Northeast Michigan Oral History and Historic Photograph Archive

Carole Cadarette Interview

Description

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 1

Transcription

CK. Hello, this is Cindy Kus, recording an interview with Carole Cadarette for the first time at the Alpena Public Library on August 11th, 2015.
 
CK.  Welcome, Carole.  

CC.  Thank you.

CK.  Your musical roots go back a long way.  Your mother attributes your love of music to the sounds of bands playing at the Maplewood Tavern when you were just a baby.  What are your earliest memories of music?

CC.  My earliest memories of music is exactly that - at Maplewood.  My dad was a musician and my grandmother had a full band at the bar. Well, it was called a tavern  then, still is -ah, she employed eight to ten musicians and my memory goes back to when my mother would get me ready for bed at night and the bands would be playing. She would hand me over to my grandmother, who would take me out on the dance floor and dance with me and everyone that was there knew it was Carole's bedtime.  After that, my thoughts are also go to the fact that my father was a musician, my uncle, they had their own band, they played in several configurations with different local musicians, played on WATZ when it was Radio Hill, we would go there on a Friday night and record for a Saturday night, ah, Saturday morning program that they would replay. 

CK.  They did this every week?

CC.  Every week.  I do believe you are looking at the early '50s, that's what my memory recalls, from that I didn't get an opportunity to go real often with my Dad but on occasion I went & I remember particularly one that sticks in my memory.  It was a song that the band used to do.  They were called the Mountain Rhythm Boys.  It was Don Cadarette, Henry Cadarette, and a fellow by the name of Bernie Scott.  Bernie Scott happened to be a multi-talented musician - played every instrument imaginable.  And they played back then, it was called hillbilly music.  

CK.  Would that be bluegrass now?

CC.  No.  No, it was actually more in the vein of when things started to change, really, in country music, um, wasn't politically correct to call it hillbilly music back then, but that's what they called it.  Anyway, things started to change when like Hank Williams came on board, the style of music started to change.  But anyway, uh, this particular night they let me go to the radio station, as I said, WATZ Radio Hill.   And they were doing the program and it was right around Mother's Day.  And they did the song "Rocking Alone in an Old Rocking Chair."  And as a very young girl, I can remember sitting in the dark shadows of that radio station and hearing that song and crying.  Wouldn't you know, it's the one that they decided that we'd go back and listen to it again before they put it on the air the next morning and I cried again.  And every time I hear that song played, no matter where I am, that's exactly what I think of is that particular, that particular instance.  So I do recall, of course, my father playing.  At the age of about eight they started giving me piano lessons.  I had a choice between tap or piano, and I took piano.  And I can remember the day they moved my Gulbransen upright piano, which is still at Maplewood, it is locked behind some curtains, but it's still there.  Uh, they brought it in, I can remember that day like it was yesterday, like I said I was about eight years old.  And I started taking lessons.  

CK.  Who did you take lessons from?

CC.  I took lessons from Mrs. Steele.  She lived on First Avenue.    

CK.  Olive Steele.

CC.  Olive Steele.  Olive was, I understand from an article in the Alpena News, that she actually did play for movies before they ever had sound, she was the piano player.  Well, things didn't go real well with Mrs. Steele and me.  Um, the lady that used to bring me in, we would ride a bus from -

CK.  You were living out at Long Lake.

CC.  I was at, right where, still almost where I live today.  We would ride a bus for five cents each way, on a Saturday and the lady's name was Jane LaCombe Mellville.  Jane would go with me and we both took lessons from Mrs. Steele, and then she was my mentor during the week to make sure that I recalled and would practice what I was supposed to be practicing.  Well probably about my memory says three or four lessons in, I got bored.  And I just wanted to play a song.  And I could - and there became the issue.  I was playing by ear.  

CK.  Ah, ha  . . .

CC.  That was a no-no.  And I will never forget Jane telling me, "She's going to catch you, Carole," and she did.  And she was not at all happy with me.  Scared the daylights out of me.  Sent me home and my dad met me at the door, and said "What is it that you're doing that's upsetting her, she's called us.  And I said, "I'm playing by ear."  He said, "Well, you come play a song for dad by ear and let me see what you're doing."  And he looked at me and he said, "Carole, I'm not going to pay for lessons if you're not going to learn what she wants, so I guess not having lessons is going to be the way we're going to go."  I taught myself how to play.  

CK.  You're on your own.

CC.  I was on my own.  And at the age of fourteen I was in a band with my dad and my uncle. 

CK.  What was the name of that band?

CC.  Just The Cadarette Family

CK.  Ok.

CC.  Uh, in fact a week before my Dad passed away, he was only 44 when he died.  Uh, we played a wedding across town at McRae Hall.  When my dad passed, I gave up music totally.  At that point I was playing accordion and piano, and everywhere you went there was a piano.  Now it might not be in tune, but the guitar players could re-tune to that piano.  Anyway, I gave up music almost totally.  Didn't go out and play.

CK.  Your heart was . . .

CC.  My heart was not in it anymore.  And so I gave it up for a long, long time, until the autoharp found me in 1979.  My brother come in one day and he said, "You know that thing you talk about with all the strings on it, they got one down at Ripley Music.  I think it's called something like an autoharp or a chromaharp or something like that . . . "

CK.  Describe it to me, cause I read in the notes that-

CC.  The autoharp?  Well, it's . . . it was made famous by Mother Maybelle Carter.  Mother Maybelle Carter took the autoharp, it used to be played on a flat surface or on your lap, she's the one that raised it up, put it up in her arm, took it on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and her first, one of her first songs and my first song to learn to play on it was "The Wildwood Flower".  And in '79, like I said, when it was bought for me, um, my ex-husband bought it for me and I practiced about a month till I could make some sense of it.  Now remember, there's thirty-six strings that need to be in tune. 

CK.  Wow.

CC.  Yeah.  And back then, you didn't have as we speak today, the electronic tuners that you have, you had a tuning fork or you had another instrument or whatever.  I learned to tune it probably by ear fairly well . . . I can remember doing workshops & tuning maybe thirty in a row.  Autoharps.  One right after another.

CK.  Are there things that you can do to help keep it in tune?  

CC.  No.  Not much.  Play it and just hope for the best.  If a string breaks on it, I can guarantee it, the strings either side of it's going to be out of tune.  So now you're . . . . One of the biggest things with the autoharp is keeping it in tune.  It fell out of favor because a lot of musicians didn't want you around with it because most of the time they weren't in tune and they sound just awful when they're out of tune.  Any instrument does, but an autoharp in particular, ok. With all those strings on it.  So, in '79 with the auto-harp found me, I was now back into music, my brother had now started a band and I kind of would be their guest. I was the oddity because I'm playing this funny-looking instrument, you know, and different sounding instrument.  So I would go out, I would do festivals, I've done several festivals in the state of Michigan, used to teach it . . . Now remember, again, I do not read notes.  I can remember one lady - this was one of my proudest moments - she wanted to learn to play the autoharp and she was not sighted and she couldn't figure out exactly what to do with her hands, how to hold the instrument and I can remember setting it up in her lap, she was a little lady and I put my arms right around her, put my hand on top of each one of her hands and she learned to play at least one song and she was grateful and I was grateful to have the opportunity.  Um, like I said, I taught that for a while and then, um . . .

CK.  You taught all over the state?

CC.  I taught at Evart, at the Hammer Dulcimer Festival and I taught at Wheatland and I had many, many workshops here in Alpena, with the help of my dear friend Carolyn Szatkowski and Luanne Jerome.  We would get together, we would do a workshop, we'd get everybody playing one song and then we'd kind of do a concert at the end of it.  Ok.  Over in Evart, in fact, I've been searching through some of my cassettes and putting them over to CDs, and I've found cassettes with 30 people playing on stage.  So I kind of gave that up back in the year '99, 1999 I quit going to Evart, and just - but I continued to play the autoharp.  In the meantime, my brother asked me to learn to play bass guitar . . . 

CK.  Oh!

CC.  . . . which I did.  Back in the uh, back in, probably I'm thinking the 1980s, and I played bass guitar for many groups in Alpena.

CK.  What were some of those groups?

CC.  I played for Jack Schultz & Company., uh . . . there was, he entertained back in the 1990s, I played bass for him, also played autoharp with him; I played bass for Ladies' Choice.  Um, I've played bass in jam sessions, the tractor show, my brother and I did music, organized music for 20 years for the tractor show.  Once a year, we'd get every musician that we could find to do our stage Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  With . . . there was no money, everybody played for the same amount- that was applause, we called it - that was your pay.  Um, along the way, I've recorded.  I've recorded on autoharp, I've recorded with Three on a String, I was the autoharp player with Carol Witherbee & Diane Madsen and we recorded in the early 1990s.

CK.  What were the instruments in that group?

CC.  Hammer dulcimer, autoharp and bass.  Uh, as I said, I played the . . . on occasion Carole would play the lap dulcimer, but only occasionally.  We went out, did a lot of, a lot of concerts in and around the Alpena area and across state.  Um, about four years ago, we had to re-organize a band that was playing out at Maplewood Tavern, one of our main players had a stroke.  And it was obvious to his wife that he wasn't coming back from that stroke.   So, we had to rebuild the band.  So I ordered a keyboard and had it sent to Florida, where I was.  And, I say this:  I am an auto harp player, yes.  I'm a bass player, but I just play it.  I am a keyboard player.  That is my love.  That, well, that has taken me through some really rough times . . .

CK.  It's where you started, too.

CC.  At that point, between worrying about my friend who had had the stroke, and some other things that was going on in my life, the keyboard came in at the right time.  Just as the autoharp did.  Came in at the right time.

CK.  It found you.  

CC.  It found me, and . . . uh, uh . . . I don't know what I'd do without music.  I really don't.  Now, um, having crushed my wrist a year ago, I now cannot play the autoharp or the bass.  I am playing the keyboard.  But I'm hoping that I will be able to get back to it when they take the plates out in a few weeks.  

CK.  I hope so, too.

CC.  Yeah.  For sure.  In fact, I was just listening to a recording that I found where I'm playing all three instruments and back in the day to be able to do that, I credit my ex-husband with being able to overlap the instruments, the dulcimer, the autoharp and the bass, and we've come up with a fairly decent recording.  And it's . . . But it's deja-vu.  It's wonderful, but it's sad.  Because, there I am, I can, the keyboard is part of my life, those other three instruments are my history and hopefully, if nothing else, my grandchildren will be able to say, "That's Grandma".  

CK.  Yeah.

CC.  Ok. Other than that, I mean, I'm involved with, as the years went on, um, you know, I've played with so many musicians that, the names are just, many of them are not with us anymore.  Just since we started doing some music at Maplewood, for the last, what 10 years, how many we've lost.  It's mind- boggling, how many we've lost already.  And their genre has been lost with them.  Because, I don't - if you're this person and you take, you're singing a song or playing a song, it sounds different from this one - to this one.  Does that make sense?  If Sam Smith did a song - and he was one of the ones that I played with - and now we give it over to the likes of a Danny Ager …

CK.  It's going to be a different song.  

CC. … it's going to be different.  And because most of us play without notes, we're not playing from a set of rules and a set of notes, everything is different.  You take the same song, give it to somebody else, or even me - if I play that twice, it's going to be different.  Because I'm just playing the mood at the moment; and the mood at the moment for me, in this year of two thousand fifteen, if someone would have told  me, back when I was playing music with my father and my uncle, and then as I moved up and played music with Carol Witherbee, and that style of music, and now the music I'm playing now, I'd have said, "That's not going to be."  Because I'm playing jazz, I'm playing big band, I'm playing all different styles of music.  

CK.  On the keyboard.

CC.  On the keyboard. Because these new keyboards allow you to set it up with different styles and then if you can put the music together . . . um, you know, ah, I'm very, very - I don't want to brag, but it . . . like I said, somebody said to me, "can you play 'Stardust'?"  I said, "Yeah", and they just kinda looked at me.  Are you kidding?  Country girl can play that?  You know, um

Creators

Cindy Kus, Interviewer

Carole Cadarette

, Interviewee

Media Type

Audio

Item Type

Interviews

Description

Carole Cadarette began playing music at the age of 14 with The Cadarette Family Band. Starting out on keyboards, she took up the autoharp in 1979 and performed with Carol Witherbee and Diane Madsen to form Three on A String. Currently Carole performs solo as a vocalist and keyboardist around Alpena and leads the jam sessions on Friday and Saturday nights at the Maplewood Tavern near Long Lake.

Place of Publication

Alpena County George N. Fletcher Public Library

Date of Original

2015

Date Of Event

1960s-2015

Playing Time

00:52:23

Subject(s)

Oral histories
Country Musicians
Maplewood Tavern

Personal Name(s)

Cadarette, Carole

Corporate Name(s)

Three On a String ; Maplewood Tavern ; Lady's Choice ; Grzenkowicz, Clarise ; Cadarette, Henry ; Cadarette, Don.

Collection

Musicians of Northeast Michigan

Language of Item

English

Geographic Coverage

Alpena

Michigan, United States

Latitude: 45.06168 Longitude: -83.43275
Long Lake

Michigan, United States

Latitude: 45.05168 Longitude: -84.86143

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Copyright Date