John & Gretchen

As told by Bill McGovern, town historian
Dunstable, Massachusetts


Ahh, there they are. Can you hear them? Aren't they sweet.
Have you ever heard harmony as pure and true as you're
hearing from those two on the radio right now. That's John &
Gretchen Furst. They're from my home town, y'know.
Dunstable, Massachusetts. Twins, born and raised on the old
farm just past that Indian burial ground on the other side
of the field outside this library. Yes, those two you hear
so often on the radio, the nice shows like those on public
radio that is. Well I knew them growing up, and I remember
how they got their break in the music business not all that
long ago.

Now I'm no expert at music. I'm just an engineer working for
the Electronic Systems Division down at Hanscom Air Force
Base in Lexington. But David & Edna, their parents, they
sang for years down in New York before they gave it all up
for a quieter life here in Dunstable where you know your
neighbor. They never gave up singing, though, and they made
sure their kids grew up singing too. John & Gretchen spent a
good part of their 18 years singing at weddings, up at the
church for Sunday service, for musicals the Guild was always
putting on, for just about any decent people who needed two
nice singers. And I will never forget the sight of those two
twins singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" at Edna's funeral a
few years ago. David cried like a baby.

So I was glad to give John the news one day that Garrison
Keillor was bringing his Prairie Home Companion radio show
to the Dunstable Town Fair in October so's he could catch
the turning of the leaves. I was helping my wife Marilyn run
the fair's entertainment committee, and I heard the main
event on the show would be the returning to town of
Dunstable's most famous native (some would say notorious),
Suzanne Molleur, also known as The Witch, the famous blues
singer.

A lot of us weren't so sure that was a good idea. My teenage
son Greg, who's a real music fan, calls her Dunstable's
Janis Joplin. Says she's a killer or a priest, depending on
who you ask. Rumors all over town about her passion for
bourbon, her three bastard children, the year she spent in
one of those drug rehabilitation centers out west and how it
didn't do her any good.

Say what you will, John told me, his eyes in the clouds. She
made it out of this cow town and is singing her music for a
living. John & Gretchen both loved to howl along with her
records as they'd drive around, by the pastures and forests,
the dairy farms, the fields where they grew corn and squash,
the old cemetery where art students from Boston come every
year to take rubbings of the gravestones.

I remember Henry North, the church choir director, he got on
them once after hearing them shouting along with one of her
records. "God gave you such beautiful voices," Henry told
them. "You'll ruin them with that screaming." And being
teenagers and living at home at the time, that made them
scream that much louder.

So you can see why John looked like a bolt of lightning hit
him when eight hours before the big show I tell him the
Witch wants to audition them. They'd found nodes in the
throat of one of her two backup singers  and the other'd
just drunk her way into a clinic.

Now I was not surprised to hear this and I'll tell you why.
The fella who writes about music up at the Nashua Telegraph
is a fan of hers and in his column he'd sometimes include an
update on what Suzanne's been doing, her being local. To be
truthful, most people I know in town had already heard
enough about her to last a lifetime as Suzanne was not what
you'd call a pillar of the community. She made no secret in
the papers that her big hit song "Godam Cow Town Blues" was
inspired by how she never cared for living in Dunstable. I
always say if you don't like a place then it's a free
country and ain't no one keeping you anywhere past your 18th
birthday. So when she moved out of her mother's house six
years ago and took off for Chicago, most of us were hoping
the door didn't hit her too hard on the way out.

But in his latest column, he mentioned that Suzanne and her
group had been on the road for almost two years without a
break, performing most every night of the week, and the
reviews he read had begun to worry him. Seems her concerts
had been getting shorter. She was relying more and more on
her backup singers. More than one critic said he couldn't
understand her when she was introducing a song on account of
her voice was so hoarse and that she was slurring her words.
And sometimes she was just not making sense when she spoke
to the audience. They even had to cut short a show in Miami
a few weeks before because she lost her voice after hitting
one of those high notes of hers. Anyone can have a bad day
or two, he wrote, but he'd been reading stories like this
for months about her and they worried him.

Anyway, I told the Witch's booking agent the day of the fair
about how John & Gretchen had been singing since childhood
and they knew enough of her songs at least to help out for
the Prairie Home Companion. Hell, wasn't anyone in town with
a teenager at home who didn't know some of the Witch's
songs. Especially since the kids like to play 'em so damn
loud. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that woman's
song "Godam Cow Town Blues" Marilyn & I could retire. But
you know, I heard John & Gretchen singing it one day and it
almost sounded sweet.

Let me tell you that agent swallowed pretty hard at the
thought of hiring two local church-singing kids for a
nationally broadcast radio show. But he was desperate and
that afternoon John & Gretchen were singing "Godam Cow Town
Blues" to the Witch herself in the Dunstable Town Hall. It
was something to see. The hall don't hold more than a
hundred people. But the Prairie Home Companion folks did up
the stage to look like someone's living room, complete with
a fireplace, an easy chair and table with a reading lamp
next to it. It sure looked a lot better than it did during
the regular Grange meetings. There was Suzanne the big-time
singer in her beaten-up black leather jacket with her
snakeoil-salesman agent and her crew fussing over the
microphones and the big lights overhead they'd brought in
that day for the show. And standing across from her were
John & Gretchen, dressed up in their Sunday best, trying
their damndest to howl that song like the Witch did, just
like they howled when listening to her tapes in the car.

The Witch just glared at 'em after they finished singing.
She had these deep lines like a crack in the earth digging
into both sides of her mouth and crows feet coming from her
eyes, which were glassy and bloodshot. A cigarette hung from
the side of her mouth and her head bobbed in small circles
like a gyroscope losing its spin.

"Harry, where'd you find these two, the ice cream truck?"
she said to her agent. That fella at the paper was right.
She was slurring her words and losing her voice, and she
smelled like a distillery. She pulled out an open bottle of
bourbon from her inside pocket.

"C'mere choir boy, let's work on your voice," she said.
"Drink this and try it again." The twins looked at each
other, then at the bottle, and then shivered.
"I ain't got all day!" she shouted.

John closed his eyes and pursed his lips, took a swig and
handed it to Gretchen who also took a swig. It was a kick in
the pants but they did sing a little rougher, a little
looser, a little gutsier  a little more like the Witch
would do it. She threw John a pack of Marlboros.

"Here, smoke a couple of these and do it again. And bite the
filter off before you light it," she said. "If you're gonna
sing with me on the radio then I want to hear your voice
break. I want you to sound like sandpaper. Shout from the
middle of your throat so you feel it scratching your
windpipe."

"John, that's how you ruin your voice," Gretchen whispered.
But we could all hear her because of the microphones.
"Says who!?" the Witch yelled. Gretchen took a step back.
"Henry North, the choir director, said "
"Look here, schoolgirl. I'm from Dunstable too, but I ain't
singing weddings for Henry North anymore. I'm singing
concert halls. I got records in every godam store in the
country, including that one up the road in Nashua. I need
two real singers with two real voices for this radio show.
Here's your ticket out of this cow town. You coming or not?"

John & Gretchen looked at each other, terrified. They might
sound like blues singers for the show, but they could also
ruin their voices. Gretchen had a thought.

"Um, Mrs. Witch," she said, staring at her feet. "My brother
and I, we really want to be famous singers like you. But
we're just two kids who sing in church and you're so rich
and famous and your voice is so much better than ours. I was
wondering if, um, if you could show us how you do it."

The Witch laughed. "Watch a pro at work," she said. She
drank down close to a pint of that bourbon and drew in an
entire cigarette in one long breath, leaving her standing in
a big cloud of smoke. She picked up her guitar, hit a chord,
and let out the most blood-curdling howl heard in the Town
Hall since Jim Kennedy shooed away Curt Gaines' cat from a
bake sale by shootin' rock salt up its hind end with his
kid's BB gun.

Then she looked down and away, coughing and sputtering like
she had asthma. She tried to say something but all she could
muster was a whisper. Her eyes lit up with Hell's fire.

"I'm gonna take your head off!" she rasped, and lunged
toward Gretchen. Since the Witch was so drunk it was easy
for John to step in and trip her. She fell right into that
fireplace and hit her head so hard on the iron grate that
she passed out. The open bottle of bourbon emptied onto her
face. Good thing there wasn't a fire going else the whole
building might have burned down.

Well, John and Gretchen got their big break that day. They
showed up at the dress rehearsal and sang "Godam Cow Town
Blues," but the radio show people couldn't stop laughing as
the twins were more like Donny and Marie Osmond than grizzly
old blues singers. Garrison Keillor, in that low fatherly
radio voice of his, asked if they knew any nice songs they
wouldn't mind singing to their mother. John said their
mother had passed on, but Gretchen started them into "Swing
Low Sweet Chariot" after saying that was their special song
for their mother. And that brought the house down that
evening. The twins are regulars on the radio show now,
they've got a nice big recording contract, they tour the
country singing in nice places, and they still sing sweet as
cherubs.

The Witch? Police say she was smoking cigarettes in bed that
night and set her mother's house on fire. They had the
funeral at the Dunstable Congregational Church, and of
course John and Gretchen sang.