The Baron (A Tribute To D**k Curless) - Everett W McNally Jr (Wellington)

Everett W McNally Jr (Wellington) - The Baron (A Tribute To D**k Curless) This is Wellington's original tribute to Maine's country music great, D**k Curless. Wellington loved D**k Curless' baritone voice, his stage demeanor, and his seemingly endless supply of songs from memory. Wellington and D**k became friends over the years, with D**k visiting Wellington's childhood home in New Hampshire, and Wellington visiting D**k's home in Maine. Wellington is on vocal, with his Martin D45 guitar, his Dobro guitar, and his washtub bass. The lyrics were created from D**k Curless' song titles. Wellington, who's given name is Everett Wellington McNally Jr, was born in 1937. He spent his early years in New Hampshire where he graduated from The University of New Hampshire, with a degree in Electrical Engineering, working in that field for most of his career. He began playing flat-top acoustic guitar in earnest about the age of 25 and, over time, developed his own unique musical style. He has been singing and playing for over 50 years, mostly alone, but sometimes with relatives and friends in bands such as The Down East Drifters, who performed around New England in the mid 1960s. The Down East Drifters can also be found here on Youtube, in the “McNally Family Music” playlist. Wellington's early influences were greats such as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow, Hank Williams, and D**k Curless. You may also hear folk, blues, and bluegrass influences in Wellingtons repertoire. Wellington’s Youtube “video” performances were recorded at open mic sessions in Norway, Maine, hosted by Heather Pierson, circa 2010, where Wellington was a regular and a crowd favorite. Most of these songs were written by Wellington, both music and lyrics. I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as Wellington enjoyed performing them. A word about Wellington’s recordings: Wellington recorded most of these projects using and old digital audio workstation program (DAW) called SAW-32. At that time he was using an older analog sound board, and fed his Neumann U87ai microphone and a couple of Shure microphones into that. Later he moved to a Presonus Firestudio Project, which replaced the old analog sound board. This greatly simplified his setups and made editing somewhat easier. Because SAW-32 was no longer supported, I convinced him to move on to a newer DAW called Studio One. When I gained access to Wellington’s recordings they had already been mixed down to stereo, (.wav) files, and stored on cassette tapes. Because SAW-32 was no longer supported, the original project files had been lost, precluding any new mixing on my part. I then loaded each stereo (.wav) file into the Studio One DAW, and did my best to remove any anomalies, also normalizing each song. I was also able to locate a few of Wellington’s later Studio One projects, mostly the one’s where I am playing bass with Wellington, and I did edit those before mixing them down to (.wav) files. From there I put together a list of all available Wellington recordings (about 200 .wav files) and proceeded to upload them to this “McNally Family Music”, YouTube Playlist. A word about Wellington’s instruments: Wellington had many stringed instruments over the years, including banjos, violins, mandolins, 12-string flattops, 6-string flattops, Dobro guitars, electric bass guitars, and one or two more exotic stringed instruments. He also had various harmonicas, jaw-harps, washtub basses, and there were other instruments that I’m sure I’ve forgotten about over the years. Early on I remember him playing a big old Gibson J-200, that I referred to as ‘the string killer’, and a 12-string of some type, but his goal was always to obtain some quality C.F. Martin instruments, a quality Gibson mandolin, and a quality Dobro guitar. Through trading and upgrading, he did satisfy those goals, and most of the recordings included here on Youtube used one or more of the following instruments…a Martin D45 Custom 6-string flattop (identifiable in some pictures by it’s light color and the inlaid ‘dots’ on the fretboard), a Martin D45 Special Edition 6-string flattop (identifiable in some pictures by it’s light color and the inlaid ‘ovals’ on the fretboard), a custom made “Blount” 6-string flattop guitar (identifiable in some pictures by the darker colored Koa wood top), a 6-string vintage Dobro guitar, and a National Steel resonator guitar. He also owned and used a couple of top quality Gibson mandolins, an “F” model, and an “A” model. He had a set of quality Hohner harmonicas, and used several washtub basses over the years, which were home-made, of course. NOTE: A Youtube search for "McNally family music" will yield a playlist with many more songs by Wellington, and by other family members, throughout the years. John H McNally - 1/29/2023

Added 22 May 2026