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A Musical Bridge

By John Andrews

Bryan Akipa is a self-taught red cedar flute player who also makes the instruments in his home near Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Akipa has joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for several performances in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Delta David Gier was among five finalists to be the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s next music director in 2003. When the search committee asked why he was interested in moving from New York to Sioux Falls, he said,”I’m looking for someplace to build something significant.” Gier won the job, and his innovations have elevated the orchestra to national prominence, elicited praise from the nation’s most respected music critic in the pages of The New Yorker and earned him the 2022 Ditson Conductor’s Award, presented by Columbia University to conductors who demonstrate an extraordinary passion for advancing American music.

But perhaps his most important contribution to the people of his new home state has been the Lakota Music Project, an endeavor that seeks to heal relationships between Natives and non-Natives through music. Since the idea germinated in early 2005, it has blossomed into multiple performances, recordings, workshops and, most importantly, relationships that might never have developed had music not served as the bridge between two cultures that have long been mired in mistrust.

‚ÄãGier arrived in Sioux Falls with a solid musical background. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to begin a career in professional conducting in Europe. He completed an apprenticeship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then spent 15 years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the last five years dovetailing with his appointment with the South Dakota Symphony.

‚ÄãAs Gier planned his inaugural 2004-2005 season, he also wanted to gain a sense of how the orchestra fit into the fabric of Sioux Falls and South Dakota. “The one thing that was an unknown for me was how the orchestra was really serving its community and what the potential was for that,” he says.”During my first year, I was assessing — other than just playing concerts in the Pavilion — what else the orchestra was doing and what else could be done.”

‚ÄãAt a reception one evening, Gier met a young African American woman who was involved in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.”I suggested to her that maybe we should do something together, because a lot of orchestras have MLK concerts and bring in Black composers and Black artists,” Gier recalls.”She smiled and nodded and said, ‘If you really want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, you should be talking to the Native Americans.’ After 20 years of living in New York, my jaw hit the ground.”

‚ÄãThe seed was planted for what became the Lakota Music Project. The SDSO hosted a lunch for about a dozen Lakota and Dakota leaders at the Falls Overlook Cafe in the spring of 2005. Gier remembers the undercurrents of mistrust that seemed to waft through the room as he spoke.”I came in with all kinds of ideas on ways we could collaborate, and that was my first lesson in learning to shut up and listen,” he says.”They didn’t need yet another white man’s program coming in and trying to help. That wasn’t anything that would be helpful to anybody.”

The orchestra welcomed the Creekside Singers to the Lakota Music Project. Pictured are (back, from left) SDSO music director Delta David Gier, John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear and SDSO principal oboist Jeffrey Paul and (front, from left) Brent Spoonhunter, Hanna Gasdia and Ari Black Bear.

Fortunately, Barry LeBeau was intrigued. LeBeau was a veteran lobbyist in Pierre for United Sioux Tribes, but he also had a background in theater.”I think he had an understanding for what the arts could do in terms of helping to generate understanding across cultures,” Gier says of LeBeau, who died in 2020.

The two of them began traveling to reservations across the state. Their first stop was Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, where tribal elder Robert Moore — who is also a classically trained singer — brought them into a tribal council meeting.”He gave us a five-minute platform to talk about what we’d like to try to do. That was the first stamp of approval that we got.”

They also sought input from Ronnie Thiesz, a longtime professor of Native Studies and literature at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, author of several books on Lakota music and culture and a founding member of the Porcupine Singers. Moore and Thiesz began traveling with Gier and LeBeau.”In talking with Ronnie, we really fleshed out what kind of a program would be meaningful to people,” Gier says.”Those relationships became the most important thing and helped to shape our initial tour and program.”

In the meantime, other orchestra members were doing their own groundwork. Jeffrey Paul, who is entering his 20th season as the symphony’s principal oboist, had also been traveling to reservations with the Dakota Wind Quintet, a small group of orchestra instrumentalists that performs concerts in smaller settings around the state.”My first time out with that group was in Pine Ridge,” Paul says.”It was just so clear to me that we needed to be listening and communicating and developing lasting relationships. So, we started opening the doors to other conversations. ‘What’s important to you? What kind of music do you listen to and how does music play a role in your life?’

“On some of our tours, we’d have a discussion and a jam session where we might talk and learn about the function of music in each other’s traditions and play some of the music that fits these functions back and forth. As you might expect, there was a lot more commonality than difference. It was kind of serendipitous that David took an interest in that as well.”

Paul was uniquely situated to help develop the Lakota Music Project. A native of Thousand Oaks, California, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, earning two degrees in oboe performance while also playing and learning piano, saxophone, guitar, bagpipes and even Irish whistles. He also developed a strong interest in the folk music of other cultures, likely because of trips he took as a boy to visit his grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.”Back in the old days they used to say that Scottish culture was more preserved in Nova Scotia than it was in Scotland because there was so little traffic in and out,” Paul says.”When I was in the throes of studying classical music really intensely at one of the conservatories, a Scottish musician came in. It was just his voice and a guitar, but it really struck a chord in me. It was just beautiful music, profound in its simplicity and tradition. For me, that kind of tore down those conservatory walls because it affected me so much.”

That new perspective helped as he visited with elders and musicians, exploring the nuances of indigenous music and how it might blend with traditional orchestral music. Paul had written a piece called Desert Wind for electric guitar before moving to South Dakota. Gier heard the piece and asked him to expand it for chamber orchestra and to explore how to incorporate it into the Lakota Music Project. He performed it for Melvin Young Bear, keeper of the drum for the Porcupine Singers.”It dealt with feelings of being alone in both positive and negative connotations, and he said it went really well with a song that he had written for his granddaughter,” Paul says.”He said he had these same feelings when he held his granddaughter on his knee, and then she went home.”

Organizers spent four years traveling and talking to tribal elders, musicians and cultural leaders before the first Lakota Music Project performance in 2009. Since then, the group has staged concerts around the state, launched workshops and recorded an album.

Paul and Young Bear began working on an adapted version of Desert Wind that included Young Bear’s Harmony’s Song. That collaboration became the hallmark of the Lakota Music Project.”We were learning as we were going, how to listen to people and how we might actually build this thing together by listening to elders and musicians and cultural leaders. That building together became the key, and still is the key, to the Lakota Music Project,” Gier says.

“Orchestras are good at programming and implementing. That’s what we do. We’re not good at being flexible, and this kind of cross-cultural stuff was totally new. There was plenty of Indianist music that could be played. These are white composers who were truly inspired by Native American culture and seeking to honor that, but this is not something that was going to accomplish any kind of cross-cultural understanding. This cultural appropriation discussion wasn’t as heated a topic 15 years ago as it is now, but it became really evident that this was something that we needed to avoid, so we’ve never implemented that music in any of our Lakota Music Project tours. It’s always been original music that was created together.”

Members of the orchestra, tribal elders, scholars and musicians met, talked and played for more than four years before the inaugural performance of the Lakota Music Project was staged in 2009. The two-hour concert, featuring the orchestra and the Creekside Singers, explored how each culture experiences love, war, grief and celebration.”We would go back and forth. The drum group and orchestra would play examples of music that expressed each of the four themes,” Gier says.”It demonstrated not just the musical but the interpersonal relationship that we were developing between our orchestra and these Lakota musicians.”

The Lakota Music Project then took the show on the road, performing on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Lake Traverse reservations, Sioux Falls, Rapid City and at Crazy Horse Memorial on Native American Day in 2010.

All the work culminating in that first performance and tour is now considered the first phase of the Lakota Music Project. The second phase, spanning 2012 through 2016, included a new partnership with the South Dakota Humanities Council and the world premiere of WaktÈgli OlÛwa≈ã (Victory Songs) by American Indian composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Its five movements each honor a Lakota warrior: Red Cloud, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Strike and Sitting Bull.

There were performances at Crazy Horse Memorial, Pierre, Eagle Butte, Sisseton and Mobridge. A fourth commissioned work, Pentatonic Fantasy, combined the talents of Paul and Bryan Akipa, a cedar flute player from Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation.”We spent some time on Clear Lake near Sisseton getting to know each other and talking about the instruments,” Paul says.”He demonstrated a lot of cedar flute traditions, how he makes them, and the symbolism involved. It’s been a wonderful friendship with him for many years. I wrote him an entire concerto to play with the orchestra, but the second movement, ‘Wind on Clear Lake,’ seemed to grow legs and turned into its own piece.”

John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear (the Keeper of the Drum) and Ari Black Bear perform as the Creekside Singers.

Akipa is a self-taught musician and flute maker who began studying the instrument as a student of Oscar Howe at the University of South Dakota. He received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work preserving the flute and its music. The lifetime honor is the country’s highest award in folk and traditional arts.

He is heartened by the diverse audiences that have seen Lakota Music Project performances.”For the traditional flute, it’s relaxing music, but it’s almost like you are talking to the people,” Akipa says.”You are communicating with them and you’re telling a story with the song. You’re playing a song that could be sung. That’s for one type of audience. The orchestra has a much different style, and you’re bringing those two audiences together.

“For me, it was good to get more exposure for the flute. The traditional red cedar flute is really important to the culture, but maybe to other people it’s like a new age thing, or just a fad or something. Playing with the symphony helped other people take the music and the flute more seriously. The flute, and what it can do and the sound it can produce, really gets their attention. Some people might even have a spiritual experience. It’s just the way they interpret or feel the music.”

The third phase, from 2017 to 2019, included a chamber music program series of concerts in Washington, D.C., featuring Akipa and Emmanuel Black Bear, a traditional singer and drummer from Pine Ridge and two-time winner of a Native American Music Award. Jerod Tate (the orchestra’s composer-in residence in 2017) also launched the Music Composition Academies, week-long workshops every July in Sisseton and Black Hills State University in Spearfish open to students of all musical skill levels. They work with three composer mentors — Jeffrey Paul, Michael Begay and Ted Wiprud (composer-in-residence in 2018 and 2019).”It’s maybe one of the most important things to me that I do musically in life,” Paul says.”We do maybe a little bit of teaching but that’s not the primary focus, which is to draw out pure musical ideas from students.”

In September, when members of the orchestra are back on contract, they return to Sisseton and Spearfish and perform the world premieres of the pieces written by the young musicians. Gier says the experience can be cathartic.”These kids are dealing with deep emotional issues. They’re writing pieces of music about suicide because they lost a friend in school, or about missing and murdered indigenous women because this young woman lost an auntie. They’re processing this through the music they’re writing.”

Unfortunately, while the student academies have continued operating in Sisseton and Spearfish, other aspects of the Lakota Music Project have temporarily fallen silent. Like many initiatives in the arts world, much of the symphony’s programming is reliant upon grant funding, and in 2022 there has been little to none. But Gier and the other musicians who have invested 17 years into the one-of-a-kind endeavor are hopeful for brighter days.

“I went into it maybe crazily but with the idea that this is something that the South Dakota symphony should be doing. There are nine Indian reservations here, there’s a history of racial tension to put it mildly, and so rather than ignore it we could embrace it. My hope was that it would become so much a part of the fabric of who we are as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra that when I’m gone it would continue, that the relationships between us and the Native community across the state would be so rich and meaningful on both sides of the equation that there would just be no question that this would continue, that this is who we are.”

That would certainly be something significant.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Alcester’s Music Man

By John Andrews

DeeCort Hammitt organized the Alcester Community Band in 1921 and directed it for 25 years. Hammitt, an Alcester banker and musician, is best known for composing the state song, “Hail, South Dakota.”

WHEN DIGNITARIES GATHERED in downtown Yankton in November of 2013 to officially begin South Dakota’s upcoming sesquicentennial (125th birthday), students from the city’s elementary schools were on hand to sing our official state song,”Hail, South Dakota.” My daughter, Elizabeth, a student at Beadle Elementary at the time, was part of the energetic young chorus. I remember her singing snippets in the car rides to and from school or at home in the evenings and feeling glad that she was learning a bit of our state’s history.

This summer, we were all gathered in our living room. The television was on but not tuned to a program, which meant that after a certain period of inactivity it went to sleep and reverted to its screensaver. Photographs that we’ve uploaded to our Amazon account travel via a Fire Stick and appear as a slideshow during these entertainment downtimes.

As we watched the images roll past, we saw our daughter, dressed in the patriotic red, white and blue dress that my wife had sewn in advance of that gathering nine years ago. I recalled speeches by the governor and lieutenant governor and the swing band that played well into the evening. But Elizabeth remembered none of that.

“What was I even doing there, anyway?” she asked.

When I reminded her that she and her classmates were there to sing the state song, it didn’t jog a single memory.”Hail, South Dakota,” with its lines praising the”Black Hills, and mines with gold so rare,” and our”farms and prairies, blessed with bright sunshine,” was long forgotten.

*****

LAURA BAKER AND her siblings, Jane Allard and Mark, Kurt and Paul Hammitt, grew up immersed in the culture of the state song because it was written by their grandfather, an Alcester banker and musician named DeeCort Hammitt. The five of them grew up in Elk Point, where their parents, Howard and Dorothy Hammitt, had taken on the mantle of promoting the state song. Every spring, the Hammitts would give each graduating Elk Point High School senior a card with a two-dollar bill and a copy of the song. Dorothy called schools around South Dakota to make sure they all had the music and lyrics.”Everybody wanted a copy of it, and every school played it,” Baker says.”Community groups sang it.”

“I remember having to sing it when I was in school,” Allard recalls.”I don’t know when it started to fade away.”

In fact, that’s not something they thought much about until Howard Hammitt died in 2012 and his children found an assortment of photographs and clippings about their grandfather tucked away in the service station that Howard ran for decades. They began to learn even more about DeeCort (pronounced DECK-ert) and worried that his legacy as the man behind South Dakota’s state song might disappear.

Hammitt learned to play piano by ear and provided the sound for silent films shown in his family’s movie theater.

Hammitt was born in Spencer in 1893. His father, Franklin, started the town’s drug store in 1888 and worked both there and in Montrose. Franklin was preparing to move, buying a new house, drug store and theatre in Alcester, but he died in 1900, shortly after the purchases became final. His wife, Mae, and their five children still made the move. She hired a druggist and operated the movie theater, where DeeCort demonstrated his remarkable musical abilities to the rest of their new community. He had learned to play piano by ear and provided the sound for silent films.

Hammitt graduated from Alcester High School in 1912 and married Bessie Durkee from Alexandria in 1913. That same year, he composed a song called”The South Dakota Rag.” The Hammitts settled into life in Alcester, eventually raising 11 children. DeeCort worked at the McKellips family’s Alcester State Bank by day and served terms as the city treasurer and assistant postmaster. Music, however, remained his passion.

Hammitt formed the Sunshine State Music Company and continued writing music that found its way into the repertoires of bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey and Lawrence Welk. In 1915, the John T. Hall Music publishing company in New York selected his song”Don’t Take My Lovin’ Baby Away” as the winner in a nationwide songwriting contest with more than 1,500 entrants. Three years later, the Pace and Handy Music Company published a Hammitt song called,”I Want to Love You All the Time.” W.C. Handy, a composer and musician who often called himself”the father of the blues,” said it was one of the year’s best blues songs. His company advertised it as a”beautiful one-step ballad, different than the rest.”

Hammitt organized the Alcester Community Band in 1921 and directed it for 25 years. The group took regular trips to the Belle Fourche Roundup and played for President Calvin Coolidge when he and First Lady Grace Coolidge vacationed in the Black Hills in 1927. Hammitt wrote a piece called”The Roundup March,” and included special lyrics for Coolidge’s visit. The Alcester Community Band earned such a good reputation that it was chosen to represent South Dakota at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933 and 1934.

He also dabbled in radio, forming the Hammitt Radio Company in 1922, just two years after the nation’s first commercial radio broadcast originated in Pittsburgh. The inaugural program included a saxophone solo, a vocal solo, a men’s quartet and a poem recited by his son, Keith. Hammitt created weekly programs for several years, entertaining farmers within a 5- or 6-mile radius of Alcester.

A Chicago hat salesman eventually vaulted Hammitt to statewide prominence. Warner Putnam sold hats and other clothing around South Dakota. In 1941, he discovered that South Dakota did not have an official state song that could be performed at certain functions. He approached the Sioux Falls Argus Leader about organizing a statewide song contest.

The Hammitt brothers, from left: Ralph, Forest, DeeCort and Charles (Chick).

The newspaper assembled a committee of judges headed by Carl Christensen, a professor and band director at South Dakota State College in Brookings. Out of 158 entries, the judges chose six finalists including”Hail, South Dakota,” a renamed version of a Hammitt favorite.”When he read about the contest, he knew that ‘The Roundup March’ would be the perfect song for our state song,” Baker says.”It remained a very popular song with marching bands in the years after 1927. He got a lot of traction out of ‘The Roundup March’ right up until the contest.”

Ballots were printed in all South Dakota newspapers. Radio stations in the state’s largest cities scheduled 30-minute blocks on January 9 and 10, 1942, during which all six entries were played. South Dakotans sent their ballots to the Argus Leader, where staff tallied the results and declared”Hail, South Dakota” the winner. Gov. Harlan Bushfield presented Hammitt with an award for composing the new state song, and the legislature made it official in March 1943.

To honor DeeCort after the contest, he and Bessie were the guests of honor at the South Dakota Press Association’s annual banquet in Sioux Falls. The new state song was performed in public for the first time since the contest concluded.”While Hammitt was pleased with the honor and attention the song received, he said he simply wanted to promote the state he loved,” a newspaper reported.

DeeCort and Bessie moved to California in 1947, where he continued to write and publish music. He operated the C&H Music Store in Sacramento with his son, Orlin, until his death in 1970.

*****

TODAY, 48 STATES have at least one state song. New Jersey never adopted one and Maryland retired its state song,”Maryland, My Maryland,” in 2021 because of language that was deemed inappropriate. Tennessee has the most with 10, including”Rocky Top,” which you’re likely to hear throughout University of Tennessee football games. Other states have adopted songs from popular culture as well. In 1979, Georgia chose”Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael but made popular by Ray Charles. John Denver’s”Take Me Home, Country Roads” became a state song of West Virginia in 2014.”Home on the Range” is among Kansas’s three tunes, and Louisianans sing”You Are My Sunshine.”

But since 1943, DeeCort Hammitt’s”Hail, South Dakota” has remained South Dakota’s stalwart single tune, though there have been occasional challenges.”A couple of times they’ve tried to change the state song,” Allard says.”They wanted a newer, livelier and more modern state song. Mom would just send more copies to the legislature.”

While it may not hold the place it once did in the state’s popular culture, it remains an important part of certain musical catalogs. Terry Beckler is a music professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen and commander of the South Dakota National Guard’s 147th Army Band.”I’ve played the state song many times. It’s the last part of a march titled ‘The Roundup,'” he says.”By regulation, military bands should play the last 32 bars of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ following ‘Ruffles and Flourishes’ for a governor. In South Dakota, tradition has been to play ‘Hail, South Dakota’ instead. We’ve done this for every governor, as long as I’m aware.”

For that, the Hammitt family can be proud.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Jazz on the Prairie

By David Jensen

Rapid City jazz musician Gary Bloomberg teamed up with Flaunt, an old-style Black Hills burlesque show, for a New Year’s Eve performance.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

While other teenagers were listening to Madonna, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson in the 1980s, Jim Speirs rushed home from middle school in Rapid City to hear Doc Severinson’s Tonight Show Band or Maynard Ferguson. And when his classmates dreamed of being rock stars, Speirs practiced diligently on his trumpet with visions of becoming another Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis.

Speirs loves jazz — and he’s not alone. Scattered throughout South Dakota are musicians who play this uniquely American sound. They may be the next-door neighbor, farmer down the road or your office mate. Most local jazz musicians have other jobs.

Take, for example, Eric Knutson. He flies a fighter jet for the Air National Guard and plays trumpet. Jim Szana, jazz pianist, is a Pierre dentist. Cade Calder managed a Best Buy store, and Scott Olson is a farmer near Yankton; both play the trumpet. Speirs is executive director of Arts South Dakota. For these musicians and others, jazz is an avocation, not a vocation.

The 17 members of the South Dakota Jazz Orchestra demonstrate this passion over practicality.”We’re all-volunteer,” says Corliss Johnson. He’s a saxophone player and musical director for the group, which plays three or four performances a year. Johnson was head of SDSU’s music department and is now semi-retired.”Once in awhile we get paid,” he adds. But it’s seldom about money.

It wasn’t always that way. Musicians in South Dakota could once link up with a band and play ballrooms and dance halls throughout the state and make a living. Gary Bloomberg, a 94-year-old sax player in Rapid City, remembers those days. He still plays”a lot of solo gigs,” but recalls performing decades ago with the Bob Calame band and Happy Bill and All the Gang in ballrooms and on Watertown’s KWAT Radio and Sioux Falls’ KSOO.

Bloomberg is a master pool player and trick-shot artist, but he also plays with the School of Mines Jazz Band, and he helped form the Black Hills Dixieland Jazz Band.

A dapper dresser who is popular with the nightclub crowd in the Black Hills, Bloomberg occasionally traveled east on Interstate 90 now and then to perform at venues in Sioux Falls. One New Year’s Eve he teamed up with Flaunt, a burlesque act, to entertain at the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City.

He wishes there were more venues.”There are a lot of good musicians here, but not many places to play,” he concedes. Even the School of Mines band plays just two concerts a year.

Soon after jazz was born in New Orleans more than a century ago, the music migrated up the Mississippi and into the Great Plains. In the early days there were plenty of places to perform. Jazz in South Dakota has a surprisingly rich history. It started in the heyday of the big band era in the late 1920s, when orchestras based in Omaha and Minneapolis would add South Dakota ballrooms to their tour schedules. Farmers and merchants, with wives or girlfriends, drove for miles to waltz, foxtrot and jitterbug to swing music.

While bands in urban areas could find work within a city’s limits, musicians in the Great Plains formed”territory bands.” The band members tied their instrument cases atop a bus and traveled from town to town. One of the most popular territory band leaders in the 1930s was Alphonso Trent who performed in Wyoming and the Dakotas, and spent much of his free time in Deadwood. There was also the Monthly Meadowlark Band from Ramona and dance orchestras lead by John Cavacas, in Watertown; Don Fejfar, Vermillion; Johnnie Arthur, Menno; Harry Eisele, Aberdeen; Tommy Matthews, White River; and Fats Carlson and Sonny Bronson in Sioux Falls.

Jim Speirs performs with the Jazz Diversity Project, a program designed to introduce South Dakota students to the history of jazz while cultivating an appreciation for the music. Photo by Greg Latza

Ironically, while farmers and businessmen struggled to make a living during the depression era, musicians were making money. Nat Towles and his band from Omaha performed in South Dakota dance halls for $5 per band member per night. Playing six nights a week, they did well by 1930s standards, earning enough for food, shelter and new saxophone reeds. Of course, they had to play a steady array of dance tunes; most musicians preferred playing improvised jazz and considered the dance songs”Mickey music,” short for Mickey Mouse. But it paid the bills.

Big-name bands could avoid the Mickey music and perform in concert, often at Mitchell’s Corn Palace. The Jimmy Dorsey Band played there in 1938, and his brother, Tommy, performed nine years later. Other Corn Palace entertainers included Paul Whiteman (“King of Jazz”), Johnny”Scat” Davis, Harry James, Frankie Carle (“Wizard of the Keyboard”), Freddie Martin and Skitch Henderson. Lawrence Welk and his orchestra made multiple appearances at the Corn Palace, always to sell-out audiences.

Think of Welk and jazz may not come to mind. But he once considered himself a jazz musician; when he was a teenager he was a member of the Jazzy Junior Five. And in 1927 he planned to take his band, the Hotsy Totsy Boys, to the”mecca” for jazz, New Orleans. But he ran out of money in Yankton and got a job with WNAX Radio.

Welk blended the big band sound with pop, jazz and show tunes to create his unique”champagne music,” so named by a dancer in Pittsburgh who praised it as”light and bubbly.” Paul Schilf, executive director of the South Dakota Music Education Association and a former professor at Augustana University, says all serious musicians would like to blend sounds and establish a new sound, as Welk did.”He broke barriers and diversified,” says Schilf.

As the big band era ended in the 1950s, most South Dakotans turned to rock, pop and country. It was difficult to warm up to the new bebop and fusion jazz, which didn’t seem to have a melody. The so-called”club jazz” — at home in smoky night clubs and hotel lounges — is up-tempo, includes complex harmonies and improvisation, and was made popular by musicians like Gillespie, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.

Still, some musicians and aficionados in South Dakota liked it. They lived an underground existence, jamming in their homes and scrounging what few recordings they could find in the back corners of music shops. Then on a warm day in 1988 a surprising number of fans and musicians — more than 250 — gathered at a backyard party in Sioux Falls. That day the seed was planted for the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society and the city’s annual JazzFest, which was staged until 2019. Held the third weekend of July, the festival drew musicians and up to 100,000 fans from around the region to Sioux Falls’ Yankton Trail Park for live music on three stages.

JazzFest was one of the few successful, free (sponsored by local businesses and beer sales) music festivals in the country, and it became a major draw for the state.”We can’t compete with the [Sturgis motorcycle] rally or Mount Rushmore,” said Robert Joyce, the Jazz and Blues Society’s former executive director.”But we’re on a lot of people’s radar screen.” High school reunions were arranged around the fest, as well as an occasional wedding reception. Tourists made vacation plans around JazzFest.”People will call and ask about our gas prices and how far we are from Mount Rushmore or the [Terry] Redlin Center,” Joyce says.

When England’s BBC television network covered JazzFest, a reporter asked Joyce,”How come it’s held in South Dakota?” He answered,”It’s America’s music, and we’re in the heart of America.”

The festival drew big names in jazz, including a hometown boy, guitarist Mike Miller, who has performed with pianist Chick Corea and toured with comedian/singer Bette Midler. Miller grew up in Sioux Falls, as did Bruce Arnold, another guitar artist who made good. They met in New York, where Arnold has a recording studio, and produced a jazz CD titled”Two Guys from South Dakota.”

Performers like Lynwood “Cookie” Cook helped make JazzFest one of America’s top musical performances. The festival has since been replaced by Jazz Week, which includes a series of concerts and workshops throughout Sioux Falls.

Sioux Falls has become the focal point for jazz in South Dakota. It’s near the center of the”I-29 corridor,” so called by musicians who see the stretch of four-lane between Brookings and Vermillion as a link for many who play and enjoy jazz. Places like the R Wine Bar and Severance Brewing host regular or pop-up performances throughout the year.

Pete Franklin, who opened Delmonico Grill in downtown Rapid City in 2007, hoped to bring jazz to West River’s biggest city. Shortly before the Christmas holiday he booked the Sugar Free Jazz Trio at his upscale Main Street restaurant.”The place was packed,” he said.”The atmosphere was like an Andy Warhol party.”

Musicians like Jim Szana are always looking for more opportunities to play. The keyboardist/dentist, along with bass player Lonnie Schumacher (a builder and handy man) and drummer Ron Woodburn (director of the Capital City Campus from 2004 to 2013 and now a member of its advisory board) perform as the Jim Szana Trio, largely in and around Pierre. Formerly called the Rochford Trio, the group is a garage band — literally.”Lonnie built a garage next to my house,” says Szana.”Now we have a place to practice, so we should be playing better.”

The trio cut a CD called”Good Evening Vietnam,” jazz renditions of patriotic songs. Imagine a jazz version of”Anchors Away” or”The Air Force Song.” Szana served in Vietnam and appreciated the state’s creation of the Vietnam Memorial in Pierre.”But I felt more had to be said,” he says, explaining the intent of the CD.

Szana’s trio performs about 30 times a year, mostly at weddings, fundraisers and legislative banquets in the capital city. They usually adhere to a song’s original melody.”Politicians like it because it’s music to talk to,” he says. Evening social events during legislative session in January and February provide the trio an added perk.”Politicians like to give ësmall speeches,'” he explains,”but their small speeches give us plenty of time to eat at the buffet table.”

The time may come when jazz musicians in South Dakota can be full-time entertainers, and when all types of jazz — Latin, fusion, bebop, big band — draw attentive crowds, just as they did eight decades ago. That’s what the Jazz and Blues Society hopes will result from its Jazz Diversity Project, an educational program in which a combo visits schools and plays music while also giving students an American history lesson.

“We talk about the civil rights movement and segregation in New Orleans, and how it relates to jazz,” says Speirs, a member of the combo. Since its creation in 2006, more than 60,000 students throughout the state have taken part in the program.

The Jazz and Blues Society also joins with Augustana University to sponsor the All-City Jazz Ensemble, featuring about 17 young musicians from Sioux Falls high schools in a jazz concert each autumn. In the spring the program works with middle school students.

Dennis McDermott, retired band director at Aberdeen Central High School and a member of a jazz quintet that plays on occasion at the Ward Plaza Bar and Grill, also wants young South Dakotans to appreciate jazz. He long coordinated All-State Jazz Band, an event comparable to the All-State Band competition. Students from around the state audition to play in a jazz orchestra or combo and have a chance to learn from an invited jazz artist.

Many of the students will no doubt play jazz the rest of their lives. Some may even make a living at it, maybe even here in the heart of America.

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A Song for the Season

Eliza Blue strumming on a snowy West River road.

Eliza Blue is a singer/songwriter who left the hustle and bustle of some of America’s largest cities for a ranch in Perkins County, where she now lives with her husband, two children and an assortment of chickens, cows and farm cats. She teamed up with Sioux Falls photographer/videographer Christian Begeman to produce a music video for Blue’s rendition of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The sights from the snowy prairies of West River, Spearfish Canyon, Good Earth State Park and Palisades State Park blend beautifully with Blue’s voice and guitar. We hope it helps to put you in the holiday spirit.

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Music From Home

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Derrick Lawrence perform “Sails” for the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Throughout this project, I’ve really enjoyed exploring the musical landscape of South Dakota through the eyes of other musicians. Inhabiting such a rural and spread-out state, we’re not always in tune with what is happening in other areas. I often find myself going back and forth between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills to play concerts, but Sisseton, with its low rolling hills, modest population, and close proximity to the Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation has quite a nice music scene.

It is a community that not only raised me, musically speaking, but also continues to support and inspire me as well as other players in the area. Before I had even completed the concept for this project, I knew I wanted to work with guitarist Derrick Lawrence. On a small stage in Peever, he and I took in classic country, polka and folk music while honing our own performance skills.

Lawrence was always around music at home, with his father’s guitar picking and his mother’s love for the piano.”She still plays to this day,” he says. Perhaps this early immersion is why he started playing at a younger age than most musicians. At 8 years old, he was chording along with favorite songs, and he eventually dove into finger-style acoustic guitar. Chet Atkins and his father, Elden, were his first musical role models. During my formative years, I was mesmerized watching Elden play tasteful, twangy lead guitar at the monthly Jamboree in Peever. I didn’t know it then, but through listening to Elden and Derrick play guitar, I was already a fan of Chet Atkins. Today, Derrick still draws heavily on his style when performing on acoustic guitar.

In middle school, Lawrence and a few friends formed a rock band, starting out with cover songs but eventually writing some originals. The core of the band later became”Eclipse,” which, though comprised of different members, still tours the region today.”There were three of us that played guitar, I think, and we switched off,” he recalls. The early band premiered their music at Camp Dakotah, near Sisseton.”To mixed reviews,” Lawrence adds with a chuckle. Local musician Lance Pond was Lawrence’s first exposure to the”flat-picking” style that he would later employ when playing electric guitar in rock bands.

Though Lawrence plays more instrumental music than not, he’s done some lyrical writing throughout the years, and enjoys recording in his home studio and the recording studio at Sisseton Wahpeton College, where he works. For our duet, Lawrence and I selected a Steve Wariner arrangement of”Sails” written by John and Johanna Hall. The tune is almost meditative, and Lawrence’s clean fingering and even tone give it space that, when paired with the natural reverb of the windowed hall at the college, make this recording really special.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

Erin Castle

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Inspired by a Prairie Garden

By John Andrews

Eliza Blue and her children, Wesley and Emmy Rose, recreate the scene depicted in Harvey Dunn’s The Prairie is My Garden.

The September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine features a story on Harvey Dunn’s iconic painting The Prairie is My Garden, and the people and places that may have served as his inspiration. The story is illustrated with a modern-day recreation of Dunn’s scene, staged on a summer’s evening at a homestead near Isabel.

Christian Begeman and Eliza Blue teamed up to make the image happen. Begeman lives and works in Sioux Falls, but he grew up on a farm near Isabel. His photographs appear regularly in our magazine and on our website. Blue is a singer/songwriter who lives on a ranch in Perkins County.

As they studied the painting and tried to situate themselves as closely as possible to Dunn’s vision, Blue was inspired to write a song.”Originally I was trying to channel the mother from the painting, and tell a story of gathering flowers from her perspective, but, as is often the case, the song had its own ideas,” she says.”It morphed into a story told by the flowers instead.”

Begeman shifted from photographer to videographer, and the two created an impromptu music video for Blue’s”The Prairie is My Garden,” which you can watch below. If you live East River and would like to see Blue perform live, she is traveling this weekend to several venues with Spearfish musician Jami Lynn. Here’s the schedule:

Sept. 13: Pierre Music Store, Pierre, 4:30 p.m.

Sept. 14: Fernson on 8th, Sioux Falls, 7 p.m.

Sept. 15: AME Church, Yankton, 7 p.m.

Sept. 16: Good Roots Farm, Brookings, 6 p.m.

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A Voice for All Genres

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Erin Castle perform “Brush and String” for the fifth installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Erin Castle may not always take the lead, but she has carved out a niche for herself in the Sioux Falls music scene for over a decade. You may know her from folk band The Union Grove Pickers, or the alt-rock collaboration A Ghostwood Calm, but Castle’s glimmering vocals shine on their own or in the midst of a six piece band.

Castle spent most of her formative years in Brandon, where she participated in band and choir. She describes her first solo performance in fifth grade as terrifying. But the terror soon gave way to a different kind of flutter — the drive to regularly perform in front of people.”It made me feel something that I’d never felt before,” Castle says.

Towards the end of her high school days, Castle’s proximity to Sioux Falls brought her access to the burgeoning basement concert scene. The 605 House and other private venues exposed her to local and touring hard core and punk rock bands. Parts of this underground, word-of-mouth scene of the early 2000s are mirrored in Sioux Falls today. Local venue and record store Total Drag has given a home to young bands whose members are writing their own music and playing out.”I’m watching all these surf rock bands popping up in the middle of the plains, and it’s awesome,” she says.

No matter the genre in which she’s performing, Castle has a sharp ear for supporting other vocalists, male or female. As a solo vocalist now dabbling in supporting others in this series of duets, I really admire this skill. She also has piles of journals from her adolescent days, just like me. Unlike the straightforward, but methodical journals of our grandmothers, these are brimming with unrequited feelings of angst. It appears we were already collecting material to distill down into songs.

Castle’s original song”Brush and String” reads like a lullaby, but actually explores how relationships weather major life changes. I love singing with Erin Castle, and I hope to see more of her original work come to the forefront.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

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A Man and His Guitar

By Jami Lynn

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Jami Lynn and Jake Jackson perform Jackson’s “Once in Awhile” for the fourth Dakota Duet.

A musician’s attachment to their first real instrument is magical. Finding my first beloved instrument took years, multiple guitars and two banjos. To find the guitar that flat-picker Jake Jackson affectionately refers to as his”workhorse,” took him a few days tooling around guitar shops on Colorado’s front range.”It was actually the first guitar that I played out of the whole trip,” Jackson says.”I probably played 30 guitars, and for whatever reason, that was just the one.”

Years of hard playing indoors and outdoors, a stint in the Lawrence County evidence locker following the guitar’s theft from his truck, and several major tune-ups still haven’t shaken his attachment to his instrument.

But for Jackson, it wasn’t always about the guitar. In second grade, the Black Hills Chamber Orchestra visited his school. After the performance, he went home and announced that he was going to play the violin. He started in the Rapid City Schools’ orchestra program and took private lessons. Eventually, he joined the bar scene in Rapid City and Tuesday night old-time jam sessions with the Black Hills Bluegrass Band. During those Tuesday night sessions, he moved from the fiddle to the banjo, and soon settled into picking the guitar in the bluegrass style called flat-picking.”We didn’t play anything really fast, but we played all the traditional tunes,” Jackson says.”It’s kinda how you know someone’s got their old-time chops: If you walk into the room and say, ‘Hey, let’s play Sally Goodin,’ and they know how to do it.”

In 1998, he met banjo player Trappor Mason, bassist Dave Curington, and mandolin player Dan Cross, which led to the formation of his Spearfish based band, Six Mile Road. Twenty years of playing together has refined their progressive bluegrass sound, and given Jackson an outlet for his songwriting.

While he’s not one to sit down and intentionally try to write a song, they seem to find him just the same.”If it doesn’t happen for eight months, then it just doesn’t happen. It’s important to just let them come on in their own way.”

For our Dakota Duets collaboration, we chose Jackson’s original song”Once in Awhile.” Like most of his songs, it was conceived and finished within 30 minutes. It showcases Jackson’s straightforward style of writing, easygoing tenor and that workhorse of a guitar.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

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Cultivating a Listening Culture

Mike Linderman and Jami Lynn record the third installment of Dakota Duets.

Mike Linderman was growing up in Greybull, Wyoming when he and his friends — soon to be seniors in high school — ordered instruments from a Montgomery Ward catalog and started a band.”We learned ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and played those two songs like a hundred times,” Linderman says.

It’s safe to say Linderman’s songbook has grown substantially since then. He’s established himself as one of the Southern Hills’ most recognizable musicians, and is featured in the third installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide tour featuring folk singer Jami Lynn and an assortment of South Dakota singers and songwriters.

Linderman fell in love with the landscape around Wind Cave National Park following a stay at a friend’s cabin and hiking adventures around Custer and Fall River counties. That led to his move to Hot Springs. He used his musical talents by performing and booking other artists at venues like The Songbird Cafe in Custer. The bi-weekly concerts and open mic nights were modeled after similar events at The Bluebird Cafe, a 90-seat music club in Nashville that features acoustic performances by nationally known artists and receives more than 70,000 visitors annually.

“Cultivating a listening culture as a music organizer is no small feat,” Jami Lynn says.”It doesn’t surprise me, however, that such a driven and focused individual as Mike could accomplish this.

“One of the first things I learned about Mike is that not only does he keep his guitar in a high quality hard case, but that case then goes inside a guitar cooler, or thermal case. I imagined someone who valued their instrument so much must also have mastery of it. I was not disappointed. His melodic finger-style accompaniment to carefully chosen or written songs not only thrills me, but brings me to a more focused listening space than usual.”

Linderman chose”One Lone Rowan Tree,” for this installment of Dakota Duets. The song by Kim McKee tells of the Celtic tradition of the burial of lost souls.”During a certain period of time in Ireland, if an individual was cast out of the church for any reason, a churchyard burial was also forbidden,” Jami Lynn says.”People started burying these loved ones under lone standing trees, believing the trees would watch over them. The story and song have a haunting quality that highlights Mike’s delicate finger-style arrangement and unadorned vocals. It was a pleasure to lend my voice to a carefully crafted arrangement of this beautiful song.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

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Jami and the Wolf King

Thomas Hentges’ first gig involved four songs played in front of the Chester High School student body before they were dismissed for Christmas vacation.”I got pulled out of the place by my ear by the principal because he thought I was using profanity on the stage,” Hentges recalls with a laugh.”I assured him that I wasn’t and that he needed to get his hands off me.”

It was a rough start to what became a successful musical career. Hentges now performs solo and with a band, both under the unique moniker Burlap Wolf King. The Sioux Falls artist is the second musician to be featured in Dakota Duets, a summer-long, statewide music tour in which South Dakota singer Jami Lynn performs with artists in a variety of genres. All six installments will be featured on our South Dakota Magazine website.

“Though our beginnings look very different, time and musical evolution brought Thomas and I to almost the same place at the same time,” Jami Lynn says.”Many consider him one of the best songwriters in the state. And just as we’ve finally fallen in the same folky singer/songwriter genre these past few years, Thomas is already morphing into his next musical state.”

For the second installment of Dakota Duets, Jami Lynn and Hentges perform”If I Needed You,” by Townes Van Zandt, a songwriter perhaps best known for his country hit”Pancho and Lefty,” recorded in 1983 by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Van Zandt has been a source of inspiration for Hentges.”What I didn’t know what that around 2006, he watched the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me for the first time,” Jami Lynn says.”It inspired him to ‘pick up that crappy acoustic guitar in the corner of my apartment and get into three chords and the truth.’ I think you’ll find the truth in Thomas Hentges’ voice and lyrics in any genre. While listening to our version of ‘If I Needed You,’ I hope you’ll agree that three chords are exactly the right amount.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets.

Paul Larson