Ernest Hood: A Short Biography
The Story of the Ambient Pioneer behind "Neighborhoods"
This is a followup to What is an Outsider Artist? where I first introduced readers to Ernest Hood, singling him out as someone I could identify with. Here I take a closer look at his life and times.
An Overview
About two years ago I chanced upon the story of Neighborhoods, a 1975 self-released LP that had been rediscovered decades later and ultimately reissued. It was ambient, before ambient was codified. I was taken in. The unusual instrumentation; early Roland, and Crumar synthesizers with multi-tracked zithers was intriguing, but it was the pairing with field recordings—sounds of children on front stoops and ranging around—that cemented it. I wanted to know both more about them, as characters, and more about the artist weaving these elements together.
What follows is a brief introduction, followed by a deeper dive than you’re likely to find elsewhere, based on hard-to-find bits and pieces from Hood’s life.
Ernest Hood left a lasting mark on the world of ambient music without ever knowing it. Born in Portland in 1923, he started out as a jazz guitarist in the 1940s, playing in local clubs and building a name for himself. Things took a turn in the 1948 when he was diagnosed with polio, which left him unable to continue playing guitar professionally.
Instead of giving up on music, Hood found new ways to create. He started playing the zither, which he could handle despite his limitations, and began experimenting with field recordings. He captured the sounds of everyday life—kids playing, birds singing, outmoded transportation, and the ambient soundscapes of rural and suburban American life. This exploration led to Neighborhoods, released in 1975. The album mixed field recordings with gentle zither melodies, painting a nostalgic picture of childhood.
After his death in 1995, Hood’s music began to find a new audience. In 2019, Neighborhoods was reissued by Freedom to Spend, introducing Ernest’s unique sound to a whole new generation and solidifying his status as a pioneer of ambient music.
Childhood (1923-1944)
“My love of our beautiful state goes back to 1925 when I rode on my father's shoulders up the old logging-railroad tracks to Breitenbush Mineral Springs Resort, which my father and Merle Bruckman operated for many years, and where I listened to stories told by our friend, Tex Rankin, a World War I flying ace, and perhaps a founder of the Aero Club.”
Music came naturally to Hood, who grew up in Portland after moving from his birthplace in North Carolina as a child. His mother, Ina Harrison Hood, was a vocalist on KOIN radio for 20 years, beginning in the late 1920s.
Hood recalls that his first musical effort involved a family band in which he played guitar, his mother was on piano, and his brother, Bill played saxophone.
When Hood entered Lincoln High School he began playing with local groups.
Early Adulthood, a Truncated Performance Career (1944-1946)
The highlight of Hood’s short career as a guitarist was playing with the Charlie Barnet Big Band, traveling all over the United States. One of his fondest memories was playing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
From this KBOO archival recording dated 02/12/1973, Hood relates details from his early days as a performing musician.
“Francis [Shirley] had been with him [Charlie Barnett] six or seven months…they came out to Jantzen Beach. I went out to see them one time… I brought my axe out and sat in a couple tunes and was hired on the spot. 1945.”
“Oh, it was packed with adventure. We played a lot of insignificant cities. We horsed around Los Angeles a lot. Played Long Beach…”
“Oh I did get to play with Lucky Thompson, probably one of the best tenor players in the whole world.”
Polio (1946)
Hood was stricken with polio in 1946.
“I think the only reason I got out of the iron lung was because I was so mad and yelled so loud that my lungs were finally able to take over so I could breath on my own.'' said Hood, recollecting the trauma in 1988.
Hood’s ability to play the guitar never quite recovered, but he learned to play many other instruments within his limitations.
Other Pursuits (1950-1965)
When Hood regained his mobility, walking with the assistance of canes, he returned to Portland to study orchestration. This led to his work arranging music for the Oregon Symphony's pops concerts and The Britt Music Festival in Jacksonville, Oregon.
In the 1950s, Hood lived in Medford, where he led a band called The Zephyrs, composed music, and wrote and directed local television shows. During this time, he also began to paint, inspired by the old farm buildings, covered bridges, and country stores of Southern Oregon, while also continuing to pursue his earlier interests. I seem to jump from one project to the next,'' Hood said, looking back.
In 1959, Hood was named the Jackson County coordinator for the Oregon Centennial. “I organized the activities of 14 cities, and it was fascinating for me,” said Hood. “I think my interest in history began then.”
Jazz (TV Program:1961, Remarks on Jazz:1972)
A 1961 live performance at KGW TV studios in Portland Oregon, hosted by Northwest Abstract artist Louis Bunce featured the Jim Smith Nonette, which included legends from the NW jazz community. The video combines action painting accompanied by live jazz. Ernie can be seen briefly playing the vibes.
Eight minutes in, we see Hood and Bunce in conversation, introducing an experimental film. Importantly, we get our first documented glimpse of Hood’s interest in incorporating nature sound recordings with musical arrangements.
It’s difficult to imagine KGW TV allocating a half hour to similarly adventurous content today.
Hood helped start Portland's first jazz club, The Way Out, under the Hawthorne Bridge in 1960. Its nightly concerts were broadcast live on KWJJ, which played jazz at that time.
A decade later Hood offered some off-the-cuff thoughts on jazz in conversation with Homer Clark.
“Instinct tells me, people were afraid to listen to it because somebody told them they shouldn’t. It’s like the very name jazz; it looks funny on paper. In the old days they’d say ‘it’s too loud, it’s too dissonant’. But today they accept the young people’s music, which is earsplitting. “
“Who is they?” asks Clark.
“‘They’ is the people you don’t want to offend?… Maybe it’s yourself.” Hood ponderously added, “Hey here’s the point: If you are selective and you know what you want to find out—I mean you don’t know what you want to listen to, you just gotta pry and experiment and open your ears and your mind and go after it. Not many people are willing to open up and go after it. Just from some silly fear that they won’t be accepted in their peer group. The music has always been there… There still was music with integrity going on if you looked for it… You’ve Gotta dig. You’ve got to dig in, and want to know about it, and don’t listen to anybody else.”
“Where is Jazz heading, anyway? Jazz is kind of a loaded word…”
“I think we can drop it. We can drop the title of ‘jazz’. Let’s just go to ‘music’. Like Duke says, if it’s good music, it’s good music. I don’t know what jazz music is now, because it’s been assimilated by all other styles. Everybody’s using it, you know? You’ll find it in Percy Faith, Hugo Montenegro…Joan Collins. Country Western especially… George Jones is one of the best jazz singers in the business. …Jazz is dead as we know it.”
KBOO (1968 - 1990’s)
When prompted for his thoughts on the state of radio in 1973, Hood had this to say, “The difference between KBOO, folks, and other radio stations I think can be summed up in one sentence: Whenever I scan the dial, the AM or the FM, I want to either write them a letter—some of these other commercial stations—and just lay it on ‘em, or maybe have bumper stickers made, or leaflets dropped from an airplane, your radio station sounds like 82nd Avenue looks!”
If the 1968 photos below are any indication, Portland’s 82nd Avenue was being remade as modern suburban strip, emphasizing car culture, with frontage parking lots, larger signage, and a modernist Californian architectural style.
The commercial uses that existed prior to 1960 generally catered to a local trade but the opening of Eastport Plaza in 1960 and a Fred Meyer shopping center in 1964 at Foster road drastically changed shopping habits in the corridor and indirectly forced the closure of some neighborhood stores. Mall 205, and Gateway Plaza reinforced these shopping trends. (fadedportland.com)
Ernie was drawn to general stores in rural settings, perhaps seeing them as endangered species of a certain style of commerce. Personal, local, character-driven. He took pains to document these kinds of places both with his expertise as a recordist and an illustrator.
“Now we’re going to go to the cash register so you can hear Christy ring it up a couple times.” says Hood, narrating his audio tour of The Mist Store in 1974:
Hood’s daughter is named Laurel. One wonders if the quiet town of Laurel and the Laurel Valley Store served as inspiration.
Reminiscing about the earlier days of KBOO, Hood recalled the origin of the call letters:
“I remember one of the first organizational meetings…and the thing was finalized as a non-profit thing, and Lorenzo was reading the thing, so everybody understood what was happening, and at the end he says, ‘Dated this Halloween, 1964’ or 1965 or whatever it was. Yeah, Halloween. So when he made up the list of call letters to name the station, KBOO—you know “boo”, like Halloween—was put in as a joke and he got stuck with it.”
On His Musical Heroes (1972)
In a conversation about the importance of Duke Ellington, Hood offered, “Yeah. I think he's a very exceptional genius and you can say that word without any reservation.
Homer Clark, host of the Jazz Hole Cover show replied, “Most of the critics seem to think that the early forties was his greatest period.
Hood: “I do too…You don't though?”
Clark: “Well, I'm not a musician so I have to, you know, I kind of have to respect what the musicians and the critics say…”
Hood: “I don’t know that you should, because you’re going on feeling, and that’s what Ellington was trying to give to the American people, was a feeling of joy, and you caught it!”
Later in the discussion, Clark asked Hood about Django Reinhart, an artist of particular importance to Hood.
Clark: “Why are you so enamored with Djano Reinhart?”
“I have an exploring mind to go into the essence of things. When I first heard Django, I said there’s a genius. He’s doing something to me inside that just turns me upside down. And I began to buy his records and listen to him very closely and I thought that’s impossible. How can a human being make a guitar work that way?. Then I got caught up in the romanticism of him, and I’ve got a pretty high fantasy quotient. So, it just struck me, like he was a gypsy, wondered France, and he lived a good life. He was very happy—he was loved and he loved. I guess I’m a romanticist—put it that way—I’m a sucker for that. And, a romanticist with dignity, like Duke Ellington, that does it. That’s the supreme way to live I think.”
Collaborations 1970-1974
In 1970 Hood teamed up with pop star Herb Alpert to record a single. “Ollie” was written and produced by Alpert. The B side, “Sitka” was written by Hood.
Two years later, in 1974, Hood and Flora Purim co-wrote “Mountain Train” for the Brazilian jazz singer’s sophomore album Stories to Tell. The track bears some resemblance to “Train to Grass Creek” released posthumously on the bonus CD Where the Woods Begin. Hood contributed zither performances to her first two studio albums.
Roadside Notes, Radio Days, Radio Pictures
Recorded in the era of reel to reel, Hood’s radio programs—of which there seemed to be several—all revolved around nostalgia. Old Radio Hour / Radio Days dipped into Hood’s private collection of Big Band recordings. Hood printed a decoder card for this program, allowing the listener to decode a secret message at the end of the hour. The prize for the first correct answer was gold pencil with various gold inscriptions, perhaps chief among them: Zither Music Is Best.
In his 1975 New Years Day episode of Radio Days (or was it once called Radio Pictures, or Roadside Nostalgia Notes?) one can hear something of an antecedent to Neighborhoods.
“Hello there people. This is Ern Hood, and today we'll be showing you some pretty pictures over the radio. The real beauty of it all is that your own creative minds will be sloshing the color on the canvas, but we'll supply the words and the music and the sounds in this order…” (Treasures of the KBOO Archive,1975)
The show begins with a spoken table of contents. Think audio magazine. The audio tour commences with a newspaper article set to orchestral music. The music and solemn narration imbue Don Holm’s opening line with gravitas. It sounds like something that could have been produced 30 years prior in the golden days of radio programming. At the twenty minute mark, however, the listener hears the hallmark sound of synthesizer and zithers:
That particular cue will later be collected in an exclusive companion CD to the posthumous Back to the Woodlands titled, “Open Fields”. One more instance of Hood’s music punctuates this audio tour. The pacing to the tour is sometimes quite slow, but the production quality is high, and there is the sense that this is all by design, and the listener is left to draw their own conclusions.
Thistlefield Agency
Thistlefield Agency, or just Thistlefield, was the publishing identity of Hood, primarily trading in audio cassettes of his radio shows featuring field recordings, music, and narratives woven together.
In the past, the tapes have were distributed to ‘shut-ins’ through the Clackamas County Senior Council.
Hood also printed Christmas cards, calendars, greeting cards and prints, depending on his latest whim, from his printing room, at his home in West Linn, Oregon.
If that weren’t enough, he also wrote books of poetry. In 1988, his latest project was recording an autobiography. One wonders how far he got on that.
Neighborhoods (1975)
Neighborhoods was self-released in 1975 on vinyl. This private press release, more gifted than sold we are led to believe, is the curious embodiment of “musical cinematography”, in the words of Hood. It ran crossgrain to the musical trends in 1975. In the mainstream were hits like “Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain and Tenille and the disco hit “Jive Talkin" by the Bee Gees. New Wave was in an embryonic stage with David Bowie’s “Fame”. Most people were more concerned with looking forward than looking back.
Hood addresses his listener with zeal on the back of the record jacket:
It saddens me to know that the predominately commercial music purveyors of today give such scant consideration to the enrichment of your gentle spirit. Young people looking for something other than plastic novelty music played on military weapons may find here a balm for the mind.
Only speculation exists about the exact pressing quantity and any promotion that may have been done on its behalf. On the reverse jacket liner notes is an appeal to send $5.95 plus 50¢ postage and handling to order. Today an original copy can fetch north of $400.
“It was accidentally ahead of its time,” says Jad Bindeman, with Freedom to Spend Records, “Ernest wasn’t trying to make anything groundbreaking at all. He was just expressing what he wanted to get out. It’s this very pure and genuine thing.”
Neighborhoods was released later in the year. An exact date is unknown.
Hood’s compositions are tonally complex, offering a counterpoint to the nostalgia comprised of layered field recordings of children playing and suburban ambiences (c. early 1970’s) and older (early century) recordings of automobiles, steam trains and AM radio big band broadcasts. Hood clarifies his intentions on the record jacket:
My purpose in creating this album is to pay a debt to some beautiful and loving people. To older folks everywhere, but especially the ones who put up with my childhood pesters, those who played such an important role in the formation of comfortable memories…I hope this brings back something warm and joyful to your hearts.
This is not a social record in the sense that it be played at a gathering. Indeed, it is a rather personal thing to be reflected upon (as musical cinematography) alone, or with a dear, close friend. It is a social record in that it reminds us of the fact that most of us made our first social contacts and early transactions in our neighborhood streets. How familiar, how indelible the pictures are: aromas of soft velvet days, strong friendships, fears, hates, loves… If the music seems a little bittersweet, well…isn’t that the taste of nostalgia? Mostly it is meant to bring joy in reminiscence.
- Ernest Hood (Neighborhoods LP Jacket)
After a slow build over decades, from obscurity to rediscovery, fueled by bulletin boards and LP rips (on YouTube and elsewhere), Neighborhoods was re-issued on Freedom to Spend Records in 2019, to critical acclaim and commercial success. The re-issue was remastered from the original tapes, bringing to life the full fidelity of the home-recorded album.
The enthusiastic response prompted a follow-up release of collected works, Back to the Woodlands, three years later in 2022.
The Dawn of Ambient Music
Brian Eno is widely attributed to have coined and popularized the phrase “ambient music”, with his first release in the genre, 1978’s Music for Airports. In his terse summary, ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
This was an update to composer Erik Satie’s 1917 unpublished concept of furniture music; short pieces with an indefinite number of repeats designed for background play.
Some notable works that gave the ambient genre a foothold prior to Eno’s arrival include:
Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott (1962)
Music for Zen Meditation by Tony Scott (1964)
Environments album series by Irv Teibel (1969-1979)
Worlds Within Worlds by Basil Kirchin (1971)
Neighborhoods by Ernest Hood (1975)
This is a short list. There are many.
Oregon Historical Society's Award of Merit (1988)
In honor of Hood’s dedication and a unique way of telling the story of the Oregon Country through a collection of recorded sounds, The Oregon Historical Society honored him with an Award of Merit in 1988. “It is awarded when we feel someone just has to be recognized,'' according to Tom Vaughan, the historical society's executive director. “Ern has a long career of preservation, and he was doing it before it became modish,'' noted Vaughan, who had known Hood for 30 years.
“One of the things that I admire most about him is that he has spent all these years in a wheelchair and yet he is still full of beans and good cheer,'' Vaughan said. “He never became a whimperer.”
Back to the Woodlands & Where the Woods Begin (2022)
Three years after the re-issue of Neighborhoods, Freedom to Spend followed up its success with a posthumous album Back to The Woodlands. In an interesting move, they bundled a bonus album Where the Woods Begin with the CD version of the release. It is offered in no other format. While not possessing the same arc as Neighborhoods, the music is cut from the same cloth, certainly, and there is the inclusion of field recordings made in nature. The bonus album holds its own against Back to the Woodlands, and is worthy companion.
Death with Diginity (1995)
In 1994 Oregon voters approved a death with dignity law allowing terminally ill patients to self administer a lethal dose of medication. In 1995 Hood was one of the first to take up that freedom, not without plenty of hand-wringing and back and forth at the hospital. At the time Diane Dietz penned an excellent article for The Statesman Journal, worth excerpting at length:
The only way to tell if a decision is right is to view it in the context of the patient's life and see if it is consistent with lifelong values. Doctors found a clear case with Ernest Hood.
Hood grew up in Portland during the big-band era. As a teen-ager, he picked up a guitar and began laying down rhythms for a band that worked dance halls and hotel ball-rooms. The band was successful enough to be booked on a world tour.
But one day after rehearsal, Hood fell down and never got up. It was the beginning of polio, which put him in an iron lung for a year and in a wheelchair and leg braces for the rest of his life.
But those were only a small part of the ways the experience changed him He be- came a sharp observer of the world. He delighted in sharing the details that other people missed. And he loved the radio.
Hood's own show, Radio Days, aired on KBOO and KOAP. It consisted of aural post-cards, where he described scenes from his travels through Oregon, being careful to capture the sound of the place and enlivening it with recordings from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. For many elderly and disabled people, isolated in their homes, the program was a line to the world.
But when Hood reached his 60s, he developed Post-polio Syndrome, which progressively weakened the muscles in his body, gradually affecting his arms and his lungs. His breathing grew labored, and then one day it ceased.
He was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors inserted a respirator tube down his throat. One day when daughter Laurel came to visit, the doctors removed the tube for a while, and Hood was amused at what it had done to his vocal cords. It reminded him of a Mickey Rooney movie, and he said "Gee, I guess I'll have to shave”.
It was the last time Laurel heard him speak.
The doctors cut a hole in his throat, a tracheostomy. The procedure kept him alive but robbed him of his ability to talk.
His condition continued to worsen. He caught shingles. Fluid built up in his lungs and around his heart. He was moved to an intensive care floor at Oregon Health Sciences University.
When he first arrived at the hospital, he could write messages, but he soon grew too weak to hold a pencil. Instead, he spelled words, letter by letter, with an index finger on the opposing palm.
So Hood, a man who cherished saying precisely what he meant, was reduced to mouthing words, which his family only could understand partially. The effort would bring tears to his eyes. He didn't want to go on.
…Barbara Glidewell, the hospitals's patient advocate, came into the room with the news that the officials had reconsidered and that the ethics committee would take up his request immediately. Hood mouthed the word ‘Finally.'
Hood died in the presence of family in March, 1995.
On A Personal Note
My father relied on the Oregon Death with Dignity Act 32 years later to hasten his own death, after suffering from partial paralysis and a rapid deterioration of quality of life in the wake of stage four cancer that had spread to his brain.
Following his death I made a number of structural changes in my life, opening up more time for self-direction. In that open space, I developed an interest in field recording, noting the way that listening to the environment while documenting it calmed me. I began incorporating these recordings in my music compositions in 2019, and haven’t looked back, releasing over 100 recordings that have explored the fertile ground at the confluence of field recordings and music.
In 2022 I discovered a kindred spirit in Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods and Back to the Woodlands. I find Hood’s music and story equally comforting and compelling, inspiring me to carry on.
Chad Crouch, Dec 10, 2024