Tuesday, June 18, 2024
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Idaho is rich in history, but not many of us are familiar with our state’s heritage. One man, Gary Eller, wants to change that.
“I believe you can learn something useful for today by understanding what happened in the past,” said Eller. “I think if you understand where you came from, you have a better chance of doing a better job going forward.”
Eller grew up in rural West Virginia, got multiple degrees, and made his way to New Mexico.
“I worked at Los Alamos National Lab in nuclear science and engineering for 30 years and then retired up here in 2004. I thought I’d be running rivers all the time but instead, I’m playing music,” said Eller. “I found a fantastic music scene in Idaho. It’s the finest I’ve ever been around, and I’ve lived in a lot of places in the US.”
Music is Eller’s lifelong passion and he’s interested in a very specific genre.
“I like songs about actual events and actual people that lived in Idaho before radio came out in 1923,” said Eller. “I don’t see a reason to make up an event because truth is stranger than fiction.”
Eller says he is interested in poems and songs before the year 1923 because that’s when mass production of records became available to the public.
“Nobody had recorded anything in Idaho, and they didn’t until about 1950, believe it or not. The people here started hearing songs that were recorded by the Carter family in Virginia and Jimmie Rodgers in Mississippi and so on,” said Eller. “My theory is they dropped their music and started copying other people, and that continues to this day in Idaho.”
Eller maintains an admiration for traditional storytelling and hopes to keep it alive.
“Now if you listen to the radio, you have no idea where the song came from. In fact, the band members may never have met, you might have a bass player from Chicago and a drummer from LA and a guitarist from Nashville,” said Eller. “Those songs today are not handed down by oral tradition.”
To find and preserve these old songs, Eller spends a lot of time in museums, archives and libraries.
“I read wildly, I’ve read just about every historical book that’s been published on Idaho,” said Eller. “Songs were never preserved in Idaho, almost uniquely among the lower 48 states. The only way you’re going to find them is to get into libraries and old museums and things like that, and so here we are 200 songs later.”
Eller chronicles historical events by writing books that come with CDs. He is currently working on his twentieth book, each available for purchase by emailing him at olslim47@gmail.com.
“When I write these booklets, I try to make them well documented so if people want to take a deeper dive into the story it makes it easy for them,” said Eller. “Maybe you can stimulate some interest in somebody to say, ‘Well, I want to learn more. Who was that guy?'”
Eller says the booklets allow deeper context for stories that simply can’t fit into a 3-minute song.
“My heart is preserving these old songs, I think it’s worth doing,” said Eller. “My first preference is to find a song written back in the day by somebody who was involved or knew what they were talking about. Failing that, I find one of my singer-songwriter friends from around Idaho who knows what they’re talking about in the story and try to talk them into recording it for more authenticity. Then the last resort is that I write the song. I’d rather find the song written back in the day and find somebody from the area where this event took place to record it, but sometimes that doesn’t happen.”
While he admits it was unintentional, Eller is getting people interested in Idaho history by turning past events into catchy songs.
“I’ve found that telling stories and music is magic. I mean, I can go give a lecture on the event I just described, right? I probably do an okay job, but if I add that in a structured song, with some lines that are designed for people to remember, and they walk away with a sentence or two or even a phrase that they remember, you’re in communications, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
Eller is currently working on a project about Idaho’s Poet-Prospector, Clarence E. Eddy.
“I’m finishing up a 276-page book that I’ve been working on for 17 years about Idaho’s Poet-Prospector, who wrote five books of poetry and song in this lifetime,” said Eller. “It’s amazing and there are hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles by and about him coast to coast.”
The passion Eller has for preserving Idaho’s history is evident.
“I’ve been in just about every library, museum, large and small in the state of Idaho, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them,” said Eller. “There’s always more stuff to find out there.”
Eller has more stories to tell and songs to write, but he can’t do it alone.
“If somebody has a poem or song from the early days, and I mean before 1923, I’m very interested in seeing that.”
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