The Catskill Chronicle

Story by Carol Montana, Photos by Leni Santoro, Kathy Lounsbury and Carol Montana

Grahamsville, NY – “There’s something about living in Wyoming … I was just writing music all the time,” says Grahamsville resident Paul Lounsbury.

Now his, friends, family and fans can hear that music and more in Lounsbury’s first CD From My Perspective, released this past November.

Lounsbury is that rare breed, a Sullivan County native. He grew up on his family’s farm at the top of Columbia Hill in Hurleyville and attended Monticello Schools. “My family were dairy farmers, here since the 1700s .”

After graduating high school, Lounsbury attended SUNY Farmingdale during the Vietnam War. “The only lottery I ever won was the 1970 draft lottery. They picked your birthday and assigned a number to it – mine was 5. While in college, the army called me for my physical. I went to the Whitehall Street Army Induction Center (made famous in Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant) where you get infected, detected and selected.” He was given a 4-F because of his “horrible flat feet.”

Graduating with a two-year degree in Electronics Technology, Lounsbury came back home and worked installing cable TV systems for awhile, then got a job with NYSEG as a field engineer.

Getting married changed his life in more ways than one. “My wife always wanted to go west. Prior to going, I sent out resumes to power companies out there. We flew into Billings, MT, started driving south and got to Casper Wyoming, where I eventually got a job with Pacific Power and Light.”

Up till the 1960s, there hadn’t been any musicians in the Lounsbury family. Even when he was in 4^th grade, none of the instruments available in the school band appealed to Lounsbury. But in the 60s, with the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul and Mary, “that’s when the music clicked for me. My parents got me my first guitar from Jamesway when I was 14 or 15.”

His parents also got him a beginning guitar book, but it wasn’t quite what he had in mind. “I didn’t want to play Polly Wolly Doodle. I wanted to play Bob Dylan …” During lunch break at school, Lounsbury would hang out at Bill Sedlack’s appliance store on Broadway in Monticello, where they also sold records and sheet music.

One day, “there on the rack was Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, a big hit at that time. … I opened it up and over the music were chord diagrams. … At the end of that night I could play a D, G and an A chord.”

Lounsbury kept going back for more. “Eventually Murray Snyder’s Music Store came along and I bought music from him.” Lounsbury and his best friend, Stuart Kabak started performing in school talent shows.

Fast forward to 1977 Wyoming where Lounsbury started getting paid gigs. “Every Wednesday night, I’d play for a couple of hours in a restaurant and I’d get $10 and dinner.”

And he took a couple of classes – Fundamentals of Music and Sight Singing at a community college. During that time, Lounsbury first heard the music of John Denver. “We were soul mates. I’d sit down and play my guitar and sing right along with him.”

Denver wasn’t the only one Lounsbury played with. Next-door neighbor Leroy Haygood would play his fiddle on the front porch, joined by Lounsbury’s guitar and tape recorder. “I’d record all these old-time fiddle tunes. And Leroy would say ‘Well this is in the key of D.’ And I’d think ‘well one of these chords is D.’ But the others, no clue. Leroy was very patient and that inspired me to take those classes.”

Lounsbury got his first fiddle, and started writing songs. Again, “John Denver was a big influence – the purity of his voice and guitar, and he sang about beautiful things … a celebration of life …” Gordon Lightfoot was also a big influence.

Not long after he started with the fiddle, Lounbury’s first daughter was born. And while he and his wife loved Wyoming, they were homesick. “We didn’t have a lot of money, and just couldn’t get home to see the family. I wanted my family to know my kids and vice versa. Wyoming was a lot of fun, but family’s more important.”

In 1978, the Lounsburys came home, bought a house in Grahamsville in ‘79 following year, and went through a divorce in the mid-80s.

Sometime after that, Lounsbury and Kabak were at The Towne Crier in Beacon. “I saw this guy playing this big weird thing with little hammers,” says Lounsbury. I’d never heard a hammer dulcimer before. … the next turning point in my life.”

He started collecting more music and a couple of hammer dulcimers. “Every instrument has a different sound – like people,” he says.

In the ensuing years, Lounsbury met, wooed and married Kathy, his wife of 20 years. She jokes that they “waited a whole year before we got married – went through every holiday just to see how things went.”

In November of 2009, Lounsbury finally felt he had a “bunch of songs I considered keepers.” Primarily as a legacy for his kids and grandkids, he wanted to put them on a CD. “I don’t get to play most of these songs … people don’t hear them. Some my kids had never heard. They thought someone else had written them …”

Lounsbury’s knew that his friend Larry Kitzmiller had purchased a music engineering program for his computer. “The opportunity to do the recording came this past November when Kathy and her mom announced they wanted to go up to Ogunquit, Maine for a week.”

The CD took about a month to produce. “The actual recording is sometimes the easy part,” says Lounsbury, who performed guitar, fiddle, hammer dulcimer and vocals, as well as dogs and cats on the album. Kitzmiller accompanied with his guitar on some songs, and his wife Ellen played flute for one cut. The mixing and editing, Kitzmiller did in his spare time.

Lounsbury’s songs come “from my left ventricle, my right ventricle,” he says. Some songs, such as All I Have is Really All I Need, are inspired by personal experience. “I was working at Schmidt’s, we didn’t have a whole lot money, my girls were babies, we had this little old Toyota station wagon … everything was tough that year. The spring behind this house dried up …” And so the lyrics “my spring went dry no water would my faucet give to me” – “need new tires on the car, there’s no money in the cookie jar” – “can’t afford to pay the rent, gave the Arabs my last cent.”

Sweet Jack is about Lounsbury’s grandson; Punky’s March is named after Kathy who reminds him of Punky Brewster, and Kathy’s Garden was written after visualizing his wife skipping through her flower garden, then doing a circle dance with the cat and dog.

“It makes me feel loved, I think it’s very sweet that he’s done that for me,” says Kathy, who tells that her husband actually asked her to skip around the house.

And now a new visualization has inspired Lounsbury. “Now we have grandchildren and Kathy could spin with them instead of the cat and the dog, so someday I’d love to do a little video of that song and have our grandkids spinning among the flowers.”

He’d also like to do a video of Dog Hair, inspired by a Golden Retriever he had in Wyoming. The current Lounsbury canine is Mattie – a sweet medium-sized black and white dog who graces the front cover of Lounsbury’s CD. Kathy jokes that they could “just let things go for a couple of weeks” and the video would almost make itself.

Catskill Mountain Trilogy was inspired by stories Lounsbury heard as a child, his grandfather’s work for the ice company owned by O & W Railroad, and Manville Wakefield’s book To the Mountains by Rail. “I just love railroads,” says Lounsbury, who has performed the song at O & W Day and the Sullivan Renaissance Award Ceremony, among other places.

The first part of the trilogy, which he wrote in one day, is Lounsbury’s grandfather telling of the railroad’s construction and foreseeing that things were changing. Part II is about the heyday of the resorts, and all the people coming up on the train. And Part III is Lounsbury’s father completing the story, as he drives around seeing the remains of a once thriving industry.

Lounsbury made a video of the song with the assistance of Mountaindale’s Barbara Schmitt. “I put it on DVD and John Conway wrote a nice article in his Perspective column in the Sullivan County Democrat. I started getting requests and mailed out over 200 all over the country,” reports Lounsbury. About three years ago, he put it on YouTube. Recent stats indicate over 6900 people have viewed it. It’s such a popular video that the O & W Historical society has a separate page just for Lounsbury’s work on their Web site.

Lounsbury and his wife are very religious. “My main driving force is to just share what God has given me through my music, share my stories,” says Lounsbury. In fact, he mentions “the Lord” in several songs on the CD, including one he calls Psalm Potpourri .

His stories aren’t the only thing Lounsbury shared on the CD. He also collaborated on the cover with students in the Advertising and Design class taught by Leslie Huppke at Tri-Valley School. Every year the class creates a CD liner, but it’s always been for a fictitious client. So Kathy, who was Huppke’s colleague in the Art Department, came up with the idea of letting Leslie’s class do the cover.

Huppke had the students listen to the CD and write down emotions, colors, etc. “Just to get them to feel the music,” says Lounsbury. Then Kathy took a whole bunch of photos, and, along with some they already had, sent them to the class. Lounsbury visited the class, and played some cuts off the CD. “They’d never seen a dulcimer before,” he reports. And he told them “I’m looking for simple but elegant.”

Two weeks later, Huppke showed the Lounsburys 14 entries. “We spread them all out and we did a score sheet,” says Lounsbury. “We got it down to four finalists. It was really tough to choose. This one had the wow factor,” says Lounsbury pointing to the cover they chose.

It was designed by senior Brendan Moore. “I sent a letter home to Brendan with a copy of the CD. He was very touched and flattered by that. I found out later that he never opened the CD – he left it in the cellophane. I had to give his stepfather Joe another copy that I pre-opened so he could listen to it. It was like me saving my original Woodstock tickets.”

Moore will be attending Hudson Valley Community College in the Fall. He wants to take his liberal arts classes there, then transfer to a four-year school, possibly to study Advertising Design.

When he first heard Lounsbury’s CD, he says he thought of “Grahamsville and big mountains.”

The funny thing is that, because Moore had studied with Kathy Lounsbury prior to her retirement, he knew what she would like and designed it to please her, using the program Photo Shop.

To his surprise, his tactic worked. “I had seen some pretty good designs from the other kids,” says Moore, who thought the “project was fun, especially the whole idea that it’s not just a school assignment – people are actually going to buy it and see it.”

Future plans for the Lounsburys include traveling to Texas to visit their new granddaughter and a trip out West. “I’d like go to Caspar, Wyoming where many of his songs were written,” says Kathy.

Whatever the Lounsburys do, they will carry their upbeat attitude with them. Kathy and I walk very closely with the Lord, and He gives us great joy. We’re so blessed with our life.”

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Paul Lounsbury’s CD From My Perspective can be purchased by sending a check for $15 (includes shipping and handling) to 237 River Road, Grahamsville NY 12740. You can reach Paul at: paullounsbury@yahoo.com, or by calling him at 845-985-2923. Lounsbury says if you order right now, he’ll throw in a complimentary hairball as a companion to the song Dog Hair.

To see the video of Catskill Mountain Trilogy go to: http://www.youtube.com/user/paullounsbury#p/a/u/0/ZzKeuTAJBgM