From: "Doug Bright" <75366.2463@compuserve.com> To: Subject: Article: December, 2005 Date: Thursday, December 15, 2005 9:28 PM PART TWO: TALL BOOTS: NEW CD PRESERVES A WESTERN MUSIC LEGACY By Doug Bright At first, the job of researching the family repertoire proved to be an agonizingly slow process. "Little by little, I just asked a whole lot of questions," Marshall recalls. "I did a lot of writing the Library of Congress, looking for song titles. I didn't know what the titles were: I could just tell 'em how it went, write it down, and ask somebody to research it when they got time. A year and a half later they'd say, You know, I've not seen anything like that here." Marshall's breakthrough finally came by way of the respected music scholar Douglas B. Green, better known to fans of the western harmony group Riders In The Sky as Ranger Doug. Although they had conversed on previous occasions when the Riders came to town for concerts, she never discussed her musical quest with him until they met again at a show in Hood River, Oregon, where Marshall was working the Taylor guitar sales booth. "We all drew straws and I didn't get to go to the show," she remembers. "While I was sittin' there feelin' sorry for myself, I was playin' my archtop. Doug had run down to get somethin' and saw me there, so he stopped and played for a couple minutes while they were waitin' to get onstage. I took off with them on the bus after that, and we talked for a couple hours. I told him what I was lookin' for, and he gave me names of a couple people and did some contacting for me." Through her new contacts, Marshall found the documentation for the songs her family had written in old film clips of the Sons of The Pioneers. "As a kid I knew that they'd written a lot of songs that they didn't get paid for," she explains. "Any time that subject came up, the subject was changed. It was obviously a sore spot, yet there was a lot of talk about how much fun they had doin' those films. It was a gamble. If they wrote the song for the movie, they might make more money than if they'd recorded it, so they were goin' back and forth tryin' to decide. Some of the songs stayed in the movies and did really great." Nevertheless, some of the group's best songs didn't make the cut and would have been lost forever if archivists in charge of the footage hadn't taken the initiative to preserve them. "They literally put them back into the movies and kept them in a vault in this underground place back in North Carolina somewhere," Marshall explains. "My grandfather knew where all this stuff was, and the person that was supposed to tell me about it decided they weren't gonna tell me and left all this stuff with somebody else. As I finally tracked it down, I found out where it ended up, and that's how I found Elizabeth McDonald." As curator of the Bob Nolan collection at the University of North Carolina, McDonald had been gathering every film clip she could find on Nolan's songwriting career as a founding member of The Sons of the Pioneers. "She was trying to document every song they ever did," Marshall explains. "This lady's tenacious! Douglas had told her about me, so she called me because she heard I might know about some things, and when she found out what I knew, then that helped her." From that point on, McDonald provided videotaped film clips that finally corroborated Marshall's childhood memories. A particularly happy case in point is Nolan's 1938 lullaby "Slumber Time On The Range", mellifluously revived by Riders In The Sky on Marshall's new CD. Although she only remembered a few lyrics and had no song title, she had remembered the melody and chord structure well enough to write them out for McDonald. "I sent it to her, asking if she thought this was in any of the film clips that she had," Marshall recalls. "Elizabeth immediately recognized that and told me, "I have something to send you." She could not believe that I had remembered it all that long, and she knew for a fact that nobody else could have heard it 'cause it had never come out. On the day it arrived, I curled up into my rocking chair well after midnight and turned it on. The film clip was barely visible, but the audio was clear enough to hear nearly every word. Time disappeared for a few hours that night." Through Elizabeth McDonald, Marshall made contact with other historians, and when the vast resources of the Internet became widely available, the research process was suddenly many times easier. By the end of the decade, Suze Spencer Marshall had amassed a considerable body of information about her family's musical heritage. Nevertheless, her studies were only a personal quest until steel guitarist Stacy Phillips planted a new idea in her mind. While discussing her research with him one day at guitar camp, he told her, "You know what, young lady? You know too much about this, and the rest of the world needs to know. You need to get goin' and make a record. You need to find some people and do it right, and you can do it yourself. You need to get this music out because this is good stuff!" "He would call me every couple months," Marshall recalls, "and say, "Have you thought about who you might have play? Have you interviewed any studios yet?" I was savin' money like crazy 'cause I knew it was gonna cost me a lot. When I had enough to get me a super-good start, I started interviewing recording studios all over the place. I told them I wanted everything recorded live with really good microphones: I didn't want to use any pick-ups at all. A lot of studios spent all their time tellin' me what I needed to do and not listening at all. Then I ran into David Lange's studio." Lange, a highly respected recording engineer with a studio near Tacoma, was a popular resource for acoustic and roots-based musicians with album projects in mind. When Suze Marshall engaged him to help her produce a demo for her western swing band Way Out West, she knew her family heritage project had found its digital home. "I'd been recording all our gigs," she explains, "and I wanted a good demo that I could use for people that wanted to hire the band, so I thought, "I'm gonna take him a bunch of these old tapes and see if we can make something out of it." I actually did a demo project just to find out what he was like in the studio. I spent a whole day up there and realized he is just awesome! I asked him what kind of microphones he had, so at the end of the day he went through and showed me all the cool old ribbon mikes he had. He's so encouraging and knowledgeable: he's all about sound!" Marshall's approach to recruiting musicians for her project was deliberately slow and gradual. "I never asked a single person to play until after I called 'em and told 'em that I had some things for 'em to listen to," she explains. "I didn't want people tellin' me how to do it or how to change the music. I needed to have my whole game plan well planned out and get the good people. I scheduled two years ahead of time so I could get everybody there." In January 2004, Suze Marshall and her hand-picked crew of musicians began a series of recording and mixing sessions that took a near and a half to complete. The resulting CD, entitled TALL BOOTS, is a star-studded, dynamically performed, and warmly recorded revival of the Spencer family repertoire, including hot Texas-style fiddle tunes, a few waltzes, lyrical western pop ballads, uplifting trail songs, and even a couple of Bennie Nawahi's vintage Hawaiian swing tunes. The rhythm section is so solid, the cowboy jazz solos so heartily swung, and the vocal harmony so inspired that the album literally sells itself after a few moments of casual listening. "People hear one tune and say, I gotta have the rest of that," Marshall observes. "They say, "It sounds like really good people are playing in my living room." When you get a compliment like that, you know you've done your work." At this point, Marshall's primary sales vehicle is her website, www.suzespencermarshall.com, which features plenty of information on the songs and artists, sound samples allowing the prospective customer to preview the album, an easy ordering procedure, and eye-catching images of vintage instruments. "I wanted to have enough pages where people could do a little exploring and find out more information," she says. "I'm gettin' a little bit of action on the website: I've sold a few already. They're finding it by looking up "pioneers" and "cowboys"." The album is also available locally at Dusty Strings on Fremont Avenue North and The Folk Store on Roosevelt Way Northeast. ----------------------------------------