Timberbound

g here. According to my dad, who was living a few miles away from Keasey at Mist during this time, the old timers were helpful and caring to a fault when their help was needed, and adopted a live-and-let-live stance the rest of the time. John clearly loved the spirit and the manners of expression he encountered in the logging culture, and he beautifully captured something of the hilariously irreverent, clear-eyed and poetic spirit of that culture in his lyrics. One has to only spend 10 minutes in the woods with John’s old friend, Gary Everett, to get a taste of the incredible brew of highly literate and sublimely earthy language that has developed here. Kim recalls her life there with John as follows:

“We moved there to be caretakers for the 80 acres Charles Laird and John Ullman had acquired, which included the old logging camp of Keasey. They had jobs in Seattle and came some weekends. John and I moved into an old bunk house still sitting on its cedar skids (this technique allowed them to move their camps to wherever they were logging), plank floors pitted with caulk boot piercings. We hauled our water uphill from Rock Creek in 5 gallon buckets, making gardening a small scale endeavor. We lived without electricity, refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Bathed in a bowl or in the chilly creek and cut firewood for our cast iron stove with a two-man saw left behind from the 1920s. We ate a lot of wildweeds, berries, stinging nettles and mushrooms which we spent many hours learning to identify. The time left after our survival chores was spent playing music, writing verse and tunes and reading. We rarely got paid to play music, but never left home without our musical instruments, entertaining people whether or not we'd been invited to. Troubadors is how we thought of ourselves and was how Hobe Kytr describes us in the Timberbound Songbook, [in the] ‘Ballad of John Cunnick.’”

Sadly, John and Kim were only able to live their life as cabin-dwelling troubadors for five years before tragedy struck. On January 4, 1976, John was driving to pick up Kim from work after visiting his friend Leo at the Mist Mountain commune. As he reached the top of Mist Mountain his truck went off the road, going right between the end of the guard rail and a giant fir tree. After several days of searching, his vehicle was spotted at the bottom of the ravine. Friends and neighbors gathered nearby at their friend Chico’s house and prepared to descend to the creek bed. When they found John’s body, a flat pick lay nearby. The coroner said John had died of hypothermia. Kim recalls what followed:
Jim Buxton was responsible for “Organizing” the funeral. He asked me within minutes of finding John's body, how I wanted to bury him. I replied that I wanted us, his friends, “to do it ourselves.” And we did. Jim got permission from the neighbors (Georgia Pacific I believe) to bury him in the lupine meadow. One among us had experience as a gravedigger and volunteered. Tony Hyde, an artist friend, built John's coffin carving a banjo in relief on it the lid. Laura, Clint's wife, donated her grandmother’s homemade quilt for its lining. Gary Everett surprised us by reciting his homemade poem and tossing it afterwards into the open grave... [A] catholic priest heard of our homemade ceremony, and felt compelled to consecrate it with his presence and liturgy. Hobe, Dave and I had never really played music together till the day we buried John. That was the beginning of our alliance – The Timberbound Stringband. After the burial the fellas came nearly every weekend to shore me up and learn our songs. As part of the burial ceremony, we planted a gravenstein tree on the grave. Listen to Kytr's “Trees”, the gravenstein gets a verse to itself.”

Surely no one was more devastated by John’s passing than Kim, who was now a widow. Rather than despair, she chose to do the hard work of moving on. Kim commemorated her husband’s life by publishing a book of the songs they had written together (which was an idea they had hatched together before John’s death). As she compiled the songs and notated the melodies of the Timberbound songbook over the following year, she kept playing the music with friends. One was Mark Loring, a harmonica and mandolin player whose father was a professional singer, one who had the added distinction of having befriended Woody Guthrie when Woody lived in Portland in 1941. Dave Berge, who Kim mentions above, was a big bear of a logger who told me he remembered playing music with John and Kim (contrary to the recollection quoted above). Dave played the autoharp and guitar, and sang harmony with a wonderfully rich baritone voice. Hobe Kytr had been a friend of John’s as well. Though the two men never had the chance to play music together, and knew one another for only a short time before John’s passing, they both were of Welsh ancestry, and each displayed a great gift for writing songs that uniquely captured the jobs, the history and the spirit of life in the Pacific Northwest. The "Timberbound Stringband" (the name was soon shortened to "Timberbound") performed at people’s parties and eventually served as the opening act for Mike Seeger when he toured the northwest in 1977. Two tapes exist documenting the band’s performances in Portland, one during fall of 1976 and the other at the Woodcrafter’s Theater in 1977. From these recordings we can hear why they experienced such success so quickly: their harmonies are lovely and compelling, while their instrumentation is invigorating. They performed songs from the songbook and sprinkled in a few of Hobe Kytr’s originals, which fit flawlessly into the mix. It must have been a very moving experience to witness a young woman, newly widowed, performing the wonderful, authentic songs that she had written with her late husband. They did not play together for a long time, but their music left a powerful, lasting impression on their community. Sadly, they never entered a recording studio together, and by 1978 they disbanded. Kim remarried and moved away. I was born eight years after John died, by which time Kim had left the region, and so I first experienced the Timberbound songs at parties where they were played for enjoyment by many of my folks’ friends. Foremost among these people were Hobe Kytr and Dave Berge, who were still performing together as a duo in the mid-1980s. A few of my very earliest memories are of being in a wooden house (very possibly one of the cabins out at Keasey) hearing a room full of people singing harmony, being saturated in the physical feeling of voices mingled with the pure warmth of the wood stove. Besides the obvious strength and beauty of the songs themselves, one special element that makes this music true folk music is its intent. John and Kim would perform their songs for money (or various other forms of compensation), but ultimately this music was decidedly non-commercial. It was made for enjoyment, to be played at leisure, and to express how people were living while reflecting the glory and charm of their immediate surroundings. As I have studied and performed this music over the past decade of my life, I have slowly realized that we do not play folk music to keep it alive, we are playing it because it helps sustain us. The purpose of the present recording is to spread these songs a little further, so that more people can learn about our particular incarnation of the American spirit, and why we love to live here in the Pacific Northwest. Kim, Hobe and Dave have given us free reign to perform and interpret their songs, and for that we are profoundly grateful. Their freewheeling and relaxed approach to making music was a vital element in creating the joy and freedom we felt while capturing these songs in the confines of the recording studio. That approach is what frees us from being weighed down by the gravity of this endeavor. It could be a heavy responsibility to carry on these songs, to do them justice and stay true to their intent. But, in recording this music with the blessing and involvement of its creators, our little group of musicians has learned a powerful lesson about the nature of tradition. The elder generation passes the art to the younger, and both gain immeasurably from the transaction.

- Joseph Paul Seamons, February, 2014