[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 8 (Thursday, February 3, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: February 3, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
HONORING NED GUTHRIE
Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I am proud to offer into the Congressional
Record a statement in fond memory of Mr. Ned Guthrie, who passed away
January 28, 1994.
Many of my colleagues will recall Ned's tireless work on behalf of
musicians. I had the opportunity to work with Ned for several years on
the Live Performing Artists Labor Relations Amendments (Live PALRA),
which is designed to correct several longstanding inequities in our
Nation's labor laws.
It seemed as if Ned was always working toward the advancement of
equity for musicians. Whether it was writing letters and articles or
making countless telephone calls, he did so with such earnestness,
sincerity, optimism, and personal commitment--that many were inspired
to join his efforts. Having worked as a musician, he had personal
experience regarding the many injustices musicians had faced and
continue to face. I suspect that many of my colleagues would not be the
strong supporters or cosponsors of legislation like Live PALRA, but for
Ned's diligence.
I would like to share with my colleagues a 1990 article from the
Charleston Gazette about Ned. The article highlights Ned's career as a
musician. In the early 1960's, as member of an integrated band, Ned
fought racism while touring the South. I ask unanimous consent that it
be printed in the Record following my remarks.
Mr. President, I offer my sincere sympathy to his family and friends
in this time of loss. Ned will be missed by many. I encourage my
colleagues to join me in honoring his work and his memory by working
toward the enactment of the Live Performing Artists Labor Relations
Amendments.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Charleston Gazette, Nov. 1, 1990]
A Career of Note
(By Sandy Wells)
``You could start a fight there with two or three people,
and in five minutes there would be 300 people scuffling and
police trying to get through. Up and down the street, it
would be the same thing.
``I was in the middle of all that,'' Ned Guthrie said.
Actually, he was beneath all that. In the late 1930s, amid
the night life noise on Summers Street, you could hear
Guthrie and the Charlestonians playing in the basement of the
Lincoln Hotel. Strains of ``Chattanooga Choo-Choo'' and
``Marie'' blared up through the Fife Street grates.
For seven years, six nights a week, Guthrie packed them in
at the Rathskeller. Fights broke out down there, too. ``As
soon as a fight would start, I would jump over the bandstand.
The drummer would get one guy and I would get the other one,
and we'd hustle them out. It got hectic sometimes.''
Through five decades, he played on riverboats and radio, at
colleges and hotels, prisons, fraternal lodges, for
vaudeville and circuses and Broadway stage shows, in
speakeasies and beer joints and ballrooms and a cavalcade of
nightclubs all over the East Coast.
Nothing compared to the Rathskeller.
``The traveling bands would come in and ask the bellboys
where the action was. Well, there were a lot of places, but
the bellboys would say, `There's only one place.' They knew
where the women were. They knew we had the three
ingredients--wine, women and song.''
Today, a hump in the carpet at the Fife Street Shoe Shop
marks the closed staircase that led to the hidden door.
Except for the terrazzo floor, the basement looks like an
ordinary storage area. Around the corner on Summers Street,
the only vestige of the Lincoln Hotel is a peeling gold-
lettered sign camouflaged in the remodeled entry.
Back when Guthrie played in the basement, ``Summers Street
was called the Street of Dreams, because it was so exotic
when dark came along. It was thriving with human beings after
dark.''
Bluebloods and blue-collar workers walked the street with
streetwalkers from the Triangle District, attracted by the
hotels, honky-tonks and movie houses, vaudeville shows at the
Kearse Theater, the comings and goings at the Greyhound bus
station.
From preachers to prostitutes, just about everybody ended
up in the Rathskeller. ``The reason it got to be popular is
the Triangle District was still around and there were a lot
of ladies of the night. Most of them came to the Rathskeller.
We had preachers there, too. And Statehouse people. And
country club people. It was very cosmopolitan. It wasn't
lowlife. It was a mixture of everybody.
``The Rathskeller was the most famous place that's been
here in all the years I have lived.''
Ned Guthrie has lived 80 years, most of them as a musician,
much of them as a force in the American Federation of
Musicians. Fingers that tickled the clarinet keys aren't as
nimble now. He doesn't talk as fast. Or walk as fast.
Arthritis destroyed his knees. But time has not tampered with
his memory. From his musical boyhood, Guthrie can trace, in
minute detail, a lifetime devoted to music.
As a grade school boy, he played the drum for the march to
recess. He drummed ahead of the Bigley School contingent in
an all-city parade of schoolchildren.
As a sixth-grader in Morgantown, he fell in love with
classical music. ``The teacher played records. I heard one
tune I can remember today as vividly as if it was this
morning. It was Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman. The melody
of it and the rhythm of it was so simple, and it haunted me
all the time.''
As a high school band member in Point Pleasant, he realized
musicians could be treated unfairly. Band members were told
to report at 9 p.m. to go play somewhere, he said. ``I could
tell we were going to the baseball field, but it was pitch
dark, not one light on anywhere. The band director said we
wouldn't be able to see to read music, so he picked a tune
everybody knew. I could hear horses. When those lights came
on, there was a big flaming cross on the pitcher's mound and
around that baseball diamond was a solid ring of white hoods
and Ku Klux Klansmen, and it scared the living daylights out
of all of us.
``It was a pretty bad thing for me, and I never did get
over it because it was just plain exploitation and racial and
un-American, and I was uncomfortable with that.''
Another incident stuck in his craw. The band took a
wearisome trip to Gallipolis to play for presidential nominee
William Jennings Bryan. The band director got $50. ``We
didn't get anything. I didn't much like that.''
Then, in 1930, when he was playing with Del Willis and the
Kentucky Wildcats, a promoter took them to a concert site
with a piano, but no chairs. ``He said, `Oh, I'll go get the
chairs.' That was early May of 1930, and he hasn't come back
yet. That made up my mind.
``The Ku Klux Klan thing, and the boat ride, and that guy
going after those chairs, those were the three things that
made me join the union.''
Most people know Guthrie as a pioneer of the state
Musicians union, a national union official, the man who
almost single-handedly won a war to repeal the Lea Act, a law
that barred musicians from bargaining collectively with
broadcasters.
His years as a union leader have been documented much more
closely than his career as a bandstand musician.
At Charleston High School, band director J. Henry Francis,
groomed him to make a living professionally. ``He taught me
how to sing when I don't have a voice and taught me stage
presence. He taught me how to act because I was in the school
musicals. J. Henry taught me how to control an audience.''
After high school graduation in 1927, he went to work in a
wholesale grocery house in Rainelle, and ended up forming a
band, the Midland Trail Five. ``One night I made $56 playing
with the band, the most money I'd ever made. I made up my
mind to give up the wholesale grocery and go to Montgomery to
school.'' At New River State College, forerunner to West
Virginia Tech, he got a scholarship in return for playing at
school social events.
But college couldn't compete with an offer to play in a
full size Charleston band, Charlie Giles and the Vagabonds.
They played weekends on the third floor ballroom of the
Kearse Theater.
Itching to go on the road, he got a job playing with Del
Willis in Harlan, Ky. After the manager ran off with the
band's money, the group regrouped under a new name, Mark
Groff's Wonder Orchestra, and traveled through New York
State, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and the eastern Kentucky
coalfields.
Eastern Kentucky was tough terrritory. ``We went into one
place called Corbin. There was a table sitting over by the
bandstand and I put my alto sax case there and the tenor sax
player said, `You can't put that there. That's the gun
table.' I said, `What do you mean, the gun table? There's
nothing on there.' Well, he helped me put my things in
another place and sure enough, when the crowd started coming
in, the men would walk over and put their guns on the table.
That was to prove to everyone that they were gentlemen and
everyone trusted everyone.''
He broke his father's heart when he turned down an
appointment at the Naval Academy to travel with various
bands.
Still on the road in 1933, he met Gladys Evans, his wife of
57 years. Her pregnancy in 1935 brought him back to
Charleston, where he found steady work with his band at the
Rathskeller. ``I made $18 a week, union scale. Between 4 and
7, I taught lessons for 75 cents.''
One of his music students remains forever in his mind. He
wanted to change his class time so he could go to basketball
practice. ``This kid had no coordination playing that cornet,
so I told him, `You'll never make a basketball player.' That
was the biggest mistake in the world. The student was Jerry
West.''
Throughout Guthrie's career, as advances in music narrowed
playing opportunities for live musicians, he began to see a
need for union involvement. ``The first thing that happened
that was bad for musicians were motion pictures with sound. I
played some in the pit for silent movies, at the Avalon
Theater in Montgomery when I went to school up there. When
talkies came along, they stopped that. Then along came
records and jukeboxes. We played for our funeral when we made
a recording because the recording replaced live musicians.''
The advent of the jukebox cost him his job at the
Rathskeller. ``The jukebox operators went into places where
we were playing and said, `Why pay this band $90 a week when
you can put in a jukebox and make $65 or $70 a week?' So they
got a jukebox and got rid of us.''
He found a new job at the Gypsy Village in the basement of
the Ott Building. When the jukebox was turned on during band
breaks, Guthrie would cut short intermission and play along
with the jukebox. ``I had to sell the idea that we were
better. A record isn't visual. I put a bucket on top of my
head and played the clarinet just to attract attention. A
jukebox couldn't do that. I clapped my hands. The jukebox
couldn't do that. We'd start playing louder and louder until
I signaled the waitress to pull the plug on the jukebox.
``The dance floor would be full of dancers, but they
weren't dancing to the jukebox. They were dancing to us.
Soon, all the people who were going to Rathskeller were
coming to the Gypsy Village. They asked us to come back to
the Rathskeller. All together, we played there six and a half
years.''
In 1942, he went to Nashville to play with the staff band
for WSM Radio. By 1944, he was back in Charleston, playing at
the Blue Room beside the Arcade.
``The soldiers came home and everything boomed. Moose Clubs
became popular, and American Legions and VFW's popped up in
every little town.'' Business dropped off at the Blue Room,
so he quit and started playing the area clubs. When federal
crime busters removed lucrative slot machines, clubs pinched
for money had to cancel dances. Guthrie formed a bigger band
and spent the next two decades playing for country clubs,
dance clubs and nightspots around Charleston.
Before he battled for musicians' rights, Guthrie fought
racism. In 1960, a country club in Charleston wanted to
cancel a 12-dance contract if Guthrie didn't replace Jo Baby,
his black vocalist. ``The president's wife objected to Jo
Baby using the women's room. I said, `I'm going to drive up
there and unload my band, and if you don't let me play all 12
dances, I'm going to sue for everything you've got.' He
backed down.''
They were booked for a dinner-dance at the Daniel Boone
Hotel, but the sponsor forgot to arrange for them to eat,
Guthrie said. They were directed to the main dining room. A
black band member, knowing he wasn't welcome, refused to go
in. ``We drug him in there to eat. We broke the color line
right there.''
In 1953, with musician friend Jim Beane, Guthrie opened the
Guthrie-Beane Music Co., opposite the Arcade. ``That was my
day job.'' The store eventually moved to Quarrier Street,
where it stayed for 22 years.
At age 63, deeply involved in union struggles, he sold the
store, handed his band to Mel Gillespie, and concentrated on
abolishing the Lea Act.
President of the union local from 1977 to 1982, and a state
and national officer, he believed the act forbidding
bargaining with broadcasters was oppressive. He worked for
eight years to get it repealed.
He also worked to build up the union locally. ``We had
problems here. As far back as 1959, musicians in the Symphony
were playing for $5 a concert.''
Guthrie doesn't think much of the music foisted on youth
today. ``If I was young and doing it again. I'd probably be
learning to jump around like the music on MTV. But that's not
music. That's photography, sex and violence. There is no
melody. Try to hum one tune they do on there.''
If he were young and doing it again, is there anything he'd
do differently?
``Yeah,'' he said. ``I'd change the pay scale.''
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