The Twain Meet: Tom Azarian and Peg Tassey Create Together - The Montpelier Bridge (2025)

It may have been his first encounter with a banjo, and his memory of it, 80 years later, that attests to Tom Azarian’s lifelong fascination with the confluence of music and history.

“It would have been 1944, the last full year of the Second World War,” he says. “My father went to a junk shop and brought back a banjo he’d bought for 50 cents. There was no bridge and no strings, and we didn’t know how to play it. And it was real old; I mean, the hide was yellowish brown. I turned it over and I always remember the owner’s name. It said, William C. Brown, Willimantic, Connecticut, February 1871.”

It registered with him that, at nine years old, he was holding a banjo purchased in the 19th century by someone who lived not far from the Azarians’ home in the Berkshire hills in Massachusetts.

The unplayable but fascinating relic was a five-string banjo, not the modified, four-string version that debuted in the early 1900s and became a staple of jazz, Dixieland, and (somehow) Irish music.

“So I knew that five-strings were played in the North,” he says, “although not as much as in the Appalachians.” When he was a teenager he met up with an “old timer” in New Hampshire who said he, too, had played a banjo like Tom was carrying. “To me, that was the second person that played five-string in New England.”

His interest in music and music history derived in large measure from his father, Karekine Azarian, whose Armenian first name was Americanized to Karl. (Similarly, Tom is actually Tomas.) Karl played the mandolin and violin. Tom also had a grandfather in the old country, whom he never met — both his parents’ families escaped genocides by the Ottoman Empire — who played what might have been an oud. It definitely wasn’t a lute, although they’re similar in appearance. Pondering that question sets him off on the kind of tangent he loves.

“I think the oud has eight or ten strings [Wikipedia says eleven, most often] and they play it with a quill from an eagle. When the crusaders went into the Middle East — Syria, Lebanon, and like that — they brought the oud back to England. The Arabic title for ‘oud’ was ‘al’ — like ‘the’ — ‘oud.’ And ‘al oud’ morphed into ‘lute’ among the English. Only the English added frets to it. The original oud — no frets at all.”

The banjo had a similar multi-cultural evolution, having derived from an instrument brought to the American colonies by kidnapped, enslaved Africans. Tom Azarian went from that first encounter with an unplayable five-string to an immersion so thorough that it has melded into his name. A recent article by Dan Bolles in Seven Days — “The Ballad of Tom Banjo, Vermont’s ‘Vagabond’ Storyteller” — recounts in grand detail how Azarian, steeped in a passion for traditional music and the humanitarianism often at its core, followed his peripatetic instincts, banjo in hand, from campus to campus, town to town, street corner to street corner, around the Northeast. He arrived in Vermont in the early 1960s. When others followed — rejecting the superficiality they perceived in citified American culture — Azarian was already here, raising kids with his (now former) wife, Mary, an award-winning artist and children’s book illustrator; sugaring; and gardening; working the land at the family’s spread in Cabot. And playing music.

(He’s a gifted cartoonist, too. Particularly in Burlington, where he lived for 26 years after his marriage ended, he’s known for his “cranky shows,” playing and singing while an accomplice unspools a spoofy, hand-drawn story, with social and political commentary lurking behind comedic themes about cats and meatballs and such.)

Tom is back in central Vermont now, living with family members in a Calais farmhouse. In his late 80s, he’s self-deprecating: “I can’t play as fast as I used to; I’ve had carpal tunnel and operations on both hands.” After being complimented on his still-powerful tenor singing, he adds, “I can’t reach the high notes that I used to.”

Only he can judge that. But sitting at his kitchen table and belting out, a capella, a verse and chorus of Utah Phillips’ “Larimer Street,” his voice soars with conviction.

“Then where do they go?
Where do they stay?
They’ve knocked down the neighborhood and hauled it away…. WAY!”

Concluding with, “It’s always the poor that they run out of town.”

Those surgeons, it’s clear, didn’t mess with his passion.

Reinvention

In January 2023, Peg Tassey went to hear Tom, his son Ethan, and grandson Francis, perform at The Whammy Bar in Calais. A local resident, with a home within walking distance on Curtis Pond, Tassey had migrated to central Vermont in 1978, partaking of all things Plainfield: she clerked at PLR Manwell’s store, milked cows on Hollister Hill, and eventually enrolled at Goddard College, studying photography with instructor Jeff Weiss.

Tassey had played rock ‘n’ roll as a teenager in Florida. In Plainfield she occasionally sat in, singing harmonies with local bands, but, she reflects, “Something wasn’t happening for me with music at that time.”

Then along came The Empty Pockets.

“They played at the Grange above the Plainfield Co-op,” Tassey recalls. “There used to be a phone booth out there and I called up my friend Vanessa Rabin and I said, ‘I’ve found the band I want to be in!’ She said, ‘You can’t! You’re too old!’ And I’m like, ‘I know! But I love them!’ They were a bigger influence on me than, like, the Beatles.”

Two members of The Empty Pockets were Azarians: Tom’s oldest son, Ethan, on guitar, and his brother Jesse on drums. (Tom’s third son, Tim, is also a musician.) The band changed its name to The Hollywood Indians, and played and wrote prolifically, earning success in Vermont’s rock scene and beyond.

Tassey never joined the Pockets/Indians, but her passion had been jump-started and she launched her own career. Her music is raw, raucous, and emphatic. Now 67, she fronts Peg Tassey and The Loud Flowers (which includes her daughter, Audrey Tassey Ayer).

As the years passed, Peg expanded her talents, serving as a producer for other artists’ recording projects. In that role, a not-surprising dynamic revealed itself — and pissed her off.

‘There were always men at the helm!’

Citing a particular, but not unique, experience, she says, “I had arranged these songs. I had hired each band member for what they would bring to it, I paid for the studio with money I had raised for the artist. But I noticed that after a take they’d look at the engineer and say, ‘How was that?’”

The engineer, she hastens to say, was tremendously skilled and excellent to work with. But the inequity stung. Judging from the lyrics of her 1991 recording, “Boys Club,” it was infuriatingly familiar.

“I was the producer,” she says, “But I’m a woman. I’m an older woman. I kept finding that people didn’t take me seriously, even though I’ve been playing for a long time and I really know what I’m doing. And I’m a good producer. I have a really good ear! I can say that and feel okay about saying that.”

Her frustration boiled over during a phone conversation with Jeff Weiss, her former photography professor at Goddard, now a renowned conceptual artist in California. They’ve maintained a collaborative relationship since his departure, and he was asking her to contribute music to a video project. He couldn’t pay, but he promised to provide something she’d find useful.

“So he bought me thousands of dollars of recording equipment!” she says. “I’m like ‘Jeff, I don’t know how to use this stuff!’ and he says [with a crude reference to the male anatomy], ‘You’re gonna do it. I want you to be in charge of music.’”

She found the technology incomprehensible, but when the pandemic struck and people hunkered down with pet projects, she managed to qualify for a grant from the Vermont Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, now called HireAbility Vermont, to take an online course in production and engineering from the Berklee College of Music. The other students were half her age, computer savvy, and scattered around the world.

“Honestly, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life,” she says.

But she earned a degree. Then, to her surprise, Capstone Community Action urged her to apply for a $5,000 E.M.B.R.A.C.E. grant to turn her fledgling skills into a business.

“That’s how I started this place,” she says, motioning to the spacious, high-ceilinged room around her, empty but for minimal furniture and a drum set. She engineers from a small adjoining room, a modest suite, called the Emotionoise Recording Studio, in the second story of a building in Burlington, where she lives when she’s not in Calais.

“Honestly, I could never have done this without people believing in me. I’m so grateful.”

Grateful — and, finally, in charge.

The Common People

When Tassey heard Tom, his son, and grandson that evening at the Whammy Bar, her imagination reoriented toward production. (She had already commenced three recording projects.) Tassey had known the Azarians for decades; she and her daughter had lived with Mary in Calais when both women were divorced, and during Tom’s extended stay in Burlington she had seen him perform with a friend on the streets, at the Radio Bean, and elsewhere.

“Really,” she says, “he’s sort of legendary around here.”

And so she proposed a recording project. There would be logistical challenges — repeated bus rides to and from Burlington, for example — but Tom was interested.

So the project began, and its results are now online. “Tom Banjo: Music of the Common People: American Folk Songs, Labor Songs, Ballads, and Unauthorized Opinion,” is handsomely featured on Bandcamp.com

The title should surprise no one. The selections Azarian chose express his continued commitment to the cultural, historical, political — and certainly the musical — value of folksong. He starts off with “Goodbye Girls,” and in a spoken introduction puts the song in context. It’s a New England song, Tom explains — “Goodbye girls, we’re going to Boston …” — probably 100 years old. And since he no longer remembers all the verses he originally heard he’s made up some of his own, drawing on his New England roots, combining nostalgia and humor as he sings about food and family.

Tassey does a good job capturing the tone of his Stewart-MacDonald banjo. It’s not the driving, bluegrass sound, but a mellower, older form of playing. He employs techniques learned from Pete Seeger’s instructional booklet, “How to Play the 5-String Banjo” and sometimes imitates the playing of Uncle Dave Macon, whom he heard on radio broadcasts of The Grand Ole Opry when he was a kid. On “Goodbye Girls” he often plucks harmonies to his own vocals. On his original song, “Redneck Engineer,” he frails, a more syncopated style.

“The banjo had such a unique sound,” he says, recalling his first exposure to the instrument. “It’s that damn fifth string. It’s like a drone, like the bagpipes. Nothing else sounds like it. I just got infected.”

His other commanding instrument, however, is his voice. He uses it to particular effect on “Henry Lee,” a disturbing Appalachian murder ballad sung by the late Ralph Stanley, whose lonesome mountain tenor evoked a time when people sang in their cabins, or deep in the woods, and no audio equipment had been invented to trap them, like amber, in modernity. Ralph’s rendition is riveting. Tom’s matches it. Peg, in her tiny adjoining room, nails it.

“Tom Banjo: Music of The Common People” touches many themes important to its protagonist. In conversation, however, he reveals a particular affinity with “Mother Jones,” first recorded as “The Death of Mother Jones” by Gene Autry in 1931. Mother Jones was an impassioned, courageous labor organizer a century ago. In his version, Azarian concentrates on her work on behalf of striking West Virginia coal miners. After two verses from the original, he tells the story his own way.

“I added my own ‘cause I’ve studied enough about history to know about labor in this country,” he explains, sitting in his kitchen. His verses are awkward at times — the syllables and meter temporarily astray — but this is folk music, and Tom Azarian has cred. “I’ve been in a couple of strikes myself.”

One, he relates, was at a Westinghouse factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. He describes the police techniques for busting through the picket lines; but even more poignant is his description of how companies leverage the workers’ own poverty to retain control. “They send the [workers] that were called scabs . . . to break the strike. Which is really hard because they [the scabs] have families and little kids and they’re desperate. But the employers love it because it makes working people hate other working people and they use that to break the strike. They always want to keep a certain percentage of what they call ‘the labor pool’ so desperate that they’ll work for pennies. That’s how they turn them into ‘scabs.’”

Other experiences he recalls were in unionized machine shops at New England woolen and paper mills.

Now he’s on a roll.

“I worked at the North Montpelier Woolen Mill that used to be where that old dam is. But they were polluting the brook from the dyes, dying all the wools. So with the environmental laws they pulled up and went down south. The South [shuns] environmental laws, and the South hates unions.

“And then they left there, a lot of companies, and went into Third World countries! No unions, no environment; people go out on strike and they call up the armies and just shoot ‘em down, which the United States and the CIA set up with these military coups. They’re going to have a controlled population that’s just going to have to work and not strike. It was all in the guise of the Cold War and stopping the Russians.”

It’s a devastating worldview. Maybe the best way to counter it is to sing about it.

It took Tassey several months to distill Azarian’s recordings into a final package. Recording and producing — weaving a compelling, coherent musical narrative from scores of takes and retakes — is an exacting craft, moreso even than playing the music. But, of course, they’re dependent upon each other, together creating an experience for people to listen to, learn from, and enjoy. As the 21st century embroils itself in new and frightening conflagrations, recordings like these could be among the last echoes we will hear of times somehow simpler, somehow more digestible without terror.

But they also tell us how we got here.