You could stink like a railcar bum or stink of Pomade hair grease. Didn't matter, because eventually you'd stink of booze and cigarettes, the odors that bound Missoulians at the hot, hot, hot corner of Woody and Alder streets.
Inside Jimmy Rose's Sunshine Bar, assuming you could push your way in, you'd stand toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, with everyone who was anyone in the Garden City. Society ladies. Well-heeled men in suit jackets. College kids. People who worked the land, people who rode the trains, people who shared little in common save one thing: their love of the country-fried hillbilly music radiating from the stage.
You were there or you were square. If you didn't get in, you stood on the street and listened anyway. And if you couldn't do that, you'd drive around in your car with your buddies, your radio tuned in to KXLL, the station that carried live Saturday broadcasts of the most happening band in town.
You just had to be there, somehow, in the presence of the Snake River Outlaws.
There's a pawnshop there now, a lawyer's office, a dog boutique, the City-County Health Department. Today, Woody and Alder is one of the quietest corners in downtown Missoula, even on a bustling business day.
But half a century ago, when night fell, you'd have to push and shove just to get a spot on the sidewalk.
Sure, you could wander over to the Maverick Bar, or turn the corner and quaff a few at the Silver Dollar, the other drinking options on what was considered Missoula's “skid row.”
But everyone knew the Sunshine Bar was the place to be. And the Snake River Outlaws made sure of it.
The four-piece country band - no drums, just fiddle, guitars and upright bass - had captured Missoula's heart and soul with the popular music of the era, the new country sound that the Grand Ole Opry had made famous in its radio broadcasts. Wedged between the big-band era and the coming age of rock 'n' roll, it was the dance music of the day, and it drove Missoulians absolutely bananas.
The Snake River Outlaws, four guys from Idaho, played it all - hundreds of country songs by the likes of Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, Gene Autry and dozens of others. And Lord, how Missoulians loved it.
“There was only room for like 75 people in that bar, so people would park all around the street, and if they couldn't get a parking spot, they'd just drive around and listen to the radio show,” said Scot Wilburn, son and nephew of two of the founding members, and today a professional steel guitarist.
The band had formed in Weiser, Idaho, in 1951 and toured regularly around the Northwest, but it was Missoula that became its home for years beginning in the spring of 1953, until the Outlaws slowly disbanded and devolved into fossilized memories of Missoula old-timers.
But in those glorious years, with Orval Fochtman on guitar and lead vocals, Jimmy Widner on fiddle, Harold Wilburn on bass, Vern Wilburn on guitar and “The Nightingale of Woody Street,” Ruby Wilburn, belting out a few tunes of her own, the Outlaws bonded Missoulians in a way they never had until Grizzly football came of age.
“They just really enjoyed the music,” said Ruby Wilburn, Vern Wilburn's widow, who now lives in Clarkston, Wash. “There was no seating room at all. It was just packed, six days a week.”
Ruby was the unofficial fifth member of the Outlaws, following her husband's band and taking a job waitressing at the Sunshine.
On occasion, the guys would invite their wives and girlfriends to sing a tune or two. Ruby, whom bar owner Jimmy Rose dubbed “The Nightingale of Woody Street,” was an instant smash.
Ruby's voice grows hoarse quickly these days, evident even in a short interview. And so she doesn't sing much anymore. But the Nightingale and the two surviving members of the Outlaws will be in Missoula on Sunday for a very special reunion as part of the River City Roots Festival.
This is as rootsy as it gets. The other two members - Fochtman, of Weiser, Idaho, and master fiddler Widner, who lives in Darby - will take the stage on Main Street, playing again together with the help of Wylie and the Wild West.
It was Scot Wilburn, a guitarist in the Wild West, and band namesake Wylie Gustafson (the yodeler in those “Yahoo!” ads) who made this all possible, happening one day on some old recordings of the Snake River Outlaws that have painstakingly been turned into a new CD.
“I never knew what celebrities they were in that era,” said Scot Wilburn.
He wouldn't have, really. His father Harold didn't speak much about his time in Missoula, and had shed his country-western attire for the clothes of a sawmill worker.
In fact, were it not for Orval Fochtman, the Snake River Outlaws would likely have been relegated to the dustbin of Missoula's history. Their time here was short - a couple years at the Sunshine, and, having lost two original members to career and family, five or six more in various places around Missoula.
It was Fochtman who brought along a tape recorder to the Outlaws' gigs at the Sunshine and later at the Chicken Inn toward East Missoula.
Back then, Fochtman stuck the recorder right in front of the stage, hoping to get a good enough recording of the evening to listen to later as a rehearsal tape for his bandmates.
“They were recorded right out of the club,” said Fochtman. “I designed it so you could record the tape through a microphone. Then if you wanted to record on the radio, you'd dial the station and turn the tape on.”
Fochtman recorded every show he could. Trouble was, the band never bought any new tape, so Fochtman kept recording over the previous recordings. Today, there are only six tapes remaining.
It was those six tapes - lo-fi, scratchy, riddled with background noise like clinking drinks and whoops and hollers - that Scot Wilburn discovered a couple years ago.
“I said, ‘Hey Wylie, come listen to this,' ” recalled Wilburn. “When I played the tapes for him, he just went completely crazy. He said, ‘We have to preserve this.' ”
But how? These recordings were - not to put too fine a point on it - simply awful. They needed some serious TLC.
And so Wylie Gustafson dug into his own pocket, and he and Wilburn sent the tapes off to Wolf Productions in Washington, D.C., where engineers began digitally filtering out the background noise and remastering the music.
“They were horrible and scratchy, with lots of white noise,” said Wilburn. “But Wolf Productions really brought out a lot of the musical instruments and masked a lot of that noise.”
What emerged were 20 surprisingly clean digital tracks of live performances in Missoula, syrupy cowboy ballads and upbeat honky-tonk jams. They're an important piece of not only Missoula's musical history, but of Western culture.
Even in digital form, the recordings might not have been heard again. But then the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nev., heard them.
The center, which preserves and documents Western culture and most famously sponsors the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, was wondering what to do with the remainder of a Paul G. Allen Foundation grant when the recordings landed on its lap.
It thrilled Western Folklife Center founder Hal Cannon, who said the project fit perfectly in the center's mission.
“One of the things that interested me is who all these people of all ages were there, crowding on Woody Street to hear live music,” he said. “It was such an interesting mix of people: college students, society people, loggers and hobos.”
The center, through its own Deep West Records label, further cleaned up the recordings and had 3,000 CDs pressed, complete with liner notes by Cannon and historical photos of the band.
The Paul G. Allen Foundation grant also allowed the center to produce a radio show (heard earlier this week on KUFM) and record video interviews with the surviving members.
And there was enough money left over for a reunion concert - taking place on Sunday in Missoula with Wylie and the Wild West.
For Cannon, the two-year project provided a visceral snapshot of not only night life in Missoula, but American culture following the agonies of World War II and the Korean War. The partying going on in Missoula was a prelude to more prosperous times.
“The Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War ... young people in 1953 were just ready to have fun,” he said. “Jimmy Widner said to me, ‘People just felt displaced.' After the war, people just didn't feel settled in. People wanted to have a big highball, listen to music and smoke cigarettes.”
And they did, six nights a week in Missoula - but especially on those hot, hot, hot Saturday nights, with the bar hopping and the radio blaring.
Every band has an ending, and so did the Snake River Outlaws.
Some say it was this new thing called television that took over people's Saturday nights. Other say it was the fact that Jimmy Rose got in legal trouble with the Sunshine, which was closed down in 1957.
But the Snake River Outlaws also hastened their last dance. Two of the members got married, and a few newborn babies - including Vern and Ruby's twins - didn't help things much.
“I got married at the time, and decided to move back to this country,” said Fochtman, who hasn't left Weiser, Idaho, since. While Fochtman continued to play music every now and again, mostly he did it for his kids and grandkids. He recently retired as a chauffeur for a funeral home.
Jimmy Widner also got married and left the band to work for the railroad. But his best musical days were yet to come: In the ensuing years, he won several national fiddle championships, and continues this day playing around Darby when he can.
Ruby and Vern Wilburn kept the band going in Missoula a while, hiring new musicians to fill the void. But it was clear the band's heyday had come and gone.
“Orval got married, Jimmy got married, and everybody started drifting,” said Ruby.
Vern Wilburn has since died.
Harold and Barbara Wilburn gave birth to Scot in Missoula - “My birth certificate actually says, ‘Father's place of employment: Sunshine Bar,' ” he said. They moved to Libby and raised their family. Harold died last year.
Surprisingly - or perhaps, not at all - the surviving members of the Snake River Outlaws don't visit Missoula much.
Fochtman said he hasn't been on Woody Street since the 1950s.
Ruby Wilburn has been through Missoula a few times, a stop on her occasional trips to Libby.
“It has changed so much,” she said.
It has. There is no more Sunshine. Half the band is gone. Whole lives have been lived since.
And we all know Missoula isn't the same town - not by a country mile.
Still, something real remains from those hot, hot, hot Saturday nights on Woody and Alder. And Ruby Wilburn holds on to them dearly.
“Memories, you know?”
Reporter Jamie Kelly can be reached at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
Dance like a bandit
The Snake River Outlaws' launch concert is from 1:45-3:15 p.m. on Sunday on West Main Street as part of the River City Roots Festival. Wylie and the Wild West, joined by original Outlaw members Jim Widner and Orval Fochtman, will perform.
From 3:30-5:30 p.m., there will be a “beer and lemonade” reception with the Outlaws, including an informal dance with music by Wylie and the Wild West, at the Missoula Art Museum, 335 N. Pattee St. From 3:30-4 p.m. at MAM, you can learn 1950s-style Western dance with Martha Jane Newby. All events are free and open to the public.
River City Roots Festival schedule
Saturday
10 a.m.-6 p.m. - juried art show
Noon-6 p.m. - children's activities in Caras Park
Noon-10 p.m. - Food court on Ryman Street
12:30-10:30 p.m. - Music on Main
Tom Catmull & the Clerics (Missoula) 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Mike Bader Blues Band (Missoula) 2-3 p.m.
Reverend Slanky (Missoula) 3:30-4:30 p.m.
South Austin Jug Band (Austin, Texas) 5-6 p.m.
Great American Taxi (Nederland, Colo.) 6:30-8 p.m.
Emmitt-Nershi Band (Colorado and Tennessee) 8:30-10:30 p.m.
Sunday
10 a.m.-6 p.m. - juried art show.
11 a.m.-1 p.m. - four-mile run
Noon-6 p.m. - children's activities in Caras Park
Noon-7 p.m. - food court on Ryman Street
11:15 a.m.-7:30 p.m. - Music on Main
David Boone (Missoula) 11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Broken Valley Road Show (Missoula) 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Wylie & the Wild West (Washington) - Snake River Outlaws CD Launch, 1:45-3:15 p.m.
Martha Scanlan & the Stewart Brothers (Johnson City, Tenn.) 5-7 p.m.
The Clumsy Lovers (British Columbia) 5:30-7:30 p.m.
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