IN MY COLORADO HOME

“In My Colorado Home” is a song first recorded by the Sons of the San Joaquin.  Those readers who are paying close attention to this point may object that the San Joaquin Valley is in California, and not Colorado – and that’s true.

The Sons of the San Joaquin are a trio consisting of brothers Jack and Joe Hannah and Joe’s son, Lon Hannah.  The Hannah family moved from Missouri to California’s Central Valley during the Great Depression.  Jack and Joe’s father became a fan of the Sons of the Pioneers in the 1930s, when that group was a trio made up of Roy Rogers, Tim Spencer and Bob Nolan, and he would often sing their songs at home.

Spanish Peaks, La Veta, Colorado

Spanish Peaks, La Veta, Colorado

Half a century later, in 1987, Lon Hannah thought it would be fitting to perform some of those old songs at a birthday celebration for his grandfather, and he enlisted the aid of his father and uncle for the performance.

Jack and Joe Hannah are interesting and talented men.  Both had played professional baseball for many years in the 1950s and early 1960s – Joe as a catcher in the Chicago Cubs organization and Jack as a pitcher for Milwaukee Braves’ farm teams.  When they retired from baseball, both became high school teachers and coaches, and Joe was also the high school music director.  They had performed together at local events for several years and were certainly prepared when Lon suggested the performance for their father.

The family trio was a great success and they soon began playing professionally.  Their success continued, and in 1992 Jack and Joe both took early retirement from teaching to become full-time musicians.  The following year, Lon, who was an elementary school teacher, took an extended leave of absence from his position and resigned soon thereafter.

The songs on their first four albums, which were released between 1990 and 1993, were almost all cover versions of songs that had been written and performed by the Sons of the Pioneers.  In 1995 they released an album called From Whence Came the Cowboy that contained mostly original songs written by Jack Hannah, either alone or with a co-writer.  Jack’s songs were featured on most of their later albums, and were good enough that he was named the Western Music Association’s Songwriter of the Year in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2011.

One of the songs on From Whence Came the Cowboy was “In My Colorado Home,” which Jack co-wrote with cowboy poet Darrell Arnold1.  It seems that the song may have been influenced by “Rock Me To Sleep in My Rocky Mountain Home,” which had been recorded in 1935 by the Sons of the Pioneers, but Arnold brings a legitimate tie-in to the State of Colorado.

Darrell Arnold was born and raised in the small town of La Veta in southern Colorado.  He studied Wildlife Biology in college, served four years in the Air Force and held a number of different jobs before he became a journalist in 1983.  In 1990, he started a publication called Cowboy Magazine, which was known as the “voice of the working ranch cowboy” until it ceased publication in 2008.  I believe that Mr. Arnold still lives in La Veta – which has a population of less than 800 – where he collects Social Security and still writes the occasional poem.

The Hannahs are also pretty much retired, but they still perform in California from time to time.  Here is the original version of “In My Colorado Home,” showing their wonderful harmonies:

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COLORADO (BY PAPER BIRD)

This post is about the song “Colorado,” by Paper Bird . . .  but before we get to that, let me talk a bit about my kids’ education.

In 1993, the summer before our son Michael began 4th Grade and our daughter Suzanne began 2nd Grade, our family moved to the mountains outside of Idaho Springs, in Clear Creek County, Colorado.  Clear Creek is small county, and over 70% of it lies within national forest and other public lands.  There were (and still are) fewer than 10,000 people living there, so the school system was rather small.  The whole county had four elementary schools, one middle school and one high school, with the middle school and the high school sharing a single building.

Carlson Elementary School, Idaho Springs

Carlson Elementary School, Idaho Springs

Our children attended Carlson Elementary School in Idaho Springs.  The principal was a gentleman named Kim Summeril.  His wife, Gayla, was a counselor for the school district, and their son, Caleb, was a student at Carlson.

Kim was one of those picking and singing kind of principals.  He would regularly bring his guitar to school and go to the different classrooms to sing songs with the students.  He was popular and Carlson seemed to be providing a good education, so we were disappointed when Kim left a couple of years later to accept a position paying a lot more money as a principal in neighboring Jefferson County, which has Colorado’s largest school district.

The children in the Eastern part of Clear Creek County attended King-Murphy Elementary School through 6th Grade, and then were bused to Idaho Springs when they began middle school.  Sarah Anderson was one of the girls from the King-Murphy region.  She was in the same class as Suzanne, and they both sang in the choir for several years.  Sarah had a beautiful voice, and the choir director always made sure she did some kind of solo at all the choir concerts.

Now let’s jump forward to early 2013.  Michael and Suzanne were grown and Cathy and I had moved down the mountain to Arvada nearly eight years earlier.  I was walking along the Ralston Creek Trail with Darcy, our new 3-month old puppy, when two people riding bikes passed us going in the opposite direction, and then turned around and stopped next to us.  One of them asked me, “Didn’t you used to be Lou Weltzer.”  I admitted that I still was, and as they removed their bike helmets and sunglasses I recognized Kim and Gayla Summeril.  I had not seen them for at least 10 years.

Paper Bird

Paper Bird

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We talked for little while and asked about each others’ families.  They told me that Caleb was playing in a band called Paper Bird.  It seems that in the summer of 2006 Caleb had gone hiking with Sarah Anderson and two other friends, Paul DeHaven and Esme Patterson.  They were all musicians and had brought instruments along with them, so they began jamming on the streets of the ski town of Breckenridge, and somehow got a gig to play that night at a local coffee house. Continue reading

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

In an earlier post, I mentioned that a statute enacted more than a century ago designates “Where the Columbines Grow” as the official Colorado State Song, but in 2007 the Legislature adopted a Resolution naming John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” as an “official co-state song.”  Here, we will look at “Rocky Mountain High.”

John Denver

John Denver

John Denver, whose real name was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., was born into a military family in Roswell, New Mexico, and moved frequently as he was growing up.  He studied architecture for a short time at Texas Tech University, but dropped out in 1963 and moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in music.  In 1965, he replaced Chad Mitchell in the Mitchell Trio (formerly the Chad Mitchell Trio) after Mitchell left to pursue a solo career.  That group disbanded in 1969 and Denver began his own solo career as a singer-songwriter.

He was a prolific songwriter, recording more than 200 of his original compositions, and recorded often.  Eight of his albums sold more than a million copies, and half a dozen others sold more than a half million.  His association with Colorado was not limited to taking his name from the state’s capital; he resided in Aspen from 1970 until he died in 1997, at the age of 53, in the crash of his personal experimental aircraft.

Denver’s most popular song was probably “Rocky Mountain High.”1, which was written

Cathedral Peak and Cathedral Lake, Aspen

Cathedral Peak and Cathedral Lake, Aspen

in August of 1971 and released as the title song of his 1972 album, Rocky Mountain High.  It soon became a Top 10 hit in both the United States and Canada (where the Rocky Mountains may also be found), but was especially popular in Colorado.  In 1974, by which time he was the most popular male performer in the United States, he was selected as poet laureate for Colorado.

By the late 1970s, John Denver seemingly became less interested in producing new music as his attention was focused on a variety of humanitarian and environmental issues.  He founded the non-profit Windstar Foundation in 1976 and the World Hunger Project in 1977.  He was appointed to the Commission on World and Domestic Hunger by President Jimmy Carter and he received the Presidential World Without Hunger Award from President Ronald Reagan.  In 1993, he was the first performer from outside the classical sphere to receive the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for humanitarian activity.  Denver was one of the first American pop artists to tour both the Soviet Union and Communist China in an effort to promote international cooperation and understanding.

One criticism leveled at Denver’s music was that his songs were often simplistic, sentimental and overly sweet. Continue reading