A couple years ago Sue Boydston decided to tear down her garage. Traffic had decreased since her husband, Bob, died of cancer in December 1999. Bob Boyd, as he was professionally known, was the rhythm guitarist of the popular country-and-western trio the Sundowners, who between 1959 and 1989 played five nights a week at the various incarnations of the Bar R R Ranch in the Loop. When the Sundowners weren’t gigging, they could often be found in Bob’s garage.
Rice took home three carloads of reels and meticulously transferred the music into the digital recording program Pro Tools. Many of the tapes disintegrated as they played, but he trimmed up those that survived, cutting out dead air and performances by other bands. Everything that was left–about 28 hours of music–is now housed at the Old Town School of Folk Music’s Resource Center.
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“There were lots of surprises. Bob used to sing much higher. He had his tonsils taken out in 1967 and his voice dropped. They reworked a lot of the trio [parts]. And Curt [Delaney]’s steel guitar work is phenomenal. They played an awful lot of Hawaiian music in the early days. Listening to the tapes was a lot of fun. You could hear what a bar in the Loop sounded like in 1960.”
Bob told me in 1997 how the new band chose its name. “One night we were going to work and the Robert Mitchum movie The Sundowners was playing at the Clark Theater, which was next door,” he said. “It was on the marquee. The movie was about Australian sheepherders. In Australia a sundowner is a guy who gets a job on a sheep farm. They feed him and give him his bunk and everything. When morning comes and it’s time to work, he’s gone.”
Rice is an alumnus of another local roots institution, the Special Consensus bluegrass band, and has played with everybody who’s anybody in Chicago country and roots rock–from the Insiders and the Jump ‘n the Saddle Band to Freakwater and the Waco Brothers. Recently he’s backed Nashville singer-songwriter Pat McLaughlin and soul legend Mavis Staples. He says the Sundowners have taught him an important lesson: “If you’re going to enjoy working, you better be working with real good friends. If you look at the photos from the early period, you can see they’re the tightest of buddies. [On the tapes] there wasn’t one cussword or any moment when any of those guys were talking down to each other at all.”
Fulks nodded toward a speaker through which Bob was singing the folk classic “Tom Dooley” over a country-western shuffle. “You can hear it now,” he said. “You can’t put it on. Nobody can pretend to do this. It is beautiful. The first song I heard them play was ‘The Gambler’ by Kenny Rogers. Even the stupid songs grabbed me.”
