The Flying Elbows

The Flying Elbows is a foot-stomping string band that has kicked butt around Martha’s Vineyard for the past half-century. Its roots go back to Gale Huntington.

Huntington is a legend among Vineyard musicians for his lifelong fascination with sea chanteys and fiddle tunes. Starting in 1928, an up-Island group of fiddle aficionados, helmed by him and including Artie Look and Hollis Smith, played square dances, parties, and weddings. As time passed, others joined in –– even Thomas Hart Benton, when he wasn’t painting. They all played together through the decades. 

When he was 18 years old, Bob Hammond, who plays banjo and fiddle, watched Peter Huntington as part of a band called the Menemsha Bighters. “They were playing at a party up in Chilmark,” Hammond recalls. “It would have been around 1970.” 

Nancy Jephcote, the fiddler, nods and says, “This band has a lot of roots from previous bands. We knew we were continuing something that had been here before us. And those who were alive knew about us, and were glad that it was being perpetuated.” 

Guitarist Tom Hodgson says, “Coming up, I heard Gale playing with Mike Athearn and Ernie Correllus. They were the Flying Elbows of their day. That’s our folkloric link to the past here.” 

Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s and ’70s, still largely undiscovered by vacationers, celebrities, and real estate moguls, was a refuge for artistic off-Islanders of all talents, who landed here without fame, connections, or status. They included woodworkers, pottery throwers, avant-garde painters, freeform dancers, stained-glass window crafters, and musicians. 

Lots of musicians. Hodgson remembers, “In the early 1970s, there was this whole wonderful music scene that I started getting involved with. I grew up participating in the up-Island tradition of ‘musicales.’ We would get together to play two, three, four times a week.” 

If you wanted to play, there were lots of opportunities. Bassist Paul Thurlow played in a rock band with his brother and some friends. Their first gig was a dock dance in Edgartown around 1969. “We used to play at the Sea View back in the late 1970s. It was a great scene. The thing about the scene back then was that everybody took what they could get. We were playing bebop and Mingus, and people got up and danced.” 

Brian Weiland, percussion and mandolin, recalls, “I played every band I could get invited to.”

Island life was not cushy in that era. The unemployment rate was high; people took whatever work they could and held on tight to it, doing what they had to in order to pay the bills. 

But they lived for their art. Jephcote remembers, “My first job was at Morning Glory Farm as the greenhouse manager. I was a marginal young person trying to get by on as little work as possible so I could be the creative individual that I wanted to be in my life. Work was not my focus.” Hammond was a carpenter, who played when he could steal the time. Thurlow painted houses. Hodgson did too, until he trained in sign-carving and painting. Then his hard-earned self-employment gave him the freedom to adjust his schedule. “I think there are a lot of people on Martha’s Vineyard, they may have other passions, but they are here because they can be independent, work for themselves, and do what they love,” he says. “That kind of independence has always made a sane life possible for me.” 

Weiland taught at the Oak Bluffs School: “I think most year-round Vineyarders choose a certain quality-of-life experience, often of a time-honored vein, at the expense of serious modern professionalism.”

Out of that swirl of talent and commitment came the Flying Elbows.

Bob Hammond, the sole remaining original Elbow, remembers, “I started playing with a group of musicians one summer, and we called ourselves the Flying Elbows. We started jamming at the Ritz with whoever showed up. The name stuck, but the people changed all the time. It was a wild scene. I learned late, and was just playing with a lot of good musicians coming through the Island. It was an opportunity to learn from them and play tunes, and then it morphed into the [contra]dances.” 

The ebb and flow of Elbows meant an inconsistency of fiddlers. So when Jephcote, a fiddler, moved to the Island in 1984, “I was immediately adopted into every up-Island band because I wasn’t just a guitar player. Everyone was playing the guitar in those days, and the fiddle player was glommed onto. The following summer, I saw the fiddle contest [which Hammond had created, at the fair], and I grabbed my fiddle and got up onstage. I played a tune.” That fiddle contest, profiled on NPR, almost immediately became a mecca for mainland musicians. “Off-Island fiddle groups were given permission to camp at the Fisher Farm [Flat Point Farm], which made for great all-night sessions around the fire!” says Jephcote. 

Meanwhile, Hammond and David O’Brien, another early member of the group, asked Jephcote to play dances with them, “so I became an Elbow. Our most regular gig in those days was playing the monthly Saturday contradances, up at the Chilmark Community Center.”

“The contradance was a big part of the next step in our development,” Hammond agrees. “We played every month regardless of whatever else was going on. We weren’t looking for work. We all had these other lives. Bars weren’t really our scene. We weren’t playing popular music and cover music. It had to be people who wanted us, specifically.”

The Flying Elbows remain true to their lineage. Jephcote defines them as “an agricultural niche band.” They play the Pumpkin and Strawberry festivals at Morning Glory Farm, the Felix Neck Fall Festival. They welcome people who want to learn. Jephcote teaches fiddle and other bowed instruments; Hammond oversees free old-timey music sessions on Tuesday nights. Of course, they still play the contradances. Jephcote would love to “bring a bunch of us together into an informal contradance ‘orchestra’ of sorts … This way, some potential dance fiddlers could get their feet wet without exhaustion, and possibly get a taste for it.”

This Island is not what it was in Gale Huntington’s days. There are fewer, if any, all-night camping jam sessions around farmland bonfires. Yet, dotted across the Vineyard, little pockets of fiddlers still gather. “We fiddlers all know each other. We are part of a culture of traditional music on the Island,” says Jephcote. From Chilmark to Chappy, musicians of all levels come together, rarely belonging to a single group. 

Fifty years ago, Gale Huntington dropped a fiddle-shaped rock into the becalmed musical waters of Martha’s Vineyard. Those ripples still expand, on and on.

The Elbows still fly.