A Stony Creek Story by Christopher Shaw A curious aspect of the years after we moved to Stony Creek in the early seventies was that nobody had a record player. Hank Soto and John Strong managed somehow to keep in touch with the music that was current, but I lost touch completely, and the only music any of us really ever heard was what we made ourselves. In those days we lived in suspended animation, far from disco, in an overheated environment of endless jam sessions, part-time jobs, and outdated jukebox selections. It seemed like everybody in town had an instrument, or at least a song they knew. Looking back, a couple of those years seemed like one very long Sunday afternoon at the Stony Creek Inn, continuous marathon jams in which dozens of transients would participate while the nucleus of Hank, John, Michael Roden on bass, and usually Art Pratt on the fiddle, held down the back-up. Chan Goodnow was sixteen and actually living at the Stony Creek Inn. One day he learned his first three chords on the guitar. Six weeks later, he blew us away on the banjo, and the band took him in. Soon Randy Rollman came along on pedal steel. With the addition of Tom Parker on drums, Hank's lead acquired new authority and John's dominance of center stage and vocals increased. This group achieved moments of brilliance. The repertoire blossomed to embrace a smorgasbord of American musical styles, everything from Cole Porter to Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rogers and their own infectious songs, all fed through a hopper of distinct identities and stamped with a sound that was recognizable over the sound of heavy traffic from a block away. It was the Adirondack's, it was Stony Creek, it was our era and it was us.

The band kept growing. One night five or six years later, shortly after Dave Maswick came in on bass, I walked into John Barleycorn's in Lake George to find, with the addition of Larry Robinson on second lead guitar, seven musicians arrayed across the stage, and turned up. Here was a band that had engaged in some serious woodshedding and emerged slicker, sharper and more upbeat than any previous version. Their following grew. A Stony Creek Band gig became the sort of thing that residents of Albany planned their vacations around. I remember, in my role of frustrated musicologist, haranguing certain fellow regulars on my theory that what we were responding to with such unalloyed delight was a product of the landscape as authentically upstate as any Hudson River School painting or sculpture by David Smith. Much has been made of the Adirondack regional sound in the last few years and I will betray my prejudice by stating that the music of The Stony Creek Band contains a more purely distilled essence of the Adirondacks -- that special mixture of Quebec fiddle tunes, lumberjack ballads, and postwar country-swing -- than can be heard on all the albums of the genre's more recent exponents. It came down by direct transmission from the retired lumbermen and dancehall fiddlers who settled in Stony Creek in the forties and fifties, after the big timber ran out, and from the yodelers and western guitar pickers who hung around the areas dude ranches. Hank and John came to Stony Creek at a time when many of the town's old-timers were in their twilight years and eager to perform for a new audience, one which took a genuine interest in their times and their music. The band's distinctive blend of folk, country, and bluegrass grew from the humor, wry wit, and irony of those old men and women who sang songs and told us stories of the old days, and from their wistful but hard-edged sense of loss -- a range of emotions seemingly unavailable to the one-note sentimentality of the self-styled Adirondack gang. It is a direct link, a bridge of a single span, connecting the era of the cross-cut saw, the river drive, the kerosene lamp and wind-up Victrola, to that of the chainsaw, the Kevlar canoe, the satellite dish. In the intervening years, this fluctuating corps of more than twenty musicians, now including veteran drummer Mike Lomaestro, has continued to develop the contemporary Adirondack regional sound born in Stony Creek in 1973.

FROM THEN 'TIL NOW is a new compilation of recordings and original songs from those years. It traces the Stony Creek Band's evolution from an acoustic trio with roots in traditional folk and country to an eclectic purveyor of American idioms, and back again. In track after track the sound is expansive rather than insular. It takes the Adirondacks to the world. It rings with the unsilenceable voices and licks of hardscrabble, backwoodsmen and women. It spurns saccharine self-reference and transcends pigeonholes. It is the sound of mature, seasoned artists with businesses, jobs, and children, who have outlasted the years and their own baser instincts to mentor and encourage younger artists, enrich their communities and preserve and transmit a living memory. Now their fans can listen with ears tuned to past and present, while the music grows in meaning. For this fan, the band and its music hold a great deal of meaning indeed. September, 1998