[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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