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Obituary

Old-time country voice dies at age 85

Lester Buchanan and his brother began on a New York street. They ended up in the Top 10.

By LESLIE PAREDES
Published August 12, 2005

TAMPA - Lester Buchanan's passion for music and guitar began innocently enough. He wanted to get the girl.

The story, according to his daughter Sherry Stockman, goes that he was in grade school when he saw a girl playing guitar and proclaimed proudly, and falsely, that he too could play.

It would be nearly 20 years after his white lie that Mr. Buchanan and his brother Chester would become the country music duo the Buchanan Brothers. Their biggest hit, 1946's Atomic Power, garnered them acclaim, credibility and an induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Mr. Buchanan had lived in Tampa since 1976, most recently at his home near Fowler and Nebraska avenues. After dedicating his life to music, family and hard work, the folksy, back-country musician died Saturday (Aug. 6, 2005) at age 85.

Mr. Buchanan was born in Canton, Ohio, but grew up in Trenton, Ga. Stockman said her father never made it past the seventh or eighth grade, giving up school to find a job.

"We grew up the hard way - barefoot, picking cotton, cutting timber - and damned near starved to death in the process," Mr. Buchanan told the Times in 1994. "The Depression started 'bout 10 years earlier for us than it did the rest of the country."

It would be this poverty that sent Mr. Buchanan to New York in search of a job and a way to care for his family: his wife, Elsie, and their infant son, Charles.

Stockman says her father got a job at a shipyard in New York, renting a tiny apartment for the family. There, she says, playing in the street in front of their apartment, her father and his brother were discovered by promoter Bob Miller and his wife, Esther Van Sciver. "We didn't know diddly-squat about what New Yorkers called studio direction, melody orchestration and that kind of stuff," Mr. Buchanan once told the Times. "All we wanted to do was play and sing face-to-face with our audience."

Even with little understanding of the recording industry, the Buchanan Brothers were faced with fame immediately after the release of their single Atomic Power, a song inspired by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a Top 10 hit.

"I think he was tapping into what everyone was feeling in the world," Stockman said. "I think Daddy was a very caring man, and that happening just touched him."

Mr. Buchanan is survived by his wife of 65 years, Elsie; a daughter, Sherry Stockman, Tampa; a son, Charles, Tampa; a brother, E.S., Flatrock, Ala.; six sisters, Jewel Heiser, Lakeland, Ida Cooper, South Pittsburg, Tenn., Virginia Joiner, Chattanooga, Tenn., and Delores Smyth, Wanda Hilley and Ruth Schraeder, all of Trenton, Ga.; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

There are no services.

- Leslie Paredes can be reached at 813 226-3339 or lparedes@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 11, 2005, 08:56:11]