Spencer Bohren was “a genuine American folk hero,” New Orleans musician Paul Sanchez said.
He was a hero to Sanchez since he was 19 and saw Bohren on a local magazine cover in a 1940s-syle suit with a Stetson pushed back on his head.
“And it was this great story about how he traveled the country playing his songs, his way,” Sanchez said. “He had his wife with him and they had their kids they were homeschooling, and I just thought, that’s my hero. That’s who I want to be.”
Casper native Bohren, who traveled the globe performing and was a staple in New Orleans music, died June 8. He’s remembered as a musician regarded highly around the world as a storyteller, educator and “road scholar” who connected with others musically and personally.
A memorial took place Sunday in New Orleans.
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Bohren shared his adventures and his truth with audiences in the spirit of oral tradition and storytelling, said musician Inda Eaton, longtime friend of the Bohrens.
“That’s the other thing you could see, especially in Casper and all over that region: just a real huge influence on people with his art,” she said. “You could see it; you could see the mood in the room change. And Spencer could do that with his music and he did it masterfully, he really did. He could read an audience, and he could zero in on them and take them somewhere else.”
‘A Wyoming treasure’
Bohren grew up in Casper and toured with bands across the West before setting in New Orleans in the mid-1970s with his wife, Marilyn. He became a fixture in the New Orleans music scene, performing weekly on Bourbon Street. His first album, “Born in a Biscayne,” was released in 1984 featured New Orleans music legend Dr. John, who died two days before Bohren. Bohren performed numerous times in the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Bohren toured across the country for seven years with his wife and four kids in a silver Airstream trailer behind their red-and-white 1955 Chevy.
“Spencer was what was best about life and music,” Quint Davis, producer and director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, said in a statement. “He was an authentic troubadour of the blues at the very highest level, traveling the country in his classic car. As much as he was a great musician, Spencer was universally loved as one of the very best people we’ve ever known.”
Besides tours across the U.S. and 21 CDs listed in his discography, Bohren played more than 100 tours in nearly every European country, according to his website. His educational programs span music, art, American roots guitar and music business across the U.S. He received the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award for performing his “Down the Dirt Road Blues” documentary concert across the world and once was dubbed “a road scholar” at a university business class. He performed as a storyteller at events including the National Storytelling Festival. He was also known as a visual artist and held shadow box workshops at venues such as the Wyoming Girls’ School.
Bohren returned often to his home state throughout his career, where he’s remembered as “a Wyoming treasure,” said Pat O’Brien, organizer of Ten Sleep’s Nowoodstock music festival.
He invited Bohren to play at Nowoodstock in 2005. He and another musician were chatting in a group when Bohren’s first steel guitar note of “People Get Ready” rang over the loudspeaker. “And we both looked at each other, looked at the guys we were talking to and said, “We’ve got to go.”
“And I swear, the hair on the back of both of our necks raised,” O’Brien said.
Bohren sparked more than 100 cultural events in Thermopolis, promoter Jacky Wright said. He explained how to organize house concerts as fundraisers and apply for grants, and in 2009 he gave the first of the artist residencies and house concerts Wright organized there, she said.
“He’s reached the majority of our community because of the information that he gave me about how to do all that type of work,” Wright said.
His personality kept audiences rapt with his concert or educational programs whether it was at schools or assisted living centers, Wright said.
“He is so gracious in his presentations,” she said. “He has no ego. He was right at everybody’s level whether it was the kindergarten kids right through to the elderly people.”
Bohren and his family returned to Casper for a time in the 1990s. They decided to settle somewhere their son Andre could learn music after he played “Fur Elise” by ear at a hotel piano, said family friend Carolyn Deuel, founder of Casper arts nonprofit Artcore.
Eaton met the Bohrens then while recovering from malaria in Casper. Bohren became her mentor and produced her first two records. Because the couple opened their life to her, she said, she learned from example how to follow an artist’s path — lessons that can’t be taught in books or classes.
“Spencer and Marilyn were the biggest mentors I ever had in music,” Eaton said. “And Spencer and Marilyn literally adopted me into Rock and Roll University — that’s what it feels like to me.”
Wyoming Arts Council executive director Michael Lange has been a fan since he traveled with his father from Riverton as a teen to see Bohren in Cody.
“And I think even though he spent so long, a couple decades, living in New Orleans, he performs across the state of Wyoming — and all the small communities across the state and the larger communities,” Lange said. “You’d be hard pressed to find a music fan in Wyoming who has not been to a concert of Spencer or knows who he is.”
Connecting across the world
Recording engineer Reinhard Finke met Bohren in 2000 in Germany and asked if he’d produce an album with him at his Valve Records studio.
“Because I like him as an artist, and I think he has a good spirit in what he’s doing,” Finke said. “It’s not because of blues music or roots music. It’s more the person behind the kind of music he’s playing and the style he is performing it — the interpretation. I like that very much.”
They created the first of 11 records they’d release together as their friendship grew.
Bohren returned to Germany many times, sometimes accompanied by his brother Dale and lifelong friend Cory McDaniel, who make up Casper musical duo The Tremors.
One doesn’t find musicians like Bohren often, Finke said.
“But he really wanted to play for his audience and he really wanted to touch them,” he said, “And I think he was quite good at this.”
New Orleans musician Dave Malone recruited Bohren to form a harmony-focused country-rock band before Malone co-founded The Radiators. In a New Orleans music scene ruled by R&B, soul, funk and brass bands, Bohren arrived playing old blues, old ragtime, rock and fingerpicking music, Malone recalled.
Bohren told tales about his songs and the old blues and country songs he played, Malone said.
“It wasn’t just a person who went up there and played music,” Malone said. “It was he told stories about the songs and engaged the crowd and all. And he was very good at it.”
John Magnie was among Bohren’s friends who played stages like Tipitina’s.
The Bohrens shared “that romantic notion of the road, the American Road,” Magnie said, which takes someone with Bohren’s extensive mechanic skills.
“He was a renaissance man,” Magnie continued.
Bohren managed to carve out his own place in a town with a deep musical history, Magnie said.
“Then Spencer, a great thing he always had going was he played solo really good. And what he did on the lap steel is just something really unique to Spencer,” he said. “It was sort of like his superpower in music.”
Like Magnie, Bohren was featured on the HBO show “Treme.” Bohren was shown performing his song “The Long Black Line,” named for the flood line left by Hurricane Katrina. The song, “a musical reportage of post-Katrina New Orleans, provided the soundtrack for that great city’s recovery process,” according to his website.
Bohren hated when New Orleans musician Sanchez called him a hero, since he wasn’t that much younger, he said. Sanchez said it was “a dream come true” to work with Bohren after successful Nashville songwriter Jim McCormick chose Sanchez and Bohren among songwriters for a project called The Write Brothers. Sanchez had played in successful New Orleans rock band Cowboy Mouth and turned to Bohren for advice on solo gigs when he needed to start over after Katrina.
“And he smiled at his wife and said, ‘Well, what I do is I get up in the morning, and I have a cup of coffee and I get on that computer,’” Sanchez said. “’I don’t stop working my ass off until I have two or three gigs. And then when I have a few gigs, I practice, so that when I play those gigs, I’m going to give them a great show.’”
Music was never just business for Bohren, who loved others’ company and was a storyteller off-stage too, Sanchez said. One of his favorites was Bohren’s story about how he heard secular music for the first time at age 13, when he and a friend sneaked a Hoyt Axton folk record to the basement.
“We felt like we were a couple of real desperate outlaws,” Sanchez recalled Bohren saying. “But I heard it and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is the Devil’s music.’”
Bohren soloed during final performances in April at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and performed in his band The Whippersnappers with his son Andre. Sanchez performed there with Bohren as The Write Brothers sang their song “We’ll Be Together Again.”
“And he came out with his cane and he directed the band with his cane,” Sanchez said, “and he was joyful and full of life, and it was a gorgeous moment.”
In a video, Bohren sings with his son Andre and friends on stage, flashing a wide smile while they all sing the chorus:
“Let’s lift our glasses and drink to the sadness/and sing the familiar old songs with our friends/All too soon, comes the end of the tune/and who knows when we’ll be together again.”
Editor’s note: Casper Star-Tribune publisher Dale Bohren, Spencer’s brother, was not involved in the writing or editing of this story.
