May 14, 1977: The Boot Hill Boys

 

The last local band to be featured in the Pause section of TV Topics. After years of lobbying by us artsy types, The Buffalo News launched its weekend entertainment magazine, Gusto, on the first Friday in June and TV Topics went back to being about ... television.  

May 14, 1977

Boot Hill Boys Plan Bluegrass Version

Of ‘Jimmy Who?’ for President Carter

THE BOOT HILL BOYS SCRAWL the tunes for their 25-minute set on strips of paper that they’ll tape to their instruments as the Folk Extravaganza begins in the Tralfmadore Café, little realizing how much bluegrass they’ll go through.

          Lately they haven’t been playing out much. Things have tapered off after a high point six weeks ago, when they were up in front of crowds three nights a week.

          Now it’s down to once a week – Charley Brown’s in Clarence Mall every Thursday. The group shares the same problem every other ground-level folk performer in Buffalo complains of.

          There are few places to play. Even the Tralfamadore has cut back to one folk night a week.

          Nevertheless, there’s an audience for it. The full house for the Folk Extravaganza inspired visitor Jerry Raven, proprietor of the Limelight, Buffalo’s folk mecca through the ‘60s, to ponder aloud whether he should open another coffeehouse.

          “I wonder sometimes if there isn’t a plot to keep people from hearing this kind of music,” says Boot Hill banjoist Steve Stadler, who has the blond good looks of a Southern college fraternity recruiting chairman.

          Bluegrass hooked Steve when he was a Canisius High School student. Somebody slipped “Dueling Banjos” into his steady died of Top 40 radio. He bought the record. Then he bought a banjo.

* * *

HE CHOSE a five-string model over a four-stringer, reasoning that if he didn’t need the fifth string, he could always take it off.

          He learned to pick from an Earl Scruggs book, recruited a violinist and guitarist Jim Zaprzal to rehearse with and staged a concert in the high school cafeteria on the last day of their senior year in 1972.

          “The prefect of discipline came down and yelled at us,” Jim remembers. “The kids were sticking around to listen to us instead of going to class.”

          “I didn’t know it was bluegrass then,” says Paul (Slim) Norton, who picked up a mandolin after seeing Seals and Crofts on TV. “They heard I had a mandolin and they told me to bring it to school the next day.”

* * *

THE GROUP split up to go to college, then rekindled as Slim left UB and Steve came home from Syracuse University, where he’d abandoned studying for a second-semester midterm exam in favor of learning “Turkey in the Straw.”

          The Boot Hill Boys say they’ve been playing seriously since September, which is when chunky stand-up bassist Jim Cooke joined the band.

          He’s their foremost promoter and he’d play bluegrass seven nights a week if he could.

          “There’s three of us that’d work seven nights,” Slim insists. The only one who wouldn’t is Jim Zaprzal, who’s a year away from a biology-nursing degree at Canisius College and Sisters Hospital.

          “I could only do five,” he estimates.

          Another project ahead of them is recording. They connected with songwriting octogenarian Belle Dowdall, who calls herself “The Bard of Buffalo,” and plan to do a bluegrass version of her new tune for the President, “Jimmy Who?”

* * *

JIM COOKE’S 27, five years older than the others. He grew up in Alden, attended Bryant and Stratton business school, moved on to UB. These days he commutes to a job in Buffalo from Batavia.

          He met the Boot Hill Boys when he went to see Doc Watson at a folk festival at Rochester Institute of Technology and kept in touch with them.

          It is the Boot Hill Boys’ destiny this night to deliver the second half of a one-two punch that closes the Folk Extravaganza.

          Blues guitarist Linda Namias having charged up the full-house crowd for them, they get wild cheers as they take spirits even higher with their energetic mix of old and new tunes.

          Instrumentally, they’re never too far from a solid, sure-footed solo. Even more marvelous is their high, smooth bluegrass harmony. For such an unlikely combination – Slim’s nasal barroom tenor, Jim Zaprzal’s church-choir clarity and Steve’s Burton Cummings glide – it works extremely well.

          It goes so well that the only one keeping track of time is David Benders, who’s directing the broadcast of the Extravaganza over WBFO-FM, sponsor of this benefit concert.

          “Are we still on the air?” Slim asks at one point. Benders is gone already, having signed off several minutes earlier.

          The Boot Hill Boys play on – “Old Joe Clark” and John Hiatt’s “Hobo Song,” the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

          They finally quit after 80 minutes on stage, with the thinning audience clapping for more.

          They had to stop, Jim Zaprzal says later. The radio people came back to take home the microphones.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, Jim Zaprzal, Steve Stadler, Paul (Slim) Norris and Jim Cooke.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: The Boot Hill Boys kept picking and singing until 1984 and along the way added a fiddler, Bob “Buffalo Zew” Palaszewski, who went on to form the Buffalo Zew Revue and play with the Stone Country Band. When Jim Zaprzal and Jim Cooke left, the name changed to Night Watch. Mandolinist Paul “Slim” Norris went on to become a mainstay of another long-running bluegrass band, the Pointless Brothers. Jim Cooke died in 2012.

As Mark Panfil and Rick Falkowski relate in an essay about these years on buffalobluegrass.com, there were quite a few younger bluegrass groups around here at the time. They mention the Border City Bluegrass Band with Bob Schneider, who taught banjo and is considered the father of local bluegrass; Billy Hamilton and the Bluegrass Almanac, headed by a prof at UB; the Erie Lackawanna Railroad with Mark Panfil and his brother Chris; the Hill Brothers with 1960s folksters Jerry Raven and Don Hackett; and Creek Bend, formed in 1978, whose banjo player, the late Ted Lambert, brought touring bluegrass groups to town throughout the 1980s. Creek Bend is still playing and the Panfil brothers are an enduring part of the group.