Harley Brumbaugh can’t hear the 1950s hit song “Dear Hearts and Gentle People,” without a twinge of nostalgia.
“For me, ‘Dear Hearts’ really has a feeling,” says Brumbaugh, North Bend’s longtime resident bandleader. The song reminds him of a home and a community that disappeared long ago.
In 1959, as a homecoming Army trombonist, Brumbaugh couldn’t wait to visit his old neighbors in the company town of Snoqualmie Falls.
But as he found out, “there was no Snoqualmie Falls there,” Brumbaugh said. “They had moved the town.”
The Weyerhaeuser-built company town was dismantled that year. Employees, like Brumbaugh’s parents, had the option to move their homes, via a trestle bridge into Snoqualmie proper, and many did. Those homes, much altered, still stand in the former Williams addition downtown. It gave people a chance to start over, build equity, and some got to keep their familiar neighbors in a new neighborhood. The moment was a signal experience in Snoqualmie’s history.
But the young Brumbaugh took it hard.
“That was devastating to me,” he said. “They didn’t have a choice.” His hometown had vanished forever.
Happy or sad, music has always been a big part of Brumbaugh’s life. Since his teen years, he’s earned a living by it, playing in big bands, serving in an Army band, teaching students the art of music, directing civic bands and choirs. “If music is going on, my ear is directly drawn to it,” he says.
Songs of the 50s still have a significance for Brumbaugh, who experienced that watershed decade as a budding professional musician.
He’s been tapped to present songs of that era in a community singalong, “The Fabulous 50s,” as part of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society’s annual meeting. It’s the second year that Brumbaugh will lead the singalong, which packed Boxley’s club in downtown North Bend with more than 200 guests, last year to remember songs of the 1940s.
He will call out birthdays, integrate local events and use music to draw his audience into history.
In it, standards like “Stardust” mingle with “Rock Around the Clock,” and the ‘Duck and Cover’ slogan meets “Don’t be Cruel.”
Changing times
Out of 38 songs Brumbaugh chose for the show, the one voted most popular by the society board is “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley, which hit number one in 1958. It’s miles away from Brumbaugh’s swing-band origins, and illustrates how American music changed in the 1950s.
By the mid-century, vinyl records had come to the fore, replacing the older, fragile 78-rpms discs.
“This introduced the possibility of albums on record,” said Brumbaugh. Forty-five-rpm singles and 33-rpm long-playing albums gave people new ways to listen to music, and, combined with the jukebox, “it replaced the big bands.”
“The recording industry switched,” he said. “After the war, a lot of bands disbanded.”
Meanwhile, television could bring a band right into your home.
“Hit Parade came on weekly and would play the top 10 songs of the previous week,” Brumbaugh said.
People started buying records by individual artists instead of just songs. And radio deejays discovered the lucrative potential of the teenage music market. Rock and roll burst on the scene.
“The music changed drastically, particularly in 1954, with Buddy Holly’s ‘Rock Around The Clock,'” Brumbaugh said. Rock was still rhythm and blues.
Snapping his fingers, Brumbaugh sings a few bars of Elvis’s “Hound Dog.”
“That was really the old swing beat,” he said. But soon, rock started going in its own direction.
There had been music fads before. But Elvis Presley burst a bubble, and his many imitators made sure rock was here to stay.
“It appealed to the young,” Brumbaugh said. “The younger jockeys found they had a captivated audience if they played rock music. They made it accessible. They would have sock hops at schools.”
When rock came in, at the same time, cool jazz was making inroads on the west coast. “It became concertized, it moved away from the dance halls.” Jazz players “didn’t want to be considered entertainers.” They considered themselves artists, Brumbaugh said. “It was an exciting time, but in a way, it caught everybody off balance.”
In college, Brumbaugh formed his own dance band, “Harley’s Hi-Fi’s.”
“High fidelity (stereos) had just come in,” he said. “We thought, ‘Boy, that’s going to be one swinging name.'”
They played college dances in Ellensburg, Wash., and went live every Saturday night in a broadcast from the Playland Ballroom in Yakima
“We would do a little more contemporary stuff, but mainly the big bands. That’s where we thought our future was,” Brumbaugh said. “There will still big bands being formed, but the dance halls were folding, turning into skate rinks and superstores.”
The home front
On the home front, the 50s were mostly peaceful, but there was quite a bit of change happening beneath the surface.
The Cold War was in full swing, and “In the back of a lot of people’s minds was, what’s going to happen with the atomic and hydrogen bombs? Let’s make the best of life as we can.
“Every once in a while, we would have an air raid (drill). Get under your desk and cover your head!” Brumbaugh remembered.
In 1950, Brumbaugh was a freshman in high school. He attended Central Washington University, and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1957, scoring high enough on his audition to join the Army’s permanent-cadre band as a trombone player.
“Not everybody went rock and roll,” Brumbaugh said. In the Army, in the late 50s, “we were still playing the big band stuff. We had the top musicians on the west coast. If you were 21, 22, you were ripe for the draft. These guys would go to Los Angeles to start their career, just get started, and the draft would get them.”
Brumbaugh considers himself fortunate that he got the band experience that he did in the ’50s. He went on to teach music in schools throughout the Eastside, founded the Bellevue College music program, founded the Voices of the Valley choir, and still leads the Snoqualmie United Methodist Church choir to this day.
Accompanied by Danny Kolke on piano, and perhaps with a bass player in tow, Brumbaugh loves leading the museum event. He thrives on “the communal feeling that music can bring.”
“People’s hearts get synchronized when they’re singing the same song,” said Brumbaugh. “It feeds the spirit.”
Remember that tune?
North Bend bandleader Harley Brumbaugh leads the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum’s singalong and meeting, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 26, at Boxley’s, downtown North Bend.
His musical selections for “The Fabulous 50s” are dozens of pop, rock and sing tunes, including:
1950: Rag Mop, My Heart Cries for You
1951: Hey Good Lookin’, Cold, Cold Heart
1953: P.S. I Love You, Rock Around the Clock
1954: I Left My Heart in San Francisco
1955: Wake the Town and Tell The People
1965: Que Sera Sera, Blueberry Hill
1959: Mack the Knife, The Sound of Music
