Lenny Breau died at the age of 43, in 1984 (when I was all of nine years old), so I never saw him perform. In my seven years of writing about music for this paper, however, no single performer has ever been more lauded by more local musicians. I’ve taken to imagining him as a cross between Doc Watson and Joe Pass. Still, while I’ve heard a great deal of brother Denny Breau’s music, solo and with Turkey Hollow, I’m only passingly familiar with Lenny’s work and I suspect that most Mainers have no idea that it’s more than possible our fair state produced the best jazz and fingerstyle guitarist ever to walk the earth (and thus grow his fingernails creepily long).
Hopefully, that will all change with the publication of Ron Forbes-Roberts’s fine biography, One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau. A contributing editor to Acoustic Guitar magazine, Forbes-Roberts walks the line between adulation and research, music nerd and general interest reporter, with aplomb, and most importantly delivers a very readable account of a personality most readers should find endearing (if heartbreaking), even if they’d never previously heard of Breau.
Maybe older readers will remember Breau from his days working with his folks, Hal Lone Pine (the late Harold Breau, a member of the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame) and Betty Cody (originally Rita Cote), country music stars whose popularity rose and fell in Maine from the late ’30s through the mid ’50s. Back then, Lenny was a bona fide prodigy, singing with his folks by the age of six as Lone Pine Jr., joining the family band as lead guitar player by 14, and recording his first record with Westbrook’s Event Records the next year in 1956. Many people locally may still only know him from his work there with Curtis Johnson and Dick Curless, especially after Curless’s Soul of Dick Curless was re-released as A Tombstone Every Mile on Bear Family Records to some acclaim in 1995, and Breau’s own Boy Wonder, taken from those sessions, was released in 1998 on Guitarchives.
Initially following his parents wherever the fans were, Breau spent the majority of the rest of his life in Canada, Nashville, and Los Angeles, only returning for short times in the ’60s and ’70s before settling back here for a while in 1978 and actually living in Portland for about a year from 1980 to 1981. That didn’t stop him, though, from working with some of the best jazz musicians in Maine for extended periods. Drummer Steve Grover played with him often, as did clarinetist Brad Terry, and both remain fixtures of the jazz scene (what remains of it) in Maine even now. Forbes-Roberts quotes them extensively, as he does Event Records founder Al Hawkes, the late guitarist Tom Rowe, and a number of other long-time Maine club owners and scene members among more than 100 interviews the author conducted for the book over the course of some five years.
How good was Lenny? In 1979, the legendary Chet Atkins called Breau “the greatest guitar player in the world today.” For good measure, bassist Don Thompson called Breau “the best electric bassist ever, including Jaco [Pastorius]” of Weather Report, who also died tragically young.
