my first single. I think ‘Those Were the Days,’ being originally a Ukrainian folk song, has a timeless quality, but ‘Goodbye’ is set firmly in the sixties pop era.”

From a business perspective, though, there are certainly better things to be said of that sixties pop era, as the modern emergence of American Idol styled star-making machinery bears little resemblance to her own Opportunity Knocks beginnings. “I hated the idea of talent shows, but a local agent persuaded me to go along to an audition. When I appeared on the actual show, I was impressed by the great care that the organizers took to present the artists. We had individual orchestral arrangements especially written. We were treated with respect and presented as professionals. There was none of the public humiliation and destructive criticism of the artists that has now become acceptable. I find this quite abhorrent, and so only rarely (whilst channel-flicking) watch in horror while some poor soul is torn to shreds by a panel of egomaniacs we’d never previously heard of, all in the name of entertainment. If a true talent emerges from this awful weeding process, then he/she truly deserves to succeed. Yes, it’s a highly competitive business, but surely there’s still a place for some compassion and dignity.”

Those thoughts represent the very reasons Hopkin is happy to be away from the spotlight. “There’s absolutely nothing I miss about fame and recognition. From the moment I signed my first autograph, I disliked being recognized. I’ve always been very guarded about my privacy, and hated all the celebrity nonsense. I am, of course, very grateful for all the wonderful support that people have given and the creative freedom I now enjoy as a result of the early successes.”

And so Mary Hopkin lives her musical life happily in her own world, writing and recording for fun with both of her adult children. She makes music for her own pleasure in her own universe–no celebrity nonsense needed.

Mary’s cyberspace interviewer was unable to fully restrain himself from asking just one blatantly Beatlesque question, an irresistible curiosity involving a remarkable film clip that has surfaced on youtube.com: On a hillside, a young Mary plays a guitar and sings the beautiful song, “Morning of Our Lives,” while a fluffy dog frolics in the grass. Is it possible that this is Paul McCartney’s beloved Martha, the English sheep dog about whom he wrote in “Martha, My Dear” from the Beatles’ White Album? “Yes, it was indeed the lovely Martha in the video,” recalls Hopkin. “I had forgotten this reel existed until [my daughter] found it on Youtube. I was sitting in Paul’s garden on a lovely summer’s day, singing with guitar, while Martha completely upstaged me, rolling about with legs waving in the air – Martha, not me! I can’t remember who was filming – it might have been Paul or Derek Taylor or anyone else.”

The playful dog occupies a more vivid memory for her than the Beatle behind the camera, a memory consistent with her indifference toward celebrity. Why would it matter who shot the film? It’s the beauty of the day and the song and the sheepdog that made the moment special.

And therein lies Mary Hopkin’s world view. It’s as clear as her voice.

The Valentine and Live at the Royal Festival Hall 1972 CDs can both be purchased at http://www.maryhopkin.co.uk.

In 1958, photographer Art Kane gathered together fifty seven major American jazz musicians for a group photograph in New York. Kane’s photo would be called “A Great Day In Harlem” and would appear in an Esquire magazine article about jazz, which had come a long way by that time, musically and culturally. There were few color boundaries in jazz culture, as the photo shows, and this was nearly a decade before American blacks and whites would finally dismantle so many other societal rules of racial separation.

Six decades earlier, though, things were different. In the young days of recorded music, forty-two prominent American musicians would gather at the New Jersey estate of Thomas Edison for a similar photograph. Edison, of course, was largely responsible for the very existence of recorded music, and his own label was already hard at work documenting the music of the time.

And among the Edison recording artists appearing in that 1900 photo was only one black man. George Washington Johnson had been born into slavery in the 1840s. There was no cultural largesse or color-blindness that had led to his inclusion. He was there because of a particular song, one around which he had built an entire career.

Johnson recorded “The Whistling Coon” literally thousands of times direct to cylinder, the medium of the day, each recording being sold individually in the days before mass production. The song was a grotesque caricature sung and whistled by Johnson for a white audience: “You may talk until you’re tired but you’ll never get a word, from this very funny queer old coon / He’s a knock-kneed, double jointed hunky-punky moke, but he’s happy when he whistles this tune.” That song, along with three others, quite literally constituted the entirety of Johnson’s long professional musical life.

Putting Johnson’s story in its proper historical perspective is among the purposes of an expansive book covering the first thirty years of recorded music, and the prominent role that black American musicians played in it. Lost Sounds: Blacks And The Birth Of The Recording Industry, 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks (published by the University of Illinois Press) dedicates over fifty pages to Johnson’s unique musical role (and scandalous murder trial), and that’s just the beginning of the in-depth study (which includes many photographs, like the aforementioned Edison estate shot).

Most of the story of Bert Williams, an enormously successful and popular humorist and singer, takes place roughly a decade after Johnson’s heyday. Williams’s career would be characterized by a little more dignity and a little more acceptance than Johnson’s—but only a little. Advancements were made at a painfully slow pace in American society, and the music and entertainment its people consumed serve as a great metaphor for this sluggish social change.

Williams and his long-time partner, George Walker, were popular among blacks and whites, and their humor didn’t always involve race. One black reviewer pointed out that “chicken stealing gags and crap game songs are conspicuous by their absence, which is delightfully refreshing.” The most famous black American of the time, Booker T. Washington, wrote of Williams as being an asset to their mutual race as it strove for social acceptance. “The best reason I can give for liking his quaint songs and humorous sayings is that he puts into this form some of the quality and philosophy of the Negro race.”

This was higher brow entertainment in a time during which entertainment by blacks was usually one-dimensional representation of one’s self as inferior. Williams and Walker were better than that, and it could be heard in the appealing singing voice of Bert Williams, and yet the two black gentlemen would still perform in black face atop their naturally dark skin.

And therein lies the fascination of the subject, which Brooks covers with exhaustive (and necessary) research for what had indeed been a lost history of the music that preceded jazz.

Chapter after chapter, Brooks details the stories of solo singers, vocal quartets, and humorists. The self-mocking tradition of vaudeville and the beautiful depth of Negro spirituals get equal billing here.

The book unfolds not as merely a collection of character sketches of talented blacks of the time, but as the story of racial progress itself, while the Civil War gradually slipped deeper into the past of the wounded country.

Indeed, as time marched on into the 1920s, black artists emerged beyond the obvious musical categories allocated to them by the rules of society and business. The book’s greatest illustration for this development comes in the story of Roland Hayes, the child of ex-slaves on a poor farm in rural Georgia. Such humble and remote beginnings did not prevent the thoughtful young man from exposure to the beautiful and compelling voice of Enrico Caruso. The determined Hayes managed to nearly complete a college education (only to be dismissed before commencement without explanation), which included great training and development of his singing ability. A distinguished career as an operatic tenor followed, taking him to stages previously unattainable for black performers (including Carnegie Hall).

Very few recordings were made during his earlier years, and the independently-minded musician did what he could to control his career and market his own recorded product. Brooks’ thorough research produced a fascinating letter written by Hayes to a record agent in about 1918. It would shed light on the point where commerce and race at the time would meet: “[T]here isn’t a Phonographic Company in the U. S. that is willing to make classic records for Negroes; they will and do, make ragtime and Jubilee singers records, but they refuse absolutely to make standard art songs and operatic numbers for colored artists.

“Therefore it is up to the artist to make his or her own records and put them out at their own personal expense, which expense I assure you is very great.

“We as a race, I regret to say, must suffer this treatment or do what we can to offset it. I have done and am doing what I can in that direction. Every record I put out costs me so much that were I to put out double disc records I should have to charge at least $3.00 per record, and at that I should make almost no profit at all, as I am now doing on these. With me, it is a sacrifice, but I am willing to make it that my people may hear and become acquainted with the best, which I a humble artist of the race can give them.”

The career of Roland Hayes would break down barriers. Through music, he would help to make other brilliant careers possible, like that of Paul Robeson, whose music and political efforts in the 1930s and ‘40s would in turn do the same for those to follow in the pop music era.

But before Robeson, before jazz, before rock and roll, the three decades covered in Lost Sounds had to happen. It was a time when miraculous new technology provided a means to bring black voices to white ears, while allowing black America to hear diversity in its own musical voice. Because of this, Lost Sounds emerges as an important documentation of the ironies of a racist culture as it struggled to find itself.

In 1974 and 1975, the only shirts I wore were those pseudo-western white button up ones with a yoke on the shoulders and a pattern that matched the cuffs. They were quite in vogue for the time, and there was only one reason for it: John Denver wore them on his album covers and the frequent TV appearances he made. He was everywhere. Both kids and adults liked him for his wholesome attitude, appearance, and those beautiful songs.

Those shirts, and indeed everything about John Denver, became extremely uncool just a few years later. Warm and fuzzy was forever replaced by dark and brooding in the pretentious styles and music of youth. The other day, I saw a teenager walking around with one of those giant Cat In The Hat-type hats towering a foot above his head, just like that current pop hit-maker Jamiroquai wears in his videos. Somehow, I suspect that kid will look back someday and realize just how silly he looked (as will his contemporaries with their multiple piercings, ghostly makeup, and “heroin chic” appearances).

I look back on my period of the John Denver look and am thankful that I spent those formative years being influenced by an image that represented love of life, love of nature, love of everything. I thought of that style and image and that time upon hearing of John Denver’s death at 53 in his own small experimental aircraft on October 12. And like so many others, I pulled out all my Denver albums that I’d kept all those years, listening to them and remembering the hopeful and positive words I thought I’d forgotten.

John Denver was, of course, far more than just a symbol of all things happy. He was a musician, a thoughtful one, with great depth of character and meaning in his lyrics, beauty in his memorable melodies, and sincerity in his voice. Those songs, “Rocky Mountain High,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Sunshine on My Shoulders” cheered America up. They came at the precise time that we were being bombarded with too much information, an era with dramatic social change, increased racial tension, an unpopular and inexplicable war, and political scandal that would permanently harden this nation’s view of government. Denver’s songs were a cheerful distraction, a reminder of happier times and feelings, the musical equivalent of the “Calgon, take me away” commercial.

Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., the son of an Air Force pilot, moved around a lot as a child, as military families do. He adopted the name Denver just as he adopted the beautiful
state in which that city resides. As a young musician, he was
fortunate enough (chosen from over 250 singers) to become a member of the well-known Chad Mitchell Trio, and from that position, had the great honor of Peter, Paul, and Mary
recording his song “Leaving On A Jet Plane.” It became a huge hit for the folk superstars, and became a springboard for Denver’s own recording career. Things then happened very quickly for the young man. His first album was 1969′s “Rhymes and Reasons”, and within a few years, he was selling millions of records and his name became a household word.

His charming personality came through in the songs that celebrated life and love. His refreshing naivete was focused entirely on The Big Picture; the reasons for life itself and the beauty of nature. Why sing about all the subtle nuances and complexities of frenzied life in the twentieth century when you could draw people’s attention to overlooked important things like “a night in a forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain, like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean”?

The music of John Denver truly did “fill up (the) senses” of an entire generation. It was an era in which your favorite musicians would actually release several albums a year (and even smile on the cover photos!), and Denver was no exception to the rule of the day, with over a dozen records in the first half of the Seventies. In addition to the fine songwriting found in “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” “Follow Me,” “Looking For Space,” and so many others, he proved to be a worthy interpreter of other songwriters of the pop music era. His remarkable voice, a clean and pure tenor, added entirely new dimensions to songs like Michael Murphey’s “Boy From the Country,” Buddy Holly’s “Everyday,” Jerry Jeff Walker’s “My Old Man,” and especially the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son.”

As John Denver the Singer became John Denver the Celebrity, it became apparent that he didn’t just sing about love and the beauty of our world, he also lived a life accordingly. He became a zealous activist, a symbol for all things natural and cerebral, a badge he wore proudly his entire public life. The songs were just a vessel, a means to getting his message across, a message that he delivered fully two decades before terms like “global warming,” “environmentalist,” even “recycling” became part of our everyday vernacular.

Also, at the height of his popularity, he starred in a box-office hit with George Burns, “Oh, God!,” in which Denver was perfectly cast as an Everyman, dealing once again with that Big Picture, in a comical and endearing film speculating on the nature of God Himself. During this period, he also appeared on numerous TV shows, guest-hosted the Tonight Show, made memorable television and record appearances with Jim Henson’s Muppets, and collected many awards, including eight platinum albums, 13 gold albums, and the U.S. Jaycees’ Ten Outstanding Men of America Award.

By the end of the Seventies, a weary, more cynical America lost interest in songs about sunshine and mountains and began listening to music of every other type, as new styles developed and the audiences became more fragmented into specific categories (upon the news of Denver’s death, only the public station in my city would play his music; he simply didn’t fit neatly into any of the narrow current radio formats). John Denver disappeared from the television, the radio, and the major record label (RCA) for whom he’d brought so much success, selling more than 10 million albums (John Denver’s Greatest Hits is still one of the largest selling albums in the history of RCA Records).

But that didn’t affect Denver’s enthusiasm. Neither did it change his single-minded purism and dedication to his poems and prayers and promises, the things that he believed in.  He continued to release albums on his own label, reaching his core audience that had never stopped listening. And he continued to involve himself in the hunger and preservation causes that were so dear to him and had been so spiritually connected to his music.

By 1997, his tremendous body of work included over 35 albums and many years of involvement in the work of UNICEF and the World Wildlife Fund. He’d also helped to found other charitable organizations: the Plant-It 2000 Foundation is dedicated to planting trees where needed, and the Windstar Foundation is a nonprofit environmental education and research center working toward a sustainable future for the world. He was also on the advisory board of many environmental organizations including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Cousteau Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. He continued to receive recognition for his ongoing work, like the Presidential World Without Hunger Award, the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Achievement Award, the NASA Medal For Public Service, the Albert Schweitzer Music Award, and many others. This musician truly put his money and time where his mouth and his heart were. His passion for life was apparent in all his work, musical and charitable, and was even apparent in the way in which he died.

When another of my favorite singer/songwriters was lost to a 1996 plane tragedy (Nashville writer and recording artist, Walter Hyatt, in the Valujet crash), a friend of mine, also a Walter fan, paid him the highest honor one can give: She had a number of trees planted in his memory. With John Denver’s Plant It 2000, it’s pretty easy for those of us who were touched by his music to repay the favor with a similar gesture. Donations to Plant It 2000 can be sent to 9457 South University Blvd., Suite 310, Highlands Ranch, Colorado, 80126.

There have been too many recent losses of folks who spent their time here with a passionate respect for the beauty that surrounds us, that’s in our world and in each other: Jacques Cousteau (about whom Denver sang in “Calypso”), Carl Sagan, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Charles Kuralt, now John Denver. They held the public front line on protecting the health of our planet and its creatures; we wanted them there, we needed them there, so we wouldn’t have to worry about it ourselves. It’s incumbent upon the rest of us to champion those human health and environmental health causes that they dedicated their lives to, and that are still too often looked upon so cynically by our jaded society.  Now it’s our turn, and our responsibility.

The beautiful voice, melodies, and songs are what will stick in most people’s minds, those of us uncool nerds who admit to loving that sound, that joyous celebration of life that John Denver captured perfectly in his songs. But again, those songs were more than just beautiful tunes. They were instructions, advice, suggestions, not to be taken lightly:

“Come dance with the west wind, and touch on the mountain tops, sail o’er the canyons and up to the stars, and reach for the heavens, and hope for the future, and all that we can be, not just what we are.”
[from "The Eagle And The Hawk," by John Denver and Mike Taylor, 1971]

Donations to Plant-It 2000 can be sent to 9457 South
University Blvd., Suite 310, Highlands Ranch, Colorado 80126

When I think of the late Jim Croce, who died all too young at 30 in 1973, I think not only of his heartfelt songs with beautiful expressions of love and human character, but also of a nice dinner featuring a Wild Salmon Tournado entree with herb-crusted eggplant medallion, grilled asparagus and seasonal vegetables served with a tarragon beurre blanc. Okay, not really, but that does sound good, doesn’t it?

Actually, there is a connection there, the salmon being an extension of the various creative ventures from Jim’s widow, Ingrid, each pursued in the loving interest of keeping her late husband’s music alive and well. With much thanks to her, it’s doing just fine.

Not only has she opened a classy downtown San Diego restaurant dedicated to Jim’s memory (Croce’s, where the Wild Salmon Tournado is $27.95), she has also created an adjoining jazz club (Croce’s Jazz Bar), a blues club (The Top Hat Bar & Grille, after Jim’s song of the same name), a photo book (Time In A Bottle), a cook book (Thyme In A Bottle!), and now some new musical releases, culled from the unreleased archive, shedding new light on her late husband’s musical gift.

When Jim Croce showed up on the scene at the beginning of the ‘70s, he’d already spent years making music in various settings and figurations, most notably with Ingrid as a folk duo. Throughout that time, he held regular jobs, too, from which he drew inspiration for what would become his best-loved anecdotal character songs. “Speedball Tucker” came from his time as a truck driver. His breakout hit, “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown,” was about a very real person who Jim knew in the service.

His rise to the top of the pops was quick, in an era in which one could do so without benefit of an American Idol television show. Penning and singing a good song was the ticket at that time, and this shy young artist had plenty more where that came from.

He was lucky, actually (as was the popular music audience of the time), to be heard by all of America. It’s different now. The very best acoustic singer/songwriters of the 21st century (like Jimmy Lafave, Slaid Cleaves, and Terri Hendrix, to name some personal favorites) keep their music alive on the Americana underground, while ephemeral acts like Hillary Duff and Clay Aiken fill basketball arenas, celebrity magazines, and Clear Channel play lists.

If there is any hope left in the world of radio, the newly released recordings of Jim Croce should show up on Adult Contemporary and Americana play lists. Whether that happens or not, the great news is that they are available by CD and DVD technology that Jim himself could never have imagined. It’s safe to say that he’d be proud and happy about their release.

JIM CROCE LIVE

The Have You Heard Jim Croce Live DVD brings to life the gentle man behind the intimate and intricate songs, the moving pictures animating the songwriter who completely missed the MTV video age. Consisting of various live performances for music shows of the time like the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, Croce can be seen smiling, laughing, and talking in and around his storytelling songs. The cigar-smoking tough guy seen on his album covers and publicity photos of the time can now be seen more as who he actually was: a personable, humble, and warm artist, enthusiastic about any chance to sing to an audience.

This is as close as history will allow us to experience a Jim Croce concert, and the songs are performed the same way they were when Jim was on the road. There was no band, no strings, no glitz, no glamour, just a man and his rhythm guitar with his friend and partner, Maury Muehleison, taking harmony vocals and lead acoustic.

Unplugged versions of hits “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels),” “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” appear among other songs that should have been hits. It’s fortunate that “Lover’s Cross,” “The Hard Way Every Time,” and the extraordinary “These Dreams” were committed to videotape, and the same goes for some of the bonus footage included on the video. An excerpt of a filmed documentary at the Croce family farm gives us a glimpse of Jim’s family life before it was cut short. The young parents Ingrid and Jim are seen enjoying life and doting over their toddler, Adrian James.

THE FAMILY NAME

A. J., now an artist in his own right, was an active participant with his mother in the production of these recent projects. “It took about two years to put the DVD tapes and Facets together, and during that time I was writing every day but I was also working in the studio and listening to old stuff of my dad’s,” says Croce, whose fifth album, Adrian James Croce, was released in July. “It wasn’t until that was completed a year ago that I could get a chance to get into the studio and start recording the stuff that I’m putting out now.”

The stuff he’s putting out now is pure jangly power pop, a somewhat different sound from his swinging jazzy debut of fifteen years ago. His varied solo career draws more influence from Elvis Costello, The Beatles, and Louis Armstrong than from the father he lost at age two, but there is still clearly a strong musical, familial, and spiritual connection.

He came to realize this himself while preparing the newly released recordings of his dad. “There was a moment when I went into my studio, and I was transferring all these cool tapes [of my father’s] onto digital, listening to make sure everything was good. I was listening to these recordings and they were the same songs I was listening to, probably three or four of them, since I was thirteen or fourteen. I’d never heard him play them, and they were obscure. Fats Waller and Bessie Smith songs, some Mississippi John Hurt stuff. All of a sudden there was this amazing thing: How is it that we wound up playing the same stuff, that became such an important influence on us?”

FACETS OF AMERICAN MUSIC

Jim was indeed a student of the blues and jazz of America’s musical roots, and like so many guys with guitars at the time, his music came out with the sound and spirit of the folk movement. In 1966, Jim was able to commit some of his songs to tape, thanks to a $500 gift from his parents for the express purpose of making an album—to get it out of his system before getting a real job. Only 500 copies were printed of that record, Facets, which Jim sold for five dollars apiece. It included several traditional tracks, a song by Nashville’s Harlan Howard, one by Gordon Lightfoot, and some of the young songwriter’s own compositions. The most stunning track was an original musical interpretation of Rudyard Kipling’s epic poem, The Ballad Of Gunga Din. The haunting melody was introduced by a banjo and carried to its tragic end by a voice wise beyond its twenty-four years.

The sparse arrangements and echoed vocals captured something unique, a Pennsylvania white boy with the rural sensibility of southern blues. It was the very sound that had already drawn a kid from Minnesota named Bob, along with dozens of others, to the funky downtown New York neighborhood called Greenwich Village.

But New York would not be the home to Jim Croce, literally or musically (though he did try living there, by the way, as documented in his song, “New York’s Not My Home”). In the few years following the self-released album, Croce would find his own musical niche, which would soon bring more commercial success than that of some of his more folk-oriented contemporaries.

Before making pop music history with his three ABC albums, Jim and Ingrid released a duo album for Capitol, out of print for many years and now also available on compact disc. With the new release of Facets comes a bonus disc, Jim And Ingrid Too, itself a seven-song collection of original rarities written by the young couple. “Railroads And Riverboats” should’ve made its way to Peter, Paul, and Mary—and as songwriting, it was a sign of things to soon come.

THE CROCE KITCHEN

Years before Ingrid Croce would take her lifetime of culinary skills into her own restaurant’s San Diego kitchen, her husband sat down in their Pennsylvania kitchen to play some songs he liked into a small reel-to-reel tape recorder. That was how he wrote songs too, but as any musician knows, sometimes it’s fun to just play.

The Home Recordings: Americana CD may be the most interesting of these recent releases. Unlike Facets, Croce’s voice is more settled, more natural, effortless in its execution. There was no apparent commercial purpose and why should there be? After all, it was just a man and his tape deck, making a recording that was not necessarily supposed to be heard by anyone outside the breakfast nook. Therein lies its charm, as Croce plays some of the two thousand songs he had committed to memory at one time or another.

The influence of the blues can be heard in Brownie McGhee’s “Living With The Blues,” classic country in Jimmie Rodgers’ “In The Jailhouse Now,” and contemporary country in Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.” A rolling version of the great Harlan Howard’s “The Wall” provides a different approach on the prison tale made famous by Johnny Cash. That track alone justifies the release of whatever can be found in the remaining archives of the young writer and interpreter.

THE CROCE COLLECTION

Jim Croce was riding high on overwhelming success at the time of his death. He had two hit albums under his belt and a third on the way, and a huge hit in his fourth single, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” The future looked bright for the man with a promising musical future. In the years following his death in 1973, there were other releases, a few of which added new tracks to the painfully short canon of work.

But there were plenty that added quite literally nothing. The tracks from the three ABC albums were shuffled about into multiple variations on the greatest hits format, including a collection of the love songs and another of the great character songs that Jim had become known for, thanks to that Army buddy, Leroy Brown. For collecting purposes, virtually all of them are unnecessary, always pulling from the same forty tracks (and within that, usually the same dozen or so).

The few worthwhile additions include the 1975 double Lifesong LP release, The Faces I’ve Been, which featured unreleased studio tracks from various periods (some of which were from the Facets album), and an entire side is dedicated to the onstage recordings of Jim introducing the songs, sharing their background and revealing a gift of storytelling beyond that found in his songs. All in all, it’s a worthwhile addition for the completist, but its best tracks would show up on CD later.

Those best tracks included an extraordinarily powerful version of “Ol’ Man River” and a heartfelt medley of “Searchin’,” “He Don’t Love You,” and Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang.” Both would appear on the quintessential double CD on Saja Records, The 50th Anniversary Collection (released the year Jim would’ve turned fifty). The most important distinction between this and other compilations that preceded (and followed) is that the entirety of all three ABC albums is included, along with nine additional tracks like the two mentioned above. It’s still available, as are at least three other variations on the greatest hits theme.

No longer available is Saja’s 1989 CD release, Jim Croce Live-The Final Tour. Like the new DVD, it features just Jim and Maury onstage, acoustic and intimate in the final weeks of their lives. Jim’s endearing introductions are again included, allowing us just a few more glimpses of the man behind the songs.

Jim and Maury died on the way from one gig to another, doing it the now old-fashioned way, taking the songs to the people. Jim Croce had that rare gift of melody, and his unwritten tunes died with him in an airplane just as they had with Buddy Holly a decade and a half earlier. But like Holly, Hank Williams, and others who were gone before their thirties, Croce’s musical talents far exceeded that of the melodic hook. The words, the voice, the presence, and the playing all worked together in musical unity with the tunes behind them. Thanks to the determination and loving care of Ingrid and A. J. Croce, they are now further shared with the audiences of Jim’s stolen future.

JIM CROCE DISCOGRAPHY FOR THE COMPLETIST (most available through www.croces.com):

• The 50th Anniversary Collection, Saja Records, 1992 (includes all three original ABC albums, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, Life And Times, I Got A Name, plus nine additional tracks)
• Live, The Final Tour, Saja Records, 1989
• Facets (includes Jim And Ingrid Too), Shout Factory 2004
• Home Recordings: Americana, Shout Factory, 2003
• Jim And Ingrid Croce, Capitol Records, 1969
• Have You Heard Jim Croce Live, Shout Factory DVD, 2004
• The Faces I’ve Been (LP), Lifesong Records, 1975

A J CROCE CDs:

• A J Croce, Private Music, 1993
• That’s Me In The Bar, Private Music, 1995
• Fit To Serve, Ruf Records, 1998
• Transit, Ruf Records, 2000
• Adrian James Croce, Seedling Records, 2004