Hawkes was working for the family TV repair business and playing gigs himself, when country singer Charlie Bailey -- of Bailey Brothers' fame -- convinced him to start a record label, as he recalls in this clip from the film.
"The subject came up of my record collection. Charlie Bailey had seen it and he knew I had a lot of records and I'd been collecting of country music, and he said, 'You really should be in the record business, you should make records -- you're buying them, but you should make records and sell them, and you seem to know a lot of in the record business, and you're in show business and you know how to promote.' And my wife said, 'That would be some event if we recorded Charlie Bailey.' And Charlie said, 'What did you say?' She said, 'That would be quite an event.' He said, 'That's the name you want for your record company -- Event.'"
Charlie Bailey became Hawkes's first recording in a renovated barn on the family property -- and it was released in 1956.
Hawkes went onto make more than 75 recordings with 15 different artists for Event Records. Filmmaker Andrew Jawitz says it was the recordings of artists such as Dick Curless and Hal Lone Pine that first brought Hawkes to his attention.
"Each one of these artists could have had a documentary in and of themselves, but we really felt it was important to show how Al was the common thread behind all of these things," Jawitz says.
Hawkes, an accomplished bluegrass musician, has won national and regional awards for his contributions to music, but he was uncertain about being the subject of a film. "I said, 'You're going to do an Al Hawkes film? That's only going to last 10 minutes. That's not enough to talk about.'"
But his love of all things country, rockabilly, bluegrass can get him going for hours. As a producer, he would often seek out talent to record. Sometimes they came to him. "They heard about us as the records were being played on the radio stations. Of course a disc jockey would say this was made in Westbrook, Maine, and say they were already playing New Hampshire, or Massachusetts or up in Canada and they heard that radio station, they'd say, 'Wow, we better go down and see about getting on that label."
Hawkes even wrote songs for his artists, including the rockabilly classic "Baby, Baby" for Curtis Johnson.
"Without Al Hawkes, I think some of the finest music that's ever been recorded in New England by New Englanders would have never been recorded," says Cliff Murphy, a musicologist who's studied country and western music in New England, and written a book about it.
Murphy says Hawkes' artists had a unique sound, starting with the way they sang. "If you listen to the stuff on Event, you hear local accents. You don't hear this kind fo faux Nashville twang."
One of Event's artists, Betty Cody, spoke more French than English, for example, though you wouldn't be able to tell through her distinctive yodeling. Hawkes went onto record Cody's teenage son Lenny Breau before he went onto be a nationally-renowned guitarist.
Then in 1962, everything came to end. Nashville was being solidified as the epicenter of country music. Big labels were shipping off records faster than Hawkes ever could. And on top of all that, there was a major fire in the Boston warehouse where Hawkes record inventory was stored.
"We lost probably thousands and thousands of 45 rpm records and that hurt us badly because we didn't have the capital and we didn't have the insurance," Hawkes says. "And I had this Hawkes Television operating, and television was coming on strong in the Maine area. And we weren't making a lot of money in the record business. We had some outstanding recordings, but it was in Westbrook, Maine, and that was hard place to do a business in the entertainment field."
But Event Record albums live on today. Some have been reissued by the German company, Bear Family, and Hawkes still records his own bluegrass and old time country music under that label.
Hawkes, in fact, will perform some of his own music after the premiere of The Eventful Life of Al Hawkes tonight at SPACE gallery in Portland. He'll also take part in a Q & A session afterwards.