March 4, 1972: Steve Scott & The Country Music Circus channel The Bard of Buffalo

 

A spinoff from a story a month earlier, in which we hear from (but do not meet) the mysterious Bard of Buffalo herself. 

March 4, 1972 

Belle, the Bard of Buffalo,

In Tune with Steve Scott 

THE LOVELESS Singers had spoken of her in kind of an awe. They knew her by her nickname, “Mary,” and they knew that her grandson was former Dunkirk Mayor F. Neil Chaffie and despite all her activities (including work with alcoholics), she rarely left her house on Buffalo’s West Side. Whatever she needed outside she did by phone.

        And here’s Belle Dowdell herself calling. Yes and she wants to straighten a few things out.

        First of all, she’s saying she’s not “sometimes billed” as the Bard of Buffalo. She’s the real full-time McCoy. Copyrighted the name, she has. And she’s been commissioned to do songs for the Erie County Fair.

        Furthermore, she didn’t write that “salty end-of-a-love song called ‘Send Me No Letters.’” Steve Scott did. She wrote “Red Hot End.”

        She turns the phone over to her cassette player and a country singer with a voice in the Johnny Cash-Waylon Jennings league does this chorus about the world ending in 1972: 

        “Open up those gates, those pearly gates,

        I wanta get a guarantee,

        If the Devil’s gonna get me,

        I’ll be shovelin’ coal

        And Hell’s no place for me.” 

        “I don’t make public appearances because of my health and I haven’t had a picture taken of myself in 20 years,” she says. “If you want to know anything else, talk to Steve Scott.”

* * *

A LOT OF pastel-tinted photographs look like taxidermy jobs, but the 20-year-old one of Belle Dowdell has a radiance which brightens and softens the sparsely-adorned length of Steve Scott’s living room across from the canal in Tonawanda.

        She’s lighted up Steve’s lifelong dreams too, no doubt about it. First thing he talks about is the recording session she put him into last December in Buffalo’s Act-One Studios, when the Country Music Circus and The Loveless Singers put down that roughed-out version of “Red Hot End” the Bard played over the phone.

        That was the test run. The real thing comes in about five weeks down in Memphis. Steve isn’t sure whether the whole band is going. The others have never met Belle.

        “We’ve got some recording connections down there,” Steve says in that soft Jennings-Cash voice. “But I’m not gonna mention any names. We’re plannin’ on comin’ out with an album by the end of the year. The songs are gonna be split up between mine and hers.”

* * *

STEVE’S been writing songs for 6 or 7 years and he has a flair for country lyrics.

        “Everybody calls me Little Johnny Cash,” Steve says, “but when it comes right down to doing my own songs, I’m Steve Scott, not Johnny Cash or the rest of them.”

        Bass guitarist Bucky Neal and rhythm guitarist Larry Dolan write also. Bucky throws his away almost as fast as he makes them up, except for the one Steve liked so much he made him keep it.

        And Larry, the on-stage clown, the guy who does that baggy pants comedy routine about Boozer and Swee’ Thang, Larry writes hymns.

* * *

WHEN OWNER Stan Procyshyn decided to bring country music into Shveedee’s on Clinton Street near Fillmore a couple years ago, he was a little uncertain how well it would draw customers. Now he’s planning on redecorating with a country theme.

        Steve Scott & The Country Music Circus must’ve convinced Stan. They’ve held down Fridays and Saturdays in the L-shaped, no-stags-allowed back room for 11 months, ever since Bucky learned the place needed a band.

        “We make decent money here,” Bucky says, “and Stan lets us do what we want on stage.” This particular Friday night they’ve worked up a party atmosphere back there.

* * *

THE GROUP has virtually none of the sloppiness that weighs down so many weekend groups. “What we got is automatic impulses,” drummer Don Betts says. “Everybody knows what everybody’s gonna do.”

        In a “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”-“Jenny Jenny” medley, they’re like a British rock revival band, Steve playing leads that sound like early Ventures.

        Their trademark, they say, is the four-part harmony. As Don points out, they all could sing the same thing and it would sound different. Bucky has a high twang, Larry pushes a rough-edged tenor and Don has a ballad voice.

        That was what convinced Belle Dowdell when she read about Steve as “Artist of the Month” in Frontear Country magazine last fall. She called him up right here at Shveedee’s and laid out all her plans.

* * *

IT’S THE DAY before the Bard of Buffalo’s birthday this week and she’s in high spirits, getting ready to fly to Memphis.

        “I’ve been writing a book about how to write a song and make a man a star,” she says. “I’ve picked Steve Scott for the star. He tells me: ‘It seems like we’re playing a part, but I’ll go along with it.’

        “People get the wrong impression,” she adds. “They think an old person isn’t up to date. Well, I’m different. It just took me 80 years to win.” 

The box/sidebar: 

Country Music Circus 

        Steve Scott picked up a guitar back in 1955 when he was 15 – his nephew’s guitar which was lying around the house in Reynoldsville, Pa.

        “I was always into country music,” Steve says. “I growed up on it. I used to fall asleep at night listening to WSM and WWVA. I always wanted to be a country musician.”

* * *

BY THE TIME he was discharged from the Army, he had a useful skill – lead guitar. From the barracks bands in Alaska (“There wasn’t much else to do”) he learned finger picking, a little Chet Atkins and all.

        Married and in search of a steady welding job, he came to Tonawanda in 1961, had two children and spent a few seasons sitting in whenever he could. Finally he joined Cliff McCarthy & The Wranglers in 1964.

        When they broke up 2 ½ years later, Steve put together Steve Scott & His Cousins, playing the old Shanside on Ontario Street until marital and work conflicts took his sidemen.

        Itinerant once more, he played with McCarthy again, Happy Mann, Lee Forester and then a couple years ago he heard rhythm guitarist Larry Dolan wanting to get a band together.

* * *

LARRY, 24, a Tonawanda High School grad and Air Force vet, had done rock in The Reason Why, but never country. Now he likes it: “You can put feeling into country more than anything else.” He’s married, drives a soft drink delivery truck.

        Don Betts is 26 and he’s been drumming ever since he started beating his mother’s pots and pans. As a teenager in Jan & The Caravans, he played shows with WKBW’s Rod Roddy and Joey Reynolds at Cuba Lake. Later he was with The Soul Brothers (now The New Era).

        Steve’s group sat in with Don’s last band last year and that’s when Don was “enrolled.” This is his first country band.

        A North Tonawanda native and Army veteran, he’s a Children’s Hospital X-ray staffer and he’s engaged.

        Instead of going to California a couple years back, Don (Bucky) Neal, 25, took his $600 savings and picked up a bass guitar. He played with a couple country bands and got a call from Steve about a year ago.

* * *

A SEABEES veteran, he lives in Niagara Falls (went to Niagara-Wheatfield and LaSalle High), is married, has a daughter, works as a mechanic and wants the group to make it so he can get rid of the grit the job leaves on his hands.

        “Country Music Circus” was Bucky’s idea. Trouble is, everybody just calls them Country Circus.

        “They leave out the most important part,” Bucky says, “they forget the music.”

        “Well,” Steve drawls, “we don’t.”

* * * * *

PHOTO CAPTION: Steve Scott, front center, and the Country Music Circus, from left, bass guitarist Don (Bucky) Neal, drummer Don Betts and rhythm guitarist Larry Dolan.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Google doesn’t know anything about any of these folks, aside from entries in a couple issues of Billboard magazine in May 1972, where the music director of WWOL reported that his playlist included “Red Hot End.”

Meanwhile, Belle Dowdell’s grandson, F. Neil Chaffie, was one of my colleagues in the itty-bitty city room at my hometown paper, The Dunkirk Evening Observer, where I learned the nuts and bolts of journalism before I came to The News in 1968.