CLAREMONT — During the eight-plus years that Ed Leavitt performed his country-western songs with the Shana Stack Band, women in the audience often asked Stack whether she and the tall, sturdy Hartford-native musician were married.
“There were girls who were shameless and threw themselves at him,” Stack recalled last week. “One of them, when he was around 55 years old, told me that she thought he looked like Liam Neeson and asked, ‘Can you get his attention for me?’
“I called him Liam for months afterward.”
The musical partners laughed often about those and other stories from a life onstage, almost until Leavitt died of bladder cancer on Jan. 11, at age 58.
No small part of the joke: Leavitt’s heart belonged to Conrad Farnham, the band’s agent and tour manager — and the man with whom he’d lived since the late 1990s, and whom he married in 2018, shortly after Leavitt’s diagnosis.
“Our relationship was under lock and key for quite some time, the country-music scene being what it is,” Farnham recalled last week. “We were out to our family and friends, but when we went to clubs, you’d find us on opposite ends of the room for a long time. And especially when the band played events at country clubs and those kind of places, we kept things pretty low-key. You can see things are changing in some respects, but as much as we’ve made progress, we’re very much the minority.”
None of which deterred Stack from joining forces with Leavitt, after each of their previous bands dissolved. In addition to watching Leavitt with High Ground — which he’d formed with his brother Rick Leavitt — she appreciated his offer to call their new ensemble the Shana Stack Band.
“It was his idea,” said Stack, who lives in Keene, N.H. “With his work ethic and his songwriting abilities and his stage presence, he could have called us anything he wanted. But we talked about names, and he just suggested that.”
For the next eight years, on nights and weekends off from his day job in the student-affairs office for the dean of Dartmouth College, Leavitt provided the intangibles as well as the songs that propelled the Shana Stack Band to regional prominence and word-of-mouth popularity, for festivals as well as for private parties. They won numerous awards, both individual and collective, and produced four CDs of original music.
In addition to their own gigs as headliners, they opened shows for major country acts coming through New England, such as Reba McEntire, Lady Antebellum and Toby Keith.
Meeting McEntire in 2011, at what is now the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford, N.H., was one of the peak experiences both for Leavitt and for Farnham, who recalls discovering a mutual love of the Grammy-winning performer while “talking for hours and hours and hours” with Leavitt the night they met at a mutual friend’s house party in 1998.
“That’s when I knew it was meant to be,” Farnham said. “Reba sings with such passion. She has stories that you can relate to. That’s what triggered it for us. Ed is a songwriter. His life is about storytelling.”
For all the inspiration he took from encounters with Nashville royalty, Leavitt resisted rolling the dice and moving to the mecca of country music — even after the movie Compliance, with a soundtrack containing his song Let it Go, played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.
“It’s a hard, hard business,” he told the Valley News at the time, noting that it was one of maybe six songs he’d sold, out of some 300 to 400 he estimated that he’d written since adolescence.
He was prolific enough to be a member of the Nashville Songwriters Association International. He had started making connections after meeting Springfield, Vt., car dealer Pat Kelley, a songwriter in his spare time, in 2008.
“Pretty soon we were having phone conversations, and next thing you know, we were writing songs,” Kelley said on Friday. “I think we collaborated on a dozen or so, and we were always bouncing ideas off each other.
“As the years went by, he kept getting better and better.”
In addition to writing for the Stack Band and shopping around his work to prospective singers, Leavitt lent his skills to community projects. A particular passion was the song he wrote telling the story of David’s House, the home away from home for families of children undergoing long-term treatment at Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth.
Nelson Fogg started to appreciate his cousin’s balance of devotion to music and to his native Upper Valley during one of the Shana Stack Band’s shows a few years ago, with a number of members of their extended family on hand.
“When we were in school, he was already into music and my passion was for sports,” said Fogg, now principal of Hartford High School, from which both graduated in 1979. “At the time, I probably didn’t respect his passion enough. During this concert, it occurred to me how, with a band like with a good team, you need to have people who are the glue people, the folks who the other people lean on. Seeing him do that was very cool. On stage, his exuberance really stood out. You could tell he was loving the moment, being in the moment.”
Which is why Fogg gladly obliged when the family — including Leavitt’s parents in White River Junction, Dottie and Edwin G. Leavitt; his daughter Amy Leavitt and her two children; and his son Eric — asked him to oversee an Ed Leavitt Scholarship Fund, for Hartford High seniors, He estimated that family and friends and fans so far have donated $13,000, between collections at Leavitt’s wake in Claremont, a memorial service at Dartmouth and a celebration of life at the Wilder Club and Library, and a collection box at the school.
Farnham hopes the fund will grow enough for a scholarship of $500 — “a legacy scholarship, not a scholarship that will just end.”
Ed Leavitt’s bandmates and his family are still trying to figure out what to do with his artistic legacy.
“We haven’t touched the tip of the iceberg with his back catalog of songs, as far as recordings,” Shana Stack said. “And at some point, in the spring, we’re hoping to start doing some shows again. It’s going to seem odd not to have him out there. Nobody’s going to replace Ed. You can’t. His contributions to the band were just too numerous.
“There’s nobody who can walk half a mile in his shoes.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.