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Eller bringing Bad Asses and Disasters to museum |
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September 13, 2017 |
The Idaho Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and
the Boundary County Historical Society and
Museum are pleased to present “Bad Asses and
Disasters of Early Idaho” a performance by Idaho
songwriter Gary Eller, at 7 p.m. Thursday,
October 5, at the Boundary County Museum, 7229
Main Street, Bonners Ferry. His performance will
be followed by a jam session, so bring along
your instruments!
Since 2006, the Idaho Songs Project, sponsored
by the Idaho Humanities Council, has collected,
interpreted and preserved songs written before
1923 about the people, places and events of
early Idaho. These songs provide a unique
bottoms-up glimpse of the culture created by
early Idaho’s working men and women. The remote,
frontier nature of Idaho provided fertile ground
for colorful and sometimes unfortunate people
and events.
The Idaho Song Project group believes it is very
possible that songs were written about these
early notorious events of early Idaho. But alas,
they have been lost to time. The purpose of the
project is to correct, to some degree, this hole
in the musical history of Idaho.
Many of Idaho’s ballad writers and musicians
contributed to this project. One of these
musicians is Gary Eller.
As the director of the Idaho Songs Project, Gary
has documented over 200 forgotten early Idaho
songs and has published over a dozen topically
arranged interpretive booklets with audio CDs
based on these songs.
Gary Eller sings and plays guitar, five-string
banjo and bass. He was born and raised in West
Virginia and lived in Ohio and Georgia prior to
a 30 year career in nuclear science and
engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory in
northern New Mexico.
In 2004, he retired to Pickles Butte near Nampa,
Idaho. These diverse experiences have strongly
influenced his musical contributions to many
musical groups including Atomic Grass,
Crossroads, and a number of duos and trios. Gary
won the 2005 Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, banjo
contest with two original compositions and
placed second in the 2006 competition.
Currently he performs swing music in the Frozen
Dogs, bluegrass in Chicken Dinner Road and early
Idaho songs as a member of the Idaho Humanities
Council Speakers Bureau. |
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