Category: Music

Can it really be fifty years ago that our family started playing at the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Lake Charles, Louisiana?  The numbers add up, but it doesn’t feel that way.  Our first night there was on June 16, 1976.  We don’t have a photo from that first night we played, but we did take a few photos on the second night.  

I’ve shared this photo before and I have it dated from June 17, 1976.  I also said that the song we were playing is “(I Like) Mountain Music.”  That makes sense, because it was one of the few songs that Jamie would play on the jug.  No, she was not taking a swig of whiskey while we played a song.  She was blowing or puffing or whatever she did to make that jug sing.

But that first night at Shakey’s followed years of “preparation” in the Landry household.  My dad – Bob Landry – was a band director and choral instructor from before I was born.  And my mom loved music, too.  I think it was her desire to have a family band that led to us singing at ye old pizza joint.  She would play the piano often and sing along.  Of course, we would always follow suit.  If we weren’t singing it quite right, she would correct us and encourage us to match the pitch that she would repeat for us.

When you grow up in a family with music, you just go along with it and learn how to play musical instruments as well.  I never questioned it.  It seemed like the natural thing to do.  We went to my dad’s summer band program every year and sang and played with the older kids.  We thought we were special!  We’d learn the ukulele first, then move on to guitar and bass.  Then when we were in junior high school, it was time to learn a wind instrument. 

Jodie was first and she chose the flute. In college she played the flute and the bass.  Rob was next.  He played trumpet. I remember him playing along with those old Chicago albums in the living room at home.  Karen got stuck on the ukulele.  Not really.  She really liked the uke and played guitar, bass, and clarinet as well.  Al went along the same path as Rob – guitar, bass, and trumpet.  To help you tell them apart, remember that Al is taller than Rob.  He’s taller than me, too.  Speaking of me, I (Van) was next.  I went with the trombone.  We already had a trombone, so we needed someone to play it.  Not really, I just thought it looked more fun than the other instruments.  It had a slide instead of valves.  Way more fun.  Jamie played the flute.  Of course, you already know that she also supplemented that with her jug skills.

My dad could play all of the instruments, and he liked to sing as well.  My mom – Betty Lou Bucklin Landry – was a musician as well.  She had been playing piano and singing since she was young.  In the 70s they started playing at parties and receptions and such.  It was just the two of them at that time.  Mom was playing the piano and singing, while Daddy was playing bass or guitar and singing.  On some songs he would play verse or more on the trombone.  They played a lot of old standards from the 40s and 50s.

Then, somehow, the gig at Shakey’s came up.  I think there had been a band there before.  The stage was there with an old piano.  The Shakey’s owner was Gene Fontenot, and the manager was Bill Spreafico.  Daddy had talked to one or both of them, and it was decided that we would be the entertainment on Wednesday through Saturday evenings.  It was exciting and a little scary.  We all sang and played instruments, but we weren’t used to performing like that.  And when I think about it now, we were just kids!  

When we started, Momma made a sign that said that “ye old notes” were to be played by Bob and Betty Landry “and sometimes Karen, Al, Van, and Jamie.”  Momma and Daddy would be the ones there on a regular basis, and us kids would show up when we could.  The oldest three were in college, while the younger three were in high school.  It was the youngest four who were there more often.  Since Rob and Jodie weren’t living in Lake Charles, they would only show up at special occasions.

Opening Night.   All of the years of “preparation” were finally paying off.  As the curtain rose and the spotlight focused on the stage, the Landry Family Band was ready for the big time!  No, no, no.  There was no “opening night,” no curtain, and no spotlight.  We did have a small stage that was lit up.  We set up our instruments, turned on our microphones, and started making memories.

I don’t usually have a blog based on music, much less an individual song, but I think this one deserves it.  I’ve actually shared the song before.  That was five years ago, and the post was about the music that my dad – Bob Landry – had directed many moons ago at the Northside gym in Jennings.  Our family moved to Jennings, Louisiana, in the early 60s.  At first he taught at Elton, but then he moved to Northside Junior High in Jennings.  I don’t really remember the two years he taught at Elton, but I remember those early years at the Northside gym.

I have lots of memories from the band programs there.  I wasn’t even in school yet, but my siblings and I would go to the summer band program every summer.  I think it was a way to give my mom a break from taking care of the six of us.  We would go to that old un-air-conditioned gym in the heat of the summer and think nothing of it.  It wasn’t just a gym.  There were aisles of schoolrooms on either side of it.  We would go to a classroom, take out our ukuleles (guitars for the older kids), sit in our seats, and sing and play the songs shown with the overhead projector as the fan oscillated back and forth across our slightly sweaty faces.  It was heaven!

We’d sing songs like “Down in the Valley” that only had a few chords.  At first you really had to concentrate to get the fingerings right for that C or G chord and try to sing along as you strummed the ukulele to the right rhythm.  You would improve and then it was easier to play songs like “This Land Is Your Land” that had more chords.  We even learned to sing a little Spanish with “Cuando Calienta El Sol.”  We learned about our brave military heroes from the song “The Ballad of the Green Beret.”  Those songs all evoke such memories when I hear them now. 

But the song that evokes the most memories is the song “The Carol of the Star.”  The chorus at Northside would sing that every year at Christmastime at the gathering for the end of the fall semester.  My dad made recordings of some of those concerts on an old reel-to-reel recorder.  He kept them in the kitchen closet for many years.  I’m sure the old 1959 Harry Simone original recording of the song was in there as well.  It was such a fun song to sing.  There were lots of harmonies and echoes, and the older boys got to sing the best “Bum pa dum pa dum, bum pum” part.  It’s a great Christmas song that you don’t ever hear anywhere.

This recording was made fifteen years ago.  My brother Al recorded me singing the first verse over the phone when he was in Chicago and I was in North Carolina.  He also recorded himself and my sister Jamie singing the second and third verses.  My sister Karen, and my mom and dad sang some harmonies for him before he worked his magic and combined them all together.  I don’t know how he got Jamie’s husband Allen to sing the “Bum pa dum” part.  I’ve never heard him sing!  Al did multiply it and do some editing on it.  It’s a shame that my brother Rob wasn’t in on it.

The song is very moving to me.  I like to listen to it with my ear buds in, so there is no external distraction.  When I start the song, I can hear myself singing, and then Karen joins in right beside me.  Like in olden days.  As other voices join in, I really do get transported to those early days of singing this song.  It’s like my parents are right behind me again making sure we all know the words and the melody of the song.  Sometimes it seems like Jodie was still around singing along with us, but she had died long before the recordings were made.  Her voice was similar to mom’s and my sisters’ voices.  It’s like we are all together again.

I’m sure that many of my dad’s students from back in the day have a similar experience when they hear this song.  I’m including the old recording from 1966 at Northside.  I think they did a great job for junior high school students.  When I hear it, I can picture that old gym so clearly.  When I posted this song previously, I did get comments about it doing the same for other students from then.  It’s not too soon to share it again.

I also have to share a photo from an old Christmas in the past.  Some people won’t look at a post unless there is an interesting photo to look at.  My interesting photo is an old family photo from the Christmas of 1974.  It’s a photo Rob sent to me a while back.  He had his new Minolta camera with a timer on it.  Everyone can be in the photo!  From left to right (and top to bottom) are Rob, Al, Van, Betty (mom), Jamie, Dennis Franklin (Jodie’s first husband), Jodie, Karen, and Bob.

I hope that was interesting enough.  I think the song is more than interesting, but that’s me.  Hopefully others will find a connection to it.

 

Of course I’m talking about the Landry Family Band.  The band consisted of my parents, Bob and Betty Landry, and all of their kids – Jodie, Rob, Karen, Al, Van (me), and Jamie.  But it didn’t really begin that way.  The germ of it started in 1950, when young Betty Lou Bucklin went to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for Solo and Ensemble Festival.  She was a junior in high school, and she was a baritone player.  She was from the small town of Hathaway, Louisiana, and was unfamiliar with her new surroundings. She decided to ask someone for directions, and that someone was Bob Landry from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

My dad was in college at LSU at the time.  He was four years older than my mom.  When Betty Lou graduated from high school the following year, she went to McNeese in Lake Charles.  It just so happened that Bob had decided to return to McNeese because it had become a four-year university.  So they met again and went out on a date almost immediately.  They both played baritone in the band, so they started playing music together then.  They were married in 1952 and children followed.

My dad was a band director and chorus instructor.  He taught at LaGrange in Lake Charles, at Elton High School, and at Northside Junior High in Jennings.  We grew up with music all around us.  We all learned how to play the ukulele at a very young age and then transitioned over to the guitar when we were older.  My mom was a piano player, and we always had a piano in the house.  One of the songs that she’d play for us when we were small is “Boop Boop Did’m Dad’m Waddam Choo!”  She went to town singing about those three little fishies swimming over that dam!  It is a crying shame that there is not a recording of her singing that song.  She played it for all of her grandchildren, as well.  Surely they must have fond memories of that.  What say you, niblings?

In the early to mid 1970s Mama and Daddy started playing together at events.  I suppose part of the reason was to make some extra money, but for some reason I always thought that they were mainly doing it because they liked to sing and entertain people.  Our family would sometimes sing together at mass at the big Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church in Jennings.  But we kids didn’t sing with them when they had those first gigs.  Jodie went off to college in 1971 and got married in 1973.  She and her husband lived in Lake Charles at the married student housing.  Rob was off to Louisiana Tech in 1973, and Karen was graduating from Jennings High School in 1975.  The rest of us were in high school and junior high.

That’s about the time that this photo was taken.  I don’t know where it was taken or who took it.  I don’t think any of us kids were there.  I don’t know how people knew about my parents being available to hire for events.  It’s not like they were able to post this photo online anywhere.  That wouldn’t come around for several years.  It must have been by word of mouth.  Then somehow my dad connected with Bill Spreafico, who was the manager for the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Lake Charles.  That led to the family becoming the entertainment there beginning in June of 1976.  At first we played Wednesday through Saturday nights every week.  After about a year, it was changed to just Friday and Saturday nights.  We had a lot of pizzas that first year!  They were pepperoni and mushroom for me.  We also had the Super Spuds pretty often, too.

But we didn’t all sing along at first.  We started out a bit shy.  My mom coaxed me into singing “I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” by offering me a one-dollar bill.  That was in addition to the five dollars they would give us for playing along and helping to set things up.  It wasn’t too long before we all had our own repertoire of songs that we’d sing.  We all got along really well, so there was no fighting over who gets to sing when.  We would take our turns when we could.  It was all for fun anyway!  At least that’s the way I remember it.

I can’t go without commenting about the additional creatures in this photo.  Are those real squirrels that I see climbing in that tree to the left?  And what are they doing?  It looks like they’re trying to carry away the cords for the microphone that Daddy is singing in.  I don’t even think he noticed them.  Or maybe they are just decorations in the tree?  I’ve never heard of such a thing.  

There was another thing I wanted to say about this photo.  It was taken in 1975.  It’s amazing that that was fifty years ago!  When I think about that, I always tell myself that I’m living in the future.  Am I right?

 

I found this article online last year and it surprised me a bit.  It is from 1949 and it is about a music group from Lake Charles visiting Jennings and performing for them.  I don’t know how the event came about, but it must have been sufficiently interesting enough to make it into the newspaper.  And I’m glad it did.

When I was growing up in Jennings, Louisiana, we did a lot of singing.  My parents sang, my brothers sang, and my sisters sang.  We all sang together.  We sang at home.  We sang at church.  We sang at school.  We even went to school during the summers so we could sing some more!

The main reason was because my dad was a band and choral director and my mom had majored in music at college as well.  When I saw this article, I was brought back to summer vacations when we’d all pile in the old Country Squire station wagon and head to Texas or the Gulf Coast.  That old car had a sticker on the back window, and it was for this group – SPEBSQSA.  We were so proud that we could quote and say it really fast.

I always figured that my dad brought his singing and barbershopping to Jennings for the first time in 1963 when we moved there.  But this article shows me how I wrong I was to assume that.  My dad had been to Jennings in 1949 with the barbershop group from Lake Charles!  From what I know, he started with that group in 1948 when he was just 19 years old.  He wouldn’t meet my mom – Betty Lou Bucklin from Hathaway – for another year.  She was still in high school at the Hathaway school.

It looks like my dad was part of a barbershop quartet as well as the choral group.  I know he would do that a few years later when he was in the Air Force.  Then when we lived in Jennings for those many years, he would always have a quartet.  He stayed involved with SPEBSQSA for the rest of his life, even after they changed their name.  He was a fixture at those barbershop conventions through the years.  They’d sing and sing and sing til all hours of the night in to the morning.

After many hours singing and woodshedding, he’d climb into bed to sleep.  As his head hit the pillow, he probably could still hear the sounds of “When it’s darkness on the Delta” or “When it’s sleepy time down South” in his mind.  The harmonies would quickly lull him to sleep.

I just thought I would write a short post about my older sister Jodie.  Today is the anniversary of her death.  She was born Jodie Lou Landry on October 14, 1953, at Edwards Air Force Base in California.  She died on November 5, 1989, in Franklin, Texas.  She was married and had two young boys at the time.  She was only 36 years old.

But the photo I’m sharing is from her early years at college.  She graduated from Jennings High School in 1971 and started school at McNeese State University that fall.  She played flute in the band, but I think she played the upright bass in the orchestra.  I just know that she played the bass sometimes and on one particular occasion she caught the eye of a photographer for the school paper.

This photo was shown in the Contraband – the McNeese student newspaper.  There was a monthly series called “Wednesday’s Child” that focused on one of the students at the college.  Jodie was featured with this photo, which is one of my favorite photos of her.  I would give the photographer credit if I knew who it was.  My mom always liked the photo, too.  I think that’s how we ended up having this photo now.  She somehow got the original and now it is in my possession.  Enjoy.