Musicians Keep Circle Unbroken

Noel “Lucky” Lyon loved music, but contemporary country disgusted him so much that he decided to give up performing forever - or so he thought.

Then his wife Geneva introduced him to bluegrass.

“I was strictly country but she always played open string,” explains Lucky, 72. He now leads a song circle at the Kellogg Steelworkers Hall the first Saturday of every month.

Geneva, 68, grins at him. “I just never could mash down all those strings.”

When the pair met in the 1940s in Tonasket, Wash., Lucky performed on weekends for dances at the grange hall, or in local bars. On weekdays, he did general orchard work. Geneva, fresh from Arkansas, sorted apples.

“There were places to sit and drink pop and visit. Lucky and I did that. Pretty soon we were visiting a lot,” Geneva recalls.

The pair married and moved to the Silver Valley, where Lucky had been hired as a sawyer for an Osburn lumber company. He’d drifted away from performing, but Laymone Parker, a friend who worked at the Bunker Hill mine, helped Geneva coax him into some living room jam sessions.

“She wanted to play bluegrass, so I picked up the mandolin and the dobro,” says Lucky, a natural musician, who also brushed up on his violin-playing skills. As a child in Kentucky, he remembers selling clove salve to earn his first guitar.

Those first sessions took place in the early 1980s. By 1984, they’d formed a band, Bitterroot Mountain Bluegrass. Its half-dozen members played for local engagements and recorded their own tape. Lucky and Geneva became regulars at the annual bluegrass festival in Sandpoint. It was at one of those festivals that Lucky had the opportunity to meet Bill Monroe, the grandfather of bluegrass.

“I always just loved him. I made a silver mandolin (pin) just like the one he played and gave it to him. I guess he liked it, because every time I saw him on TV at the Grand Old Opry, he had it on,” Lucky says.

The Lyons found those meetings with other musicians a great way to have fun and further their musical skills. So when Don Oberg, another local musician, approached them about the idea of starting a monthly jam session for the Silver Valley, they were more than happy to help.

The Song Circle began meeting in the Arts Center in Wallace in the late 1980s. After a few years, other commitments prompted Oberg to turn leadership of the group over to Lucky.

“You have to have somebody to get things organized, get them going. Otherwise, people just run around,” Geneva explains.

For a while the group met at the Senior Center in Kellogg, but that facility’s busy schedule made it hard to come up with a regular meeting time.

Now, after a six-month hiatus, the Song Circle is back. The musicians plan to convene at the Steelworkers Hall.

“It’s fun. I’ve come home sometimes when my fingers throbbed,” Geneva says. “You know how it is. When you really like something you’re doing, there’s just no stopping.”

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MEMO: Bekka Rauve is a freelance writer who lives in the Silver Valley. Panhandle Pieces appears every Saturday. The column is shared among several North Idaho writers.