Nov. 10, 1973: Roger Hill and Blue Country
Time for an excursion out to the country:
Nov. 10, 1973
Blue Country Sticks to Middle of Road
IT’S SATURDAY AFTERNOON when you call Mama’s down in Chaffee for a table
reservation and already it’s too late. Come early, the woman says, and maybe
somebody won’t show up.
But they all make it. Mama’s, a one-time roller skating
rink on Route 16 between
Usually they do it a week in advance, around about when
they’re packing it in at the end of the previous Friday or Saturday night and
heading back for homes in Rochester, Lockport, Niagara Falls, Ont.; Warren,
Pa., and points in between.
* * *
WHAT THEY drive
50 miles or more to see is a country band that many consider the best in the
They are neither country-rock progressives nor hillbilly
reactionaries. Their music mostly cooks to middle-of-the-road country tastes, a
dash of new and a big bagful of favorites from the not-too-distant past.
“So many people are changing to country rock,” Roger says,
“but we’ve never changed our sound. That’s why when we do our old rock ‘n roll
set, we define it, so that people don’t misunderstand.”
Roger’s a warm, easygoing host whose singing is compared a
lot to Faron Young’s. The group’s leader, promoter and business agent, he has a
say in policies at Mama’s, which in some ways was set up to meet the group’s
specifications.
* * *
ROGER HILL
& Blue Country are the first and so far the only group to play Mama’s since
the club opened last February.
“With no liquor license,” Roger adds. “We gave out pop and
free potato chips the first night and had over 200 in here.”
With a few exceptions, such as appearing on the Ray Price
show on Dec. 9 in
They generally avoid jamborees (“They just keep moving the
groups on and off,” Roger says) and their day jobs keep them from doing too
many repeats of the history-of-music assembly they staged last year for the
kids at Holland Central School.
The band fled to Mama’s from Swain’s Pub, 12 miles further
south on Route 16, down over the
* * *
THE MOVE to
Swain’s Pub was part strategy, part preference after they outgrew their
original home in the former Pipe Creek Inn in
“Some people said move to the city,” Roger explains, “but
we felt a little differently about it. We liked the rural people.”
Roger, who’ll be 33 next month, and his jolly pedal steel
guitarist, Gene Strong, 34, had seen plenty of the city anyway when they were
teenagers, playing in an early Buffalo rock band called the Tune Rockers.
That band charted a hit with one of Gene’s songs, “The
Green Mosquito,” an instrumental which brightened 1958 with a buzzing guitar
riff that was killed by a swat on the drums.
* * *
TUNE ROCKERS
toured the Northeast and settled into making the rounds of
“We became too set in our ways to change,” Gene remarks,
“so we quit.”
Though Gene had been a prime mover in the Tune Rockers
(Roger was there because his girlfriend, now his wife, Arlene, had known Ruth,
Gene’s wife-to-be), he retained a love for country music that led him back to
performing.
“I went to a Ray Price show in Kleinhans in 1965,” says
Gene, “and I saw Jimmy Day up there on pedal steel. He was really zippin’
around. I told my wife right there: ‘I’m gonna learn how to play one of those
things if it kills me.’”
Gene and Roger, always close friends, started getting
together at Gene’s house to play country music in 1965. After a little
encouragement from their wives, they took to the Pipe Creek Inn a year later
and wound up filling the place every Saturday night.
“One night,” says Gene, “somebody asked us what’s the name
of the band. Well, we just looked at each other, we hadn’t thought to name
ourselves, but we both had blue on, so I said to Roger: ‘Tell him the Blue
Country Playboys.’”
At first they were just guitar and pedal steel, then came
bass guitar and drums. Looking for someone whose musical ideas would be
sympathetic, they wrote to Roger’s serious-minded younger brother Jim, who was
in the Army and drumming with a rock group.
* * *
AFTER SIX MONTHS, Jim Hill liked country music. And after six years with the band, he’s
a strong rhythm-maker, a considerable contrast to the rinky-tink work of most country
drummers.
On bass guitar (and occasionally fiddle) is Roger’s sister
Janet, who’s still a bit shy as a performer. A former concert-mistress and
all-state violinist at
She was married last summer to Danny Zorn, one of the
partners in Mama’s. She teaches physical education at
Everyone else holds day jobs as well. Jim is a welder at
American Precision in
* * *
THE ACE of
the group is Gene, who’s widely regarded as the finest pedal steel player in
the area. His double-necked, 12-string instrument is the most complex as well.
“I teach steel guitar too,” he says, “but it’s impossible
to explain how you play it. Most people don’t understand the thing. I’ve had
some of ‘em call it an iron guitar.
“Not everybody can play it. It’s gotta be inside you and
you gotta have a feel for it. You use both feet, both knees, both hands and
here and here.” He points to his head and his heart.
He wrote “Gene’s Theme,” the flip side of their single,
“Whispering Conscience,” which they recorded last spring and put out on their
own Linda label. It’s sold more than 1,200 copies.
As for going big-time or touring, the group isn’t looking
for anything that would be hard on their families.
“We’re too old for the fairy-tale stuff,” Jim says.
“And we’re probably having more fun right here,” Gene says,
“than we ever would in
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
Roger Hill, front. From the left behind him, Gene Strong, Jim Hill and Janet
Zorn.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Gene Strong’s biggest claim to fame remains his
work with the Tune Rockers. The first
Roger Hill nearly died in a car crash on Oct. 3, 1986,
but after surgery and rehab recovered enough to start playing and singing again
as a one-man band, visiting a lot of nursing homes. In a tribute to him in 2018
in the My View column in The Buffalo News, his son-in-law Drew Dietrich noted
that he had performed 250 times in the previous two years. Roger’s sister,
Janet, passed away in 2015.
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