On a winter day in 2017, after a perfect blue bird day skiing at Northstar, musician and songwriter Richard Blair relaxed on a bench by the ice-skating rink in the village to wait for his family. Feeling blissful, he answered his cellphone to hear the voice of Andy Mond, a booking agent he had talked to a few months earlier to clear a date for a June event. Blair didn’t know what the gig was, but he blocked the time.
Mond said, “Hey, we’re good to go on that gig. You’re going to be playing for President Jimmy Carter.”
Blair said he could barely keep himself from falling off the bench. The guy next to him heard his excitement. “I just got a gig playing for President Jimmy Carter!” Blair told the man. They high-fived and Blair’s day took a new turn.
The gig was in June at Sunnyside Resort on Tahoe’s West Shore for a private party to honor the people who fundraise for Habitat for Humanity. The Carters volunteered for the organization for more than 30 years.
“It was Jimmy Carter’s crowd,” Blair said. “We were pretty darn excited, and I was thrilled to share my own stuff with him.”
Blair’s original music and lyrics center on the history of Truckee, its people, and lifestyles of the early days, which fit the event’s bill for having a hometown twist with a historic message. When Blair began performing his lively, educational storytelling tunes about the history and culture of Truckee, he captured a new audience. Several sold-out shows at Cottonwood Restaurant, billed as “Streets of Truckee,” filled the faux saloon room with live-action historic characters from his stories who were at the ready to perform arguments, fist fights, and shoot-outs.
In 2015, Blair performed at Sierra Expeditionary Learning School (SELS) to liven up the fourth grade California history curriculum, where students and teachers joined in the chorus.
“A room full of students already knew my songs and sang the choruses with smiles on their faces,” he said. “They’re singing about the Donner Party. In Idaho schools, they’re singing about Captain John Stanley. When you put a little chorus hook to the story, they sing along, and they’ll remember that for the rest of their lives.” Blair said he received a message from SELS not long ago asking him to return to the classroom for a “Streets of Truckee” performance for second and third graders.
He also performed with the band 1888, which played cover tunes from the Grateful Dead to classic rock.
President Carter was renowned for his love of music, from rock to gospel to country. He maintained decades-long friendships with Greg Allman, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, to name a few. At the White House Jazz Festival in June 1978, Dizzy Gillespie asked President Carter to sing along to the tune “Salt Peanuts,” which he did to roaring applause.
While setting up at Sunnyside for the private event, Blair asked the Secret Service if there was any chance he and the band could meet the president. “The agent said he’d ask, but I thought there would be no way. Boy, was I wrong.”
Halfway through the show, President Carter’s staff stopped everything and announced the president would be coming out to meet the band.
“President Carter talked to each one of us individually, starting with Craig Iverson on piano, then bass player Steve Kershisnik, then me, and drummer Brittany Iverson, who later said President Carter was totally intent on listening to the music,” said Blair. “She had a vantage point and could see the president was an active listener who was hearing the stories and getting a taste of our culture and history.”
Blair said that meeting Carter was like meeting a normal, genuine guy who wore a western belt buckle and had food stains on his shirt from dinner.
“The president shook each person’s hand and looked us in the eye to have a meaningful dialogue about who we were and what we were doing,” he said. “He took his time to meet and greet as an individual with integrity, and one who made us feel comfortable. He told Brittany, ‘It was really great to see a lady drummer,’ something she’ll never forget.”
The Carter gig provided incentive for Blair to keep doing what he was doing: putting history to music. After living in Truckee for 35 years, in 2018 Blair returned home to Idaho, where his grown children live. In the Gem State, Blair is carrying on just like he did in Truckee. “I write about the local culture and history of places like Stanley, Idaho, the pioneers, and gold miners,” he said.
His wife, Connie, has managed the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch in Stanley since 2017. In this remote part of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Richard travels at least an hour to other towns and gigs. “There aren’t as many places to play, so I book myself in the summer, then I write and record music for the next summer, so it keeps me motivated.”
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away in Plains, Georgia, on Dec. 29 at age 100, making him the longest-living president.
