How This Site Was Born

Fellow songwriter Marty Robbins said, “Nolan was a true songwriting genius. He had the ability to say simply and powerfully what he felt. I’d like to see a tribute to his music and to him as a man. He was a gentleman and a friend of mine.” Many would like to see the publication of a complete folio of the works of Bob Nolan, accompanied by a comprehensive biography.

That paragraph from the eulogy of the late Bob Nolan by his friend William Bowen started Elizabeth Drake McDonald on a search for such a “folio” and “comprehensive biography” for herself. She found to her astonishment and dismay that nothing had been started. Everyone agreed it should be done—everyone wanted it—but no one had made a beginning.

Except for half a dozen of his well-known pieces, Nolan’s music was disappearing—dying with the people who had known it. Most public information available about the man himself was faulty. Many myths have grown around the name “Bob Nolan” over the years. Some were designed by publicity departments of film companies or RCA Victor; others were simply surmised. All were perpetuated through the years by historians largely because Nolan was silent on the subject of his own life. He did not care what others thought about him, and he did not bother to correct the myths. The truth is that Bob Nolan did not care for much other than his art. He did not care to gossip or to waste time in idle talk and was mistakenly considered a hermit.

McDonald slowly began to research Nolan in 1994 when the Internet was not widely available and all queries were mailed the old way: through the Post Office. Nolan’s life began to take shape through interviews with his friends. Eventually, she found Sons of the Pioneers historian Ken Griffis, and with his help, she made contact with Nolan’s daughter, Roberta "Bobbie" Mileusnich. Mileusnich shared her own memories and sent McDonald copies of some of her father's unpublished lyrics.

Her search for more lyrics led McDonald to read everything she could about the music scene in which Nolan was involved and, inevitably, to The Pioneer News article written shortly after his death. Robbins’ comment and Bowen’s suggestion made her stop and think, "Could I do this myself? Well, I know I can't do it justice, but I can make a start and perhaps someone else will take up the torch and finish it."

Through O.J. Sikes, she made contact with Larry Hopper of New Jersey, an expert on American music history. He took an interest in the project and helped her sort out what she had collected and then compile it into a useful tool for researchers. McDonald donated her work to the University of North Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection, which already contained related material from the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF). Hopper immediately wrote and copyrighted a book of his own on the collection, Bob Nolan: A Biographical Guide and Annotations to the Lyric Archive in the University of North Carolina. This desktop-published book is still for sale from the author.

The week after Mileusnich died in January 2000, her son, Calin Coburn, contacted McDonald. He liked the idea of archiving what was left of Nolan's music, and they agreed to work together. Coburn scanned everything his grandfather had left him. McDonald provided the annotations and put the books together. They called them The Calin Coburn Collections and donated them to the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC. McDonald and Coburn published their findings in a two-volume book, Bob Nolan, 1908–1980 in 2004 and donated it to the Southern Folklife Collection.

By 2007, the book was already out of date, and Coburn built a website—bobnolan-sop.net—to honor his grandfather and add information as it became known. The site was a product of seven years of searching, recording, scanning and writing, and publishing the information as a website rather than a book meant that corrections and updates could be made quickly as new information came to light, and the music could be heard. By 2010 the site had begun to expand beyond Nolan’s life and work to include more and more the lives and works of some of his close associates in music, most notably the Sons of the Pioneers. Coburn and McDonald continued to research, refine, and add to the site.

In 2019, Coburn passed away. In 2021, to ensure that the work she and Coburn had done would continue to be available to all interested people, McDonald decided to pass on the entire contents of the site to the Sons of the Pioneers. The scope of the site had grown so far beyond its initial focus on the life and music of Bob Nolan, and even beyond the story of the Sons of the Pioneers, that we decided to reorganize the information and present it as a new site, one that could be more easily expanded over time to include additional research and information as it becomes available. This is The Tumbleweed Trail project, www.tumbleweedtrail.net. We are honored to carry on what Elizabeth Drake McDonald and Calin Coburn started, and we hope you enjoy it!