On tour with the age-defying Carol Bailey String Band of Litchfield

It’s the middle of a day on a Tuesday, but the Elks Lodge on Route 126 in Gardiner is rocking.

The band is playing loud and the fans are into it. A few climb onto chairs to take pictures of the action. Others dance among the tables, while most are content to sit in their chairs and tap their feet.

It’s a lively affair and, unless you’re checking IDs, it’s easy to forget that these are senior citizens. It’s seniors playing for seniors, in fact, but the room is no less raucous because of it.

“I didn’t have any Christmas spirit at all until they started to play,” says Dolores McKenzie, who, at 64, is among the youngest in the place. “They have so much energy, they bring that spirit out of you. They’re just amazing.”

Amazing indeed. The Carol Bailey String Band, out of Litchfield, is comprised of 25 men and women in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Some have played their instruments their whole lives. Others had to start fresh, learning to play from scratch with the help of their beloved band director Patricia Bailey.

“This,” says Bailey, “is a remarkable group. They’ve had careers, raised children and run households. Now they have a little time and they’re using that time to make music. They do it to make other seniors happy.”

Take Verna Hobart, for instance. She was playing guitar 10 years before Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was even born. The 93-year-old Litchfield woman recalls practicing music with her sister in a neighbor’s greenhouse just a few years after the end of World War I. She started in grammar school, and later, after she’d married, Hobart and her sister played the local Grange halls.

“When my husband got out of the service, I had to put it away for a while,” she says. “I had twin boys so I didn’t get to play much anymore.”

Then the boys grew up – they’re 69 now – and Hobart pulled her guitar out of storage and dusted it off. What do you know? She still knew how to play. Mostly, though, she loves to sing, and it shows.

“I tell people, you don’t know how to make your own fun,” Hobart says. “That’s what we do now. We make our own fun. Everybody has a good-old time.”

Nearby is Russ Thayer, a 73-year-old retired minister with a great basso voice. It came into play in particular that day on the band’s rendition of “Buffalo Boy.”

“God gave me a loud voice,” Thayer says. “I don’t know if it’s a good voice, but it’s a loud one.”

Thayer plays the small bass, which is a bit of a marvel considering that two years ago, he didn’t really know what a small bass was.

“I do have a music background,” Thayer says, “but as a trombone player. I didn’t play stringed instruments at all.”

When he was invited to join the band, Thayer figured he better teach himself to play those strings and quickly.

“I got myself a good bass and just took it from there,” he says.

Joyce Drew can relate. The 71-year-old West Gardiner resident had absolutely no musical experience at all when the Carol Bailey String Band got off the ground six years ago.

“I never even picked up an instrument,” Drew says. “But I wanted to play, so I asked my husband if I could borrow his guitar.”

Drew credits Patricia Bailey with teaching her how to play. Several people credit Bailey, as it turns out, but Bailey deflects the praise and insists her band mates play because they were motivated to do so.

“You aren’t going to learn,” says Bailey, a retired school teacher, “unless you really want it.”

Drew wanted it and now she’s playing that guitar like it’s been with her for a lifetime.

“The strings were really hard on my fingers at first, but once my fingers toughened up, I was OK,” Drew says. “It’s so much fun. Even when you mess up, it’s fun. There are so many of us, the audience can’t really tell if one of us goofs. There’s safety in numbers.”

“Plus,” says Thayer, the bass player, “people don’t expect much from us seniors.”

That may be true, but the audience of three dozen at the Elk’s Lodge seemed genuinely wowed by the polished sound – not to mention the energy – of the traveling string band.

“They’re so awesome,” gushes Laurie Saunders, director of the Richmond Golden Oldies and the Gardiner Oldies But Goodies seniors groups. “They energize the audience and make everyone a part of the show. And they’re all seniors, so that makes it even better.”

Carol Bailey: Gone but not forgotten

The band launched roughly six years ago as part of the Litchfield Senior Center. Carol Bailey, who spent 35 years teaching and coaching in Massachusetts, helped create the center after she retired to Litchfield in 1991. Bailey (no relation to Patricia Bailey, as it turns out) felt that the members of the center needed a reason to get out and about more – not to mention a way to entertain and assist other seniors across the region.

“She had always talked about having some kind of music program,” said Patricia Sobeleski, the current director of the Litchfield Senior Center.

Because this is a can-do type of group, they got the band off the ground, although it was touch and go for a while. While membership was up to 25 by the time they played their gig in Gardiner, it wasn’t always so robust.

“We started out with just seven,” said guitarist Drew. “Then three dropped out. After that, we started growing and we’ve just gotten bigger.”

Bigger, indeed. According to Sobeleski, the band has performed at a multitude of places, including Bolster Heights and Clover Manor in Auburn, and St. Mary’s d’Youville Pavilion and the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston.

They perform at Alzheimer’s care centers, seniors homes, Grange halls and at festivals up and down the coast. Mostly they play for seniors, but “we go wherever we’re wanted,” Sobeleski said.

The band performs sometimes two or three shows a week. All their shows are free, although they do accept donations.

How do they get around? They have a 15-passenger mini-bus they call “The Roadrunner” complete with logo.

Carol Bailey passed away in 2010, just as the group she helped form was picking up steam. They kept the name in her honor. 

Patricia Bailey, a career teacher and musician, took over as director and is universally credited with getting more seniors on board and sharpening their musical abilities – teaching some of them from scratch.

There’s nothing old about this group

Back in Gardiner, the audience seems to get more energized as the hour-long show progresses. A few sing along to “Jingle Bells,” tentatively at first. A woman in her 80s is tapping her foot and singing when she becomes suddenly self-conscious. She peers sheepishly to her left, where a white-haired man in a cowboy hat is singing loudly and swaying back and forth. To her right, a woman is drumming her fingers on the table and also singing.

Seeing that everyone else is doing the same emboldens the first woman, and she starts to sing more loudly.

Most of the songs are familiar to the audience. Everybody knows the words to “Pretty Paper,” “Merrily on High” and “Buffalo Gals,” and most sing along.

A number of the songs were written by Patricia Bailey herself. Before launching into them, she explains to the audience how the songs came to be — songs like “The Snow Day Song,” which she wrote about her years as a school teacher.

“Teachers got even more excited about snow days than the students did,” Bailey tells them. “And even though we don’t have any snow yet this year, we know it’s coming.”

The audience first groans, then laughs, then starts foot-tapping and head-bobbing all over again.

When the band plays the lively and comic “Buffalo Boy,” the men in the band throw on cowboy or trapper hats, while the ladies pull wedding veils over their heads. Everyone is in constant motion, either playing instruments or shaking maracas and tambourines.

“I have a lot of energy, so I have to move around a lot,” says 77-year-old Dot Vachon of Lewiston.

Her vigor is impressive, all right, but so is the fact that she started out on the fiddle and worked her way up to the mandolin, all with no musical background whatsoever.

“I’d never done anything like this,” Vachon says.

Same with Eileen Guenette Turcotte, a 71-year-old Litchfield woman who missed the Wednesday afternoon gig because she was laid up with a broken leg — no, she didn’t break it in a fall off the stage during a rambunctious guitar solo; she slipped on wet leaves.

Although Turcotte played the bugle as a teenager, like the others, she took on the awesome task of learning to play a new instrument later in life because she liked the idea of being part of the band.

“I started playing a keyboard two years ago,” Turcotte says. “I found it too heavy to carry around, so now I play a ukulele. It ‘s very exhilarating to be part of this group. You feel alive when you sing and play an instrument.”

Then you have Mary and Harold Blen, a husband-and-wife team from Gardiner. She plays the spoons and maracas, he plays the four-string banjo. Everybody has a part in the feisty performance, whether the band is playing “Nuttin’ for Christmas” or “Feliz Navidad.”

If anybody is shy up on the stage, it doesn’t show.

“I can’t imagine,” says Bailey, “that they ever thought they’d be singing these songs in multiple languages, playing instruments some of us had never even heard of and doing it all in public.”

Arthur J. Bonenfant, 84, is chairman of the local chapter of AARP. He’s one of the brave souls who climbed onto a chair during the show in order to get a better photo. He couldn’t help himself. He enjoys the kind of performance that the Carol Bailey String Band produces. This was the fourth time he’d seen them play and he’s pretty sure he’ll see them again.

“They’re an amazing group,” Bonenfant said. “A beautiful group.”