a legacy of musical greatness in Lewiston-Auburn

The sister cities of Lewiston and Auburn, Maine, have hardly been celebrated locally as a cradle of culture. Lewiston plays host to Bates College, and once served as the site of Muhammad Ali’s most controversial title fight. But Lewiston-Auburn-or “L-A” as it’s known to some-has produced some of the most innovative and expressive American music of the past 50 years, long before Ray Lamontagne’s voice graced the local airwaves.

Between 1950 and 1954, Lewiston-Auburn country-western singers Hal Lone Pine Breau and Betty Cody made a series of recordings for RCA Victor. Those recordings have recently been made available for the first time in nearly 50 years on a collection titled “Hal Lone Pine & Betty Cody: On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” courtesy of Bear Family Records. While it is likely that you have not heard of Hal Lone Pine and Betty Cody, this collection of recordings proves that their obscurity is purely an accident of history.

In the early 1950s, Betty Cody was the #2 female country and western singer in the United States, second only to Kitty Wells. Kitty Wells has since been enshrined as the Queen of Country, but it was Cody who was poised to become the nation’s most prominent female singing star of the 1950s. In hearing the recordings “Pale Moon” and “Tom-Tom Yodel,” it is no wonder Elvis Presley’s future manager, the infamous Colonel Tom Parker, asked Betty to move to Nashville, where he hoped to shape her into a star par excellence. At the time, Betty’s marriage to Lone Pine was falling apart, and Tom Parker’s offer to Betty required her to leave her children for a period of six months. This was a sacrifice Betty was not willing to make. She forsook a career in music and returned to Lewiston to work in a factory in order to provide a normal life for her sons Lenny and Denny.

There is much that these recordings reveal if you seek them out. Betty Cody’s French-Canadian accent adds an endearing lilt to the songs, and Hal Lone Pine’s vocals ooze with charisma. The songs, many of which were written by Lone Pine’s guitarist (and future Hawkshaw Hawkins guitarist) Ray Couture, are alternately brilliant and downright familiar in their humor. And the sounds, captured in RCA’s Montreal and New York studios with Chet Atkins as an occasional sideman, are wonderfully crisp. If there is one Hank Williams-era country music CD you should buy today, this month, or this year, you should make it “Hal Lone Pine and Betty Cody: On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

What the world knows of Lone Pine and Betty today is largely through association with their guitar-genius son, Lenny Breau. Lone Pine soldiered on in New England, West Virginia and Eastern Canada for several decades after his breakup with Betty, touring with his talented teenage son, Lenny. Were it not the case that Byrds guitarist Clarence White also came from Lewiston, it could be said that Lenny Breau was the only guitar genius that part of Maine had known. Chet Atkins eventually took Lenny under his wing, claiming he was the greatest guitarist he’d ever seen. Unfortunately, an early death claimed both Clarence White and Lenny Breau long before their contributions to music could be properly recognized and celebrated.

But the story of the Breau family does not have an entirely tragic ending. Most nights of the year in the taverns surrounding Sunday River in Bethel, Maine, plays one of the greatest guitar players in the United States today. Unfortunately, those of us who grew up in the post-British-Invasion era have come to recognize greatness only through the trappings of the art world: mystique, arrogance, bombast and otherness. The non-musical lesson we learned in the rock age was that great musicians are not like “us.” And so, had you stopped to pay attention to the playing of Denny Breau at the après ski the last time you passed through one of Sunday River’s pubs, you could hardly have been faulted for missing his greatness. Denny Breau carries himself with a humility so honest that it obscures his prodigious talent. He has chosen to keep his talent local for the same reason his mother gave up her recording career-to be a real presence in the lives of his children.

Those of you who frequent the Southern Maine area would do well to seek him out at www.dennybreau.com. His parents’ music, which can be found on the aforementioned Bear Family Records release, as well as on a collection called “The Successful Hillbilly Career of Betty Cody-1952-1954,” is pure, unadulterated country music from an era that was heavy on steel guitar and utterly devoid of the saccharine orchestral arrangements that choked the country music of later decades. For an overview of Lenny Breau’s music, see www.guitarchives.com.

Denny and Anne Breau
Sundays in the Garden
concert series
Sunday, July 16 at 4 p.m.
Hamilton House, Vaughan’s Lane
South Berwick, Maine,
207-384-2454
$8 for general admission, $7 for seniors and $4 for Historic New England members