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Prologue FIELDNOTES ON THE DICK PHILBROOK AND THE FRYE MOUNTAIN BAND SHOW Place: Thompson Community Center, Union, Maine DATE: AUGUST 4, 2007 The drive from Waldoboro to Union, Maine, was as beautiful as I remembered it from two years before when I attended the Dick Curless Memorial Scholarship Fund concert. Old coastal Colonial houses and clam huts gave way to rolling fields of blueberries and small dairy farms. I arrived in town around 5:30, which was the time I had arranged to meet Yodeling Wade Dow for an interview and to make a recording of his virtuosic cowboy yodeling. I went inside the Thompson Community Center—a wonderfully dusty old basketball court with high rafters, a stage, a kitchen, an ancient scoreboard with orange bulbs, and dim, rusty-red overhead lighting. I approached the first man I saw in a western shirt with pearl buttons to ask Wade’s whereabouts. This was—it turned out—Dick Philbrook, the leader of the Frye Mountain Band, with whom Wade was to be playing that night. Dick is a solid man of short stature with white hair slicked back in a 1960s trucker style, a thick Down East brogue, a wide smile with a front tooth cut at a sharp angle, and big, strong hands. Dick told me that Wade had been given the night off, and he was chagrined to find that I’d traveled all the way to Union only to be disappointed. Dick and his girlfriend, Evelyn, tried to call Wade repeatedly, but to no avail, and we talked awhile about country and western music in Maine. I stepped out to look for a bite to eat, perused the snacks at the Mic-Mac Convenience Store and a small grocery store, and took a look at the Union Fairgrounds and the warehouses that serve as the center of Union, Maine’s blueberry industry. I went back into the Thompson Community Center, paid the eightdollar cover, passed on the fifty-fifty raffle, ordered a couple of hot dogs and a Moxie, and sat down next to Evelyn while the band began to play. During the second song, Dick waved me over to the stage and told me to grab my guitar out of my trunk and sit in with the band for at least one set. XIV prologue Being the youngest person by a good twenty years at least in a room (the gymnasium in this case) full of a hundred or more people is not a feeling I am comfortable with. Young people—particularly young people in their twenties through forties—are so rare at these events that the regulars can’t help but be curious about the “youngster.” I figured if I was going to stand out that much, I might as well be playing and not sitting. So I went out to the car, tucked in my shirt, and got my guitar. The Dick Philbrook band wears matching white western shirts and black pants. Dick plays electric bass and has two men playing electric guitar (both lead) and a woman on drums.The group was very loose, and band members traded off songs, with the singer starting the tune and the others joining in halfway through the first verse or so. I plugged in my acoustic and played rhythm guitar. I knew most of the songs without having ever played some of them, and I sang lead on about one in every four or five songs—mostly Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Merle Haggard songs. I got a good hand each time, and Dick gave me high praise at the end of each song on which I sang lead. That felt good. For me, personally, this was a milestone performance: though I have been playing this music now for over ten years, this was the first truly country and western gig I’d ever been on. Shows I had been playing with my own band for the past seven years either were for rock crowds or were in diverse rooms where some patrons were serious country and western fans, but most people were socializing to music that happened to be country and western. And though most of the songs we played that night originated in Nashville or Bakersfield, what we were doing at the Thompson Community Center did not feel attached to those places at all. The heady commercial country music world of Nashville—where I had spent considerable time in the past knocking on doors, making...

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