Video Interview: Sandy Munro

Sandy Munro

Interviewed by Jan Garrett

March 2023

2025.016.0006

Jan Garrett [00:00:10] Hi everybody. Jan Garrett here, and I am delighted to be with a dear old friend, a fabulous musician and… so many accolades for Sandy Munro. Sandy, how you doing?

Sandy Munro [00:00:25] Hi, Jan. How are you?

Jan Garrett [00:00:28] It’s good to see you. I love to see you. You’re in your beautiful house, I think, right now. I can see that in the background.

Sandy Munro [00:00:34] Yes. It’s our… showing miscellaneous pieces of metal hanging from the wall.

Jan Garrett [00:00:41] We’ll talk more about your house, which I know you built literally from the ground up. Yeah, so historical context, we are now end of March 2023, and gosh, I’m tempted to begin by letting the people know that you have a couple of books out which will give them more information about who you are and the history of you and Aspen. Can you tell me about those books, please?

Sandy Munro [00:01:10] Well, the book that I wrote in… I started the last book when Mary Lynn started hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2008. And the title… when that happened, my mother had recently passed away, and her husband found in the attic a box of letters. And it turned out there were 192 letters back and forth between my father and my mother when he was in the Pacific, fighting in World War II, flying off the USS Enterprise. And so it was letters I had never seen before, and I only had a very minuscule memory of my father anyway, because I was only three years old when he left, and that’s how the book starts out. But when Mary Lynn started off to, at the age of 65, to hike the Appalachian Trail by herself, which took her, which she completed, it took her six and a half months. When she took off, I started reading these 192 letters, getting them in chronological order, reading these letters, and then writing as I read, and then stopping and doing research on the aircraft carrier and the squadron that he was in. And it’s sort of the story of their relationship during that period of time. It’s called “Finding Yuri.”

Jan Garrett [00:02:34] Wow. And… but then you did not really have a relationship with your dad because he died very young. What was that about?

Sandy Munro [00:02:42] Yeah, well, he was shot down in March of 1945.

Jan Garrett [00:02:48] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:02:49] Over the island, in a big harbor there in Taiwan called Kiirun Harbor. And there was some controversy about when and where he got shot down in the harbor. And that’s part of what I tried to elucidate in the book. But mainly, I tell people it’s a war story, it’s a flying story, but really it’s a love story.

Jan Garrett [00:03:15] It’s a love story. I remember reading it, and it is a gorgeous book, Sandy. And so I would ask people if they are interested to get hold of you. I suppose that would be the best way for them to buy it? Would it? Or where can they find it?

Sandy Munro [00:03:28] They can get that book at any, and my other book, “Aspen Unstrung,” at any of the bookstores in the valley. Explore. There’s a little White River Books down in Carbondale. Izzy, she’s great. And then there’s the Bookbinders there, around the corner from Whole Foods.

Jan Garrett [00:03:52] Exactly up in Willits. So, and again…

Sandy Munro [00:03:56] And if they don’t live in the valley, they can just go to my website, SandyMunroMusic.com, and you can figure out how to do it there. Easy.

Jan Garrett [00:04:06] That would be great. And “Aspen Unstrung,” which is quite recent, isn’t it? When did that come out?

Sandy Munro [00:04:11] Came out in April of last year, 2022. And so it’s been out almost a year now.

Jan Garrett [00:04:18] Yeah. And I will just say I’ve read that one and loved that one too. And it’s really a look back into when you first got to the valley and your whole experience. It’s a beautiful memoir all the way through, especially and including a lot of really good characters and bands and what it was like for you playing music here in the valley.

Sandy Munro [00:04:46] Yeah. And it’s also a story of how the valley has changed in that period of time. Without beating people over the head with it, without being bitchy about it, but just the pure numbers. The desirability of the town and the limited amount of space that there was available to people to build houses on, it was only natural that the prices would rise and rise and rise. And sooner or later, we would end up with, you know, what we have today, which is a town that is aimed pretty much at the highest income people.

Jan Garrett [00:05:26] Exactly. But what we’re doing today, and I think there are a lot of people who would like to hear about the town before. As I say, I feel like Aspen got not sold out, but kind of abducted in a way. But to go back in time a little bit, because for me, that whole era of kind of late ’60s and especially on through the ’70s, early ’80s was really a special time for the town and especially for the music and the musicians and the people who would come to hear that music. And it’s a very soulful time, which I’d kind of like to focus in on so that people will know, you know, what was that like for you? I mean, you arrived when in the valley?

Sandy Munro [00:06:11] December of ’70, and you were here the year before, I believe, right?

Jan Garrett [00:06:15] I was, yeah, I was. I thought you guys were here in the late ’60s. Oh, you started playing with… you were playing music, though, with some of your favorite musicians: John Sommers and Cash Cashman, right?

Sandy Munro [00:06:27] We met each other when we were in flight training in 196-… I guess that would have been 1966 or so, ’65, ’66, and we met each other when we were all three in flight training to be Navy pilots. And we started playing music almost immediately thereafter. And John had already had somewhat of a music career playing in a group called the Johnson Boys. And he went on, he was on tour and made a record with that band and that sort of thing. And that was about the time we met him. And then later, before we got, that was when we were in flight training… so then we had, you know, four years to put in in the Navy. And we managed to go to the Navy detailer, John and Cash did, to see if he could arrange to get them on the same ship that I was on so we could have our band together in the Navy again. So that happened. And they were flying fixed-wing airplanes called an S-2F anti-submarine airplane. They were flying those, and I was flying helicopters, but we were on the same aircraft carrier together. So we had our band on the ship, and we needed a place to practice. So the captain of the ship, he was from Kentucky, so he was a bluegrass fan and… Captain Ben Tate was his name. And he said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you this place called secondary con that you can practice.” And that’s where, if you were at war and the superstructure of the carrier got wiped out by bombs, this is where you would control the ship from. It was all the way up in the bow with four portholes looking right out the front. You’re right under the flight deck, all the way at the bow. And there was the big old captain’s chair, which I used to sit in when we practiced. And we could…

Jan Garrett [00:08:17] Wow, man.

Sandy Munro [00:08:18] That’s where we practiced, in secondary con.

Jan Garrett [00:08:22] I would love that. To feel like the music somehow infused the whole damn ship from that vantage point.

Sandy Munro [00:08:29] We did shows for the whole ship’s company and shows for… in the wardroom, for the officers and the staff and the admiral and all the bigwigs. And we were the little darlings of the carrier there for a while.

Jan Garrett [00:08:41] {laughter} The little darlings.

Sandy Munro [00:08:43] There’s a funny story about that in the book.

Jan Garrett [00:08:44] I love that, and that’s in the book, right? So if people want to… you can check out “Aspen Unstrung.” Oh my God. And then you guys, or at least you and Mary Lynn, you guys moved to Aspen, right?

Sandy Munro [00:08:57] We did. And a fellow that came out with us had been in Aspen before. I had met him playing in a Holiday Inn in Pensacola, Florida. His name was Bryan Murphy.

Jan Garrett [00:09:09] Okay.

Sandy Munro [00:09:10] And I came out to play in a duo with Bryan, which… we lasted about three days. We weren’t very good. And John Sommers came out to visit at the same time. And he was on his way to United Airlines to go through flight training to become an airline pilot.

Jan Garrett [00:09:29] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:09:29] We went skiing one day, and before we got off the mountain, John says, “I’m going to call up United and tell them I have mono and see if I can get delayed for a while.”

Jan Garrett [00:09:39] I love it.

Sandy Munro [00:09:40] So then about every three months, he’d call him up and tell him he had mono again, and they fired him. By that time he was in Aspen playing music and could care less, you know.

Jan Garrett [00:09:49] I love that. Can we see… I would love to have everybody look at a picture of you guys when you first got to town with you and Mary Lynn, your lovely wife and dear friend Mary Lynn, and little Sandy. So can you describe for people…

Sandy Munro [00:10:05] Yeah, that’s Mary Lynn and I and my brother Joe. This is about a year after we got to town. This was the second year.

Jan Garrett [00:10:13] Uh-huh.

Sandy Munro [00:10:14] And that’s my younger brother, Joe, who moved out to Aspen about that time, too. And you can see he’s got a little of the John Denver look-alike thing going there.

Jan Garrett [00:10:22] He does. Yeah. And your son, little… we used to call him Little Sandy.

Sandy Munro [00:10:30] Yeah. Little Sandy is a little bigger than I am now.

Jan Garrett [00:10:33] I bet he is. And he’s… does he have kids?

Sandy Munro [00:10:36] He’s got two boys of his own that are in college, or one’s just graduated from college.

Jan Garrett [00:10:41] Oh my God, that’s incredible, Sandy. And also Tasha was not born at that time. That was your…

Sandy Munro [00:10:47] No, she was born our second year in Aspen.

Jan Garrett [00:10:51] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:10:53] We came and spent that first winter. John and Cash and I played together. We took our band the Clark County Coon Catchers Quartet. The bass, Sydney {Cash’s stand up bass}, was our other member of the quartet. And we changed the name to Wildwood Sunday.

Jan Garrett [00:11:12] I remember that. Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:11:15] We were playing… our first gig in Aspen was at the Hotel Jerome, and a guy was standing there watching us, and it turned out he owned the… he ran the Happy Hearth, which is where the golf clubhouse is now.

Jan Garrett [00:11:32] Yes. Of course.

Sandy Munro [00:11:34] Dick Bradley was his name. And he offered us a six night a week job that first winter we were in town, and we took it because we could leave our PA set up and just come down there and do our show. So we played six nights a week for the first year we were in town, and we were out of town a little bit, so it took a little while for people to find us, but once they did, we had a pretty good following there.

Jan Garrett [00:11:56] So that was the Happy Hearth Inn, right?

Sandy Munro [00:12:03] The Happy Hearth. We called it the Horny Hearth. Because there was this big fireplace pit with pillows around it. And the couples would come down there and make out.

Jan Garrett [00:12:13] It was like a sunken…

Sandy Munro [00:12:15] …{unintelligible} or whatever.

Jan Garrett [00:12:16] Yes. And didn’t they have a deal? Because I remember they would… rather than pay the other musicians who would come to play, you could stay. It was like a motel, and you could stay for free at the Happy Hearth.

Sandy Munro [00:12:28] And they’d feed you. They had a nice restaurant and you got meals every night.

Jan Garrett [00:12:32] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:12:33] Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:12:33] Wow. Long gone.

Sandy Munro [00:12:37] We got paid a total of $49-… our pay was: dinners off the menu and $495 for the week.

Jan Garrett [00:12:47] For four people? Or for three?

Sandy Munro [00:12:48] Three of us. Yeah, $166 apiece as it turned out, for the week. And we thought we had died and gone to heaven.

Jan Garrett [00:12:56] Of course, of course. Oh, my God, those were early days. I want people to look at this picture, please. This is… who’s this?

Sandy Munro [00:13:05] That’s a few years later. That’s when Billy Ray Latham joined the band. That’s Mary Lynn and I and a fellow named Reno McCormick.

Jan Garrett [00:13:14] Oh, yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:13:15] Reno is a great singer and a good player. And he lives down in Arizona now.

Jan Garrett [00:13:21] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:13:22] Slick Rock, a little town called Slick Rock.

Jan Garrett [00:13:24] Okay, cool. Well, that stand up bass is just about bigger than Mary Lynn.

Sandy Munro [00:13:32] Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:13:32] I loved Mary Lynn on the bass, man.

Sandy Munro [00:13:35] She was a whomper.

Jan Garrett [00:13:37] She was a whomper. What a great… and always that bluegrass thing. Ah! So, going back slightly then, to those early ’70s, because you were not only playing music. Didn’t you start teaching at Aspen High School? What was that about?

Sandy Munro [00:13:51] I got… well, that same night that we were at the Jerome, a guy named Zan Smith stood and watched us all night long, and I ended up talking to him. And he was the principal of Aspen High School, and he was the same age as I was, which was about 28. So he was the young principal of the school. And I told him, you know, I’d always been interested in teaching at the high school level, and I thought maybe I’d come and talk to him when the ski season was over about it. I needed to get a real job. Mary Lynn was pregnant by that time, turned out our little girl Natasha was on the way, and I needed a real job, and so I accepted the job. I had done no student teaching, no college credits in teaching or anything, but they hired me, maybe because I went to the Naval Academy and they needed a physics/math teacher. So I taught physics, math, and bluegrass music.

Jan Garrett [00:14:51] Oh, I love that.

Sandy Munro [00:14:53] And all these high school bluegrass bands… you might have a picture of one of the high school bluegrass bands.

Jan Garrett [00:14:57] Let me check that out. Yeah. Yes, indeed we do.

Sandy Munro [00:15:01] Well, so the year of ’70-’71 was my first full year teaching high school, and I did that for six years. And I had a class of physics, two classes of geometry, three classes of general math. And I taught an aviation program as well.

Jan Garrett [00:15:20] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:15:22] But I didn’t play. I only played… we got together with friends and played here and there, but I didn’t really play out during that period of time I was teaching at Aspen High School. I did play some, but not a lot.

Jan Garrett [00:15:36] Okay, cool. You were very busy obviously.

Sandy Munro [00:15:40] I was fairly busy.

Jan Garrett [00:15:41] Yeah. And then, so when would you say you really started playing more? Like in bands and…

Sandy Munro [00:15:48] Well, when I retired from teaching at Aspen High School, which was ’76, ’75-’76 was the last school year, and I started playing full time again after that. Once again joining with John and Cash and some other folks, we had this band called the world-famous Blue Grass Salad Boys.

Jan Garrett [00:16:12] Oh, wow. Yes.

Sandy Munro [00:16:14] And we played one night a week, and that got to be so if you didn’t come down nice and early, you couldn’t get a seat in the place. And it wasn’t because we were so great, but it was because a lot of celebrities came down and played with us: Steve Martin and John Denver and a bunch of other people, guys from the Eagles.

Jan Garrett [00:16:37] Sure. But now, where was this? What was the venue, Sandy, where you were playing?

Sandy Munro [00:16:41] Paddy Buggatti’s.

Jan Garrett [00:16:42] Oh, Paddy Buggatti’s. And tell us where that was in town, because it no longer exists, I think.

Sandy Munro [00:16:48] Yeah, up there by the Mountain Chalet. But they had a swimming…

Jan Garrett [00:16:51] By the Mountain Chalet. And I do remember that place, and they had…

Sandy Munro [00:16:54] They had a swim up bar.

Jan Garrett [00:16:56] Swim up bar.

Sandy Munro [00:16:58] And we used to, on Sunday nights when we played, we… the show ended at 11:45, and we’d kick out everybody we didn’t know, and we’d all go shuck down and go skinny dipping in the pool, in the swim up pool. And the first time we… or one of the times when we did it, Steve Martin joined us. And as we were all taking off our clothes in the hallway, Steve said, “Hey, I haven’t done this before. Is it cool to get an erection?” {laughter}

Jan Garrett [00:17:32] I remember Steve, and I have a slightly different story, but it all centers around the same theme. Oh my God.

Sandy Munro [00:17:40] Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:17:41] Yeah. Wow. Those were amazing days, those days.

Sandy Munro [00:17:46] It was a seven-piece band, too, it was the big band, and I think we made 20 bucks a piece or something.

Jan Garrett [00:17:52] Exactly. Well, I think the thing is, is in those days, as you had mentioned earlier, the real estate had not gone totally nuts yet. So people could live in town.

Sandy Munro [00:18:01] Yeah, people still lived up here.

Jan Garrett [00:18:03] Say that again.

Sandy Munro [00:18:04] People still lived up at this end of the valley in those days, and we would all sit in, you know, all the musicians in town, including your… you guys were playing with… well, you were playing with Vic and you, Vic Garrett and you, and… this is before the Liberty days, though.

Jan Garrett [00:18:26] Well, Vic and I were playing at the Hotel Jerome. This would have been 19–, God, 1971, maybe? And then John Sommers used to come in and start sitting in with us, and it was like… we had been Vic and Jan. John Sommers came in, and then we were Vic and Jan and John, and then Larry Gottlieb would come in and start sitting in and we thought, Vic and Jan and John and Larry is not a great name.

Sandy Munro [00:18:50] You were starting to sound like Pep Boys or something.

Jan Garrett [00:18:52] Yeah. And so John Sommers suggested the name of a bluegrass tune called “Liberty,” and we were like, “That’s a great name.” So the four of us, that was the earlier incarnation of Liberty. So yeah, that was…

Sandy Munro [00:19:07] With Danny Wheetman…

Jan Garrett [00:19:09] Say that…? And then later, a bit later, Danny was coming with his band called Lost in the Shuffle. They were located out in California, but Danny came into town, and then as soon as Danny came in, it was like, who’s that guy? You know? So we started…

Sandy Munro [00:19:25] He was a great member of the musical community for sure in Aspen. And it was really us, you guys and Danny that sort of formed the nucleus of the acoustic bands in town.

Jan Garrett [00:19:38] I think so.

Sandy Munro [00:19:39] And we… all of us used to… you used to sit in with us, we used to sit in with you. And if people look at the back of the “Aspen Unstrung” book, there’s a listing of all the bands that played in Aspen during that time. And it’s five pages long.

Jan Garrett [00:19:54] It’s amazing.

Sandy Munro [00:19:56] Many of them may have only played two gigs or whatever…

Jan Garrett [00:20:01] But the names were always really good.

Sandy Munro [00:20:03] The names were really funny, and there… I mean, there’s a lot of them… there’s a couple hundred bands there.

Jan Garrett [00:20:10] Well, that’s something that, you know, is not…

Sandy Munro [00:20:13] We had a good scene like no other, didn’t we?

Jan Garrett [00:20:17] It was. It was a scene, but it was really, as I recall and I remember, it was a very, it was a scene, lots of camaraderie. It didn’t seem like there was a lot of competition. People were just happy to play music, be with each other. There was a whole different vibe. What would you say about that?

Sandy Munro [00:20:33] Well, I don’t think there was ever any grumbling about who got the jobs and who didn’t. Whoever got the jobs, hey, more power to them. And maybe someone else would get one next time. You know, there’s always a hierarchy of who gets the work and who doesn’t, and it has to do with what kind of music they presented and what they were doing in their lives, and how much time they had to play music and all those things. But, you know, it was a great, fun time that is certainly… the town is sedate by the standards of the day that we lived in, you know.

Jan Garrett [00:21:12] Yes. And right in the middle of all that, Sandy, somewhere, was when you started, you got hold of the Great Divide Music Store, which was originally owned by Rick Barlow, I think. But he left, and you came on. Tell us about the Great Divide.

Sandy Munro [00:21:27] Well, Rick Barlow started the Great Divide in 19–, let’s see… he started it in 1970.

Jan Garrett [00:21:39] Right.

Sandy Munro [00:21:40] So he ran the store for seven years, and it was a great little acoustic shop. It was upstairs from Carol Ann Jacobson Realty. There were no electric guitars, not even electric strings. If you wanted strings for electric guitars, sorry. Rick didn’t carry them.

Jan Garrett [00:21:58] He was a purist.

Sandy Munro [00:22:00] Right. And he was a good craftsman. He lived in a yurt up Castle Creek Road.

Jan Garrett [00:22:06] I remember that.

Sandy Munro [00:22:08] Rick is one of the characters in the book, and there’s a little story about him, and I had really hung out, all of us hung out at the Great Divide because it was the little hangout place. And I started working for Rick, just on an odd day here and there from time to time. And after I’d worked there about 3 or 4 weeks, he came in one day and said, “Sandy, you want to buy the store?” And I had never thought of it, but he said… and he had some nice fixtures, you know, fixtures. He had some nice furniture and a real nice rolltop, glass rolltop cabinet and display cabinets, and he had some nice, tasty little things that were part of the original Great Divide layout. And I bought the… Mary Lynn and I did a calculation to see if we thought it could make money. And I still have that piece of paper somewhere where we figured out, yes, if we could make, you know, $12,000 a year out of the store, we could survive or something like that.

Jan Garrett [00:23:15] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:23:16] And we, I bought the store, and I allowed the first electric guitar amp to come in a few months later, and of course, somebody came in and plugged in and cranked it up and started playing it. And that’s when Carol Ann Jacobson came upstairs and said, “Sandy, this isn’t going to work.”

Jan Garrett [00:23:36] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:23:37] We looked for another place to put it, and we came up with the Monarch Building. Tom Moore’s father owned the Monarch Building, the little brick building there on the corner of Monarch and Main.

Jan Garrett [00:23:47] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:23:48] And that’s where we moved the music store. It was the perfect place. It had a little upstairs section, which was a neat aspect physically, and it had two downstairs rooms, one of which became the lesson room and another which became our electronic repair shop, where Bill Humphreys, also known as the “Hump Tone,” worked. Well, he’s just another character in the book. He was an ex-Navy guy, a little older than the rest of us, sort of a little stocky guy. And in addition to being an expert electronic repairman in any sense of the word, he was a great electric guitar player. We called him Hump Tone, the man that never played a bad note. And he could play the guitar.

Jan Garrett [00:24:36] Wow, man. But in the Great Divide, yeah, you had that upstairs part and then downstairs… because you did do lessons.

Sandy Munro [00:24:43] Yeah, I did lessons for six years. No, longer than that. 30 years. I’m sorry. The whole time I had the store I did lessons, usually 3 or 4 days a week.

Jan Garrett [00:24:56] That’s amazing. That’s the… I mean, it really was such a… it was a hangout place, and it was a place where you could go. I remember sometimes I would be in town and just, like, have a few minutes left over. It’s like, “I think I’ll just go to the Great Divide,” and you’d always know that it felt great in there. Often you’d run into other musicians or interesting characters, for sure.

Sandy Munro [00:25:18] And maybe some nice guitars.

Jan Garrett [00:25:20] And some fabulous guitars. Oh, man, I do remember… I want to run this by you, Sandy, to see if my memory is correct. But Jamie Rosenberg was working for you for quite a while at the Great Divide, and he started doing recording sessions at night. This is before he got his very wonderful fancy recording studio…

Sandy Munro [00:25:42] At the music store.

Jan Garrett [00:25:43] At the music store. And what I remember, now again, the Great Divide is sort of catty-cornered from Carl’s Pharmacy. And wasn’t there a pet store next door?

Sandy Munro [00:25:52] Yes. We only had… the music store in the early days was only half the size. We only had… we had a double shop later, and the pet shop, which was on the end of the building, moved to the other side of us, and it left us an opportunity to move into the old pet shop. So we had the pet shop and the Great Divide combined into the music store.

Jan Garrett [00:26:17] Well, what I remember before that combination thing happened, the pet store was still happening, and Jamie would be recording at night, but the pet store would have live crickets. And I’m not sure what kind of animal eats crickets, like lizards or something? I don’t know, but they had…

Sandy Munro [00:26:35] Well, the crickets got loose throughout the building, and so you could hear them on the recordings.

Jan Garrett [00:26:40] Exactly. Yes. So Jamie would…

Sandy Munro [00:26:43] Which, by coincidence, the same thing with Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly and his backup band was the Chirping Crickets, and it was Buddy Holly and the Chirping Crickets. And it was for the same reason, there were crickets in the studio that they couldn’t get rid of, so you could hear them on the records.

Jan Garrett [00:27:00] I love that. But then eventually all that got straightened out. But there’s an evolution of how all this stuff happens. So any more you want to say about the Great Divide? And again, y’all, read Sandy’s book, read “Aspen Unstrung” because you’ll have a lot more information about that. But anything else about that?

Sandy Munro [00:27:18] There are some humorous and some touching little intimate stories in there about the Great Divide days. And I still, you know I sold the store 14 years ago, and I still dream about it at least twice a week, but it’s always some weird incarnation of the music store. Like one night it was a pirate ship sailing the seas looking for lost instruments.

Jan Garrett [00:27:41] I love that. Let’s make a movie. That’s a great one.

Sandy Munro [00:27:46] All kinds of wacky stories. The Belmont brothers, James and Joel Belmont, two brothers who came to Aspen with their mother and lived in a car the first winter. And they were both employees at the Great Divide, and they were both really funny characters.

Jan Garrett [00:28:02] I love it. Well, one of the things I love, too, was that you were playing music with a lot of the old, what we’d call maybe old characters of Aspen. I want to show everybody this picture of you. And who is that?

Jan Garrett [00:28:18] Hildur Anderson.

Jan Garrett [00:28:19] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:28:20] Anderson Ranch in Snowmass is named after her family that had a ranch up there, up at the head of the Snowmass Valley for many years, and she was a school teacher for 50 years in Aspen, and many of the students that I had also had Hildur for a teacher earlier.

Jan Garrett [00:28:39] Yes.

Sandy Munro [00:28:40] They said she was the best teacher ever.

Jan Garrett [00:28:42] Wow, what a great character.

Sandy Munro [00:28:46] When she played accordion with you, she knew… she was a pro too. She knew when to comp and do rhythm accompaniment and when to play lead. And she was the real deal all the way around.

Jan Garrett [00:28:58] Yeah. I want to show people another, and you can tell me about who the real deal is here in this photo. What’s, what this is about?

Sandy Munro [00:29:05] Well, that’s part of the Pitkin County Fair. We had a county fair going on for a long time that was pretty much a low-key event, and we decided to bring music to the fair in the early ’80s. I think it was about 1981 or ’80.

Jan Garrett [00:29:25] Oh, wow. Okay.

Sandy Munro [00:29:26] And it ended up being a thing called the Rocky Mountain Championships at the Pitkin County Fair. And it was one day of contest, legitimately run high-dollar contests, high-dollar for that those days. First place on any instrument. We had banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle and bass, as it turned out later with Edgar Meyer entering the contest. But we had one day of contests and one day of concerts with two really good bluegrass bands, national acts, and the whole scene with the contest… we ended up by the last several years, we had a tent that seated 1000 people.

Jan Garrett [00:30:14] Is that right?

Sandy Munro [00:30:16] 60 by 90 tent

Jan Garrett [00:30:17] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:30:18] And people came in and sat on the grass in the tent or brought little blankets and things to sit on, and you had to pay to get in. And each one of those contests was $500 first prize, $400 second prize, $300 third prize, on down. And good musicians in the early ’80s would drive a long way for a chance to win that kind of money.

Jan Garrett [00:30:45] You bet. You bet.

Sandy Munro [00:30:46] And Tim O’Brien used to enter the contest. He brought up a… he put together a throw together band. One was, I remember, Ben Steele and His Bare Hands.

Jan Garrett [00:30:57] I love that.

Sandy Munro [00:31:01] So Tim would bring a band, and Hot Rize, of course, played there. New Grass Revival played there, and that’s when the bass player who… the story of Edgar Meyer and the Pitkin County Fair is also in the book.

Jan Garrett [00:31:19] Okay.

Sandy Munro [00:31:20] Edgar came to enter the… wanted to know if he… he came to the music store one day and wanted to know if he could enter the fiddle contest, and I said, sure. And he said, “Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen my fiddle.” And he went outside where he had his bass leaning up around the corner and brought his bass in. And he got it out and played “The Arkansas Traveler” for me. And he played it beautifully, but very, just simple straight-ahead melody. And I said, “Well, you know, that’s great, Edgar, but the people that win the big contests play a more flowery, jazzy style called Texas-style swing fiddle.” And I gave him an album of Mark O’Connor, who is the boy genius, genius of the universe instrumentalist in those days. At this time, Mark was national fiddle champ, national mandolin champion, national guitar champion, national high jump skateboard champion….

Jan Garrett [00:32:17] Get out! He was not! Really?

Sandy Munro [00:32:19] …junior national archery champion…all at the same time. Yeah. And Chris Phillips, who was in my bluegrass class at Aspen High School, ended up beating Mark O’Connor two years in a row in the flat picking.

Jan Garrett [00:32:31] Is that right?

Sandy Munro [00:32:33] Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:32:35] Well, all I can say is that that whole feeling that I talk about, like in the late ’60s and on through the ’70s, that you were in the center of that, Sandy. I mean, you were in the middle of that thing. And so…

Sandy Munro [00:32:47] Mary Lynn was in the center of it, too.

Jan Garrett [00:32:50] Mary Lynn was actually the real center.

Sandy Munro She was the boss.

Jan Garrett [00:32:54] Yeah, exactly. But it was like such a soulful quality that I hope people can get a sense of what that was like. And perhaps we can all just continue to bring that through, you know? You guys sure have.

Sandy Munro [00:33:07] Well, the fair was quite an event, and it was really well attended. And that was the year, that’s when Edgar Meyer met Béla Fleck and Sam Bush and all those guys. That’s where they met each other, was at the Pitkin County Fair.

Jan Garrett [00:33:21] Is that right? Oh. And for you guys who are bluegrass people, check those guys out because they are amazing. Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:33:31] Great records out there with Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer on them.

Jan Garrett [00:33:34] I want to show people… through the years… this is quick… and again, if they read “Aspen Unstrung”… here’s a picture of you guys building your own house out there up in Brush Creek.

Sandy Munro [00:33:47] Yep.

Jan Garrett [00:33:48] And so you were very busy not only teaching school and playing music, but building that house. And I know that Mary Lynn was a huge part of that. As you were building it, you know, you’d look around, and Mary Lynn would say, “Gosh, we need some cabinets in here.” And then she’d go learn how to build cabinets, and she’d build all the cabinets.

Sandy Munro [00:34:06] Yeah, she did that, too. She learned how to be a good welder…

Jan Garrett [00:34:11] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:34:13] …and an electrician and a plumber.

Jan Garrett [00:34:15] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:34:16] We both learned how to do that kind of stuff.

Jan Garrett [00:34:18] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:34:19] And we actually spent four years… well, at the same time I was teaching school was when we were building the house. So we worked on the house on weekends in the spring and the fall, and then we had the summers, after I went to two summers at Western State, getting a teacher’s certificate.

Jan Garrett [00:34:38] Okay.

Sandy Munro [00:34:40] But during that time, we drove back every weekend to Aspen to work on the house. After our last class in Gunnison on Friday afternoon, we’d drive back to Aspen, go to sleep and get up early in the morning, work two full days, and then get up at 3:00 in the morning on Monday and drive back to Gunnison for our classes the next morning. So it was… and I’d like to acknowledge that our inspiration for building the house came from a guy named Tom Hicks.

Jan Garrett [00:35:13] Oh, right.

Sandy Munro [00:35:14] And Tom’s another big character in the book. And he was, I call him “the world’s best lifestyle salesman.” And Tom’s whole theory was, if you could manage to get yourself a piece of land, you ought to be able to build some kind of a house on it so you didn’t have to ever have a mortgage. And the idea was… because the kind of mortgage you took to build a house, even back in those days, was… you know, how are you going to earn that kind of money and live a carefree lifestyle like we wanted to live? And it turns out that the house was the ticket. And Tom’s theory worked pretty well. We, you know, we were able to build our house out of… the largest loan we ever made was for $8000.

Jan Garrett [00:36:03] Wow.

Sandy Munro [00:36:04] And that was to my grandfather. Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:36:10] Can I show people a picture of what the house looks like now? It’s absolutely gorgeous.

Sandy Munro [00:36:17] Oh, yeah. That’s the back wall, the back patio there where the hot tub is. Our other big influence on the house was the world-famous American father of raku pottery, Paul Soldner.

Jan Garrett [00:36:31] Paul Soldner. I remember Paul… and Ginny.

Sandy Munro [00:36:34] Paul and Ginny became great friends. And we traded many, many workdays, working for each other in the years that went by. And their daughter Stephanie is still a great friend of ours. She lives in the house now that Paul and Ginny have passed on. But Paul was quite a character, and he’s one of the major characters in the book and a major influence in the book as well.

Jan Garrett [00:36:59] And I know that now Stephanie really has taken over that whole situation out there, that land and those buildings, and everything is so gorgeous. The Soldner Center. I think it’s now a historical landmark. And people should check out the Soldner Center. It’s a beautiful place.

Sandy Munro [00:37:19] We did a book signing out there, remember?

Jan Garrett [00:37:21] We did. Yes, we did.

Sandy Munro [00:37:24] A bunch of the old-time Aspen musicians came and joined us that day, and we did a lot of reading, and… Doug Rhinehart, I think, also joined us in that.

Jan Garrett [00:37:36] Yes. And Doug was such a wonderful friend and character through all those years as well. Just amazing photographer and so many other talents. Doug and Jean.

Sandy Munro [00:37:46] Doug and Jean became our best friends. We lived up and down the hill from each other at the W/J before we moved.

Jan Garrett [00:37:52] Yeah, I remember. Yeah. Well, this whole thing… I suppose we should start to wrap this up, but it has been so great to talk to you, Sandy. And is there anything else? I mean, I want to show, first of all, look at this picture. This is a more recent photo, right?

Sandy Munro [00:38:10] Yes, that is. That’s probably five years ago.

Jan Garrett [00:38:14] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:38:14] Yeah, something like that.

Jan Garrett [00:38:17] Yeah.

Jan Garrett [00:38:18] So you and Mary Lynn, and I’m so happy that you guys are still here, still flourishing. Anything else you want to say? Any wise words or, you know, goofy things?

Sandy Munro [00:38:29] No. Except that… well, I would just say, in the interest of… my interests have moved since I managed to pick up this Parkinson’s thing.

Jan Garrett [00:38:41] Yeah.

Sandy Munro [00:38:43] You may have noticed. And so my interests have focused more in on the writing these days, and I’ve found that I seem to be able to do that better than I was ever able to play music really. And I’m pretty excited about the whole writing thing these days. And I might have another project underway at some point.

Jan Garrett [00:39:07] Awesome, I hope so. I hope that people can keep in touch. And tell us your website again, Sandy.

Sandy Munro [00:39:13] It’s SandyMunroMusic.com.

Jan Garrett [00:39:17] Awesome.

Sandy Munro [00:39:17] Munro is spelled m-U-n-r-o. No e. It’s the old Scottish way.

Jan Garrett [00:39:25] Indeed, and there’s that Scottish heritage coming through for sure. That poetry. The poetry in your writing, just because you’re such a good writer. So, I guess, unless there’s something else you want to say…

Sandy Munro [00:39:37] I think that’s probably enough.

Jan Garrett [00:39:40] Is that enough? Okay. Thanks, Sandy. And thanks everybody who’s watching and listening. And please keep in touch. Thanks.

Sandy Munro [00:39:48] We’ll be in touch for sure. See you soon, Jan.

Jan Garrett [00:39:51] Okay. Bye. Thanks.