Friends and fans of a late Juneau singer and songwriter are on a mission to make his music more accessible to people who have a love of poetic songwriting and the voice of an artist who came from a mold that no longer exists. And to those young artists who will be inspired by him, and maybe even cover one of his songs.
The effort will kick off during the upcoming 49th Alaska Folk Festival (April 8-15) with the re-release of Buddy Tabor’s 1998 album Blinding Flash of Light on Spotify and all streaming services. Until now, Buddy’s many albums have not been available via streaming. The single Texas Blue Radio will be released March 28 with the full record available April 11. Subsequent plans include a release of a live album recorded in 2011.
“We’re doing it because we love his music and we don’t want it to fade away,” said Gustavus musician and producer Justin Smith, who performed with and played on Tabor’s records.
For at least four decades, Guy “Buddy” Tabor was an accomplished stalwart of the local music scene and the Folk Festival held annually in Juneau, with many devoted listeners and fans. He was a prolific musician who created songs in the vein of John Prine and Bob Dylan, influenced by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. His “spirit animal” was Johnny Cash.
Between 1996 and his death in 2012, Tabor put out nine records of original music, with a cover or two here and there. A three CD set anthology of his recordings was released in 2007.
But his music was hard pressed to be heard much beyond Alaska and the Yukon. Buddy didn’t necessarily help the situation. He refused to play in “bars or pizza places, because no one’s listening.” And to say his self-deprecating way of being did not lend itself to self-promotion is an understatement.
Buddy Tabor is still a household name in his adopted hometown, where he is missed. He gained some statewide recognition when his song “Get Up Dogs,” was used for ABC’s Wide World of Sports Iditarod coverage. But if you are from anywhere outside the region, you likely haven’t heard of Buddy Tabor. If you live in Juneau and are under 30, you probably haven’t heard of Buddy Tabor either.
A dozen years after his passing from lung cancer at the age of 63, Smith is one of a group of friends and musicians from Southeast Alaska determined to change that.
“It’s high art.,” said Smith. “Beautiful stuff. The fact that it is not world famous is no reflection on the strength of the songwriting and his voice.”
Buddy sang with a deep smoker’s voice and played guitar with a deft picking hand.
But it’s his lyrics that drew in lifelong devotees, like guitarist Jason Caputo, who accompanied Buddy for some performances and recordings. The song that got Caputo was Wait for Me.
“A glorious shiver of emotion ran through my body, and I’ve been a die-hard fan ever since,” he wrote in response to a 2010 blog post. The lyrics invoke a common theme for Buddy, that life is short, but there’s always the afterlife.
Wait for me when the darkness has fallen, and the night takes the light from the day/Wait for me when I’ve stumbled and fallen/Wait for me if I lose my way
In the music of Buddy Tabor, the next existential crisis is always around the corner.
“Happy songs depress me,” he often quipped.
In truth, his catalog is more varied, including funny songs, love ballads, and political polemics. Songs like Corporate Domination and Brand New Jesus still speak to current and ever-expanding societal divisions.
A cover of one of his songs is already getting positive attention on a national level.
Josh Fortenberry’s cover of New Fallen Snow, a song Buddy wrote for Townes Van Zandt, is on his recently released debut No Such Thing as Forever and getting strong reviews from the lower 48 to across the pond. In a review in the online publication Americana Byways, reviewer Andrew Gulden deemed it the song he’d most love to hear live, for its “amazing fiddle, mandolin and slide guitar as Fortenbery honors the late singer songwriter.”
The record was co-produced, recorded and mixed by Smith who also plays slide guitar on the album. He suggested Fortenbery cover a Buddy Tabor song and sent him all his albums.
“I was working through his discography and totally blown away,” recalls Fortenbery. “His songs are up there with any singer songwriter I’ve heard from anywhere. He’s 100% a poet. Just stories of everyday people. My favorite kind of singer songwriter is a John Prine or Townes Van Zandt. They’re not using twenty-dollar words. They are writing songs in a language that anyone can understand, but they’ve never heard it before. That is such a skill. And Buddy had that in spades for sure.”
Buddy made little money from his music in his lifetime. But he did receive payment in the form of appreciation, especially from his community, and the prisoners he performed for and worked with. A 2004 interview I did with him for KTOO public radio was aired by a fellow volunteer DJ from California. A doctor who worked at Folsom prison heard it and thought Buddy would be a good fit for an artists in the prison program.
Johnny Cash famously played once for prisoners at Folsom. Between 2005 and 2011, Buddy Tabor made an annual pilgrimage to the notorious facility.
Guy Tabor hitchhiked to Alaska from Roanoke, Virginia, in 1967. According to his obituary, at first working for the Post Office, the Alaska Railroad and the TransAlaska oil pipeline.
In Juneau he painted houses for a living.
Three decades after he arrived in Alaska, Buddy put out his first album, Meadowlark. Hyperaware of his mortality, he released a new CD every eighteen months or so over the next 15 years. On the cold full moon night of February 5, 2012, accompanied by his immediate and musical family, Buddy Tabor passed onto the other side.
In the end, he’d written more than one hundred songs, about two-thirds of them produced and recorded. I interviewed him for the last time six weeks before he passed on. I asked Buddy what kind of musical legacy he’d like to leave behind.
“That’ll be up to you guys to decide what survives and what doesn’t,” he said.
Katie Bausler is a writer and podcaster. Published written work includes columns, poems and essays in publications including the Alaska Beacon, Alaska Dispatch, Edible Alaska, Wildheart, Stoneboat, Tidal Echoes, Cape, Cirque, and Insider. She also hosts and produces the 49 Writers "Active Voice" podcast with writers and artists on these pivotal times, writes a newsletter focused on alpine skiing, and is a volunteer public radio DJ and host. She previously worked as a public media host, reporter and producer. She is working on a collection of essays and poems, working title: "Live Like You’re Dying." Katie and her husband Karl live near their children and grandchildren on Douglas Island along a saltwater alpine fjord in Juneau, Alaska’s capital.