The Tutmarc Brothers

On a chilly Sunday evening, eighty- and ninety-year-olds crowd the entertainment room of an assisted living community in Seattle. Walkers tangle with wheel chairs, slippers, and chair legs. Shaky hands adjust hearing aids.

“Oh,” one resident says loudly, pointing across the small room. “There’s George. I thought he was dead.”

They have come to hear the Tutmarc Brothers, Greg and Doug, who play a blend of hymns and Hawaiian standards. The brothers – often accompanied by their sister, Jeryl, on ukulele and Jay Deffinbaugh on bass – play shows for retirement communities, churches, luaus and private parties around the Seattle area.

The Tutmarcs are content playing to captive audiences and carrying on the family tradition of spiritual Hawaiian music. They come from a line of lap steel players and manufacturers. Their grandfather, Paul Tutmarc, made some of the world’s first electric guitars in his Seattle basement and produced the first-ever horizontal electric bass. Their father, Bud Tutmarc, manufactured his own brand of guitars and basses while recording dozens of Hawaiian albums all over the world.

“To have something to connect us to our dad, and then also his dad, is really important,” Greg said. “It’s emotional.”

Greg decided to learn to play steel guitar about fifteen years ago when he realized that his father’s passing would mean the end of the family’s knowledge of the instrument. “When my dad was getting old, he couldn’t play anymore,” Greg said. “So I decided that I’d better learn.”

The lap steel guitar, or the Hawaiian guitar, is played on a lap or table using a steel bar to slide up and down the strings. This sound rippled through the United States in the early 20th century. It entered via West coast port cities like San Francisco and Seattle. The 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in Seattle witnessed a performance by the Hawaiian native Joseph Kekuhu, often cited as the inventor of the steel guitar.

By 1916 Hawaiian music was arguably the most popular genre of music in the country. Paul Tutmarc, grandfather of Greg and Doug, embraced three crazes that converged between the World Wars: Hawaiian music, steel guitar, and electrification. “My great grandfather was into whatever was hip,” said Greg’s son Shane Tutmarc, also a musician and currently living in Nashville. In the early 1930s, in the dregs of the Great Depression, Paul spent days teaching music and nights in his garage workshop trying to charge instruments with electricity. Though he lost the race to patent the electric guitar, Paul founded one of the earliest electric guitar companies in the United States, Audiovox.

In a February 1935 Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper, Tutmarc posed next to a swooning woman while displaying the first ever hand-held fretted electric bass. The headline ran: “Pity Him No More – New Bull Type Fiddle Devised.” Paul said he created the bass because he felt sorry for upright bass players who had to lug their instruments across town or travel alone in a separate car while the rest of the band traveled together.

In the 1930s, the Tutmarcs played as a family in taverns around Seattle. A nine-year-old Bud played rhythm guitar. His sister, Jeanne, played ukulele and sang. His mother, Lorraine, sang and played bass guitar.

In November of 1935, Paul was invited to play at a church. Not knowing any gospel songs, he played Silent Night. Bud described the deep impact made on him by his family’s first trip to church: “We were faced with an immediate necessity of changing our entire lives. It was not only a necessity, but also a desire.”

Shane Tutmarc suggests that his family’s conversion may have had something to do with the conversion of Sol Hoopii, widely considered one of greatest steel guitarists of all time. “My great-grandfather [Paul] became friends with Sol. And my grandfather [Bud] was good friends with him…”

“Imagine,” Greg said of their father’s relationship with Sol, whom Bud first met as a teenager. “It would be like walking home from school to find John Lennon hanging out in your kitchen. “Sol was that famous, at least in our family.” Known as the “Hollywood Hawaiian,” Hoopii gained international fame for his stirring guitar work in Hollywood films like 1932’s Bird of Paradise and 1937’s Waikiki Wedding.

Bud formed a Christian Orchestra that featured a number of famous Christian guest musicians, among them: Sol Hoopii, Arnie Hartman, and Ralph Carmichael. Starting in 1951, they performed “Monday Musicales” at the Calvary Temple. The church’s orchestra maintained the drawing power of any blockbuster film. Chuck Rice, an assisted living resident, remembers the performances fondly. Rice played trombone. “It was wonderful,” he said. “We would fill the place, four or five hundred people, fill the balconies. The sound …” He shakes his head. “The music was beautiful.”

Another resident, Lloyd Lorentzen, recalls those performances. “I’d sit as close as I could to Greg’s dad, Bud,” he said. “I thought the music was straight out of heaven.”

This is a common refrain from audiences of Hawaiian music. “It just sounds heavenly,” said another resident. “It’s so soothing and different from anything else you hear today.”

Doug says: “Music is a valuable way to give the message of hope and encouragement that God loves them. We’re trying to encourage them in the right direction … I only hope someone can return the favor when we’re in a place like this.”

Although not everyone in the audience believes in the song’s messages, the songs carry extra weight delivered so close to the listeners’ days of reckoning. Doug sings the hymns in a deep and resonant voice. Greg’s guitar – a “Serenader Bud-Electro” built by his father – hums along with the melody, pulling it gently at the edges. In the audience, heads sway. A few eyes moisten. I nod in and out of sleep – a very gentle sleep.

To learn more about the Tutmarc Brothers, call Greg Tutmarc at 206-799-8172 or email gtutmarc@gmail.com