I recently made my way through Ken Burns’ latest documentary effort, “Country Music.” I thought it was one of his better productions and do recommend it. He highlights how certain areas of the country were critical in the development of country music. Obviously Nashville was hugely influential but also Bakersfield, Austin, the hollers of Appalachia and the desolate lands of the Dust Bowl. It got me thinking about the signature music that has come out of so many different places in the U.S. There is blues in Memphis and Chicago; jazz and folk and opera in New York; Motown in Detroit; country rock and punk in Los Angeles; cajun and zydeco in Louisiana; southern rock in, well, the Deep South; grunge in Seattle and pockets of rock and roll that have risen to the top briefly in places like Georgia (REM), Minnesota (Prince and Dylan) and New Jersey (Springsteen).
I lived in Denver for many years. While Denver really has never claimed a single defining music, there is no denying that it is a great music town. Red Rocks Amphitheatre alone sets Denver apart as a destination for music lovers.
In addition to enjoying many concerts in Denver while I lived there, work often took me to the southwest corner of Colorado and the northwest corner of New Mexico. The area around Durango, Colorado and Farmington, New Mexico makes up the eastern half of what is known as the “Four Corners” where four states share a common point on the map.
I was surprised how often I stumbled on music that I really liked when I traveled to the Four Corners area. To be sure, much of the music was country but it was country that mixed easily with folk, rock, Mexican and, surprisingly, bluegrass. It was not typically as hardcore as the Kentucky Bluegrass highlighted in Ken Burns’ “Country Music” but a freer wheeling mix of mandolins and dobros that co-existed comfortably with pedal steel and acoustic guitars. Unfortunately, I did not collect a lot of music in my visits to Four Corners. I would typically hear a local group at an outdoor event or in a bar or restaurant and be struck by how it seemed that I was always running across good music there.
Over my lunch hour one day in my last few years in Denver, I went outside to an annual event dubbed “The Taste of Colorado” to grab a bite and see what was going on. Denver would cordon off blocks of Downtown so local restaurants could set up and promote their offerings combined with carnival-like attractions as well as a couple stages offering live music. At “The Taste” that day I saw the group Hired Hands performing. They were mostly a very good bluegrass band but their lead singer was a guy named Eddy Lee Bullington who also went by Eddy Lee. Eddy Lee was a country rock singer with a distinctive but pleasing style. He was definitely not a typical bluegrass singer. But there was something about the blend of his high quality mainstream country vocals with a mountain bluegrass band that really grabbed my attention. Without even knowing that they hailed from Northern New Mexico, I thought, “This is that sound that I seem to always find in Four Corners.”
I lingered watching Hired Hands longer than my lunch hour. When they did “Rusty Old American Dream” by David Wilcox I decided I had to buy one of the CDs they were selling at the show.
The Hired Hands CD that was on sale did not include Eddy Lee. The Eddy Lee CD that was on sale did not include the rest of Hired Hands. Apparently the two had only recently joined forces. Nonetheless, I bought both CDs and have enjoyed them for many years. But the Hired Hands album was very much a bluegrass album and the Eddy Lee album was very much country/country rock.
Once the internet took hold and the world was no longer a place of unanswered questions, one day I searched for Eddy Lee Bullington only to discover that, sadly, he had committed suicide a year or two earlier. I continued to enjoy listening to his “Horses on the Moon” album and the Hired Hands album but neither completely recaptured that magical afternoon in Denver.
Those who subscribe to Spotify will be familiar with their daily playlists. Through means that I probably don’t want to know, Spotify greets me each day with a playlist of songs that Spotify has concluded I will probably like. I’d say they hit the mark about 60% or 70% of the time. A few weeks ago there was a playlist of country and bluegrass that looked promising so I put it on and sat down to eat breakfast. I didn’t pay much attention until a song called “Tried, True and Tested” came on and I thought “That sounds like Eddy Lee!” I picked up the stereo controller and saw that, indeed, the song was on a Hired Hands album called “Stuff That Works.” I quickly looked the album up and realized that it had been done after I saw Hired Hands at Taste of Colorado but before Eddy Lee’s death. “Stuff that Works” sewed up the loose ends that were missing on the CDs that I bought back in Denver. It is mostly an album of covers but it perfectly captures the Four Corners sound that I loved but never preserved in my music collection.
Why spend the time to tell you about Eddy Lee and Hired Hands and the merits of one album in a sea of music? Well, because another feature of Spotify is that you can see how many people are listening to a particular artist. Very few people listen to Hired Hands and “Stuff that Works.”
I have been working my way through a list of the Top 100 albums of all time (according to one source). I am only a short way in but Captain Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica” is number 96 on the list. I can honestly say that listening to that album was physically painful for me. I thought it was awful. But, that’s me. Clearly, the album meant something to a lot of people to end up on that and many other Top 100 lists. Since I believe that the primary function of music is to prompt personal joy or introspection, I have little patience for forcing one’s musical tastes on others. Even if music first makes you confront feelings you either didn’t want to confront or didn’t know you had, if it affects you in a way that makes you rejoice or comfortable with an emotion or creates a memory that re-emerges each time you hear that music, I think music has done its work. Certain music may work on me but not on someone else. That’s fine.
So, my point is not that you must love Eddy Lee and Hired Hands. My point is that I connected with their music (particularly on “Stuff that Works”) as deeply as other artists that I have enjoyed who have Spotify listeners in the millions like Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles. Willie, Bruce and the Fab Four have publicity machines at their disposal that keep their Spotify numbers in the stratosphere. But artists like Lori McKenna, Tift Merritt and, most particularly, Hired Hands, recede from view if those they have touched don’t speak up for them. In the case of Eddy Lee, if I had been able to tell him, “You may wonder if anyone is listening. Well, I am and I love it,” maybe it would have changed something for him and those who loved him.
There is a lot of great music out there in your favorite genres by artists you (and many other people) have yet to discover. Go find them. Share them. You might just change your life or, better yet, theirs.