o begin with, L. Ron Hubbard’s musical heritage came with the landscape of his youth. Among other early memories, he would tell of his great grandfather sawing away on a country fiddle through warm Oklahoma afternoons. With the Hubbard family’s move to Montana in 1913, the primary strains remained typically Western: indigenous campfire ballads, cowboy bands and the lilting reels of country hoedowns. In a later essay on the subject, he would rightly point out that such strains were soon to be lost in a blander Hollywood interpretation, e.g., Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. But the original, as he would long maintain, had been absolutely compelling -- a spontaneous and gregarious music that will always “linger in people’s memories.” Also of notable influence through his youth were the actual roots of the country sound, including surviving melodies brought in by Irish railroad workers and the so-called ’49er laments of mining camp life and dying cowboys. Less an influence, but still worth noting was the classical piano, studied under an elderly relative. Otherwise, he was self-taught on the saxophone, banjo and mouth organ.

His first public performance appears to have been an impromptu affair in Great Falls, Montana, where, as he colorfully noted in a 1928 diary: “Dunc and I bought mouth organs and played on the street while the big boy Bert of Wyoming played a tin drum and Sapp passed around the hat.” The mouth organ, incidentally, would long remain a favored instrument mainly because of its convenience. He was eventually to collect several dozen in varying sizes and keys, and would always carry them during his far-flung travels.