When Charlie Braun arrived in southern Vermont in the early 1970s, he set about building things — a home, a family and a community.
And though he left the area nearly three decades ago to scratch the itch of his questing soul, he left a little bit of himself behind in the hearts of his friends and in the land around Belden Hill and Packers Corners.
“Charlie’s sudden death has shaken our neighborhood,” said Verandah Porche, a poet who arrived in Guilford a few years before Charlie. “I realized that he built my home, with a couple of other neighbors, 30 years ago. I live in this solid place.”
Braun, 69, was struck and killed Oct. 6 while riding his bicycle in Northampton, where he had lived for more than a decade and where he owned and operated the Other Side of the Tracks Studio.
“He helped me with my first song, advised me to love being a beginner, listen deeply and share to learn,” Porche said.
Like everyone Charlie met, Porche was immediately struck by his smile and his charisma.
“Charlie smiled more than anyone I know,” she said. “Easygoing and intense, he was, in no order: musician, mentor, carpenter, family guy, dad and grandfather, neighbor, spiritual seeker.”
“I adored the guy,” said Jon Peters, who moved to Williamsville in 1975 with his friend, Richard Davis.
“Richard was playing banjo in the Arwen Mountain String Band and I was playing drums,” Peters said.
At the time, the music scene in southern Vermont was hopping, especially at the Chelsea House, a big red barn still standing on Marlboro Road in West Brattleboro.
It was there that Peters met Charlie, who was playing guitar in a band named New Shoes.
“My first assessment was he was a very skilled, hot electric guitar player,” Peters said. “He was the guy everybody wanted to play like.”
Peters quickly learned that the passion Charlie channeled through his guitar was not just abou t his music, it was about everything and everyone that Charlie embraced.
“It’s almost a cliche, but he was the guy who was always smiling,” he said. “When you saw him, you felt good. Whatever you were doing, he made you feel like you were the best at it. That you mattered to him.”
The nation was shaking off its hangover following the counterculture that sprung up around the Vietnam War, and people like Charlie, Davis and Peters were looking for something different than going into their dad’s business or becoming doctors or lawyers.
“We were very influenced by the hippie movement of the ’60s, the fledgling back-to-the-land, save-the-earth movement,” Davis said.
These people, looking for something other than what the American Dream seemed to offer, were like excited atoms, vibrating with energy, combining and spinning off into new directions.
“It was a time when like-minded people found each other,” Peters said. “Many of them were lost in the world, trying to figure out what was next.”
And they had this overwhelming desire to build something new and different — cobbling together homes out of scraps, digging rocks out of the soil to plant seeds, and raising dynamos of potentiality that could go out into the world without the same baggage they came to southern Vermont to be rid of.
“We were the immigrants,” Davis said. “But economically and philosophically, we were not very far removed from the people who were the native Vermonters. It was a philosophy of self-sufficiency.”
Charlie seemed to embody a freshness, his friends said, a questing desire for something new and different, but at the same time, his steadfastness was as old and as reliable as the earth out of which they pried rocks.
“He had an aesthetic vibrancy that bound people together,” said Wende Mueller, who first met Charlie in 1974, when she stopped in to Capt’n Bullfrogs Music, a record store on Main Street, to pick up Al Green’s “I’m Still in Love with You.”
“Charlie was behind the counter,” she said. “The moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he would have a profound effect on my life.”
Just the same, she said, “He was a tad snarky. At the time, he wasn’t an Al Green fan.”
Nonetheless, they began dating over the next few months. They did some traveling on their own, but all the while, they were sending each other letters.
They returned to the area in 1975, continuing their relationship and bringing into the world two daughters, Cedar and Jemma.
The war had just ended, she said, and it was May Day in Guilford.
“Every hippie from everywhere came to the annual event. It was a huge celebration. It was clear a new era was dawning.”
For some people in southern Vermont, it may have felt more like an invasion, rather than a new era, but that sentiment didn’t last long. Eventually, these seekers would become kith and kin, knitted into the fabric of Vermont.
Eric Morse was 23 when he moved to Vermont and was living in a house on Weatherhead Hollow Road in Guilford when Charlie showed up one day.
“We just hit it off,” he said.
They hit it off so much that Morse and Charlie built houses for their new families next door to each other and, with neighbors Sandra Marr and Smokey Fuller, raised a bevy of children who darted between the homes.
“We had a nice little settlement here,” Morse said.
“It was really beautiful,” Mueller said. “An incredibly magical and cosmic experience.”
“He was always working on a new song and playing the guitar in a studio he had in the house,” said Skye Morse, the son of Eric and Dale Morse.
And even when the kids were rousting about, noisy, or fighting among each other, Charlie never lost his cool, said Skye.
“I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice or say something in annoyance,” he said.
“He was a positive force and he was never conflicted about that,” agreed Skye’s father. “It was his intention to be positive, because that’s what the world needed and it was something he could contribute.”
Eric Morse described Charlie as a devoted father and an awesome gardener who built houses, but his real passion was playing music. And it wasn’t just the passion that showed through, he said, but also the intensity of that passion.
“Charlie just lifted the music to a different level,” he said.
Charlie also lifted relationships to a different level, said Dan Snow, who met Charlie in the 1980s when he came to build a rock foundation for a timber-framed barn Charlie was putting up.
“He was everyone’s best friend,” Snow said. “And he remained a true and loyal friend throughout.”
Snow described Charlie as “a very well-rounded guy,” a modern-day Renaissance man.
“He wasn’t trying to blaze any trails. He was just so curious. He had an exuberance and an enthusiasm for life. Nothing got past him without a full examination with care and interest. If there was any one person in my life who personified Leonardo da Vinci, my hero by the way, it was Charlie.”
After leaving Guilford and before setting up his studio in Northampton, Charlie became a school counselor in Leyden and West Tisbury, Mass.
“Charlie was the sort of person who could draw things out of those who normally kept them inside,” Peters said. “It was his nature. If I was an 8-year-old lost in life, this is the guy I would want to talk to.”
Over the past decade, Charlie recorded eight CDs of original music, reflecting his spiritual life and his fascination with kirtan, which is call-and-response devotional music with chanting that is rooted in Buddhism and Hinduism.
He’d also been living out of his van, which allowed him to just show up on a friend’s doorstep, where he was always welcome.
“He was here a few weeks ago,” Eric Morse said shortly after Charlie’s death. “He came up and helped stack wood and we watched the sunset together.”
Skye Morse was there that day Charlie showed up and helped stack wood with his father. Charlie played with Skye’s twin boys and the memory plays through his voice with both wonder and sadness.
“When I’m with my kids, I’m thinking of Charlie,” he said. “How can I just be in the moment with them and understand what they want and what they need. The plans I had for my day are irrelevant. I’m just going to bring some positivity into this moment. That’s Charlie.”
With Charlie’s death, Davis said, the world has lost a very bright and dynamic light.
“The void is massive,” Peters agreed.
But Charlie would want his friends to carry his torch, Davis said. “Each one of us has to keep going, feeling the loss and remembering the light.”
“The bumper sticker on Charlie’s VW van clearly stated his core belief, for those of us still here and assigned to carry forth,” Wende said. “The real revolution will be love.”