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Saying GoodbyeWith a SongAs pancreatic cancer takes him away, Ben Bullingtonmarks the time with a guitar, family, and good friends

You could pretty much write the story of Livingston, Montana, from a barstool at the Elks Club. The big room in the back is where folks hold their land-

mark events: wakes and receptions, reunions and fund-raisers. So it’s no surprise that, on a warm August night, twinkly lights and chiffon swags left over from a wedding adorn the stage—a festive counterpoint to the ghostly herd of mounted elk heads gazing down from the walls.

Ben Bullington, long and lean and craggy-handsome, settles into a chair with his vintage Gibson guitar and grins at the crowd. A couple hundred faces smile back, family and friends, mostly, and a lively contingent of nurses from the hospital in White Sulphur Springs, where Ben practiced family medicine for 12 years. Ben’s second

song, “Two Headlights,” is about a man who’s learned he has cancer. In plain, matter-of-fact verse, the song takes him through the medical procedures the doctor knows so well: “First the x-ray, large lymph node, biopsy, then what it showed …” Then the songwriter takes over, describing a lonesome drive back home, his headlights cutting a path to midnight, the man taking inventory of his life:

I stopped the carCut the engineStepped out in the night air sensin’Things I didn’t sense the day before.It’s all I want from lifeAnd nothing more.

Ben finishes the last refrain and leans on his guitar. “That song, I actually wrote three years ago,” he says, in a scratchy voice that’s never lost the lilt of his native Virginia. “It’s funny, I’ve got these premonition songs, or

BY MARYANNE VOLLERS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM CAMPBELL

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Ben Bullington in his trusty 1969 Chevy pickup on a dirt road near his home in White Sulphur Springs, Montana.

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something.” He chuckles, shaking his head. “Well, it’s funny to me. Not in an entirely mirthful way, I guess. But some part of me knew what was happening …”

What was happening, and what every member of this audience knows, is that 10 months earlier, at the age of 57, Ben was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It’s always fatal, and most patients don’t live more than a year.

Ben Bullington has Been one of my closest friends for the better part of a decade. My husband Bill Campbell and I have spent many an evening with Ben—and other fine musicians—trading songs and stories in the living room. I’ve seen a lot of him since his diag-nosis, and watched in awe as he’s navigated the tricky terrain of saying goodbye to the people he loves and the life he’s known. When he’s in pain, he tries not to show it. When the conversation turns to cancer treatments, he changes the subject. Like the man in the song, he wants to drink in every moment of what remains, and to spend as much time as he can with his friends, his family, and most of all his three grown sons, Samuel, Joseph, and Ben. That, and making as much music as he can for as long as he can.

My cousin went to VietnamAnd left the first six Dylan records with meI was 15 thenJust a gangly kidAll heart and appetite and misery

—“Appalachian Mountain Delta Blues”

Ben grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, the middle of five children. His dad was a Naval officer who became a stockbroker; his mom was a beauty with deep local roots. Ben’s older sister Mary showed me a report from Ben’s preschool teacher, who observed that the five-year-old boy had an excellent attention span, was interested in stories, enjoyed music, and “sings often as he works or plays.” She concluded, “Ben lives well in his world.”

Ben didn’t develop a real passion for music until he was a teenager. His first instrument was a Kent guitar he bought for $20 from a kid in the high school lunchroom. “To my surprise, I took to it,” he says. He started taking lessons and trading for better and better guitars, which led him deep into the culture of Appalachian music that seemed to pour out of the hills around him. It touched something in him that he couldn’t name. The first time he

“I didn’t go into medicine to make a lot of money, and I’ve been very successful in that way. But my boys grew up with a lot of elbow room.”

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saw somebody flatpick a guitar was at the Union Grove fiddlers’ festival. “When I asked about it, this guy said, ‘Get a Doc Watson record.’” So he did, and within 30 seconds of putting it on his turntable, Ben started jumping up and down, he was so excited. “It went right through the middle of me,” he says.

Before long, he was listening to Mississippi John Hurt, and then his cousin went to Vietnam and left him his Bob Dylan collection. (The cousin made it back; it’s unclear what happened to the albums.) Ben started work-ing out his own tunes and lyrics while he was still in high school, although none of them has seen the outside of his old orange notebook for decades.

He went to Vanderbilt University (“’cause it was in Nashville”), absorbing the music scene in the picking parlors as he studied for a geology degree.

After college, there was an oil boom in the West. Ben hired on to lead a seismograph crew that traveled all over the Rockies, packing dynamite to shake up the earth and sensors to see what oil it contained. He liked it fine and didn’t mind the cheap motels in dusty corners of Montana and Wyoming. And he was gathering material. “Corby Bond” was based on an oil field driller he met in Douglas, Wyoming. In the song, the roughneck tries to articulate why the settled life isn’t for him:

Red sky to the east on the northern plain,Every day don’t have to be the same.

Ben, too, couldn’t stand the thought of a desk job. And he was falling in love with the wide-open country. Then he transferred to Brazil and came down with a bad case of hepatitis A, which meant a helicopter out of the jungle and a stint in a Roanoke hospital. Before long he decided his oil field days were over. The question was what to do next. “I was pretty good with science and liked working with people,” he says. “So I figured I’d put the two together.”

He was accepted at the University of Virginia medical school in Charlottesville. There was a vision in his head of becoming a country doctor, living outside of the big cities, seeing all kinds of patients with something new happening every day.

Ben met his future wife, Debra, a nurse at UVA hospital. After he got his license, he and Debra and their young son, Samuel, moved to Montana, where he took a job with Indian Health Services on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Two more sons would follow: Joseph and

Benjamin. The Bullingtons stayed in Lame Deer for a few years, then moved to a small coastal Alaska town and then to a clinic in the mountains of West Virginia. “I didn’t go into medicine to make a lot of money, and I’ve been very successful in that way,” he says. “But my boys grew up with a lot of elbow room.”

Ben had always pictured settling down some day on a farm in southwestern Virginia, but the Rockies kept tugging at him. “There was something about the big space out West that I needed to feel free in life,” he says.

Dreams don’t come easyOn seven bucks an hourMaybe it’s a matterOf what kind of dreams you haveThere’re trout streams and the air is cleanAnd money don’t mean everythingIn a place called White Sulphur Springs.

—“White Sulphur Springs”

58 Peregrine Way u Bozeman, MT 59718 406-556-8417 u www.montanatile.com

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The family ended up in central Montana, where Ben worked at the six-bed hospital in White Sulphur Springs, surrounded by mountains, ranches and miles of empty. When his youngest son was four, Ben started writ-ing songs again in the quiet early morning hours. Those sessions provided most of the tunes on his first CD, Two Lane Highway, released in 2007.

The album was produced by Sean Devine, a singer-songwriter from Livingston, who met Ben by chance and discovered that the doctor was also a songwriter. By then Ben and Debra’s marriage was ending. Devine encouraged Ben to start performing at local venues and introduced him around Livingston. Which is how Bill and I met him. And it was at dinner at our house that he met Joanne Gardner, his future manager.

Joanne was a recovering music industry executive who regained her senses and moved from Los Angeles to Montana.

“I had no idea he was a doctor; I honestly believed he was a traveling songwriter,” she says with a laugh. “That was because he looked kind of homeless, and he was real hungry. Then he started playing music and I was sure he was a traveling songwriter because the songs were so damn good. But I remember being perplexed when he stood up and announced that he had to be on call the next morning. I was like, ‘Uh, where would you be on call? Is there like a poetry hotline?’”

Ben and Joanne were fast friends from that day on. After a career in the big-time music industry, she was moved by his homespun lyricism, “the level of detail and nuance in his songs that make them completely come to life for me.” He also inspired her to start singing again and she became a regular part of his act. Before long, she was managing his career, booking gigs, and introducing him to some of her influential friends in Nashville, includ-ing Rodney Crowell, the Grammy award-winner whom Joanne also co-managed at the time.

When Ben recorded his next album, White Sulphur Springs, Crowell stopped by the Nashville studio from time to time, and even traded verses on “Toe the Line,” one of Ben’s anthems to honesty in art and life, with the refrain, “Do you find your own truth, or do you toe the line?” But Rodney says he didn’t realize the depth of Ben’s talent until the two of them went for a ride in Crowell’s car and listened to the album top to bottom.

“I said to him, ‘This is poetry. You’ve really created something here.’ And that’s when I became a fan of Ben’s,” says Crowell.

White Sulphur Springs established Ben Bullington as a songwriter to be reckoned with. His artistry reso-nates in every song, from the title track, an homage to the simple but bountiful life of small-town Montana, to “Twangy Guitars,” the story of a farm family deal-ing with the wife’s cancer and finally getting some good news. His exquisite sense of detail puts you right at the kitchen table for breakfast, in the antiseptic waiting room, and then driving the pickup back from the hospi-tal on a snowy, wind-whipped highway, a country western soundtrack pulsing hope over the radio.

IN 2008 BEN LEFT WHITE SULPHUR TO TAKE A job at the small hospital in Big Timber. He put thousands of miles on his SUV, burning up highways between Big Timber and White Sulphur, where his two younger sons were still in high school.

Meanwhile, he was honing his chops as a performer, traveling around the country, sometimes opening for Crowell. He broke into radio, too, climbing the Americana charts, and new songs came in a torrent. He wrote them in his head while he was driving those long stretches; he

Enduring notesBen Bullington’s music will live on. Rodney Crowell, above

with Bullington, is putting together an album of Bullington songs, played by J. D. Souther, Darrell Scott, Guy Clark, Crowell and others. The music takes them back to a purer era, one that got lost in the commercialization of country music.

“Then flash-forward to 2009, and along came Ben Bullington, reminding us of why we do this,” Crowell says. “That’s the gift we were given.”

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jotted lyrics on the 3-by-5 notecards he always kept in his shirt pocket. Before long he was laying down tracks for his third album, Satisfaction Garage. By the time it was released in 2010 he already had all the songs lined up for Lazy Moon, an album that is Montana to the bone: recorded at Electric Peak Studios in Gardiner, and featur-ing a lineup of locally based musicians, including Bill Payne of Little Feat.

Payne, who co-wrote some of Little Feat’s great-est hits, asked Ben to write a song with him about a dear friend, Stephen Bruton, a songwriter who had recently died of throat cancer. “Tapping Ben was kind of unusual because he didn’t know Stephen,” says Payne. “But they were very kindred spirits in a certain sense.”

The result is “The Last Adios,” a sweeping elegy, earthbound in its details, sublime in its reach. The subject matter was hauntingly prophetic.

Our hearts are thorns and rosesAnd you can’t ever knowIf it’s the first step of a journeyOr the last adios …

IN THE LATE FALL OF 2012, BEN NOTICED AN ache in his gut that wouldn’t go away. At first he thought it was an ulcer. But the pain got worse, and he finally checked in with a colleague who ordered a CT scan and then delivered the hard news: a tumor in the middle of his pancreas and spots on his liver.

By the time this kind of cancer produces symptoms, it’s too late to cure it. Soon after the diagnosis, Ben took leave from the hospital (“Nobody wants a sick doctor”). He decided on a mild course of chemotherapy that would hopefully hold back the disease without giving him terri-ble side effects, like neuropathy in his hands that would

Though Bullington’s final days have been marked by song, one thing did stop: his songwriting. “I don’t want to take what little part I have of the day and use it for that,” he says.

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make it impossible to play guitar. He even delayed the start of treatment so he could fly to Nashville to record his fifth CD. Afterwards, he arranged chemo treatments early in the week, so that he could feel well enough to perform on the weekends.

Some of his friends worried that he should be doing more to fight the disease. He pointed out he’d spent a career trying to help people make good decisions, that he knew what he was doing.

“I just say to them, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got this.’”The self-titled album, Ben Bullington, came out the

next spring. It’s an elegant, stripped-down piece of work that flows like a musical memoir, from the story of his Virginia roots in “Appalachian Mountain Delta Blues,” to the poignant refrain of “The Last Adios.” Along the way he tweaks the rank commercialism that pervades Nashville in “Country Music (I’m Talking to You),” and connects climate change to the human heart in “Here’s to Hopin’” (with harmonies by another good friend, Mary Chapin Carpenter).

To the astonishment of his friends, Ben kept up a solid schedule of tour-ing all year. With Joanne by his side, he played music festivals from Florida to Texas to Tennessee, topping off the summer with his third appearance at Red Ants Pants, the White Sulphur Springs answer to Woodstock. He even went back into the studio to record a track for a compilation he’s putting together called Montana Jukebox Songs.

The one thing he hasn’t done much is write songs.“It takes a lot of work to do something good,” Ben

says. “You have to go over it, and over it, and over it. It removes you from the world. I don’t want to take what little part I have of the day and use it for that. I’d rather watch movies with the boys.”

The one song he’s written since he got sick is a fare-well to his boys, called “Son, We’re Good.” It’s the only song he has a hard time singing: “Things don’t always work out the way you wish they would. Go on and do what you need to son, we’re good …”

“I’ve got plenty of stuff that I’m happy with,” he says. “It’s a fair body of work now. That can be enough.”

Although it wasn’t planned that way, the concert at the Elks Club in Livingston was Ben’s last show. It just

got too hard after that. But he’s okay with it. That, too, was enough. “I looked out at the audience and everyone was a friend,” he says. “Just what I’d always envisioned when I started out. It was the best concert I’ve ever done, a perfect night.”

THESE DAYS BEN SPLITS HIS TIME BETWEEN THE house he’s kept for his sons in White Sulphur and the couch in Joanne Gardner’s living room in Livingston. His best time is the morning. Often he’ll pick out a tune on his banjo while the sun lights up the Absarokas beyond the picture windows.

Ben’s goal was to live long enough to see his eldest son get married to his hometown sweet-heart in early October. He made it. It was a classic outdoor wedding in Montana, with folding chairs and cowboy boots sinking in the uneven grass. Sam Bullington and Lorinda Hunt said their vows beneath a wide blue sky anchored by snow-dusted mountains, the Yellowstone River running just behind the cotton-woods, like an welcome guest tying every-thing together. Young Ben, who postponed college to help out his dad, served as a groomsman, and Joseph, a promising young writer, officiated the ceremony. Their father sat in the front row, beaming from beneath his Stetson.

Ben has been spending his time making lists, getting his affairs in order, tying up loose ends. There have been lots of talks with his boys about finances, women, fate, politics, and joy, cramming a lifetime of advice into a few short months.

But he’s already said it best in a song, of course. “I’ve Got to Leave You Now” is another one of those “premoni-tion” songs, written a couple of years before he learned he had cancer.

Promise me you won’t worryIt’s probably like the time ’ fore I was bornMake some waves out on the oceanWith all the best inside you, my sons.

Our souls might mingle in the after torchLike four friends smokin’ on a midnight porchI always loved you the best I knew howI’ve gotta leave you now …

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“I’ve got plenty

of stuff that I’m

happy with. It’s

a fair body of

work now. That

can be enough.”