May 13, 1972: Dody Lynn and The Guitarmen

 

A Southern Tier treasure who seems to have gotten lost in the tides of time. See the Footnote: 

May 13, 1972

Dody’s Career Is Filled

With Success Stories 

IT WAS a couple of years ago in the Cow Palace in Whitesville, south of Wellsville, that Gus Thomas, the headliner of a WWVA country music touring show there, heard her and announced to the crowd:

        “I wanta tell you people something. I feel Dody Lynn is great and I’m gonna try and get her on the WWVA Jamboree.”

        “I just stood there,” Dody shrugs, “and said to myself: ‘All right.’ No enthusiasm or anything. I didn’t think he was serious.”

        He took the record she recorded in Nashville in 1969 (see box) and a picture and a month later Dody had a call from Wheeling, W.Va. “Dody, are you free Feb. 6?” Gus wanted to know.

* * *

IT’S LIKE one of those fabled show business success stories. Dody’s singing career is full of things like that:

        – The music teacher in Greenwood, south of Hornell, who took Dody when she was an 8-year-old named Dolores Marie Hurd and featured her in front of the high school chorus.

        – Friends who encouraged her to get up and sing with the band whenever she and her husband Paul went out.

        – An Olean country band leader named Bob Flower, who called her from the crowd and wound up giving her a featured spot in his show. At 17, she was pictured beside him on one of his record albums.

        Each of these breaks left Dody a little incredulous. She’s always liked to sing, but it seems other people thought she was better than she thought she was.

        “Once a reporter wanted to write a sympathy story about me in Wheeling,” she says, “and he asked: ‘What has happened to you?’ and I said: ‘Nothin’.”

        So when she stepped out on the stage of WWVA’s Capitol Music Hall to be broadcast live to radio listeners from Canada to Tennessee on the biggest country music show outside of Nashville, her knees were shaky even though she was thinking: “What have I got to lose?”

* * *

“MY FIRST number was ‘Stand By Your Man.’ It’s a hard song and there’s not many singers who’ll try it. My husband and my mother wanted me to do it though, so I did.

        “When it was done, station manager Bob Finnegan ran up to me and kissed me on the cheek. He said: ‘Dody Lynn, how would you feel being signed as a star of “Jamboree USA?”’

        “Well, everything was just drained out of me. I turned to my husband and said: ‘Honey, how do I feel?’ It was a dream I never thought would come true.”

        This shiny Saturday she’s just back from taking Jeffrey, 9, to a birthday party somewhere down the dirt roads and past the gladed slate creek and over the hills up back of Caneadea, one of the smaller rural towns that line Route 19 between Warsaw and Wellsville.

        Her husband, Paul, who’s also her business agent and adviser, led the move out here about seven years ago from Olean.

        There are 250 acres, some they rent to a neighbor for farming. Lots of room for the kids. Just down the road is where Paul grew up. He commutes daily to his home improvement business in Rochester.

* * *

THEY MET in Perry when Paul was working in a knife factory and Dody was going to high school and working at a soda fountain. They were married 15 years ago, when she was 16.

        Their other boys, 12-year-old Paul and Bobby, who’s 10, lost an argument with Debbie, 13, over what to watch on TV this afternoon and settled for Lassie rescuing a wild horse. “We have two horses,” Bobby says.

        Dody sees herself as an old-fashioned housewife – she knits, sews, cans. The kids think it’s neat having a mother who sings. Once they sold promotional pictures of her to willing school busmates for a dime apiece. And anytime Dody would consider singing at school, that would be just fine.

        Lately, however, there’s been a lot more requests for appearances than Dody can fill. In fact, Paul is over in Perry this afternoon talking with someone who wants to hire Dody to play.

        “It makes it rough,” she says. “We used to go to all the jamborees, but we can’t any more.”

        When she and her band, The Guitarmen, started playing Friday nights at the Valley View Lanes, a large, rather well-appointed lounge near Warsaw with bowling alleys out back, it was for three weeks.

        That was last September. Now their fans are begging them not to take their traditional summer vacation. Instead of their usual three months, Dody thinks they’ll be lucky to get August off.

        Saturdays and Sundays they play different places around the Southern Tier – policemen’s balls, firemen’s shows and charity benefits as well as clubs. Occasionally they hit the Buffalo area. In June, they’re going to play a weekend with a WWVA tour in Vermont.

* * *

SHE’S ON WWVA once a month (next time is next Saturday at 7:30 p.m., 1170 on the dial) and within a couple of weeks she plans to record an album in Nashville. WWVA says they’ll promote it.

        “Everybody has the impression you have money because you’ve got a record,” she says. “I don’t think I make anything singing. It all goes for equipment, traveling and clothes.”

        Between sets, she changes outfits (one of Paul’s ideas). She also plays bass guitar, taking it up two years ago on Paul’s recommendation.

        She says her album is going to be a little bit of everything and so is her show at the Valley View.

        There’s Tommy James’ “Hanky Panky,” a duet with bassist-guitarist Bill Benson on “For the Good Times,” a bouncy version of “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kenny Lee’s pedal steel guitar is outstanding.

        “People say she sounds like a lot of different country singers,” Paul will tell you. The nearest would be Loretta Lynn, who is one of Dody’s idols.

        “There isn’t a thing of hers out that I don’t like,” Dody says. “And she’s down to earth. If she wants to kick off her shoes, she does it.

* * *

"I HAVE faith in Paul. He doesn’t play and he doesn’t sing, but he’s out there sitting and listening and he knows what to do. And I think he’s really helped me to come to get a style of my own.

        “Paul handles the band, too. That way there’s no hard feelings for me and I don’t believe men like to be told what to do by a woman. I would never travel without him.”

        She got the name Dody while singing with Bob Flowers. It’s a variation of Dorothy because Paul, for some reason, always called her Dot. Lynn is Debbie’s middle name.

        “Now nobody calls me anything else but Dody Lynn,” she says, “even at home. The first time somebody called Paul ‘Mr. Lynn’ it shook him. Now he overlooks it.” 

The box/sidebar 

A Group of Her Own 

        Everybody used to tell Dody Lynn she should record, but she and her husband, Paul Fuller, thought it should wait until the children got older, so that if her career got hot the kids wouldn’t feel abandoned.

        The time came in 1969. They drove to Nashville, looked up Andy Anderson at Showbud Music on recommendation of a friend and, happily, he took them in.

* * *

UNLIKE MANY unknown performers who get stuck with poor songs or sloppy productions, Dody got four tunes that Andy and his arranger wife Betty felt were best matched to her style. Plus a session in Music City Studios.

        “Neither Can I” and “Something Up Your Sleeve” came out on Stop Records and was picked up by Chart magazine as a big seller, but there was little money to promote it.

        Freddie Herman at WBTA, Batavia, wore out a copy of it, but few others picked up on it and one Buffalo station wanted $58 a week to play it.

        Previously, Dody had sung as a stand-in with country bands, but now Paul thought she should have a group of her own.

        Of the original Guitarmen, pedal steel guitarist Kenny Lee, who played with Olean’s Bob Flower, is still with her. He lives in Belmont and works as a carpenter.

* * *

DRUMMER Keith Barr of Dansville came next. A printing company worker, he’s the group’s clown. Guitarist George Henry Jr. is a partner in Warsaw’s Valley View Lanes.

        And newest member is Billy Jay Benson of Ionia, whom Dody and Paul saw singing in a club last winter shortly after he got out of the Army. He plays bass, guitar and sings.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTOS: Top, Dody Lynn and the Guitarmen, from left, George Henry Jr., Billy Jay Benson, Dody, Keith Barr and Kenny Lee. Bottom, Dody and Paul Fuller, her husband and manager.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: There aren’t many online references to Dody after her only solo album, “You Make My Day,” came out in 1973. The last mention I could find is a WWVA Jamboree artist list, which has a mention of Dody among its artists for 1979.

She also performed in the 1977 Wheeling Jamboree in the Hills in St. Clairsville, Ohio, the second singer to take the stage on opening day. Billed as country music’s answer to Woodstock, it attracted 40,000 to see a bill headlined by Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette (Associated Press caught her in this photo I found in the Danville, Va., Register).

WWVA certainly did their darnedest to make her one of their stars. “You Make My Day” was recorded at Jamboree Recording Studios in Wheeling and has liner notes by the station’s Gus Thomas, who tells how he discovered her.  

It was produced by Glenn Reeves, a singer-songwriter himself (he recorded the demo version of “Heartbreak Hotel” and Elvis imitated the way he sang it). By 1972, he was the executive producer of Jamboree USA on WWVA.

None of the Guitarmen appear on the album. Steel guitarist is Harold Fogle, a Nashville session player who toured with Stonewall Jackson extensively and with many other country stars, including Loretta Lynn.

Speaking of the Guitarmen, new arrival Billy Jay Benson came from a musical family. He went on to record his own album in Nashville and eventually joined his older brother, Lee Benson, in Sun City, Ariz., outside Phoenix, where they started the Branded Country Band in 2014.

Bandleader Bob Flower, who gave Dody her name and put her on the cover of his first and only album, was police chief in Cuba, N.Y. He called himself “the poor man’s Ernie Ford.”