Aug. 12, 1972: Belle Dowdall, the Bard of Buffalo
I finally get to meet the Bard of
Aug. 12, 1972
Belle’s Been Waiting
80 Years for a Hit
“I’VE GOT a
new song here they’re going to love down in
She says it so spryly you’d
think she was joking again, but Mary Belle Dowdall, the Bard of Buffalo, means
it. And as she’s said so often, she’s been waiting 80 years for a hit.
“My room looks like a ticker
tape parade,” she declares as she finds a battered cassette player on the
floor. “Pete’s done it a little too fast here, but you’ll get the idea.”
* * *
OUT COMES
the piano and the high nasal twang of Pete Hankerson, Belle’s musical arranger,
the guy who transposes all her songs to paper.
The tune is familiar. Like
most of her songs, it suggests some old hymn or dusty popular melody that’s
been long forgotten. The opening refrain is an ear catcher: “Music is my
business, rhythm is my song …”
Although there’s a spinet
piano in the corner of her cluttered living room, Belle doesn’t read music,
hasn’t played an instrument since one of her older brothers showed her a bit of
mandolin some 70 years ago.
What Belle does is sing the
song into the cassette machine – straight from memory – and Pete takes care of
the rest. Her compositions are heaven-struck inspiration in the purest form.
“I get most of these songs in
dreams,” she relates. “When you’re asleep, your mind is clear. The way I write
a song, I feel a mood. I’m romantic and temperamental, you know.
* * *
“THE OTHER DAY
I was sittin’ on the front porch and I got the feeling I’m going to cry. I went
to my room and it passed and I lay down on the bed and said wait a minute, I’m
going to express my feeling.”
And she sings it, quietly, seriously as its words:
“Sometime tonight I’m gonna cry about
you,
Sometime tonight I’ll long to hold you
tight.
But empty arms they’ve already told me
I’ll be cryin’ for a love that used to be.”
Her collaboration with
country singer Steve Scott (see box) has improved her inspirations greatly, she
says.
So far there are two Steve
Scott records with Belle’s songs – “Red Hot End,” about the world coming to
judgment in 1972 (“Open up those gates, those pearly gates, I want to get a ringside
view”), and “City of Souls,” which reflects Belle’s cheerful view of the
afterlife.
“I can turn a song out of
anything,” she says. “Steve and I have never thrown a song into the garbage
can. But we’ve thrown the garbage can into a song.”
Before this, in 46 years of
writing tunes, her biggest successes have come in commemorative or promotional
efforts.
She has a photo of her and
collaborator Tommy Martin with a new DeSoto they won for writing “The Gates of
Old New York,” which was chosen as the 1939 World’s Fair souvenir song.
* * *
THE EARLY ‘50s
found her on local TV after she wrote something called “Hello Buffalo,” which
the city adopted as an official song. She’s done one for
The fair song – she was asked to do it by a fair official she knows – weathered a last-minute lyric transplant when the fair folks insisted on including the words “And Exposition.” The revised version starts off like this:
“On the 19th of August, you can take it
from me,
There’s gonna be the biggest roundup you
ever did see.
You can hear it, you can see it, you can
feel it in the air;
Population explosion up in
At the
“The boys in
Married and the mother of
three boys and a girl, she came to
“Buttermilk 1892,” the year
she was born, is full of references to buckwheat cakes and walking 20 miles to
school and Lydia Pinkham’s pills.
“It was castor oil and
homemade pants, a pile of diapers too. And they pinned them on with carpet
tacks in 1892,” one verse proclaims.
For years she’d send her
efforts to music publishers and back they’d come by return mail. So she decided
to form her own music company when she could afford it. That happened in 1969.
Headquarters for Bard of
Buffalo Music Publishers is Belle’s ancient rooming house, obscured by trees on
a dilapidated block not far from lower
It’s also the center of her
primary charitable activity – feeding and looking after alcoholics, giving them
books, cigarettes. Several wander quietly down from upstairs as we talk this
rainy morning.
Humanitarianism runs strong
in her. During World War II, she operated a free soup kitchen on
“After I get done making
public appearances at the fair,” she says, “we’re going to start a $2 million
project with the senior citizens for a nursing home near
* * *
“I’M NOT a
lonesome old person. I don’t consider myself an old person. There’s nothing 80
about my body. The TV man said I have more zest than teenagers.
“I get all kinds of marriage
proposals. They all come from men in their 30s. I got one yesterday and I asked
him how old he was. He said 38 and I said that’s too old.
“But married life doesn’t appeal to me. I like seclusion. Songwriters have to know heartbreak and they have to live alone. My second husband would just say to people: ‘I married one of them crazy songwriters.’”
The box/sidebar
Singing Her Songs
In last November’s issue of
Frontear Country,
That was Steve Scott, by day
a 31-year-old welder from
Within a couple months, Belle
had him and his group into Act-One Sound Studios on
* * *
THERE’S AN ALBUM planned later this year and Steve and his band will be performing some
of Belle’s songs at the Erie County Fair & Exposition.
“Steve said I was rushing
him,” Belle says, “and I said: ‘I’m 80, Steve, I’ve got to speed it up.’
“Steve’s a man of many
talents. He plays, sings, he writes songs and he’s tall and handsome and a good
family man. I believe he’ll go a long way.
* * *
“HIM AND I
have so much fun writing songs. We kick up such an emotional storm. We always
fight on the telephone, but we never fight in person.”
Belle also has lined up as a
singer Bob Williams, a country music personality on WHLD,
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTOS:
At left, Bob Williams, top, and Steve Scott. Top right, Belle Dowdall – the Bard
of Buffalo, her records, sheet music and the spinet piano. “That picture’s a
modern Mona Lisa,” she laughs. “It’ll send all the boys to the psychiatrist.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: As noted in my story about Steve Scott on March
4, 1972, he was born in
Google doesn’t say much else about Steve. As for
Belle, I found her in the Social Security Death Index. She lived for seven more
years. One of her grandsons, F. Neil Chaffie, was a colleague of mine in the
little bitty city room at the
Her second singing choice, WHLD’s Bob Williams, was a
Western New York version of the
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