There are famous families of musicians and artists who a lot of people know – June Carter and Johnny Cash and their families, or the Jacksons, for instance – and then there are the Sysyns of Hancock.
One thing that ties them together is a legacy of performance.
“We were kind of hippies before there was such a thing around here,” said Tim Sysyn, who sometimes refers to himself as a “jackass of all trades,” referring to his family’s musical tradition, his passion for teaching others how to play guitar and his lifestyle growing up on a family farm near the Reavelys, who owned and ran the Tall Pines summer camp in Bennington. “I guess you could say we were the rural equivalent of hippies. Certainly not Grateful Dead hippies. We were more prim and proper and square. Kind of like Donovan, ‘Mellow Yellow,’ you know. We were Beatle hippies, ‘All you need is love.’”
The Sysyn family gathered for a cookout at Natalya Sysyn’s home in Hancock last weekend, where they shared stories about their family history and played music between beers, smoked pork and chicken, homemade pizza and local corn on the cob. Natayla is Tim’s daughter and a performer herself.
The overarching story that stands out when speaking with the Sysyns is the origin of their legacy of performing arts. It’s an intergenerational story that begins, according to Dave and Tim, with their grandmother, Mary Katherine Sullivan, who played the accordion, the harmonica and danced the jig while entertaining troops in London during World War I. Sullivan, or “Kate,” was an Irish immigrant who came to the United States following the war and according to Tim, she was also a pianist as well as a cook for Col. Arthur Pierce – one of the early owners of Monadnock Mills – at his mansion from the time she arrived in the United States until she was married.
“Our grandmother was asked by Sally Crocker Pierce if she would be the cook at the mansion,” Tim Sysyn said, adding that she soon began playing piano there but was eventually fired. “She didn’t like the way the domestic servants were treated. Colonel Pierce dictated how people lived.”
From there, Kate got to know Evelina, John and Catherine Reaveley, who ran what was then Tall Pines camp for girls in Bennington on Whittemore Lake along with Tall Pines Camp in Hancock.
Tim credits the Reaveleys with shaping their family’s artistic and musical trajectory through their mother Noralie, an accomplished musician herself, allowing all of them to experience what he referred to as a “smidgeon” of a cosmopolitan lifestyle while growing up in rural New Hampshire.
“The Reaveleys were very tolerant and accomplished, artistically inclined people,” said Tim Sysyn, describing their ambition as well as their acceptance of socially marginalized groups of people at the time. “When I was in my 30s doing shows and driving with our mother – she never drove – she would tell me then, driving around, about the closeted ‘gays’ that would stay at the Reaveley farm. Their place was a half-mile from Diemond Farm where we lived, which was a magical place to us.”
As children, Dave and Tim Sysyn sang in a family group in the Monadnock region with several of their brothers and sisters, performing their theme song which their grandmother had scrounged together, “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” written in 1898 by George Geifer and later recorded by Bing Crosby, for crowds of people at town events and talent shows.
Dave Sysyn, who has spent much of his life traveling around the world performing, taking photographs and sketching, as well as building log homes, recalled their mother reminding the boys they needed to beat the McGoons, one of their “arch rivals” to pay the light bill or else she said it was would be “dinners and outhouse by candlelight for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.’”
“Our mother would play for us and then she’d play for the ‘enemy’ (the McGoons),” Dave said, recalling how they would sometimes beat them at talent shows. “We were all good friends, though.”
Later on, Tim was given a guitar by his grandmother after returning from a trip to Manchester where she was receiving treatment for glaucoma. He was 9.
“It was a Stella Harmony Singing Cowboys guitar and she said, ‘I want you to play in the little group,’ which was sort of like the Clancy Brothers. She thought it would be good for our little Irish singing group,” Tim said, adding that he was much more interested in baseball and the country’s space program at the time. “I didn’t bother with it too much until The Beatles landed on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Tim recalled that date with precision – Feb. 9, 1964.
“Our grandmother knew their names were Irish when they flashed across the screen on The Ed Sullivan Show. Liverpool was a heavily Irish city and once I saw The Beatles on that show it hit me,” he said. “I got the rhythm thing and the singing thing, but I said to myself, ‘now I just need to learn to finger and play the guitar.”
Soon, Tim said his brother Kevin, who owns a bar in Cambodia today, along with another friend, began doing Beatles pantomimes at school, matching the band’s dress and musical styles.
“Kevin is a good singer and eventually we decided we’d have a real group,” Tim said. “Kevin and David and I were writing songs. Inspired by us our mother made up one song in her life, ‘Flowers on the Table,’ about a former lover. I used to say, ‘Mom you can write,’ and she said, ‘Maybe I can write a song as good as “Home on the Range” one day,’ but it would lack audience familiarity and besides, I got you and five other savages to raise and I wouldn’t want to risk losing my status as a professional matching socks sorter. She would tell funny stories when performing, which we did, too.”
Tim, who has taught hundreds of people how to play the guitar over the years, and who has likely given out that many as well, according to his daughter Natalya, also performed in a comedy music duo with his brother Dave after leaving the military.
The duo, much like Cheech and Chong, Natayla said, “was killed by the disco invasion, which they resented greatly.”
Connecting with people on a personal level while performing is something the Sysyn brothers may have gotten from Noralie Sysyn and their grandmother Kate, and today, Natalaya Sysyn and her cousins, including 12 year-old Noralie Sysyn (Dave’s daughter) continue this legacy. Noralie, named after her grandmother, recently sang solo for the first time in a school show last year.
“My cousin Jonel and I were raised on stage somewhat,” Natayla said, adding that Jonel is working on a psych-rock album and that Corrina, her uncle Kevin’s daughter, has sung out occasionally with multiple bands. “I started singing in Nanny’s show around age 3, performing as Shirley Temple for events with a giant polka-dot bow in my hair.” She also said she and Jonel did some pretty cool takes on Pee-wee Herman.
Natalya, who graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2004, started dance lessons when she was 4 and ice skating lessons at age 7. She said when she was 7 she also had a Pee-wee Herman costume and told jokes on stage.
“I’ve taken around 20 years of formal dance lessons and taught yoga, flexibility and dance,” she said.
Natalya’s mother, Claudia Sysyn, who taught school for 39 years, mostly in Bennington at Pierce Elementary School, made her costumes as a child for shows at the Hancock Parade.
“We walked the parade every year, ‘playing the crowd,’ as Tim would say,” she said.
After Vancouver, Natalya performed in Denver as a costumed go-go dancer.
“The performer thing started with a lewd mime duo,” she said, adding that it was later, after doing aerial training, that she began writing burlesque and vaudeville acts. “I started doing features in a costume party dance thing at a large club called EXDO and many goth/rainbow clubs.”
Today, she records with her partner, Tim Dowling, who attended Berklee College of Music, and the couple hopes to record with their friend AL Nesby(A23P) of Acid Allst ar Records, who has featured her on a few of his albums and tracks. Before the pandemic, Natalya was working on a rock opera, which remains unfinished, but is currently producing a series of comedy talk shows that can be found on YouTube titled “Welcome to Out of Space,” which star her family and friends.
Natalya’s father Tim, who has passed on his love of music and performance to his daughter, reflected on the reasons why he enjoys playing music with others and teaching guitar.
“You improve by playing with others,” he said, adding that ultimately it’s about just having fun. “Playing and performing, telling stories, makes people happy.”