Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,346

This is the grave of Buzz Martin.

Born in 1928 in the ridiculously named Coon Hollow, Oregon, a community near Stayton, Martin was a man of the working class. His father worked for the railroad when he could work but the Great Depression was very hard for this family, as it was for so many working class people. As his son later noted, Martin did not like talking about his childhood. Moreover, our young man had cataracts. He went completely blind at the age of 13. This was extremely treatable, or would be for a family who had any money at all. That was not this family. He ended up at the Oregon School for the Blind in Salem. His parents then both died shortly after. The kid really had nothing. He did start picking up a guitar during these years, but that was it.

In 1943, someone paid for Martin to have a corneal transplant. His vision went from nonexistent to perfect overnight. But you don’t just come out of that like nothing happened. For one thing, he became known for being a very good listener. After all, what else did have to do for two years. For a second thing, he enjoyed that guitar. By this time, the Depression was over and there was work aplenty for young men. His sister had married a logger and he moved in with them, in the town of Five Rivers, Oregon, which is next to the Siuslaw National Forest for those of you who know the Oregon Coast Range. So Buzz started working too. And yes, he was already called Buzz. So it fit.

Martin spent the next couple of decades in the forests. Just a working guy. He became a very strong man as well, with huge biceps and by the 70s, some ridiculous lambchop sideburns that make him look like a bad guy in one of the many Easy Rider knock off motorcycle films with Peter Fonda. He probably worked about every job in logging during these years. This was the glory years of the logger in the Pacific Northwest. Now, there was already a ton of nostalgia in the Northwest around logging–for the old days, the days when ten men posed on a tree trunk, when you had to skid the logs to water. But this was a second glorious period, if you consider widespread deforestation and ecological collapse to be a glorious period. There was a ton of work in logging and although it was already a lot more machine dominated than it was in ye olden days, it seemed like the work would last forever. It was considered to be a MAN’s job and who deserved their story told more than the working class white man?

Well, that was Buzz Martin’s contribution to our history. He was a huge country music fan and would tune into the latest country music on the radio. The Northwest has a surprisingly outsized role in country music history, due almost entirely to southern white migration. Everyone knows that Loretta Lynn is from Butcher Hollow in eastern Kentucky, for example, but some of her first work happened in Washington after she followed her bum of a husband up there for a job. Buck Owens was up that way too for awhile. So it was actually a pretty fecund atmosphere for someone who played the guitar and could sing a bit about the Working Man.

Martin started writing songs and working side gigs in country bands and at local parties. Almost all of this work would have been country covers, no doubt, but maybe he worked some originals in too. His songs were straight forward discussions of what he had seen in the logging camps. There wasn’t a lot of pretension here–these were working songs about working people.

Martin started getting a little attention and he seemed like a local boy who might make good. In 1963, he was invited to Portland to perform and record a 7 inch single. The front side was “Sick of Settin’ Chokers” and the back was “Whistle Punk Pete.” This was about as complex as he was going to get. Working people doing work.

In 1968, Martin got to record an entire album. This was There Walks a Man. This I have heard, thanks to a friend of mine in Oregon who discovered it. It’s……fine. I mean, Martin wasn’t really that talented. He had no real vocal range and he didn’t have any writing range either. So the extent to which you want to hear a whole album based on one topic might be limited. But for those limitations, it’s not bad. The album actually sold about 250,000 copies, which is a lot, even in the era when people actually bought albums instead of streaming them on “services” that screw over artists.

The next year, Martin got Johnny Cash to listen to one of his songs after the the latter had played a show in Portland. Impressed, Cash invited Martin to Nashville to perform on The Johnny Cash Show in 1971. This was his big break. He performed a song live at the Grand Ole Opry and Cash introduced him by saying, “The only difference between me and Buzz is that he’s singing about lumberjacks and I’m singing about cotton pickers.”

But…the big break never actually happened. The Johnny Cash Show went off the air in 1971 and the performance never aired. The Cash endorsement got him a few meetings and a few more albums, but never the big break. He signed extremely sketchy recording deals that meant he would never seen but a fraction of whatever royalties he did make. He was a bit eaten up and spit out by the Nashville record industry. In 1979, with his kind of music out of fashion anyway (no urban cowboy was Buzz), he sold all his rights and left the recording business. He moved to Alaska and got back to work. In 1983, he was working for some hunting outfit and was out on Chichagof Island when he fell and probably knocked himself out, drowning in a tidepool. He was 55 years old.

Let’s listen to some Buzz Martin.

Buzz Martin is buried in Lone Oak Cemetery, Stayton, Oregon

If you would like this series to visit guests on The Johnny Cash Show that actually aired, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Waylon Jennings is in Mesa, Arizona and Burl Ives is in Hunt City, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.