When I ran my illegal radio station, some people call it the pirate station.
We only broadcast evenings for a couple of hours, and not every evening, so it was spasmodic.
We found out later that the radio station was illegal, or a pirate station, and we heard
that the FCC was going to send down a signal-finding truck.
Oh, I knew him before that, but he was going all those other girls.
He was painting the windmill tower that he had the antenna on beside the building, putting
it up for his radio station, that illegal one.
And we did that for almost a year, maybe a little more than a year, and then we finally
shut it down, and my father came over and said, where's the power cord, and I showed
it to him over there on the wall.
And he went on and pulled it out of the wall, and he said, why not go into prison?
The station's going off the air.
So that ended my foray into being a radio broadcast.
One of the persons I met while I was rummaging through some of those old phonograph records
was Alton Myers.
He was a man of color, a black man.
Myers is the son of a railroad worker, and that's how a southern man who got to the north,
you know, to a terminus point on the train runs.
And you know, here he is with the guy who's a, you know, really essentially a half-generation
off the farm.
So, in some classic sense, you know, the African-American family man has left the prestigious work
of the railroad, at least in his father's generation.
And here's the other guy who's left the old farmland, the old agrarian part of Maine.
And he was kind of timid a little bit, and I said, I collect country music and some jazz
and old-time string bands, and he says, that's what I like, and we would get together and
listen to each other's records, he'd have something different than I'd have.
And from that friendship, we formed a duo called Allerton and Alton, and the Cumberland
Ridge Runners.
We ended up being on radio at five moneys a week and one evening, and then on another
jamboree on a Saturday night.
Barat, friends and neighbors, Allerton and Alton, the Cumberland Ridge Runners, here
again for 15 minutes of fine old-time singing and playing.
There's no history that I know of in country music of a black-white duo on the stage of
the Grand Old Abbey.
But here we go in the fifties with an actual black-white duo on the radio in Maine.
They get out there, and they're doing all this essentially old-timey music, music that's
nostalgic about a past, and then all of a sudden, modern media, it means you've got
to get a photograph and you've got a tour.
And they start sending out the eight-by-ten, and it's like a black-white guy.
And even the Mainers, who I think most are pretty tolerant, and this was no big deal
in a way to most people, they're shocked.
Not so much maybe because one was black and one was white, but because they'd heard them
on the radio and they just never imagined it.
And this was long before civil rights, and we had a lot of problems.
There were clubs where we wanted to be booked into, but the managers were unable to bring
themselves to the point of allowing us to be booked in as a white man and a black man
playing music.
And you would think up north that there was no segregation and no feelings of that in
the state of Maine, but that was not true.
And it hurt Alton's feelings, and it hurt mine too.
And eventually, I went to the, it was shipped overseas, and then he was drafted into the
Army, and he went overseas, and the act was broken up.
