WATERTOWN — The co-founder of the North Country Music Project was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that a July 18 concert by Mark and Michelle Nicolo Prentice at Clayton Opera House will benefit the project.
CLAYTON — When Watertown native and Grammy award-winning producer and musician Mark Prentice…
“It was kind of news to us, but we are pretty excited to hear that someone from last year is still thinking about us,” said Thomas Walker Jr.
The North Country Music Project is the brainchild of Walker and another Watertown expat, Larry Gordon. The “Rockin’ the North Country: The Bands, The Music, Our Story” concert last July at the opera house sold out months in advance. The concert, modeled after Kennedy Center Honors, was the kickoff to an oral history project documenting early rock ’roll music in the north country. The project also hopes to expand to other musical eras and genres.
“The concert was an important way to publicize the work that we are doing as sort of a kickoff of the oral history project, which is the core of the project, and also to pay tribute to the first generation of rock ’n roll musicians of the north country,” said Walker, former Academic Director, Graduate Programs in Environmental Studies, Cultural Sustainability, and Historic Preservation at Goucher College, Baltimore. He now lives in Washington, D.C.
“We had people with production talent on the team, notably Carol Hills. The rest of us were kind of amateurs,” Walker said.
Hills, of Boston, is a Watertown native who was part of the original team that created and launched “The World,” public radio’s longest-running daily global news program, in 1996. She has reported from Cuba, Nigeria and Vietnam and was a Knight Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001-2002. She has a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts.
Hills brought on Watertown native and Grammy award-winning producer and bass player Mark Prentice as music director of last summer’s “Rockin’ the North Country” concert.
“It drew a lot of time, and many of us were kind of on a learning curve, and it distracted a little bit from the oral history project and the work that we need to do for that,” Walker said.
The oral history project has recorded about 60 oral histories by pioneering north country rock musicians. In the early 1960s in the north country, local musicians like brothers “Tiny” and “Big Man” Trahan and Ray John already had a following. But after the 1964 appearance of the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” rock ‘n’ roll exploded across the country. Watertown was awash in the music. Local bands like Ed Wool and the Nomads and the South Shore Road Band packed high school dances, bars and clubs across the region and eventually all over the Northeast. They in turn influenced other Northern New York bands including Dancing Bare, Moondance, Contraband, Crystal, Highlife and the John Michael Band.
In addition to a digital archive, the finished project, when housed at Flower Memorial Library, will include cultural artifacts, ranging from musical instruments to photographs, Walker said.
“It’s part of the work I’ve done as an ethnographer to document some of the cultural communities in different kinds of settings,” Walker said. “When my high school friend Larry Gordon and I were talking years ago and remembering what a great music scene Watertown had while growing up, we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to design an oral history project around that to capture it for posterity?’ It challenged our capacity quite a bit, but we’ve also risen to the occasion. We’re moving ahead with producing a quality archive.”
Walker said retired accountant Terry Duffy of Watertown has helped immensely with the project. Duffy, formerly accounting manager at Children’s Hospital of Orange City, California, and who later worked locally for Mountain Community Homes, said he noticed the beginning stages of the North Country Music Project and decided to get involved.
“I was very intrigued,” he said. “I always thought that was something I wanted to get done.”
Duffy was involved in the local music scene by setting up lights and sound at concerts. He created a Wikipedia page (tinyurl.com/53vcfxfw) related to the North Country Music Project based on what he saw on genealogy websites. He was also inspired by the book, “Pete Frame’s Complete Rock Family Trees,” published in 1993. Frame used hand-drawn trees to trace the development and history of Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Genesis, The Police and other bands.
As an example of his Wikipedia page, Duffy lists 242 musicians from the 1960s. By clicking on that link, information of many of those musicians can be found, including bands they were in. “It shows this musician got together with this musician and formed this band, who came from this band, with a little history of the band itself,” Duffy said. “I’m trying to get as much information from as many angles as I can. It’s a lot for one person.”
The project team has focused on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s because it felt urgency to capture and preserve the story of those times. But there are plans to extend efforts forward to the present.
“There’s still a cohort of second-generation musicians, if you will, which is an important way of thinking about how a movement gets started,” Walker said. “We’ve generated some real excitement and interest about music and music history in this community, and we hope others will be able to take that mantle, particularly the historical aspects of it, and take it where we’re not able to go.”
