6 minute read
Carolyn Dutton
~by Boris Ladwig (photo by Tom Preston)
When Carolyn Dutton grew up in Martinsville during the 1950s, she dreamed of a career as a journalist or actress.
“Something exciting and wild and wonderful,” she said.
Her plans represented a bit of a rebellion against her mother, Nina, who worked as a concert pianist, church organist, and piano teacher.
Her mother taught her how to play piano at age four or five, and the daughter began playing violin at age ten.
A life playing in an orchestra or teaching music did not appeal to her.
Dutton planned to study English at Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio. However, when college officials heard her play violin in a music course, they persuaded her—though it took a long time—to major in music.
After college, she worked for a bit as a journalist in Indianapolis and New York City. But majoring in music turned out to be the right decision, because it steered Dutton toward a decades-long “exciting and wild and wonderful” career that ranged from immersing herself in the arts and theater communities in New York City to working on a show with Meryl Streep and playing violin in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris.
For years as she worked as a journalist in New York, she didn’t touch her violin, until one evening, sometime in the late 1960s, when she attended a party in Greenwich Village where people were playing fiddle, and people were dancing and having a great time.
She thought to herself, “I could do that. That would be fun. Why don’t I do that?”
“So, after like eight years, I dragged my fiddle out,” she said.
She had turned up her nose at that kind of “hillbilly music,” but in the mid-1960s, folk music blossomed all over New York City, in part because Bob Dylan had performed at the famous Folklore Center there and was starting to get national attention.
“In New York, that kind of music was vast, it was fascinating,” Dutton said. “The kids, they loved it. They gathered around New York University and they all played, sat around all weekend, strumming in the streets.”
Dutton made connections through the Folklore Center and played with a string band, “The Delaware Water Gap,” through which she met other musicians and played with the country rock band “Olduvai Gorge.”
Meanwhile, Dutton also had taken some acting classes, but was too scared to do auditions. She and some friends launched a production company, The Drama Tree Players, which produced off-off Broadway shows.
That steeled her nerves to do auditions, to some of which, when appropriate, she took her fiddle, which landed her, among others, a role as a fiddleplaying evangelist. With Dutton’s reputation building, she landed roles in other shows, including a comedy musical about Jesse James, with which she toured to play at the Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, and the Charles Playhouse in Boston.
When she first arrived in New York, Dutton moved in with three other women in an apartment, but a couple of years later, she found a rent-controlled apartment on East 84th Street, the Upper East Side, paying $65 a month. She stayed there for about a decade.
She lived in Greenwich Village for a while with a boyfriend and later moved to Soho in the late 1970s, when the area “was still kind of empty and weird and dark and strange,” she said.
The area consisted primarily of cast iron buildings and warehouses that weren’t zoned for residential living, but in which people started squatting, and which attracted artists because of the big spaces.
“You would not believe the rats, the size of cats….It was amazing,” Dutton said. “That’s what it was like there in the ’70s. It was just like this dark, grimy place with a few little bars around.”
Eventually, the tenants got together, bought the building for $500,000, and got everything up to code. Dutton lived in the loft for about 20 years.
Today, each of those floors is worth millions of dollars, she said.
In 2000, she decided to leave the East Coast, in part because at her age, almost 60, she was struggling to get as many parts as she did when she was younger.
“I wasn’t the young, cute, little thing,” Dutton said. “And I was tired.
“I said, ‘I’ve had it with New York,’” she said with a laugh. “I had done as much as I wanted to do.”
She sold her loft—for a nice return on her initial investment—and came back to Indiana, because of her father, Judson.
After her return she decided she was not done with music, and in 2003, obtained from Indiana University a master’s degree in jazz studies.
Dutton said that when she lived in New York, she thought she would only ever leave the city to move to the south of France, a Caribbean island—or Brown County, where she and her family had traveled often when she was younger.
“I always thought it was so beautiful, you know,” she said. “I just thought it was a great place.”
Plus, Dutton said, the area has an active music scene, and she thought her ability to play varied styles would allow her to fit in.
She bought property in Nashville, built a house, including a “huge, great room” to remind her of her Soho loft—though she has since sold it.
Within a month of living here, she got a call from Slats Klug, a musician famous for albums and performances that explored Brown County’s history.
“He was looking for a fiddle player,” Dutton said.
She played with Klug and immediately was immersed in the local music scene. Dutton also met jazz piano player Monica Herzig, with whom she played shows and on whose albums she appeared.
For about the last two decades, she has played with a Gypsy jazz band, Bleu Django, which plays tunes of the 1930s style’s creators, Jean “Django” Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.
Daryl Jones, a retired engineer and guitarist with Bleu Django, said he and another guitarist, Bob Foster, had enjoyed jamming Gypsy jazz for years and thought about getting a band together when they ran into Dutton and realized she, too, had a fascination with Reinhardt and Grappelli.
They formed Bleu Django soon thereafter and have been touring all over Indiana since, playing festivals, weddings, and other private events.
Jones said the musicians on stage often talk about the songs, as their origin usually has an interesting story. “Artillerie Lourde,” for example, represents heavy artillery from World War II. And many of the tunes, including “Nuages,” French for clouds, have a darker tone to them.
Dutton said she still enjoys performing, especially with Bleu Django, because she likes introducing people to that style of music, in the hopes of making them as enthusiastic about it as she is.
“I just want people to know about [it] because it’s such an exciting music to me,” she said.
You can find out where Bleu Django plays next by visiting the band’s website, bleudjango.com , or through Facebook.
