My very first memory of Park City was musical. Four of us had driven through the night from the West Coast to visit friends and make some turns. While searching for what passed for downtown back then, ’67 having just morphed into ’68, we passed a slogging pilgrim wrapped in a P-coat, muffler, and what looked to be a 5X-beaver Stetson.
A somewhat-weathered Martin guitar, slung over his shoulder by a thick leather strap, stuck out its thumb. Stuffing them both into the back seat, we followed directions and spun tires through the snow up to what we later came to call “Old Town.” Our new friend worked in a local saloon, cleaning up in the morning and picking and singing for the après-ski crowd in the afternoon.
While he turned up the heat in the watering hole and assembled some “sheepherder’s coffee,” the banter turned to music and what kind of requests he got from the paying customers. Shaking his head, he cracked: “Everything from ‘Louie, Louie’ to ‘Like a Rolling Stone.'” Those who were on that trip still use that line to this day.
Music came from everywhere — a makeshift stage, a turntable, an 8-track player, or a jukebox. The small local scene wasn’t all that different, in the microcosm, than what had greeted us earlier in Greenwich Village, the French Quarter, Haight-Ashbury, or the west coast of Mexico.
Back then, explorers of the interior landscape, dragging books and vinyl recordings behind them, roamed the two-lanes and rail lines, stopping in those locales with a similar mindset where they would partake of the odd job, crash pad, and a bit of stimulation. Ski towns, particularly, fit the bill.
By the time I up and moved to Park City for real, about a year-and-a-half later, the scene had undergone a pituitary adjustment. Once-nearly-vacant eateries were now all abuzz about James Dickey’s “Deliverance” and Rossignol Statos, Hendrix’s recent overdose and the new “jet turn,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and the “wet look” in ski fashion.
Although, as far as I know, no one in town owned a copy of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” at that time, the ethic of that landmark recording certainly was evident within the eclectic record collections in the various miners’ shacks around town.
This was driven, of course, by an inherent curiosity among many about the ancestry of musical forms, about where all these songs we so revered first drew breath. We were awash in the flowerings but were searching for the “roots.”
The “great folk music scare” of the early ’60s had connected many of the dots for us. We had learned, for example, that the musical structure of many of Dylan’s songs had been around for generations, some going back to the British Isles and others to darkest Africa. Appalachia and the Mississippi delta became fertile hunting-grounds for our explorations.
Amid the cinderblocks and milk cartons that provided the interior decoration of choice within the peer group in question, there would be albums of Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and assorted others of the lineage.
With the Park City Museum set to host the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit “New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music” from April 10 through May 24, 2010, I’ve recently been revisiting those days when early jazz, folk, country, and blues first came to dominate the local scene.
Music served as the glue that held our Park City “newcomer” culture together back then and the blues- and-country-driven rock and roll that became the soundtrack of our expatriate lives probably did as much to define us as anything. Barhopping to hear our local bands perform became de rigueur.
The Park City Museum is also organizing an exhibit of its own as prelude to “New Harmonies” that will document historical local music culture. “Music Makes Park City Community” is set to open in February.
Currently, the museum is collecting “stories, photographs and other musical Park City mementos” to display in the exhibition. The fact that they’re going back at least to the 1940s with this and continuing on through the 1980s should prove quite enlightening.
All this has got me digging into my archives for articles and photos from the 1970s for anything that might lend itself to telling that particular story. Those were certainly heady times and I would encourage anyone with musical artifacts or photos from the era to contact the museum and become a part of the exhibit.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.