Around Shenandoah

In 1925 Earl May and Henry Field, owners of rival seed companies in Shenandoah, Iowa, both started radio stations to advertise their products.  May's station, KMA-AM, featured country music interspersed with May selling products from his nursery.  Performers would come from around the country to play on KMA.  The station also broadcast a swap shop, where listeners call in to trade or sell goods.  The swap shop kept me company while I was driving.

Ike Everly had a show on KMA in the 1940s with his wife Margaret and their two young sons, Don and Phil.  As teenagers the Everly Brothers became famous in their own right; their harmonies influencing pretty much every pop and country group of the last half century.

One of the Everly Brothers classmates was renown jazz bassist Charlie Haden.  Haden's parents also had a music show on KMA, on which Charlie sang and played bass.  Haden is best known for his many albums with Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett.  He also recorded with his own group, the Liberation Music Orchestra,  as well as Don Cherry, Hank Jones, Kenny Barron, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones and Yoko Ono.

Yet another Shenandoah contemporary of Haden and the Everlys was legendary record producer Gary Kellgren.  When Kellgren opened up his recording studio, The Record Plant, in Manhattan he broke away from the sterile lab-like studios that were the industry norm, to a more relaxing, hotel like atmosphere.  The first album Kellgren produced at he new studio was Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix.  Kellgrand also produced records for the Velvet Underground, BB King, Frank Zappa, and Barbra Streisand, among others.  Among the albums recorded at all three Record Plant locations are Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and Darkness at the Edge of Town, Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, The Eagles Hotel California, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and Lady Gaga's The Fame.  To bring us full circle to artists influenced by the Everly Brothers, Kellgren was the producer of George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh and John Lennon recorded Imagine at the Record Plant, which is also where he and Yoko Ono recorded Double Fantasy (Lennon was returning home from the studio when he was murdered).

That's a pretty amazing amount of musical talent to have been growing up in small town Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s.

I had lunch at the Nishna Valley Cafe in Shenandoah.  My waitress may have been a babysitter for the Everlys, Haden or Kellgren.  The pork tenderloin sandwich and fries were excellent, as was the bathroom scenery and instructions.  After that lunch, though, I needed a piece of pie and a big cup of coffee (and I don't drink coffee).

Comments

[Dane]

Please tell me you posted that first one to Flickr and the Poor Arboreal Planning group.

[Joe]

I'm still putting the September photos on Flickr! Someday all of these will be there.