Feb. 5, 1972: The Loveless Singers
And now for a bit of feel-good family fare:
Feb. 5, 1972
Loveless Singers
Get Loads of Love
From Their Fans
LAUGHTER in
the back room. “Looks like $3 pants you got on sale for $2,” Ed Loveless is
saying with a grin.
“Lookit them, always pickin’ on me just ‘cause I’m the
drummer,” Don Sears blinks. “A guy just tries to dress up and …”
“Don’t those look like $2 pants to you?”
* * *
DON GETS up
from the table to give everyone a full shot of blue-gray, diamond-checked,
pegged-cuff glory – the kind which would’ve knocked them out in Gene Vincent’s
heyday.
“Haven’t seen anything quite like that in 15 years,” a
visitor says. More laughter.
In the rear of Christe’s restaurant, a red brick landmark for
maybe 125 years at Gardenville’s
Except for jamborees and benefits like the one they’re
playing Friday at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Hall,
* * *
THIS HOMEY
occasion is Wednesday night practice, the successor to all those sessions in
the Loveless living rooms in
Luckily, it’s one of those nights nobody’s missing because
they have to work. They’re learning “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” a
heavily-requested number.
“We don’t push strictly country,” Ed says. “Country’s good, I
enjoy it, but we do everything. We always try to keep with what’s good and
what’s asked for.”
Even Irish numbers. That’s one of Rose Hearn’s specialties,
even though she’s Scottish-Canadian. Rose is their Tammy Wynette specialist as
well.
Ed’s effervescent wife, Mayna, is their Lynn Anderson.
Mischievous bass guitarist Orville Peever takes the Merle Haggard stuff, wiry
lead guitarist Bob Pickett does a fine Johnny Cash and Ed handles whatever
yodeling they need.
“If the people ask for a Merle Haggard song, they want to
hear the Merle Haggard sound that goes with it,” Bob says. “The thing is to try
to give them something to identify with.”
“The first five or six songs, we do what we want,” Ed says,
“but the rest of it’s all requests. We’ll wind up playing past 3 o’clock
sometimes just because the people here are so great.”
“You don’t see the same people every week either,” says
Mayna. “We get at least four different crowds.”
The
“You could’ve heard a pin drop in here,” Orville says.
He calls Judy, who, it turns out, is a waitress here, and he
puts a bass line behind her as she chords behind the words of sorrow the band
has copied many times for fans from
* * *
THE ENDING
goes:
“Now we wait upon the
man
We put in
charge of our land
To see
that a crime like
Will never happen again.”
There’s been talk of recording it, but wait, here’s a record
– an acetate – the band did at
* * *
THEY BACK Steve
and his band on one side, “Send Me No Letters,” a salty, end-of-a-love song written
by 82-year-old Belle Dowdell, who’s sometimes billed as the Bard of Buffalo.
She sent the acetate over here tonight by taxi so the group could play it.
The record player in the back of the kitchen is one of the
ways the band has made Christe’s a little more like home. There’s the wall box
that holds requests and notes and there’s a couple shelves on stage for things
like extra strings for Mayna’s guitar.
“It’s never my fault,” Mayna protests with a grin. “It’s the
guitar, sixty-five cents a shot. And it’s always the G or the D string.”
“She swings so hard that when she gets to the E she isn’t
even touchin’,” Ed laughs.
Maybe that’s why the flat-top guitars give the band such a
rhythmic kick, enough so that until last year they saw no need for a drummer.
The sound is so full that “Folsom Prison” can be mistaken for the Johnny Cash
original.
Making things a little more like home extends to
They came to
“Back then it meant a dollar an hour raise under better
working conditions,” Ed says. “Now with inflation and the way taxes have gone
up here, you’d probably break out even.”
* * *
THEY’VE HAD
offers to play elsewhere – as far away as
“I don’t think we could ever make it playing full time in
“We’re friends first and a band second,” Ed says. “This is a
hobby. If it ever becomes a job, I’d quit.”
Midnight’s here and it’s time to go. Ed heads for the frigid
parking lot to warm up his car.
“Here,” Orville says, throwing his keys, “would you start mine too? The final word,” he winks, “is that us Canadians all stick together.”
The box/sidebar:
Happy Music Gang
Pertinent information about
The Loveless Singers:
Ed Loveless, 34, electric guitar and vocals, native of
Mayna Loveless, “My age? It’s 30-shh-h-h,” flat-top guitar
and vocals, native of
Rose Hearn, also “30-shh-h,” flat-top guitar and vocals,
native of
Bob Pickett, 31, electric guitar and vocals, native of
Orville Peever, 36, bass guitar and vocals, native of
Don Sears, 32, drums, graduate of
* * *
WHEN ED,
Mayna, Rose and Orville came to
Two years later they were hitting jamborees, playing electric
instruments with Orville switched over from guitar to bass. Their stand at
Christe’s began in late 1968.
Bob, a country and rock player before he hung up his guitar
in 1960, came out of retirement in late 1970 to replace Jim Kay, who left after
a two-year stay as lead guitarist and emcee to form his own band.
* * *
DON IS the
band’s first drummer. A veteran of Ray Grace’s country group, he came in early
1971 to fill out the rhythm section when Rose took maternity leave.
Some of their fans feel that the name Loveless Singers
doesn’t fit right. It’s the “Loveless” that gets them.
“They say we should be The Lovable Singers,” Mayna says. “And
once at a jamboree, they actually introduced us as Mr. and Mrs. Love.”
* * * * *
THE PHOTO CAPTION: From left, front, Mayna Loveless and Rose Hearn; center, guitarists
Bob Pickett and Ed Loveless; rear, drummer Don Sears and bass guitarist Orville
Peever.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Google doesn’t turn up much on any of these
folks. Apparently the Loveless Singers recorded again with Steve Scott,
resulting in the release of a single: “City of
Mayna appears in a coming-up item in Gusto in 1989 as
part of one of the area’s leading Irish singing groups, the Colleens. The item
notes that Mayna and her daughters Julie Czubinski, Janice Young and Cathy Lehman
were one of the few all-female Irish groups in the nation.
The Colleens were still active in 2014, when a Facebook posting from the Buffalo Irish Center announced that its St. Patrick’s Day celebration would include a group called St. Mary’s Road, in which a third generation – Chris Young, daughter of Jan, and Kari Czubinski, daughter of Julie – have joined with grandma Mayna and their moms.
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