JUNE 23, 2017
“SHENANDOAH” (WRITER: TRADITIONAL)
ARTIST: THE GOLDEBRIARS
RELEASED ON 7” 45 AND ON THE
GOLDEBRIARS ALBUM, 1964
In 1964, Epic Records signed a two-man, two-woman folk group
from Minnesota named the Goldebriars.
This quartet sang and played traditional songs
and used banjos and guitars, but also wrote plenty of their own material.
Interested in all sorts of unusual things, the quite bohemian Goldebriars relocated
to Los Angeles, donned way-out clothes, and brought Jezebel—a fertility goddess from the Marshall Islands—with them everywhere as a good-luck charm.
The group’s leader was Curt Boettcher, a melodic and
harmonic genius with gifts for composition and arrangement. His male cohort was
Ron Neilson, who played the more difficult instrumental parts. Sisters Dottie
and Sheri Holmberg provided the adventuresome, angelic harmonies that distinguished
them from other such groups. The Holmberg sisters sang with clear diction but
took their voices to new places.
Their first 45 release, in spring 1964, was “Pretty Girls
and Rolling Stones,” an updated standard with writing credited to the group. This
raucous hootenanny roof-raiser doesn’t quite succeed, but had more immediacy
and harmonic sophistication than the music of other mixed-gender ensembles such
as the New Christy Minstrels or Serendipity Singers.
“Pretty Girls” got little airplay and no sales. But in May,
some DJs began playing the flip side, “Shenandoah,” a recasting of a melancholy
old folk song that likely originated with northern hunters and trappers and their meetings with local Native tribes. It was usually sung by the likes of Paul Robeson or
Tennessee Ford—men with deep voices who summoned the valleys and mountains with
their rich tones.
The Goldebriars couldn’t compete with such a thing, so they
did their own, utterly singular version. The Holmberg sisters took the lead with
assistance from Boettcher, incanting male-perspective lyrics with no irony.
Transforming this tough, male folk song into a lush sort of
international folk, a festival of interlocking harmonies, took some doing; this
was daring, forward-thinking music. Producer Bob Morgan apparently deserves
credit for helping the group with the overdubbed, multi-layered vocal
arrangement.
Boettcher & Co. created, possibly by intent but most
likely simply by following their vision, what a year later would be called
folk-rock. The harmonies, ethereal guitars and autoharp, and carefully layered arrangement
also presage psychedelic folk music by two
years.
Given exposure in St. Louis by Top 40 power KXOK, “Shenandoah,”
with its reference to the wide Missouri River, was an instant smash, vaulting into the station’s top five by mid-June. It also
reached the top 20 in across the state in Kansas City. It got scant radio play
anywhere else, though. As a result, “Shenandoah” never dented
the Billboard charts and made just #148
in Cashbox.
Following two albums, the Goldebriars disbanded. Only
Boettcher remained a fixture in music, quickly landing jobs producing hit songs
for Tommy Roe and the Association and spearheading groups like The Ballroom,
Sagittarius, and the Millennium. In these various permutations, he created some
of the richest, most layered pop productions of the 1960s.
He continued to work into the 1980s without his earlier
level of success and passed away in 1987 of a lung infection. Boettcher was
just 44.
This isn’t among the most famous record he was on, but it’s
one of my favorites. Hope you like it.
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