Artist Biography

In Tune With Travis
by Ana Luisa Terrazas

Folksinger Travis Edmonson creates his own harmonic convergence

Every sound is music to Travis Edmonson.

"All my waking hours are in terms of music. I see it in my mind. I know when it's right, and I know when it's wrong. Everything that has a sound is music to me," says Travis, one of folk music's greatest legends and half of the 1950s and 1960s duo of Bud & Travis.

That vantage point has served him throughout his life and continues to be a great source of inspiration, despite some minor chords along the way.

Born in Nogales on the Arizona side - his mother was a teacher and his father worked for Santa Cruz County - Travis was fascinated by the sounds of Mexican music. He sang with his three older brothers and began singing publicly at age 7 as a member of the St. Andrew's Episcopal Church choir in Nogales. He took his falsetto across the border, where he sang with the mariachis at La Caverna, a once-popular restaurant in Nogales, Sonora. (And, yes, the restaurant really was in a cave!)

A beautiful voice and a mop of ringlets made the boy stand out. In fact, when he was 5, he had a stint as Curley on the TV series Our Gang.

As a member of the Tucson High School choir (his mother sent him there because she thought the education would be better in the "big city"), he learned proper breathing from Maj Utterback, one of Tucson's most famous teachers. "From the time I was 15, I was not just 'Travis,' but 'Travis and his guitar.' The guitar has done a great deal for me, and I have done a great deal for the guitar. We are very close."

Digging It

In addition to "digging music," as they liked to say in the 1960s, Travis also had a love of just plain digging. For shards and the like. "As a hobby, I would dig. What I found would blow me away. I was fascinated by it and I couldn't wait to take it back to school" for further investigation.

In fact, this fascination with the past led him to study anthropology at the UA. His two older brothers had Ph.D.s in anthropology and his other brother had a master's degree in social word. "You wouldn't believe the intellectual discussions we had at the dinner table!" Travis recalls fondly.

At the UA, he worked under Edward H. Spicer and began research on a nearby Pascua Yaqui community in Barrio Libre. As part of his research, Travis worked on a Yaqui-Spanish dictionary and was made an honorary member of the tribe in 1948. He also became interested in Apache and lived on the San Carlos Reservation for a time. Travis speaks fluent Spanish, Yaqui, Apache, Navajo, a little French, and, "when pushed, enough Hawaiian to get by."

"Above everything else, however, I played the guitar and sang. That's what gave me entry into these communities."

Despite this remarkable work, Travis says of his time at the UA: "I wasn't serious. I was more fascinated by the fact that I could slide by and enjoy all the UA 'things.'"

Things?

"I thought the University was the world. I lived my whole life on that campus. I spent a lot of time in the Student Union," which was built the year Travis was a freshman at the UA in 1950.

Superior animals

Actually, the old Student Union contained a life-size poster of Travis and Roger Smith, a Nogales High School friend who eventually became an actor and actress Ann-Margret's husband. The reason for this adoration? Travis and Roger serenaded the women's dormitories and the sororities at night with Mexican songs. "We stayed in the shadows, so the women couldn't see us. We were a mystery for three years. We did it partly because we were shy and partly out of wanting it to be romantic."

It must have worked.

Teddie Ogg Burch was one of the women serenaded. "I was a student at the UA in 1952-1953 and resided in Pima Hall," she recalls. "The beautiful hacienda style building still stands on Second, near Park. Travis and Roger regularly serenaded the girls' dorms. They always appeared after hours, of course, much to the chagrin of our housemother! We would gather at the windows of the upstairs sleeping porch to listen and to call down requests. It was all very romantic to the 20-something resident women!"

The housemothers wanted Travis and Roger to be ejected and often called UA Police Officer Frank Frey to the scene. "You know, Frank would never get rid of us," Travis says. "He'd show up looking very stern, but he'd hear us and say, 'You know, you really know how to play that thing.'"

Travis delights in the story, almost as much as he delighted in serenading the UA women. Ever-charming, he says, "I have this romantic notion of ladies as a superior animal who I will never, ever understand, but will always admire.

But Travis says his fondest memory of the UA was the night he and Roger won the campus talent contest, which led to winning the Ted Mack and Horace Heidt talent shows.

A boy named Bud

While Travis was attending the UA, his brother Colin, who was in the Infantry, brought a friend home on leave. His name was Oliver "Bud" Dashiell. "Bud fell in love with the Mexican music that my brother and I were always playing," Travis recalls.

Bud, on the other hand, played American folk music, having grown up in New York City and in farm country in Virginia. "Colin and I were enthralled," says Travis.

In the meantime, Travis says, he did the "sing-for-your-supper circuit" in Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and LA. That's when he got a draft notice from Nogales and went home.

"I think my life would have been different if I hadn't been brought up in Nogales. Abstract choices elsewhere are actual choices there. The vagaries of human beings happen there.

"During the time I was waiting to be inducted, I played in the Colonial House restaurant in Nogales. Oklahoma was being filmed nearby, and the cast and crew were staying there. One night, I was playing a medley of tunes from South Pacific, when I noticed one gentleman who seemed to be paying closer attention than most. He was. He came up and introduced himself. It was Oscar Hammerstein! He was quite gentlemanly, of course, and thanked me for doing his songs. Years later, I was fortunate enough to meet Richard Rodgers, who found my chance encounter quite delightful."

When Travis got out of the Army, he performed at the Purple Onion in San Francisco with such heavyweights as Maya Angelou, Phyllis Diller, Kitty Lester, and many others. He also began playing more American folk music and found it struck a chord with his audiences. Of course, his love of anthropology also led him to spend a lot of time researching folk music from different countries in libraries and museums.

Traveling the globe as Bud and Travis

Travis later traveled to Los Angeles to fulfill a club date on Sunset Strip, and that's when he and Bud began to make their mark as a duo. "Bud was attending art school in LA to become an illustrator and was playing in a local coffeehouse to augment his income." They hooked up to do some shows for an FM disc jockey friend. "The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree," Travis says.

Back in San Francisco, Bud also appeared at the Purple Onion and stayed with Travis. They rehearsed often and took vocal lessons. Then, they performed together for a few weeks at the Purple Onion. It wasn't long before word had gotten out that they were on the up-and-coming list. Concert dates and record contracts followed. Bud and Travis traveled the globe, making hundreds of appearances and recording 10 albums. Jazz and blues also became part of the mix. Bud and Travis' The Latin Album features the song Malaguena Salerosa, which sold one million copies in the 1950s. The Mexican love song is Travis' signature song. A product of his roots, Travis played a major part in the crossover to non-Hispanic audiences.

In the early 1960s, Bud and Travis performed The Time of Man, and antiwar song written by Travis, on the floor of Congress. "The Time of Man was about the use of atomic energy and was known throughout the world. It was a favorite song of Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, I've been told," Travis says.

Cuckoos and heavyweights

Travis is no stranger to such musical heavyweights. He's known Henry Mancini, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. He's performed with Arlo and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and was a member of the Gateway Singers for almost four years.

Interestingly, he even was the Smothers Brothers' landlord in San Francisco for about a year. "It was like owning a couple of trained bears. They were angels, but they were cuckoo. You never knew what to expect!"

The prolific songwriter says, "I have 6,000 songs in my mind and I can call any one of them back. This is a great computer," he adds, as he points to his head. And the one message he tries to impart in all 6,000 of those songs is, in a word, love. "It's always about love - the consideration of love, the depth of love, the expression of love."

In the early 1970s, Travis created a musical score to accompany friend Ted DeGrazia's work. "Ted painted music and I played paintings," he says. The symphony was performed before the Tucson Press Club and the City of Santa Barbara.

His song Truly Do, also from The Latin Album, served as the background on many episodes of the TV show Northern Exposure.

Another song, Cloudy Summer Afternoon, from Spotlight on Bud and Travis, made the American Top 30. And, of course, another Travis original, If I Were Free, was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. Travis also was instrumental in the success of his close friends, the Kingston Trio.

A hard lesson

Despite mingling with such musical nobility, Travis says the single greatest influence on his life has been his mother, who actually was voted Arizona's Mother of the Year twice, in 1950 and 1951. Travis says the reason she influenced him is simple: "Because I really followed her teachings - and she was right."

One of his mother's teachings was to never complain about one's circumstances - a teaching that's been put to the test since 1982, when Travis' ability to play the guitar was stolen as a result of an aneurysm and a stroke. "It came as a great shock. I couldn't play. It was a heartbreaker. It would have been easier not to be able to walk."

Rose Marie Heidrick, his longtime companion and a Travis historian of sorts, notes, "Travis never, ever complains."

Travis laughs and says, "That's that sainted mother of mine. That's what she taught. It doesn't help to complain. It may blow some steam off, but it makes it harder for the people around you."

Ironically, Bud suffered and inoperable brain tumor at the same time. Travis says, "I was paralyzed on the left, and he on the right." Travis also suffers from Parkinson's disease. Sadly, Bud died in the late 1980s.

The father of five girls and one boy, Travis now makes his life in a humble setting in Mesa, Arizona. But his love of the Tucson area remains. "Tucson never leaves you," says Travis. Of course, he admits, "One of the big reasons I love Tucson is the ladies. Tucson has a definite edge on the rest of the country with the lovely and interesting ladies!"

But there is much more to his love of Tucson than that. Travis could often be found singing and sharing tales of the Southwest two to three times a week at schools or the St. Mary's Hospital burn unit.

Tucson's love of Travis Edmonson also is never ending. Once pegged as the city's Singing Ambassador or Good Will, he was honored in Tucson in May [2001] at the Travis Edmonson Tribute. Several dignitaries were on hand to present a proclamation announcing that May 12 is Travis Edmonson Day in Tucson.

At the sold-out tribute, The Tucson Tapes, a double CD of Travis' Tucson concert in 1966, also was released.

Today, the Tucson legend writes poetry, works on those 6,000 songs in his head, and finds joy in the natural world. "Ever since I was 12, nature has recharged me," he says.

No doubt, the sounds of nature are playing a joyful symphony just for him.

-Arizona Alumnus, Fall 2001