by Vince Farinaccio

     Shortly beyond the entranceway at Siloam Cemetery, there stands a mausoleum, unassuming in appearance, yet the first monument a visitor encounters. At the top stands a cross with the name “Mori” inscribed just below it. A second cross occupies much of the right front wall, beneath which the names “Eugene” and “Olive,” along with their respective dates of birth and death, are engraved. If anyone takes a moment to peer through the glass door, a bouquet of artificial flowers sits beside the tombs on the floor inside, its array of colors in conspicuous contrast to the gray of the small building in which it is locked. Eugene V. Mori, one of Vineland’s most successful and nationally known businessmen, may have selected this spot in his hometown as a final resting place, but his legacy is more accurately a tale of two cities.

          Mori’s achievements started out small in the Vineland neighborhoods where he grew up delivering milk door-to-door, but these early accomplishments intimated that there was something greater in store for him. As a young adult, he earned the attention of his hometown before making his presence known in the state and in the world of horse racing. National publications like The New York Times and Sports Illustrated ran stories on him. A city took its name from his developments there. And eventually his business acquisitions extended into California and Florida. But no matter where his work sent him, he was never away too long from where he began his life.

     The son of Italian immigrants who settled in Vineland in 1889, Mori was born here in 1898 in the most unpromising of conditions. In a lengthy phone interview several weeks ago, Mori’s son Eugene, a successful businessman and land developer in Florida, recalled the family’s plight. “They were really poor,” he explained. “They had almost nothing to start with. They came from Parma, Italy. My father was the only son in his family who was born in the United States.”

     A popular anecdote the future millionaire would tell about his early life concerned the directions his mother, Teresa, gave him as she dispatched him to D’Ippolito’s grocery store to purchase spaghetti. She told him to buy the broken pasta that sold for two-and-a-half cents instead of the six-cent unbroken kind. In relating the story, Mori would say that he “learned to handle money by watching her make ends meet.”

     A 1973 New York Times article reports that while Mori was growing up in the early years of the 20^th Century, his father worked in a Vineland rug mill. Mori attended grammar school at Third and Elmer Streets, and entered the business world at age 10 when he purchased a Holstein cow for $125 and delivered milk in the neighborhood for four cents a pint. “He always chuckled about that,” his son recalled.

    At the age of fifteen, Mori was paying his father, Eugenio, rent and attending business school in Philadelphia for nine months. While still a teenager, he started a bicycle repair service that, according to his son, was an early partnership. “He had a little bicycle repair business with a partner named Jules DuBois and they had a shop somewhere around West Landis Avenue.

     This soon gave way to a new partnership with Charles Pennino in a venture selling automobile tires under the collective title Penmor. Ads for the company appearing in 1918 editions of the Evening Journal reveal that the business provided items like Fisk Cord tires and Pennsylvania Auto Tube as well as steam vulcanizing.

     Business partners would be standard for Mori in the early years. The New York Times quotes him as saying, “I always took in a partner, he might not have money, but he could pay for his interest out of earnings and he could run the business and leave me free to go on to something else.”

     Mori’s obituary in the Times Journal states that the Penmor partnership was dissolved in 1920 when Pennino returned from military duty in World War I. Pannino continued to sell tires under his own name, but by April of that year, ads began appearing for a car dealership under the title Mori Bros. The new enterprise included as partner Mori’s brother Amadore. The earliest ads indicate that the dealership was originally located on the 700 block of Landis Avenue, sold vehicles like White Trucks, used cars and Firestone Tires and also contained a service station. Not long after, the brothers opened a similar business in Millville.

     The automobile agency was a logical step in Mori’s business endeavors especially since his wife Olive’s father, John W. Ewan, had been a significant figure in Vineland’s association with the newly developed motor car. “My mother’s father had the first car agency in Vineland,” Mori’s son said. “Before that, he originally had a livery stable, a horse stable and a horse delivery business. Then when automobiles came in around 1900, he had the first car agency. I remember the livery stables were still there when I was a very young boy He was retired, but it was still there. And we would get our milk delivered by horse and wagon back in the mid Thirties.”

    But in the later half of the 1920s Mori, had relocated with his wife and daughter Janice to another part of South Jersey. Mori’s son recounts the situation. “I was actually born [in 1928] in Cooper Hospital in Camden because my father had a car agency in Merchantville and he was living there at the time,” he explained. “It wasn’t that long, maybe a couple of years or so. Shortly after that, he sold that agency and moved back to Vineland.”

     The Mori family, with newest addition, daughter Joan who was born a year after Eugene, settled back into Vineland, but it wasn’t long before tragedy struck with the early death of Amadore in 1934. Mori continued to run the business, which was now located next to Sacred Heart Church at East and Landis Avenues, on his own. Within several years, he decided to have a new structure built across from his current location. The facility would accommodate his car dealership and an adjacent movie theater and become known for decades as the Mori Building.

     Construction of the Landis Theatre and the new home for Mori Bros. began in November 1936. Online sources reveal that seventy-five construction workers labored daily to complete the structure which had been designed by Philadelphia architect William H. Lee. In a mere four months, it was completed.

     The first business launched on the site at Landis and East Avenues was the Mori Bros. auto dealership which opened March 1, 1937. The state-of-the-art facility, as described in the pages of the Evening Journal and the Evening Times, was replete with “one of the largest and most modern showrooms in the country,” measuring 38’ x 40’ and decorated in a color scheme of green and white, as well as a 50’ x 50’ service department behind “three huge glass doors” to allow for natural lighting. In addition to a stock room, offices filled a mezzanine balcony at the rear of the showroom.

     Mori, whose local businesses by now also included the Cumberland Credit Agency and Household Credit Company, was reported as being “in general charge of construction” of the building and chose to carry top-of-the-line vehicles that continued to set him apart from the other car agencies in Vineland. “He sold REO trucks, Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac,” Mori’s son explained. While REO had been largely known for its cars, the opening of the new dealership corresponded to a time in REO’s history when it had dispensed with manufacturing cars in favor of trucks.

     Olga Platoni, a Vineland resident, remembers that particular Mori dealership well. “He sold more expensive cars,” she recalled. “I was a working girl and I bought a Chevy. You didn’t go to Mori’s to buy a Chevy, as I remember it.” Platoni wasn’t able to buy her choice of car from Mori in Vineland, but across municipal lines it would have been a different situation. Mori’s son explained that his father had also opened an auto agency in neighboring Millville that did indeed sell Chevrolet along with Buick. Platoni explained that there were still many Vineland residents who were customers of Mori Bros. “You’d be surprised!” she explained. “There were people who had worked very very hard and became wealthy professionals.”

     At the start of December 1936, Mori had announced that the movie theater, then under construction, would be called the Landis Theatre. The Evening Journal reported him as saying, “We thought it would be most appropriate to honor the life and work of Charles K. Landis by naming Vineland’s newest motion picture theatre after him…Its completion will mark another milestone in the steady growth of the Vineland tract founded by Mr. Landis 76 years ago.”

      Landis Theatre officially opened 7:30 p.m. on Friday March 12, 1937. It was a most unique creation with its Art Deco ornamentation, Art Moderne mirrors and rounded corners and high tech sound. The online history of the theatre describes it as having had a Mirrophonic System that produced an evenly distributed noiseless sound reproduction through di-phonic speakers that were installed throughout the room. A system was also available for the hearing impaired. Interior lights and the stage curtains were controlled from the projection booth. And there was air conditioning.

     “My father tried to make it a first-class operation,” said Mori’s son. “It was a beautiful little theatre. I remember the first few years the Landis operated they had ushers and usherettes in uniforms to take you to your seat. It had a beautiful curtain that opened before the movie came on and colored lights. It was quite a show.”

     The Landis Theatre’s opening night was a gala event attended by local and state dignitaries including Congressman Elmer H, Wene and Vineland Mayor Samuel L. Gassel. Mori managed to be there despite having been hospitalized for several months. As his son recalled, “A few months before the theatre opened, my father was in a very serious automobile accident and almost was killed. My father and mother and Dr. [Charles] Cunningham and his wife were coming back from Atlantic City. He was thrown out of the car and broke his pelvis and broke his leg and was in traction at Newcomb Hospital for almost six months. He came to the opening of the Landis in a wheelchair. He got out of the hospital for the night and he had to go back the same night. I was there. He got a great ovation from the opening-night crowd.”

     Despite the facility’s elaborate artistic design and the best features in modern technology for sight, sound and comfort, the Landis Theatre was still missing a key ingredient of movie houses. “For many years my father resisted selling popcorn and snacks,” Mori’s son explained. “He felt that demeaned it, that it was degrading. So it wasn’t for several years that, by popular demand, he had to provide popcorn.”

     With or without popcorn, the Landis Theatre was a rarity among film houses of the time. In an age when many theatres were owned by Hollywood movie studios, the Landis was an independent entity which would soon provoke a legal battle with Warner Brothers Studios, owner of Vineland’s other cinema, the Grand Theatre.

     “Warner Brothers tried to cut [my father] out of the good pictures,” Mori’s son recounted, “so he got a Philadelphia lawyer and beat Warner Brothers. It was quite a landmark case. Warner Brothers was then required to share equally all the good pictures that became available. I think a year or two after the opening he got the favorable court decision.”

     Mori’s son said his father later purchased the Levoy Theatre in Millville. According to the Levoy Theatre website, Mori purchased the Millville movie house in 1952. The emergence of television offered audiences entertainment in the confines of their homes and ticket sales for films had dropped. There was a bit of irony in the Levoy sale, however. The owner who sold Mori the theatre happened to be Warner Brothers.

     But before this business transaction was undertaken, Mori was drawn to an area of New Jersey known at the time as Delaware Township in a venture that would involve Vineland investors in the first legal thoroughbred race track in the state since the Civil War.

     In 1940, the area of Delaware Township in Camden County bore no resemblance to its current consumer-age stretch of bustling highways, ever-expanding shopping plazas and high-rise office buildings. It was a largely agricultural region and it was in the midst of this farming community that Eugene V. Mori planned his race track.

     The New Jersey Legislature approved parimutuel betting, the type of gambling that applies to events like horse racing, greyhound racing and jai alai, in 1939. It was ratified the same year by voters in a special election. Mori’s son recalled the events leading to his father’s first race track.

     “For a year or two, nobody came forth with a proposal to build a track,” he explained. “So my father saw the opportunity and got together a group of his Vineland friends. In 1940, they raised a couple of million dollars, enough to get a license to build a track.”

     The popular press account tells of Mori appearing before the newly formed state racing commission and being told to return in two weeks with a certified check for one million dollars. “Two weeks later he startled the commission by doing it,” the New York Times wrote in 1973.

     Vineland residents had no reservations about investing in the track to be located on 268 acres of land on Marlton Pike (Route 70). One Vinelander was quoted at the time as saying, “I went to the bank and mortgaged everything I had. [Mori] made money with everything he touched.”

     The Garden State Racing Association of Vineland received a license on November 7, 1941 amid a storm of opposition from religious, civil and social groups who remained adamant about keeping racing and betting out of Camden County. Wasting no time, Mori oversaw the groundbreaking the same month, but construction soon encountered an unforeseen snag when the country entered World War II. A shortage of materials resulted from restrictions placed on supplies required by the war effort, forcing Mori to replace unavailable steel with wood throughout much of the track.

     “I remember being with him many times while the track was under construction,” Mori’s son said. “He stayed at the old Walt Whitman Hotel in Camden.”

     The New York Times reported in late 1941 that the opening of the Garden State Race Track was projected for May 1, 1942, but construction was completed on June 6, with finishing touches continuing until the official opening the following month. The track’s first races were run on July 18, 1942 and Mori’s son witnessed the proceedings.

     “I think the crowd was something like 30,000 or 40,000,” he recounted, “even though it was a rainy day. I remember they had a flagpole that was weak and the wet flag pulled the flagpole into a bent position.”

     Despite the rationing of gasoline and rubber during the war, Mori found a way to help deliver prospective Philadelphia patrons to the track. According to the New York Times, he arranged horse carriages to transport visitors the two-mile distance from train stations in Haddonfield and Merchantville to the race site.

     The Garden State Race Track proved to be popular and successful for the next several decades. According to a 2001 New York Times article, in the 1950s and 1960s it enjoyed an average of 16,000 fans during the week and 33,000 to 35,000 on weekends.

     After World War II, Mori purchased the Tanforan Race Track in San Francisco, California in 1947. Newspaper accounts report that he sold it in 1954 for $3.5 million, which Mori’s son said would have been a higher figure in another year or so. “It was right across from San Francisco Airport,” he explained. Shortly after [it was sold] a new expressway was built right through the property from the airport. My father sold it for what he thought was a good price at the time, but if he had just held on to it he would have gotten I don’t know how much more.” In hindsight, a decision like that would be cause for regret, but Mori’s son said that wasn’t the case with his father. “He always said, ‘Never look back,’” he explained.

     In 1954, Mori bought controlling interest in the Hialeah Race Track in Florida for $7.5 million, selling it in 1972 for $21.5 million, according to the New York Times. Mori’s son would run the Florida track throughout the 1960s before becoming president of the Garden State Race Track in the 1970s. As he explained, “I was general manager of Hialeah for about eight years and president for another eight years. When my father fell ill and decided to retire, I ran [Garden State Race Track] for several years and then we had the fire [in 1977] and that was the end of that.”

     While these new endeavors involved other locations, Mori attempted to expand his businesses in New Jersey as well. By 1950, the state had added tracks in Mays Landing and Oceanport. At the time, the state allowed up to four tracks. The New York Times reported on July 13, 1950 that Mori was seeking a permit to build a $7 million track in Secaucus at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Both flat and harness racing would be provided at a sight estimated as eight minutes from New York’s Times Square.  Within a week, a second developer requested a permit to build a track one mile west of Mori’s proposed site. On September 16, the racing commission denied both requests, basing its decision on the shortage of construction materials due to the Korean War.

     Today, a portion of the Secaucus land that would have housed the projected track is the property of Mori’s son. “I still own part of that land which I’m trying to develop,” he said “I have 180 acres there.”

     In the 1950s, Mori established the Cherry Hill Inn not far from the race track as well as the Cherry Hill Lodge. The naming of these facilities is historically significant, as Mori’s son related.

     “My father, my mother and I, when he decided to build Cherry Hill Inn, were looking for a name for it. He was going to call it ‘Garden State Inn.’ The land it was on was a little hill called Cherry Hill. There was a grove of cherry trees. My mother and I persuaded my father to call it ‘Cherry Hill Inn.’ It had a nice country sound to it. I feel rather proud about it.”

     In 1961, Delaware Township officially changed its name to Cherry Hill.

     Despite ventures like race tracks in Cherry Hill, California and Florida, Mori remained very much a part of Vineland businesses as well. In addition to the auto dealership and credit agencies, he also served as president of Tradesmens Bank in the 1940s.

     Vineland resident Olga Platoni worked as a teller in Tradesman’s Bank during Mori’s time there as president. “He was gracious, physically beautiful, a gentleman and very astute in finance,” she related. “When I worked for him he had the Cumberland Credit Agency and owned a large portion of the stock at the bank.”

     Business required Mori to spend more time out of town in the 1940s and 1950s, but he consistently maintained residence here into the early 1960s. Two homes in which Mori and his family lived still stand today. The first, a stone structure, located on Landis Avenue and Howard Street, was also the site of the family’s previous house. Mori’s son recalled the family’s original home.

     “It was called Spruce Cottage,” he said. “It was a nice old house. My father demolished it and built the stone house on the same property. After he demolished Spruce Cottage, we lived for a couple of years in a little English style house on the Northwest corner of Valley and Landis. He built the stone house and we lived in it for four or five years and then we moved out to East Landis Avenue where he had a horse farm. I drove in and looked at it a few years back. It brought back a lot of memories. The horse barn is still there. I’m kind of an amateur architect and I designed the barn.” 

    The second surviving Mori home along with the horse stables was located on a spread of land known as East Acres which now belongs to the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Mori sold most of the property to the church in 1964 and the house was initially used as a Sunday school. Today, much of it serves as office space.

     On an afternoon in early April, Eileen Chiatello, the church’s Coordinator of Parish Ministries, and Heidi Flebbe, a parishioner, provided a spontaneous tour of the former Mori residence. The records they shared indicate that the building was placed on the market in 1948, the year Mori probably purchased it. A publication at the time, Previews Incorporated, devoted three pages to advertising the house, highlighting its ten rooms, three floors, built-in storage cabinets and glass tile baths. The asking price was listed as $100,000, a considerable price during the 1940s.

     Mori’s son provided some background on the home. “It was built by a man named Max Eddy,” he explained, “who was an executive of Kimble Glass. When Kimble Glass was sold, Eddy moved away and that was when my father bought it.”

     Many of the rooms today are filled with computers and filing cabinets, but the air of a family residence is still evident nearly 50 years after Mori sold his home. “We try to keep it a home-looking environment,” said Chiatello.

     The former master bedroom, now filled with tables and documents of church history, leads into what was once a spacious dressing room that is now an office. Abundant storage space, much of it in the form of built-in cabinets, fills many of the rooms. Bathrooms contain glass towel rods. Drape holders and various lighting are inconspicuous as they are set into the ceiling. A cozy breakfast nook situated off the kitchen once opened out onto a patio. There are even servants’ quarters attached to the house.

     The church has honored the Mori legacy by adapting a variation of the East Acres title for one of its programs. “That’s why the pre-school is called Little Acres,” Flebbe explained.

     When Mori sold the home before moving to Morristown, he maintained ownership of a portion of the land, his son explained. “As I recall, he kept the horse farm,” he said, “and just sold the house to the Lutheran Church. He would go down from Morristown and visit the horse farm frequently, usually on the weekends. He was quite successful with the horses. He had several good stakes-winning horses. I’m guessing he probably started owning horses around 1950 and he continued right up until the time he died.”

     Mori’s death came in the early morning hours of October 8, 1975. He was 77. His son provided the details that are missing from the obituaries that appeared in the Times Journal and the New York Times. “He slipped and fell on his head and had a blood clot,” he explained. “He never really regained consciousness. He lived for over a year. We had him in the best nursing home, I think it was outside of Morristown, but he never was really conscious. He was not in any pain.”

     A viewing was held in Cherry Hill the evening before the burial. At 10 a.m. the next day, funeral services were conducted at Siloam Cemetery and Mori was interred in the mausoleum where his wife Olive had been laid to rest four months prior.

     “I’ll probably be buried there myself,” Mori’s son said. “There’s a place for me, if and when.” But Eugene Mori Jr., at the age of 81, isn’t contemplating any “ifs” or “whens” at the moment. “I’m lucky,” he said. “I’m in good health.”

     Mori worked for a while at his father’s auto dealership in Vineland when he was young and after graduating college and a stint in the Navy, it wasn’t long before he was running the Florida and New Jersey race tracks. He has since achieved success with his company, Mori Properties, in Hialeah, Florida. “I developed an industrial park in Miami and built apartments and warehouses,” he explained. “I’m still active in all of that. I still own one apartment building and recently sold a 200,000-foot warehouse and I still have 12 acres of land yet to be developed in the industrial park.”

     He explained that his sister Janice died around seven years ago and that his sister Joan is currently living in San Francisco.

     In reminiscing at length about his father’s life, Mori paused for a moment to reflect on the disappearance over the years of some of the accomplishments that have been testimony to his father’s legacy like the Cherry Hill Inn and the site of the Garden State Race Track, now overrun by a plethora of shopping plazas. “It’s sad all these things are gone,” he lamented.

    But news of the Landis Theatre’s restoration seemed invigorating. He said that he would try to attend the gala reopening and expressed relief at its resurrection. “I’m very happy to hear that the Landis [Theatre] is going to be restored and saved,” he said. “I was afraid it was headed for demolition.”

     This Saturday, when the Landis Theatre celebrates its reopening, a new restaurant filling the spot of the former auto agency will honor the man who brought this building into existence by calling itself “Mori’s.” Saturday’s ceremony might even recall the excitement of that March evening in 1937 when the Landis Theatre first opened and the crowd greeted the arrival of Eugene V. Mori with thunderous applause. Perhaps on Saturday, in remembrance of Mori, a similar ovation of the same magnitude will fill the night air, loud enough to be heard at Siloam.

By Vince Farinaccio

     The Kennedys, who will be performing in Vineland this Saturday at the Fuel House, aren’t your typical folk act. Sure, there are the jangling acoustic guitars, the occasional cover songs that dip into the traditional well of material and those unmistakable harmonies that filled many a Bleecker Street café in the early 1960s. But this husband and wife duo also pack a repertoire of infectious pop-tinged original songs, a driving sound derived from the rock ‘n’ roll genre and an eclectic array of influences from Billie Holiday to Stravinsky to the Byrds.
     Pete and Maura Kennedy met in 1992 in Austin, Texas. Pete, Nanci Griffith’s lead guitarist at the time, was performing solo at the Continental Club while Maura Boudreau was enjoying a night off from gigging with her band the Delta Rays. The couple met soon after for their first date at the grave of Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas. By the following year Maura joined Griffith’s group as backup vocalist just in time for a European tour.
     “When we were on the airplane going over there, Nanci said, ‘I’d like you to open some of the shows on this two month tour,’” Maura recalled during a phone interview with the couple several weeks ago. “It was kind of a panic situation because Pete and I hadn’t played anything together as an act. We knew if we were going to be an act, we were going to be doing original songs.”
     “We’d written a few songs,” Pete explained, “but not enough to do a whole act. We literally started writing more songs. Our first album, River of Fallen Stars, was basically written under the pressure to have enough songs to play for a half-hour.”
     The writing sessions were the result of a serious discussion about what direction the songwriting would take in distilling the two styles of the writers. “When we first landed in England”’ Maura said, “we went to a coffee shop and said, ‘If we’re going to be writing songs, how do we want to write?’ It was a very defining meeting that we had because Pete played more rock and blues around D.C. and I was playing more Americana, even though the term hadn’t been invented yet, and I had more of a pop thing going melodically. So we were trying to figure out what our combined sound would be like.
     “We talked about all the music that we loved and we both were very solid on the Byrds, so we identified what it was about the Byrds that we loved, and for me it was the modal harmonies – they sing in fourths like monks instead of thirds like the Everly Brothers. And what Pete really liked was that they drew a lot from world music and jazz and classical, so Pete said, ‘We’ll do this cool type of modal harmony and then we’ll imagine that the Byrds are still drawing from world music, but there’s so much more available to us now than what they had. We would have the same paint, but it would be a larger palette. That was our concept, not to sound like the Byrds, but to draw on wide influences.”
     For Pete, the duo’s sound can be specifically traced to a classic 1965 track by the Byrds. “There was one song, ‘Eight Miles High,’ that we decided to use as a template for our whole concept,” he explained. We weren’t trying to sound like that song, but to have the same creative freedom as that song. We play ‘Eight Miles High’ for that reason at a lot of our shows.”
      The couple, who married in 1994, commenced writing in Ireland, a setting not only new to the Americans, but inspirational in its heritage of great writers such as James Joyce and William Butler Yeats and in its rich tradition of folk songs. “It was great and it was inspiring because we were in a new environment,” Pete related. “We’d gone from Austin to suddenly being in Dublin, Ireland which is a really culturally stimulating place. All those songs are written in that environment. There’s a lot of creative stimulation. Dublin’s a great place to write. There’s something about it. It’s a very literary town, very poetic and very musical. It’s a terrific place to write songs.”
     Both musicians were quite comfortable with the Irish literary tradition they encountered. Each had been raised in a household in which reading and academics were commonplace. “My dad was a high school English teacher,” Pete said, “and Maura’s dad was a college professor, a world-recognized Henry David Thoreau scholar. He just retired a few years ago. And she has two siblings who are college professors too, so she grew up in an extremely literary environment with people reading and writing books all the time. So it’s really natural for us to be constantly reading.”
     The Kennedys feel that the literary tradition also extends to songs, shaping the characterizations, stories and themes they write about. And literature has been an inspiration as well. A work like The Odyssey lit the way to the song “Sirens” and transcendentalist Thoreau acted as muse for “Just Like Henry David” while the discovery and influence of mythologist Joseph Campbell has permeated a series of recent albums.
     “To both of us,” said Pete, “lyrics are a form of literature. When we write songs, we don’t really refer to other singer-songwriters so much as to books that we’ve read because there’s just such a wealth of stuff there. We write, sometimes, from the point of view of characters in books, rather than just our own point of view all the time and it just opens things out.
     “At the time we first started writing, I was traveling all around America, either with Nanci Griffith or, between tours, I could just get in my own truck and drive around. I was just one of those people always out on the open road. John Steinbeck was huge with me at the time. I love the Steinbeck books and I love the Steinbeck movies too, like East of Eden with James Dean. And then I got into non-fiction, especially Joseph Campbell, who ties together a lot of world mythologies. That shows up a lot, I think, in our later albums.”
     While Maura cites author John Irving as a favorite, she says her songwriting usually isn’t narrative in style and leads her to a varied approach from her husband’s. “I tend to be more influenced by other musicians than I am by lyrics,” she said, “because when I write a song, I start out with a chord progression or melody in my head and then I find the inherent mood of that melody or chord progression, and then a lyric will emerge. So a lot of times I’ll start out with [wanting] to write a song that has the vibe of this band or this song.”
    The Kennedys’ writing and recording processes are never prolonged, so that their CDs, including 2008’s Better Dreams on Appleseed Recordings, preserve the freshness of the first listen with each subsequent play. “We write pretty quickly,” Pete related. “We’ll do a song in a couple of sessions. We’ll do a rough version and then lie with that for a little while, then do some fixing up if anything bugs us about it. We don’t really like to overwrite the songs or overproduce them either. A lot of the records are the original demo just with stuff added onto it but the original guitar and vocal will be from when we first wrote the song.” 
     On early albums, the duo was usually joined by other players, including The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, the Dixie Hummingbirds, E Street Band member Nils Lofgren and current Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton, but recently, all instruments on the recordings have been played by Pete and Maura.  “I think we kind of envision the whole song,” Pete explained. “When I write a song, I hear the end product record of the song. When I do that the most efficient thing for me to do is record all those parts so it comes out sound just like I heard it in my head.”
     As a guitarist, Pete, who also worked with Mary Chapin Carpenter, is a most accomplished player, moving with ease between bluegrass licks, finger-picked passages, jazz runs and rock lines. Classical music is also a common feature of Pete’s live performances and has been a part of his recorded work since his 1985 Sunburst album featured an acoustic guitar rendition of Debussy’s “The Girl With The Flaxen Hair.” The early Nineties CDs Shearwater and Channel 3 are, respectively, acoustic and electric explorations, as inspiring to guitarists now as when they were first released, and a recent disc, Guitarslinger, revisits material from the Washington, D.C. music scene when Pete was growing up. Today, however, the guitarist has returned to his classical roots.
     “I wanted to connect back with my original interest in classical music, which I’d really gotten away from,” he said.  Now I’m trying to synthesize some of that. I got really interested in Stravinsky a couple of years ago, and that led me to other composers who were working at the same time as him like Debussy and Ravel. Once I really started listening to that stuff, it didn’t seem like a dry, academic exercise because I discover melodies that I really love. I’m diving into that and learning things classical people learn when they’re ten years old. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what the result of all that is. I think it will be worked into my regular stuff.
     “I teach a lot – have a lot of guitar students and some are songwriters who want to expand – and I always try to get them to listen to Gershwin and Cole Porter, and playing Debussy for them so they can see it’s not foreign that it’s something they can incorporate into their own music. I think you have to be fearless, and if you’re not a huge marketable brand, you do have more freedom to do stuff like that. You can keep reinventing yourself as you go along, and your audience will go with you. Only a few of the bigger people like Neil Young and Bob Dylan get away with that.”
     Maura agrees with the creative need to evolve as an artist and traces the duo’s early albums as examples. “As you play, you evolve in different directions at different times, she said. “Our second album [Life Is Large (1996)] leans more toward pop, like more of a Beatles sensibility as far as the three-minute pop song goes, and then the next album [Angel Fire (1998)] was a little more folky and then the fourth album [Evolver (2000)]was a little more rock. I don’t think any musician wants to play the same thing over and over again or create and record the same thing over and over again.
     “And that’s really why we’ve done so many side projects as well because we want to go in this direction, but it’s a little too far afield for a Kennedys record, so let’s just call it something else.  There are people who love the Kennedys and we put out an album of ukulele swing tunes and call it the Kennedys,  they’d be scratching their heads and they might go away and never come back. We don’t want to limit ourselves musically, but we also don’t want to confuse our audience unduly. The people who know us know that we’re going to do these side things, but they also know they’ll get a Kennedys record every year or two.”
     The album of ukulele swing tunes Maura refers to is an actual release under the name The Stringbusters. Inspired by the early recordings of Billie Holiday with saxophonist Lester Young, the main instrument used in the project is the ukulele, played by the couple on songs ranging from standards like “Me, Myself and I” to Beethoven’s “Symphony Number Five,” and even Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.” One of the standout tracks, a solo performance of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” has become a concert highlight that Vineland audiences can probably expect to hear on Saturday.
     Another side project is The Strangelings, a band comprised of the Kennedys, Chris Thompson, Rebecca Hall and Ken Anderson, which was launched in 2007. The endeavor resulted in the CD Season of the Witch, an album steeped in the mysticism and melodies of old from the tarot card illustrations that grace the packaging to the selection of traditional tunes like “The Coo Coo” and “Wayfaring Stranger.” The band’s brief existence afforded Maura the opportunity to revisit the British folk-rock bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s she discovered in her hometown of Syracuse, New York.
      “I was working in a used record store, which was great for me,” she said. “First of all, I was living in Syracuse, New York which wasn’t really a cultural mecca and there was one college station that was really great – they played modern college rock for a while before they went all talk. I never heard anything beyond what was on the radio at the time, the Top 40 stuff, which I hated, and oldies, the same old stuff that you hear on oldies radio now. You’d never have an opportunity to hear a band like Fairport Convention in Syracuse in the Eighties unless you happened to be working in a used record store and curious, and since the records were all opened, we could play anything we wanted to. You discovered a lot of cool music that way that wasn’t in the mainstream, Fairport being one of my favorite discoveries.
     “[Fairport vocalist] Sandy Denny’s voice I just have always adored. I think there’s fluidity to her voice that I always wanted to emulate without trying to sound like her. I like the flexibility she has. She always puts extra turns at the end of phrases or in the middle of phrases that I always thought was amazing. So I would say, vocally, she’s been a big influence on me.”
      Maura revealed that the blueprint for the Strangelings project dates back to Syracuse and her earliest days as a performer. “The biggest evidence of that influence is our band The Strangelings,” she said “When we were putting that together, my whole thing was that if we were going to form a band like this, it’s going to have to be based around the Fairport Convention version of ‘Matty Groves,’ which was always one of my favorite recordings of any genre. There’s no way we would have thought about doing an album like that if I hadn’t discovered Fairport and become a fan. My very first real band that didn’t just play in my friend’s basement was in the mid-Eighties. Most of the songs we did were Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and the Albion Band. We had a terribly small audience in Syracuse, but the ones who knew of the band were really into it. It was my first real band and I was young and I wasn’t that good on guitar and I wasn’t that good a singer yet. I always thought of it as a really good idea for a band, one that I’d like to revisit. I always wanted another chance, because we used to play ‘Matty Groves’ in this young band of mine and it was never…you could tell we loved the music, but we couldn’t pull it off. I’m really proud of how The Strangelings handled that.”
     It might be difficult for fans of the group to envision a time when Maura “wasn’t that good a singer yet.” Her voice, alternately girlishly sweet and womanly wise, has defined the couple’s sound as much as Pete’s production and guitar playing, and gives even the outside projects a distinctive air. The vocal tunes on The Stringbusters CD leave no doubt that she was born to sing standards while The Strangelings disc can convince listeners that traditional folk music is her natural calling.
     The side projects also reveal another side of Pete’s instrumental expertise by featuring him on an instrument other than guitar. The ukulele was his choice for The Stringbusters, but Season of the Witch gave Pete the opportunity to expand the use of his electric sitar, an electric guitar which reproduces the distinctive sound of the Indian stringed instrument, the sitar, first brought to world attention by Ravi Shankar and popularized by the Beatles on their mid-Sixties recordings. While it has graced various recordings by the Kennedys in the past, its use was expanded for The Strangelings CD.
  “On that record I decided to restrict myself to only playing electric sitar,” Pete explained, “because the women were really great guitar players, so there wasn’t a need for more guitar. I was able to do all of the Celtic sitar stuff which, for me, tied together those really ancient traditions. The ancient sound of the Celtic music is somehow made more ancient by playing it with that whining buzz of the sitar.”
     While the Kennedys’ side projects feature more cover songs than usually found on the duo’s own releases, the couple did record a collection of other artists’ material for the 2006 release Songs of the Open Roads. Singing material by the likes of Bob Dylan and Nanci Griffith, the duo also pays tribute to the signpost that has guided their collaborations from the start with a rendition of “Eight Miles High.” But according to Maura, choosing another composer’s tune is not a random selection. “We don’t do a lot of cover songs on record,” she said, “but there are songs that we just can’t deny we love and want to sing and not just love the song, but really want to sing it.”
    The 2001 CD Positively Live is the group’s only album that captures Pete and Maura in concert with a set that mixes material from the couple’s albums, Pete’s solo projects and several blues and folk standards. This was followed by Get It Right (2002), Stand (2003) and Half a Million Miles (2005) before the most recent Open Road and Better Dreams.
     Maura says that a new Kennedys release will probably wait until next year. She has recently put out her first solo album, Parade of Echoes, and says that Pete has completed his own solo project, Union Square, a collection of story songs about New York City where the couple has lived for most of the last decade. And, there’s also Maura’s acting career, which has so far consisted of some non-speaking television roles on White Collar, Gossip Girl and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. The previous week she filmed a background role in episode 18 of this season’s Ugly Betty in which she plays a London Mod, and she was ready to continue her new career at the conclusion of the interview. “Today I’m headed over to the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit soundstage,” she said. “I’m going to be in this Grand Jury.” So why has acting now become a part of her life?
     “We moved to New York in 2002,” she said, explaining that they later relocated for a short period before returning to the Big Apple. “There were so many things I wanted to do and one of the things was to get involved with acting. When we moved back, one of the first things I did was register with some of these casting agencies. Also, when you live in a city like New York, it’s very easy to get really comfortable with your own neighborhood and not venture outside your neighborhood and I didn’t want to get stuck in that. There’s so much diversity here in every way. I just wanted a good vehicle for getting around the city. Every shoot I go on is in a different location. So I’m seeing different parts of the city, I’m meeting different people, I’m seeing how different directors work, which is really interesting. So it’s like every day’s an education for me.”
     The Fuel House gig is one that Maura is particularly looking forward to playing. “I do not enjoy an audience more than a New Jersey audience,” she revealed. “There’s some kind of inherent love of rock ‘n’ roll in all New Jerseyans. They’re fun loving and very knowledgeable about rock ‘n’ roll. I look forward to every New Jersey show.”
     But the philosophy of the couple’s live performances will also be part of Saturday night’s concert. “Hopefully the end product is getting the audience expanding their own musical vision,” Pete said.  “It’s all about expanding the music, leaving it a little bit bigger and broader than it was when we came to it.”

Many thanks to my old friend Mike DiLeva for sending me a link to this clip from the Michael Keaton film Johnny Dangerously (1984). Mike was working in public relations at Bally’s in 1992 when I first met him. I was a cub reporter and Mike facilitated an interview with a revue show producer. I was working at the Cumberland News in Vineland at the time, but wrote that piece as a freelancer for Casino Player magazine, which was the next stop on my career path. Mike DiLeva is now a hospitality and gaming marketing consultant at Experior Consulting. Thanks to Mike, you can check out the clip below to see why, when you’re not sure what to believe, it pays to “know this Grapevine.”

Blue-eyed soul singer Michael McDonald was great laying down lead vocal tracks such as “What a Fool Believes” and “Takin’ it to the Streets” with the Doobie Brothers in the mid-’70s. His unmistakable pipes have also contributed in on-again-off-again fashion to the success of Steely Dan (that’s McDonald’s wailing in the backing vocals in “Peg”) for the past four decades. He teamed up for mega hits in the 1980s with James Ingram (”Yah Mo B There”) and Patti Labelle (”On My Own”). But McDonald has also proven he can top the charts as a solo performer with hits such as “I Keep Forgettin’.” But in 2003, he took his career in a different direction by recording his tribute album Motown. That album included covers of so many famous Motown hits, including Marvin Gaye’s “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” Check it out:

The gig on Saturday night (4-26-08) lived up to its name: “Cumberland County’s Got Talent.” The Vineland Rotary Club sponsored the talent contest, and 400 people were treated to 27 varied acts (28 if you include Trainwreck, the Rotary band) during the night. The contestants ranged from singers and street dancers to choreographed karate and a film short — all interspersed with comedic rants by emcee and former Miss New Jersey, Dena Blizzard. By the time the dust settled at the Centerton Country Club, The jazz band Zoe emerged with both the People’s Choice Award and the grand prize of $500. (click on pictures for larger version and caption)