TERRE HAUTE —
If you didn’t come early, the seats were hard to find.
Organizers of the 19th Annual Wabash Valley Musicians Hall of Fame induction banquet found themselves blessed with the mixed gift of a packed house Sunday afternoon. The dining room of V.F.W. Post 972 was packed to its capacity of 400 shortly after the noon kickoff, and more were streaming through the door, steered to the clubroom which could contain up to 250.
Andrew Hayes, now in his second year as chairman of the organization’s board of directors, said he hated to see people turned away at the door, but the event’s growing popularity is certainly a positive.
“I think part of it is the group going in and the other part is people saying year after year, ‘Oh, I want to go to that,’ ” he said of the sellout crowd.
The Class of 2012 ranged from attorneys to custodians, with musical genres spanning jazz to rock.
Eligibility requirements for induction include 25 years of professional work and a minimum age of 50. Many members spent a career traveling the Nashville circuit before returning home to retire, Hayes said. More yet manage double lives, working ordinary jobs by day and rocking the clubs at night.
Up to his waist in legal briefs these days, former Clay County Circuit Court Judge Bob Pell once laid down the law with a guitar, well before graduating from Indiana University’s School of Law in Indianapolis.
“When I was a kid, I had a baritone ukulele and that got me started,” Pell, one of Sunday’s inductees, said that afternoon.
Seeing “Paul Revere and The Raiders” perform helped inspire him, and soon he was working on guitars and a saxophone. While in the fifth grade, he and classmate Henry Lee Swartz formed a band called “The Piranhas.”
Swartz went on to perform under the professional name “Henry Lee Summer,” scoring national recording contracts with hits such as “I Wish I Had A Girl.”
But as “The Piranhas,” the future rock star and his attorney buddy couldn’t get a class of 10-year-olds to bite at the talent they were sure they had.
“We were really bad,” Pell laughed inside the VFW. “Really bad.”
But those relationships continued and Pell played with Swartz through high school and college, also hooking up with fellow Brazil resident Ric Jeffries, who was likewise inducted into the Hall of Fame Sunday. Along the way, Pell played with “Eddie and the Motivators,” a 1950s tribute band, and he still performs with the Jackson Township Band and Brazil Concert Band.
“There’s always been bands,” he said. “Brazil’s always been that way.”
Hayes said stories such as Pell’s are what make the organization great.
“Bob Pell is a musician. He might be a lawyer today, but back in the day, he was in those old garage bands with guys like Henry Lee Swartz, who became Henry Lee Summer, and Ric Jeffries.”
Many of the musicians credited early childhood experiences as prompting them toward what would become a passion.
Fellow inductee Jim Rasley said his family has always been musical, and explained his mother started him in piano lessons by age 7 because she’d never been able to take them when she was young.
“So that’s where it all started,” he said, adding his sister has performed in church orchestras for 40 years, meeting her husband, an operatic singer, while the two were in music school.
Music earned Rasley a scholarship to Butler University and today he can play anything with strings, he said.
“Music has always been my life,” the Ivy Tech Community College instructor of computer technology said. As a youth, Rasley performed in New York City and the World Fair, advancing his way through genres ranging from country to jazz, his favorite.
The connection people experience while playing music is what life’s all about, he said, crediting his ivory-tickling mother, Berniece, and harmonica-toting dad, Don, as instrumental in his bringing his own son, Eric, into the field.
Sunday’s ceremony was a celebration of the “vibrant music community” found in Terre Haute, he said.
“It’s a great honor. There’s nothing like getting recognized by your peers,” he said.
Brian Boyce can be reached at 812-231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com.
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