Windham performer reflects on successful music career

By R.D. Frum

Con Fullam of Windham has been described as “Maine's musical maestro” because he combines lyrical genius and melodic magic to captivate your ears and win your heart. Fullam doesn't simply sing, he also orchestrates a symphony of passionate tales.

Musician Con Fullam of Windham has
performed with many bands and artists
such as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 
Aztec Two-Step, Razzy Baily, Gram
Parsons and Emmylou Harris. He is
also known as the composer of 'The
Maine Christmas Song.'
COURTESY PHOTO  

Fullam’s talent has taken him to stages around America and performances with legendary musicians and bands, but it all started where he grew up in Sydney, Maine on a gentleman’s farm.

“It was lovely and lonely,” Fullam said. “My closest peer was about six miles away, so I spent a lot of time by myself, and that’s where imagination comes in. My father passed away when I was 5 and so I inherited his ukelele, and that’s how I began to play. It was a huge help to me to get through some very sad times.”

Fullam’s entire family played music, further fostering his interest.

“My father played ukelele, my mother was a pianist and a voice teacher, my brother played the banjo and guitar, and my sister played the guitar, so we were a musical family,” he said. “Back in those days, I went to a Catholic school. I was the only kid without a father. It was a defining point at some level, but I found that I had something they didn’t have. I was the guy that played the ukelele, and then a four-string guitar, and it sort of set me up as somebody who could stand his own ground.”

Fullam would play at church and civic events, and he and his brother played together as a duo on a radio show that his brother had in Waterville. When Fullam was 14, he started a band, and since then he hasn’t looked back. Music has transformed Fullam’s life because it is his life.

“Sometimes lyrics come to me, sometimes melodies come to me. There's no real set process that I go through,” Fullam said. “Writing a good lyric to me is hard and writing a good melody is hard because as far as I know there hasn’t been an original song written in many millennia. This is a 12-tone scale and there are 50 million songs written. It's then a matter of finding something that is as best you can do and unique to yourself.”

He said that he’s written a lot of songs and on any given day one particular song sticks in his head.

“But if I finish them then I generally think that they're pretty good,” Fullam said. “At some point you get to a certain level where you can sort of tell when something's going to actually breathe or not. So, if they breathe and I finish them, then generally speaking they go into the repertoire.”

Fullam has performed with many other artists like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Aztec Two-Step, Asleep at the Wheel, Richie Havens, Tim Harden, Razzy Bailey, and more. And he’s co-written a song with Rex from Aztec Two-Step, who is also from Maine.

One of Fullam’s favorite places to perform is Max’s Kansas City in New York. There were three up-and-coming clubs during the time Fullam played in New York: The Bitter End, Gaslight, and Max’s Kansas City.

“I got to play all of them,” Fullam said. “I just had some great shows at Max's Kansas City. There was a great audience, always. It was a small, 200-seat room, very intimate. I played there with Richie Havens, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris. It was always a special moment.”

According to Fullam, if a musician goes into writing a song thinking that they want to write a hit, they should probably find another profession.

“A hit song is a rare and unusual accomplishment and I warn people that in this business if somebody comes to you and says that they know what a hit is, you want to run away because they don’t, no one does,” he said. “Why something is a hit and why something isn’t, nobody knows.”

Fullam said if you don't play for yourself and about yourself, then you're never really going to capture an audience.

“The audience needs to see that you're genuine, that the songs you play or you're playing are coming from your heart,” he said. “And if that happens then as a rule the audience will buy in, and you know there's nothing better than to have people come up afterwards and say this song touched them. I wrote ‘The Maine Christmas Song,’ which is obviously special to Maine, and 35 years later, I still get people coming out and saying how much it meant to them and that's a very wonderful feeling. I never would have written it without Bob Elliot, who was the muse for the song.”

He also wrote a picture book inspired by “The Maine Christmas Song.”

“The book came absolutely out of the blue. Bob passed away several years ago, and it was two years ago that I got a call from this young publisher who grew up with the song, and she and her mom were talking about it and her mom suggested she thought it would make a great children’s book,” Fullam said. “I would’ve never thought about that in a million years.”

During his career, Fullam has served as the executive producer of the PBS children’s series, “Ribert and Robert’s Wonderworld,” for which he co-wrote, and co-produced the music. His co-creation “The Wompkees” has also aired on PBS and is now distributed in more than 40 countries around the world.

In 2005, Fullam founded Pihcintu, a multi-national girls’ chorus.

“The obvious and most immediate challenge is you lose your voice, literally,” he said. “They are coming in speaking Arabic or Portuguese or French or whatever it may be. That's obviously immensely difficult, so I formed the chorus to give girls their voices back.”

Fullam has a new 2-set CD called “A Song, Paintings, and Portraits” coming out with 26 songs.

“All of the songs on there made it because they’re important to me,” he said. “Some of the songs go back 40 years and some of them are as recent as months ago just before I finished compiling the CD.”

That CD will be available at confullam.com <

Beekeeping builds buzz across Lakes Region

By R.D. Frum

Looking to embark on a buzzworthy adventure? Look no further than beekeeping: the sweetest form of multitasking. Not only does one get to produce liquid gold, but one also gets to become the ultimate wingperson for Mother Nature. Local beekeepers Isabel Kelley and Mark Cooper of Windham unveil the secrets behind the captivating world of nurturing bees.

Beekeeping is a year-round activity in the Lakes Region and
some beekeepers and farmers in Windham and Raymond
choose to sell or gift the honey that they collect from the hives
they tend. COURTESY PHOTO 

The only bees that get kept for honey production are honeybees, scientifically named Apis Mellifera. Honeybees are of Italian and Mediterranean origin, and they are the only type of bee that produce surplus amounts of honey.

Contrastingly, bumblebees are native pollinators, meaning they pollinate plants, and they may collect a small amount of nectar. But bumblebee colonies are not managed, they survive in the wild and their natural nests are typically very small with a maximum of 10 or 20 bees, or a large colony might be 100 bees. On the other hand, a honeybee hive at peak season can have 20,000 to 50,000 bees.

“You do mark the queen and if you buy a package of bees to install in a hive, the queen will usually come separated and marked with a dot on her abdomen,” Kelley says.

Honeybees are very docile and easy to work with and typically, to manage, Cooper says.

“Bumblebees are fun if you leave them alone but there’s no way to manage them,” he said. “They don’t live in hives and won’t live in manageable conditions.”

Cooper has around 100 hives on his farm Cooper Charolais Farm & Apiary in Windham.

Mites are the biggest challenger of honeybees because the bees have no way to defend themselves against the mites and the viruses and diseases they carry. Varroa mites are the most significant threat to honeybees. The immune systems of the bees are weakened as a result of the hemolymph, bee blood, that these parasitic mites feed on while attaching themselves to adult bees and their offspring. If left uncontrolled, varroa mites can spread illnesses and viruses and cause colony decline and loss.

The natural lifespan of an average honeybee is around six weeks from the time they emerge from a cell as a fully-grown adult bee. The colony can survive the chilly months thanks to the bees that start raising new baby bees known as winter bees. The winter bees emerge as autumn approaches and have a longer life span. They protect the hive and have different responsibilities and don’t forage every day, which helps to extend their life.

Bees don't hibernate throughout the winter; instead, they gather in a close-knit cluster to keep warm and gorge on honey reserves. They start brood rearing in the middle of winter to increase their population and get ready for the spring's honey and nectar flows. The hive, which is made of three-quarter-inch hardwood boards and frames, is subjected to a variety of protective methods to conserve warmth, from insulating wrapping to tar paper coverings, helping the colony's management of temperature and survival.

“I do wrap my bees up in the winter and I'll also put guards around all the entrances so that no mice can get in there,” Kelley says.

Insulating material is stapled on to lessen wind impact, while insulation sleeves and specially made plastic form a barrier around the hive to maintain temperature without obstructing bee movement. A further alternative for coping with severe weather is polystyrene insulation, which can be found in the shape of sleeves or attached panels. This enables bees to endure the elements more easily.

In the art of beekeeping, a smoker is used which suppresses the bees' natural pheromones, which are essential for communication inside the hive. The colony can continue working unhindered since this smoke calms the bees and stops the distribution of alarm pheromones. Beekeepers typically cover their faces with a mesh veil and handle frames and bees with gloves designed of thin leather specially made for beekeeping.

“Some people wear gloves all the time, some people will occasionally, and some beekeepers never wear them,” Cooper says.

“The bees go through the process of capping the honey frames, so you'll know when they're ready. They're quite heavy; they'll have a fresh coat of wax on them that's little whitish,” Kelley says. “I usually wait like many beekeepers till the end of summer, early fall to make sure that they have done as much as they can before things get too cold and they’re not out there harvesting as much.”

Beekeeping can be a costly pursuit. “For somebody starting out brand new, a complete hive we call a Langstroth hive, which is the most common commercially made hive set up in the world basically is roughly $250 for a basic setup,” Cooper says.

“The beekeeper also needs things like a smoker, hive tool and some kind of personal protective gear such as a veil, some gloves, just for protection and comfort while working with the bees,” Cooper says. “So reality is probably $500 to $1,000 expenditure for somebody getting started out is in the ballpark.”

Beekeepers decide whether they choose to sell or to gift their honey.

“We do sell honey,” Cooper says. “We sell it at the farm year-round. A typical one-pound jar of honey is around $10 and that’s probably a pretty common thing for local raw pure honey.”

Kelley said she sold the honey that she had in 2020 but that I hadn't sold it since.

“I was doing $20 for a pint mason jar and mostly it's just some neighbors that were buying it from me,” Kelley says. “But I don't typically sell it. I just kind of hang on to it and give it away as gifts for family or friends who are looking for some.” <