Halleck Brenden

Halleck B. Brenden

Laurel, MT 59044

5/12/41 - 7/25/07

Halleck and his son, Paris, circa 1983...

Halleck Buind Brenden (1941 - 2007)

Halleck Buind Brenden was born in the family home in Laurel, Montana on May 12, 1941, to Carl and Mabel Brenden. He died on July 25, 2007 at St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, MT. Halleck grew up on the family's small farm, driving a tractor, taking care of cattle, shocking grain bundles, thinning sugar beets, fencing, etc. It was hard work but good living. Early on he demonstrated both academic and musical talents, and he excelled at both over the ensuing years. He was a Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout, enjoying and appreciating our wilderness areas. In the early 1950's he participated with his siblings in numerous trips floating down the Yellowstone River from Columbus to Laurel – usually the only raft on the river. He started violin lessons at age 9 and continued with violin and piano lessons through high school. He backpacked extensively in the Beartooth Mountains around Red Lodge especially to his favorite place, Keyser Brown Lake. Halleck graduated from Laurel High School in 1959 and from Montana State College in 1963 with a B.S. in psychology. His summer jobs while in college were logging in Washington, artichoke harvesting in central California, and playing piano in a bordello in Mission Beach, California. He was selected for a special three-year program in psycholinguistics at the University of Illinois. While there he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and was one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). One of his prouder moments was appearing on national television directly confronting the governor of Illinois while speaking for the anti-war movement. He graduated with an M.S. Degree in Psycholinguistics, and completed all requirements for his doctorate up to the final oral defense. He was denied his PhD because of his anti-war activities. In 1965 he married Sally Roggia and they had a son, Leif, in 1969. He became an Assistant Professor of psychology at Belknap College in Centre Harbor, New Hampshire, was selected as Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and served on the Academic Senate. He earned tenure in short order and his classes were very popular and overflowing. He established strong friendships with many of his students, and these connections endured over the years with a number of them visiting him repeatedly with their growing families and some moving to Montana. While at Belknap College Halleck played wonderful improvisational piano and fiddle in the Jug Band. When Belknap College closed, Halleck worked from 1972-1975 for Owens-Illinois in Massachusetts doing silk screening. In 1975, he drove his truck Homer back to Montana, working for Carpenters Local 1172 in Billings, Montana, 1975 through 1978. After his marriage ended he went to live with his brother Carl in New York City. He was a performing artist and raconteur at Kenny's Castaways from 1978 to 1979. He met Sheila Miles and together they worked carpentry jobs and played music throughout the New York City area and later throughout Eastern Montana. Halleck's music was recorded and produced by Beet Records and he played concerts with Dobro Dick Dillof. One of their first gigs was at the famous Folk City Club. In 1979 Sheila and Halleck moved back to Montana where they were married in 1980 at Keyser Brown Lake. Halleck could fix anything; on their move to Montana the u-joint went out on their van and Halleck carved apple wood to repair it until they could get to the next town. This talent made him a much sought-after carpenter when he worked as a millwright in Carpenters Local 1172 in Billings. Their son Paris was born in 1982 in Billings, and in 1983 they moved to Miles City where Halleck was a DJ for a radio station. Halleck adored his son and missed him terribly after the marriage ended in 1989. From 1987 to 1997 Halleck had wide-ranging life experiences. He had many musical engagements including playing with well-known musicians like Vassar Clements, and a tour as a fiddler with Country Shuffle around a five-state area. He said it was "probably the most broad and humanizing educational period of my life." Halleck loved being in the Big Cattle Drive of 1989, and he was in his element playing his fiddle each night at the campfire. In 1997-1998 Halleck worked with Walter Foster on the "Lewis and Clark Trail/ Clark Bottom Rendezvous." After a back injury in 1987, Halleck played with bands and wrote music until health problems three years ago made it harder to get out. He turned to his writing, poetry, and music with friends in his beloved "Circle Cross" barn. Halleck was a gentle spirit who befriended many at his home in Laurel, sharing his music and writing gifts with others there. He touched many people with his sensitive writing and music as he played piano, violin (fiddle), guitar, and mandolin. His dog, "Woofersnap" was his loyal and beloved companion. His good friend Paul Garrison (Dr. Mongo) helped produce his first CD ("Lost in A Honkey-Tonk Dream") of his songs and poetry. "Fiddler" is the name by which many knew him as he played and sang alone and with various bands in the area. He will be deeply missed by so very many of us, and we are thankful that his hundreds of poems and songs and writing will live long after him. The family wants to thank the many people who helped Halleck, brought him things he needed, and were there for him as dear friends and companions. Our special thanks to Michelle (Shelly) Herren, David Strever and Louise Murray for helping him. Thanks also to the nursing and medical staff of St. Vincent 5th Floor. Halleck is survived by his deeply grieving son Paris Miles-Brenden who is earning his PhD at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Halleck and Paris would talk on the phone for hours, had a very close relationship, and were able to spend valuable and enriching time with each other in recent years. Halleck is also survived by his older brother Carl (& Margaret) of Columbus, MT, and his younger sister, Sonvy Sammons (& Richard), of Bismarck, ND. He has three nieces and nephews: Kirsten Razzone of Traverse City, MI, Heather Sammons of St. Paul, MN, and Eddie Williams of Raleigh, NC. He was preceded in death by his son Leif, his parents Mabel and Carl Brenden, and brother Sam Brenden. The family suggests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the Humane Society or Yellowstone Public Radio. There will be a Memorial service on Tuesday, July 31, 1:00 PM at Dahl's Funeral Chapel in Billings (Division and Yellowstone). Friends of Halleck are invited to come, bring instruments and stories, and to share memories and music to celebrate his life.

Photo provided by Joe Kaiser

 link:        http://www.billingsgazette.net/h/blogs/citylights/?p=2135

by Ed Kemmick, reporter, Billings Gazette

A few words on Halleck Anybody who knew Halleck Brenden won’t soon forget him. He died last Wednesday at St. Vincent’s, where he had been in a coma for more than a week. I met Halleck almost as soon as I moved here in 1989 and saw him frequently over the years. A lot of people knew him as Fiddler, as the obituary mentions, and he was a fine musician in his day. The only trouble was, Halleck liked to talk as much as he liked to play music, and, at least when I knew him, he rarely got through a song without stopping to spin a yarn or three.

The obituary also mentions that Halleck took part in the Centennial Cattle Drive in 1989. It doesn’t say that he was, as I recollect, the only person to have walked the entire length of the drive. In recent years he was living in a portion of a barn on some family property in Laurel. When I first started visiting him there, I feared that he wasn’t getting any other visitors. Was I wrong. That first day, and on all the subsequent times I went out there, he had a steady stream of visitors, of all ages, and all of them interesting, to put it mildly. He was the kind of character who attracted other characters.

I can’t remember the last time I saw Halleck with a fiddle. For years past, all he played was his battered, dust-covered old guitar. He wrote a lot of songs toward the end of his life and he would occasionally call me to let me hear a new one. Sometimes he’d put the phone down on his bed and play his guitar and sing, but even better was when he’d play back a recording of a song over the phone, meanwhile shouting out explanatory notes in the background: “Here’s the bridge,” “I missed that chord,” “I’ve got to work on that line,” or “I really like this part.”

His friend, Dr. Mongo, recorded a big batch of Halleck’s songs a year or so ago and a lot of us were looking forward to their release on CD. But Halleck, in his maddening, dilatory way, could never settle on cover art and the CD wasn’t released. I hear Dr. Mongo still plans to release it, maybe over the winter. Halleck did give me a copy, and it is great stuff. Between Halleck’s voice, his old guitar, his style and the subject matter of the songs, you’d swear the thing was recorded 75 years ago. His creaky voice and cracked yodeling are just perfect for the cowboy waltzes and old-time philosophizing, and his fingerpicking, despite the ravages of illness and age, is just as good and just as apt for his style of music.

I learned a lot from Halleck’s obituary and wish I had known him in his heyday. I knew he had some sort of degree in linguistics, but I didn’t know it was psycholinguistics, which sounds almost scary. I wish I would reproduce some of his rambling musings on linguistic matters. He was always drunk on words. You’d say something and he’d seize on a word, talking about its various meanings and associations and cognates, jumping from subject to subject as new words triggered new lines of thought. He’d usually end these impromptu lectures with a guffaw, laughing at the odd workings of his own mind. I’m going to miss that laugh.

Fare thee well, Fiddler.

I was very sorry to hear about the passing of Halleck. I have so many great memories of him when we lived in Baker House, plus all the wonderful times at the Big House. But this one memory has stuck with me everytime I think of him; it was years after I left Belknap and I came up for a visit, I ran into him at a party. Hadn't seen him in years, He just walked up to me and said,"Bruce you old rascal, how the hell are you? He had the big Halleck grin, and we talked like it yesterday. I miss him........................Schwartz

City lights: Unusual CD was recorded just in time By ED KEMMICK City lights When I met Halleck Brenden back in the early 1990s, he was something of a bar stool philosopher, always ready to embark on a rambling lecture that was a mystifying blend of genius and incoherence.

Once a woodworker and mechanic who could make or fix just about anything, Halleck used to disassemble words in a way that was almost physical, explaining what a particular root word signified in three or four languages, how it was related to similar words and how it had found its place in English.

Known to many as Fiddler, Halleck was a Montana original, a Laurel farm kid who got a degree in psycholinguistics and became a college professor on the East Coast.

He moved back to Montana for good in 1979. Ten years later, during the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive from Roundup to Billings, Halleck, dressed in his denim overalls and weathered leather hat, supposedly was the only person to walk the entire route. At the end of each day he was a fixture around cattle drive campfires, crooning and fiddling deep into the night. Music was as important to Halleck as words. Even when he sang a song, either a cappella or accompanied by the fiddle he used to carry almost everywhere, he could barely get through it without pausing to gnaw on some word or phrase, puzzling out its significance or tracing its evolution.

In time, though, the bar stool grew a bit too comfortable. It was hard, even for those of us who didn't know Halleck in his prime, to watch him squander his gifts and sink into what his friend, Paul Garrison, called "a great long welter of indulgence."

And yet even at the end, when Halleck was living in a portion of an old barn on his family's property on the east end of Laurel, he was full of surprises.

No lack of friends

The first time I went out there to see him, I thought I was visiting a virtual hermit. I quickly learned that Halleck still had a wide circle of friends, acquaintances and confidants. Men and women of all ages stopped by the barn, some bearing gifts and hoping to help, but many going to Halleck for advice, consolation and, if they were lucky, a song or two.

Luckily for all of us, Garrison managed to sit Halleck down last winter, five or six months before Halleck died at the age of 66, and record 13 songs and three poems, all original and all uninterrupted. The resulting CD, "Lost ... in a Honky-Tonk Dream," was recently released by Garrison, a bluesman better known by his stage name, Doctor Mongo.

Halleck, who played music his whole life and was proficient on the piano, fiddle, guitar and mandolin, sings and plays guitar on the CD. Garrison said Halleck concentrated on the guitar in recent years because it was a much better instrument than the fiddle for accompanying himself when he sang. The sound that resulted, Garrison said, was old-fashioned country-western, "but the way he does it is completely Halleck."

By that, Garrison said, he meant that Halleck "never aspired to be slick in the way that modern country recordings are. With Halleck, perfection was not the goal. The goal was soul. He wanted to get the feeling in the song. And that he accomplished."

He certainly did. The songs and the poems have an antique sentimentality to them, a sentimentality salvaged by sincerity and honesty. The title for the CD comes from one of Halleck's songs, "Stranger to Myself":

Well, I've always been a stranger,

The things I feel are so hard to tell.

But more and more I'm getting to be

A stranger to myself.

Since you left me, time's gone by like shadow,

Nothin's quite what it seems.

But you know where to find me, drinkin' alone,

Lost in a honky-tonk dream.

Garrison recorded the whole CD in the course of one day late last winter. He hauled his digital recording equipment and two microphones from his home in Greybull, Wyo., to the barn in Laurel. Garrison, in liner notes he wrote for the CD, said Halleck's songs "contain the very essence of the spirit of Country and Western music, sung with heartfelt emotion, self-pity and even humor, in a voice worn down by cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer."

The recording took about eight hours, Garrison said, and Halleck sang every song and recited every poem from memory. They had to back up and start a few songs over, but basically everything was done in one take, and what you hear is exactly what Garrison heard that winter day in the barn.

Halleck was playing his 50-some-year-old Gretsch acoustic guitar, a dusty, badly battered old instrument whose strings looked as though they hadn't been changed in a decade. Garrison said he didn't dream of suggesting new strings for the recording session. The ancient strings, like Halleck's creaky voice, added to the authenticity of the music.

The only bad news is that Garrison is going to be on the road playing music for at least the next six weeks and doesn't expect to be able to start selling Halleck's CD on his Web site until late winter or early spring. But you can check in periodically at www.perfectbedlammusic.com to see if it's available.

Halleck waited until the end of his life to get his music down on disc, so I suppose his listeners can wait a few more months to buy it.

Contact Ed Kemmick at ekemmick@billingsgazette.com or 657-1293.

Published on Sunday, January 06, 2008. Last modified on 1/6/2008 at 1:34 am