Tag: bob dylan

’70s Music Meets the White House in ‘Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President’

Posted on by Editor

In 1978, during a concert on the White House lawn, legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie put the leader of the free world on the spot. President Jimmy Carter, formerly a peanut farmer in his home state of Georgia, had requested “Salt Peanuts,” a rambunctious tune that had been a hit for Gillespie back in the 1940s, but the musician said he’d only play it if Carter himself sang the lyrics. That’s not a hard job: There are only two words, “Salt peanuts,” repeated over and over, in a fast, staccato exclamation.

Carter gamely obliged and took his place onstage among the jazz greats, wearing not an official suit but a more casual outfit of unbelted slacks and a shirt-sleeve shirt. No musician himself, the President gave it his best shot, but could barely keep up with the veteran players. The song ended in laughter, but it was no joke. Instead, it revealed not only Carter’s sense of humor about himself—a rarity among politicians—but also his abiding love of music. Even as he’s flubbing such a basic vocal, he looks like he’s having the time of his life up there.

That impromptu performance is a key scene in the persuasive and often joyous new documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, which redeems the 39th President by examining his accomplishments in office through his relationship to music. The words stagflation and malaise are never mentioned, nor is there any appearance by an angry rabbit — all issues that have long obscured Carter’s legacy. A naval submarine officer turned politician who farmed peanuts on the side, he served in the Georgia State Senate through the 1960s before running successfully for governor in 1970.

Six years later he ran for president, right at the heyday of southern rock and outlaw country, when the entire nation seemed to be fascinated by the South. Artists like Gregg Allman, Ronnie Van Zant, and Willie Nelson saw in Carter more than a little of themselves: Southern men who didn’t fit the old hick stereotype, who might have called themselves rednecks, but rejected the hostilities and prejudices and buzzcuts associated with that figure.

And Carter was a real fan of the music they were making at that time. They not only befriended but endorsed him, playing fundraisers along the campaign trail and later visiting him in Washington, DC. Willie Nelson was famous for sneaking up to the roof of the White House to smoke pot and Rock & Roll President reveals that it was Carter’s son Chip and not some security guard who joined him. These were not family-friendly pop stars like the Osmonds or the Partridge Family, but countercultural figures who could very easily have hindered a candidate by tying him to drugs or sex or rebellion. Rather than undercut Carter’s gravity or mission, they helped portray him as an outsider who could clean up the mess made by Nixon and Watergate.

As the documentary makes clear, however, this wasn’t just politics as usual. There was no strategy behind Carter’s partnership with these southern musicians. Instead, it came about more organically, a happy accident stemming from his clear love for the music. He and several other talking heads say as much in the film, but the most convincing evidence is visual. Rock & Roll President is filled with archival footage of the President watching and listening to a wide array of music — not just rock, but folk, jazz, gospel, and country — and at every concert he’s there singing along and smiling his big, toothy smile. Rather than playing up a focus-group-approved reaction, he lets his guard down and projects something resembling pure joy. At 95, Carter remains an imposing and presidential presence. Yet, especially when he’s recalling a particular concert or simply putting a Dylan record on the turntable, that unselfconscious smile returns, its hint of mischief intact.

Rock & Roll President includes interviews with a range of artists, some of whom are still identified as progressives (Rosanne Cash, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan) and others who have swayed further right over the years (Larry Gatlin). But they all respond to Carter’s calls for bipartisanship, his moral leadership, his steady demeanor in office, and of course his musical knowledge. Over time many of his accomplishments have been dismissed, undone, or simply swept under the rug, but the documentary connects some of them — his handling of the historic peace treaty between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, for example — to Carter’s Christian faith and the principles he found in music.

There are, of course, holes in the story Rock & Roll President presents, but Carter’s idealism is refreshing especially at a moment when politics has become ugly, divisive, and cynical to the point of nihilism. He comes across as a folk hero: embraced by the people and too honest for politics. “There was so much about the story that is timeless, in terms of messaging,” says director Mary Wharton. “During filming and production, there were all these things that would happen in the news that resonated with the stories that were being told in the film. Things like Carter’s role in the Civil Rights movement continue to be more and more relevant.”

She and producer Chris Farrell spent three years researching and filming the documentary, which included two trips down to Plains, Georgia, to speak to the former peanut farmer himself. For our latest Roots on Screen column, BGS spoke to the duo while they were in Massachusetts for the Berkshire International Film Festival, where Rock & Roll President played at a drive-in theater — just like it was ’76 all over again.

BGS: In the film, Carter seems to be very unselfconsciously enjoying himself around this music whenever there’s live footage. What was he like to deal with?

Chris Farrell: He’s in his mid-90s, first of all. He’s a former President. He’s a naval guy. He’s pretty stern, and even in his advanced age, he’s still pretty imposing. He shows up to the interview and sits down and he’s very serious. But within the first three to four minutes, he realizes this is not the typical interview. We want to talk about his love for music, what music meant to him, and how he used music in his personal and political life. I’ll never forget — that smile just showed up, and you can see it in the interview.

Mary Wharton: We were told that President Carter was a very punctual man and that we needed to be ready when he walked in the door. They said he’s not very patient in terms of waiting around for you to get ready for him. He’s a very exacting person who does not suffer fools. And why should he? But it was obvious that he had enjoyed talking about this stuff, and that he had a lot of fun with it. I think he genuinely enjoyed sharing this part of his life that he had never really been asked about before.

Was he the first president to use music this way? How unprecedented was it to have endorsements from this kind of countercultural creative class?

MW: JFK got the endorsement of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. I don’t know if they were doing campaign benefits for JFK or not — I never researched that — and the only other thing I could point to is Nixon inviting Elvis to the White House, because Elvis wanted to be made a sheriff or something along those lines. But that didn’t seem like anybody endorsing anything…

CF: And Johnny Cash, remember? Nixon tried to co-opt Johnny Cash and it didn’t work. Again, the interesting thing was: This was not marketing necessarily for them. As the film shows, from his very early childhood, music was massive in Carter’s life. It was very, very important to him, and that’s why it made a natural component to his campaign. It wasn’t like some campaign manager said, “Hey, listen, boss, just trust us on this. You know, if you hang out with these guys, you’re gonna get endorsements and people are going to like you.” He genuinely loves music, all music, and he really, really felt a strong relationship and bond with these guys, and that’s what made them willing to endorse him.

Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Jimmy Carter

And these weren’t just any old musicians either. They were Southern musicians who seemed to be redefining how the South was being depicted. The Allmans and Skynyrd were popular right when you’re having movies like Walking Tall and Deliverance, and suddenly there are new ways of thinking about the South.

CF: Mary and I are both from the South — and not terribly far away from where Jimmy Carter is from. We’re both from North Florida. Even though we were young when he was elected — I was ten, Mary is slightly younger than me — we spent the ’70s in the South and we remember that it was changing. As Chuck Leavell says very well in the film, and Rosanne Cash says extremely well, things were going in the right direction, and Carter personified that attempt to move us along not only in the South but the country as a whole. Unfortunately, a lot of those issues we were making progress on then, it feels like we’ve gone backwards on, whether that’s civil rights, women’s rights, a whole host of issues.

Looking back, many of the artists associated with that movement are now seen to be very conservative, while Carter was and remains very progressive. It’s interesting to see footage of him sharing a stage with Charlie Daniels.

MW: Charlie Daniels [became] very conservative. But he was more affiliated with Carter and was onstage at his campaign rallies. He did a lot to support Carter at the time, then had a bit of a change of heart during the Reagan administration. Larry Gatlin is another one who’s in our film who is now very conservative. At the time, though, he did support Carter. He saw that Carter was a good man, and he believed in him. The country was a little less polarized back then. As John Wayne says in that clip in the film, he’s a staunch Republican and was known for being “the opposition.” But he makes clear he’s a member of the “loyal opposition.” He saw that Carter was president and said he would support him as best he could. We as Americans may not always agree on every issue, but we need to figure out how we can work together to come up with some kind of compromise that we can all live with. We’ve gotten to a point where that doesn’t even exist anymore.

CF: That’s ultimately the point of the movie: that Carter was able to use music to bring people together. We have so many examples of how music broke down barriers and brought people together, unified people — and would it be nice to think that, somehow, that can happen again.

MW: We had an early screening of a rough cut in New York, just some friends of mine and the editor. We just needed to get some feedback from some outsiders, and there was this one woman in the group who had a very visceral reaction to the Charlie Daniels piece of music in the film. Charlie Daniels is playing at this campaign rally in 1980 where the Ku Klux Klan showed up and were counter-protesting and demonstrating outside the rally. Carter stood up to them and essentially called them cowards for hiding behind white sheets. Charlie Daniels got up on the stage and performed, and that was why we wanted to play that music. This woman so associated the music of Charlie Daniels with many of the beliefs that the KKK espouses. She saw Southerners as automatically racist, and that’s a common misperception. I’ve heard people say, “Oh, you’re from the South, but you’re not a racist. What made you change your mind?”

CW: One of the most beautiful examples of that is the jazz on the White House lawn. There’s the sheer brilliance of those musicians and how Carter brought them all together and how he honored the genre. Carter said part of the reason that jazz had not been recognized over the years was racism. He was able to talk about racism in a way that eludes so many politicians. They find it a difficult topic to deal with, but he tackled it head on. That’s one of those scenes where you really get the essence of Jimmy Carter, where he really shows moral courage and moral leadership.

What I find remarkable is that he’s able to connect that to his Christian faith, which is another issue that people seem to have misperceptions about. Christianity is usually associated with a very specific political stance.

CF: The best example of that in our movie, I think, is the Gregg Allman story, because, to me, that’s the essence of Carter. He didn’t judge Gregg Allman, and he didn’t think he needed to forgive Gregg for something, because he knew it wasn’t his place to forgive him. It was his place to be compassionate and be there for his friend in his time of need. I consider myself Christian. I’m an Episcopalian, and to me that’s what Christianity is all about. It’s about love. It’s about compassion. And I think that he really does exhibit those attributes.

Carter seems to be thought of as a failed president who really came into his own after he left the White House. But the film argues that the traits we associate with his humanitarian efforts were the same traits that guided his presidency and the same traits he found in the music he loved.

MW: The thing we wanted to do with Carter was look at him through this different lens of his relationship with music, and perhaps that might make people reconsider their ideas about his presidency. Jim Free [formerly special assistant on congressional affairs], who’s so great in the film, got angry when he talked about how people saw Carter as a bad president. On both sides of the aisle, people will say, “He was a terrible president, but I love what he’s done post-presidency.” And that would just make Jim angry. He said, “If you like what he’s done post-presidency, then take another look at what he accomplished during his administration because he was about the same things. He wasn’t always successful, because the presidency is not a dictatorship. It’s not a monarchy. You can’t just decide what you want to happen and then, lo and behold, it happens. You have to work with Congress. What Carter was able to accomplish puts him on the right side of history.

CW: If people would go back and look at the record — and we could have done this with the movie, but we decided not to go down this path, because Stu Eizenstat wrote a 900-page book about this — they’d see that Carter had an enormous amount of legislation, some really groundbreaking legislation. He’s one of the most efficient and effective presidents in history, in that regard. Nile Rodgers rightly says that Carter got the short end of the stick somehow. Hopefully, upon further reflection and examination, people will hold him in higher stead. And he loves music and understands that it has this incredible power to bring us joy, to bring us together, and to remind us that we’re more alike than we are different. We all want to dance to a good song.

Lede photo, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter photo, Jimmy Carter on stage photo, and Jimmy Carter interview photo: courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment; Photos with Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, and photo with Dolly Parton, from Carter Presidential Library.

LISTEN: Joan Osborne, “That Was a Lie”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Joan Osborne
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “That Was a Lie”
Album: Trouble and Strife
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Womanly Hips/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “I get so enraged watching these polished, camera-ready mouthpieces for our government just straight up lying to us. And journalists seem unable use the word ‘lie’ when talking about this: their coverage is full of euphemisms like ‘falsehoods’ or ‘misstatements.’ But these are just blatant lies, and I think it’s important not to sanitize them, to call them what they are. People in power are abusing the public trust, whether it’s government officials or the insurance industry or the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and I believe we need to call them on it in no uncertain terms. To quote Bob Dylan, ‘I just want you to know I can see through your mask.'” — Joan Osborne

Photo credit: Jeff Fasano

How Bettye LaVette Finally Learned to Let The Songs Sound Like Her (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

When Bettye LaVette covered “Your Time to Cry” nearly fifty years ago, she wrung every ounce of hurt and drama from the lyrics, but especially on the chorus. She stretches out the word “time” until it breaks into two syllables, implying a similar emotional break that doesn’t undercut the song’s determination, but shows what cost she has paid for it. It’s a riveting performance, a raw, southern soul slow burner that should have established her as one of the finest R&B voices of the 1970s.

During those same sessions, she also covered Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” among other tunes, yet for reasons that were never made clear, Atlantic Records shelved the project, declining to promote “Your Time to Cry” as a single or to release her debut album. That has been a defining moment in LaVette’s long career — and one she subtly and slyly addresses on her new album, Blackbirds. She is the woman wronged, the embodiment of the music industry’s disregard for talent, especially that of Black women. For three decades LaVette continued to work, developing and strengthening her voice and expanding her repertoire. She explains, “When people say I had a resurgence, I want to say, ‘No, I never stopped. You just didn’t come to where I was!’”

Now, nearly fifty years after recording “Your Time to Cry” in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she has become one of the finest and most accomplished singers in R&B or any other genre for that matter, with a string of albums that showcase her stylistic range as well as her deep understanding of pop history. After releasing a comeback record on the tiny Blues Express label in 2003, she caught the ear of Andy Kaulkin at Anti- Records, who signed her as a new artist at the height of the soul revival of the 2000s.

Since then, she’s covered The Who for the Kennedy Centers Honors ceremony (famously bringing Pete Townshend to tears), recorded with Drive-By Truckers (back in the Shoals, for an album appropriately titled The Scene of the Crime), and reimagined Dylan tunes so thoroughly even his own bandleader didn’t recognize them. And those original Shoals sessions did finally get an official release, first in 2000 on a small Dutch label and again in 2018 from vinyl specialists Run Out Groove.

Blackbirds is among her most powerful albums: a collection of songs by female artists active from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, including Nancy Wilson, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone, whom LaVette refers to collectively as “the bridge I came across on.” It’s an album that celebrates these artists, but also emphasizes their shared experiences as Black women in the music industry. “Every broken promise broke my heart,” she sings on “Book of Lies,” a song made famous by Ruth Brown. Her voice is lower than it was in 1972, but no less expressive, and she makes that sentiment more than just romantic; it’s also a professional lament, addressed to the industry that derailed her career so long ago.

We spoke with LaVette about Blackbirds in our second half of the interview; here, she tells BGS about her early hopes and disappointments.

BGS: What was your impression when you were down in Muscle Shoals? Had you been there before you recorded?

LaVette: No! What would I be doing there?! What would you go there for, if you weren’t going to record? They had to win me over. I’d wanted to record in New York and Chicago. I always wanted to be very bougie. But after I had accepted how different my voice was — how un-girly-like it was — I identified more with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. After I was down there for a day, I was absolutely as happy as I could be. They were absolutely wonderful — and wonderful to me. When I got back to Detroit, I could not stop talking about them, especially with the way they wrote and read music.

Were you ever told why your ‘72 sessions were never released?

That has been one of the big mysteries in my career. I can think of that album and my dog Mickey, that I had when I was 11, and just burst into tears at any time. I had Brad Shapiro, who was Wilson Pickett’s producer. I had the Swampers, who I had wanted. I was at the label that I had loved. But when they told me they weren’t going to release the album, I got up under the dining room table and stayed three or four days. My friends brought me food and wine and joints. I’m telling you, I’m about to cry now. It was to be my first album, after having already had a string of singles. For years, all I had was “Your Turn to Cry.” Whenever people would come in with their latest whatever-it-is at my house or at a party, I always kept that song handy, maybe on a cassette. I’d say, “I made a record that was really, really good one time. Y’all wanna hear it?”

I just found out — when I say “just found out,” I meant in the last twenty years, maybe — that it was a split between Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Jerry Wexler was on my side and Ahmet was on Aretha’s side. For the longest time I never knew what happened. I had no idea, and it sounded so stupid, for thirty years, to tell people, “I have no idea.” Many people had heard “Your Time to Cry,” and they said, “If that stuff is anything like this, I can’t understand.” When Atlantic put “Your Time to Cry” out, it was just out. They didn’t mention it to anyone. They just put it out. What you wanted at a label was to have one of everything, and maybe a junior one of everything, too. So they could see where that wouldn’t work with me and Aretha. I think Diana [Ross] is probably the reason I was never at Motown. Those personalities wouldn’t have worked.

Judging by reissues from those sessions, you had already worked up a pretty diverse repertoire.

My manager, Jim Lewis, who was the assistant to the president of the musicians’ union in Detroit and a trombone player with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, was a hard, hard taskmaster. When we started to work this management thing out, he said, “You’re cute. You’ve got a cute little waistline and a cute little butt, but you’re going to have to learn some songs, because there’s a possibility you may not be a big star.” That’s not a given, but you can be a singer for the rest of your life, if you will learn a lot of songs. He said, “You’re a different kind of singer, and you should learn that.”

How so?

I’ve accepted that I sound more like James Brown than Doris Day. But I used to think I had to sound the way Nancy Wilson sounds, which discouraged me from even wanting to learn how to sing. The thought that I could sing it and it didn’t have to sound beautiful didn’t even occur to me, until Jim came along. He told me, “Just let ‘em come out of your mouth. They’re gonna sound like you.” So I had to satisfy myself with the songs. I had to choose songs that I really like, and I would tell people, “Do you like the song or do you like the record? Because those are two different things.”

Jim made me learn a lot of songs. He insisted I learn “Lush Life,” which permitted me to be comfortable at the Carlyle Hotel for ten years. He insisted I learn “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “God Bless the Child,” which put me in the lead role in Bubbling Brown Sugar. He made me learn country and western. Otherwise, I would have been fighting with the local songwriters over them giving songs to Aretha and not giving them to me, you know? I was able to say, “Hey, I can go on and just be real good.” So I approach what I’m doing a little differently. I thought Jim was telling me to sing these songs like these people, but he just wanted me to sing them how they came out of my mouth. However they come out, sing them like that. Now that I’ve accepted that, I’m not so concerned about how it sounds, but how I feel about the song. That helps me present it. I’m very grateful to him.

That comes through on these sessions from 1972, where you’re covering Neil Young and John Prine and doing a song that Bowie was doing at the same time. There’s that range.

Well, it was after that that I did “What Condition My Condition Is In” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. And that got me another record contract. Kenny Rogers came to Detroit and Jim said, “Why don’t you take it and let him hear it?” I didn’t think he’d like it, but Jim said, “You don’t know how it’ll sound to him.” So I took it to him and Kenny loved it. His brother, Lelan Rogers, was just starting a record label called Silver Fox, and they flew me down to Nashville. I was with them for four or five years, but still no album. All these albums were set to come out and didn’t come out.

After finally breaking out in the 2000s, you established yourself as an interpreter of songs. What do you bring to a song? How do you make something familiar sound like you? Or is that even something you’re thinking about at this point?

That isn’t something that I plan or set out to do. When I hear the song and start to sing it, that’s just the way I sing it. The thing that makes it new is that it’s different. I doubt I could come up with anything new. But it is different, and so I need for people to change their attitude about it. That was one of the things with Interpretations, my British rock album. The thing that helped me the most recording that album was that I didn’t know most of the songs. I had never heard most of them. They didn’t play them a lot on Black radio. So all I did was just lift the lyrics and sing them the want I wanted to.

Michael Stevens was brilliant, and he did the arrangement of “Love, Reign O’er Me” by The Who that I did for the Kennedy Center Honors. When I went to rehearsal, they got ready to go into the tune, and I told him, “I can’t sing it like that.” And he said, “Well, sing it the way you want to sing it.” So I sang the song to him a cappella, and he took a break and after a while came back and redirected everybody. He’d been listening to this song for thirty years — since he was a teenager! — and I’d only been listening to it for three or four days.

Something similar happened on the Bob Dylan album, Things Have Changed. We had Bob Dylan’s guitarist, Larry Campbell, playing on it, and he had a ball. He said, “I’ve wanted to hear these a different way for seventeen years!” Because he knew about the inner workings of each one of the tunes, more than any of us, he started to find clever little things, probably, that he had always wanted to play, and he played them for me.

How was working with these songs on Blackbirds different?

Working on this album was intimidating, in that I didn’t want to bastardize any of the songs or cast them off. I didn’t want to do anything to them just for the sake of doing something, you know? That was kind of daunting. But that’s the thing that makes Steve [Jordan, producer] so important to me. When we develop an arrangement, what I usually do is I’ll get my keyboard player to go in the direction that I want to take the song.

When Steve hears me with the piano, singing it the way I want to sing it, that speaks to him to put something else in there. He no longer hears Billie Holiday’s interpretation of “Strange Fruit,” and he arranges what he hears in his head, not what the other record was. I’m not going to change any of the notes — I’m just going to put them in different places and say them differently, so you can’t follow that trajectory that you know from the record. It has to be different.

(Editor’s Note: Read part two of our interview with Bettye LaVette.)

Photo credit: Joseph A. Rosen

The Show On The Road – David Bromberg

Posted on by Chris Jacobs
This week, The Show On The Road features living folk-blues legend and underground guitar icon David Bromberg.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Host Z. Lupetin got to speak with the now 74-year-old Bromberg in a hotel room before the pandemic shutdown, prior to Bromberg playing a show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles back in February, 2020.

Coming out of the fertile Greenwich Village scene on the heels of Bob Dylan, Ramblin Jack Elliot and other shaggy troubadour-storytellers, Bromberg’s encyclopedic knowledge of American songwriting traditions made him a coffee house wunderkind who refused to be pigeonholed in one genre. By the age of thirty, Bromberg was the go-to guitarist for Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Prine and Ringo Starr, and he could be found jamming at dinner parties with George Harrison.

A man of many interests and talents, Bromberg actually stepped away from performing for nearly two decades at the height of his notoriety, moving to Chicago to learn how to build and then appraise violins. He became obsessed with identifying the best instruments just by sight, and even opened a respected instrument shop in Wilmington, Delaware called David Bromberg Fine Violins.

He returned after twenty two years off the road with the triumphant and Grammy-nominated Try Me One More Time in 2006, and has assembled an energetic band of friends that continues to join him on his new, high energy offerings.

Bromberg’s muscular and ever genre-bending 2020 release, Big Road pays homage to his heroes like Charlie Rich and 1930’s bluesman Tommy Johnson, but also injects heavy doses of swampy rock, horn-heavy funk, and good-humored, folk storytelling along the way.

Stick around to the end of the episode to hear him play a new acoustic tune called “Buddy Brown’s Blues.”

Bluegrass Memoirs: Scruggs Pegs & Earl’s Hooks

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Let’s begin with a 45 RPM record I played banjo on. 

In July 1964, I was hired by the Rick Sutherlin Orchestra to play banjo for one night at the Monroe County Fair in Bloomington, Indiana. They needed a banjo player, because they were going to back up the fair’s featured music that night, the famous barbershop quartet, The Buffalo Bills. 

The Rick Sutherlin Orchestra was a big band based in Bloomington. Its leader Sutherlin, from a local family, was not a great musician. I remember him at the fair waving his baton at the front of the stage while one of the sidemen did the countdowns before each tune. I’m pretty certain I got the gig because Tom Hensley, who’d played bass in our bluegrass band, the Pigeon Hill Boys, played piano for the orchestra. They needed a banjo; he suggested my name. Hensley, like most of the other members of the big band, was at the Indiana University School of Music. He recently retired after over 40 years as Neil Diamond’s pianist.

A banjo solo was needed for the show, so one of the other orchestra members, trombonist Gary Potter, came to consult with me. Potter and I had been classmates at Oberlin College, playing in Dick Sudhalter’s jazz band in 1960. The following year we had roomed in the same boarding house, and he’d played bass with our campus bluegrass band, The Plum Creek Boys. Now he was at the start of a long career teaching music, principally at IU’s Jacobs School of Music. 

We decided on Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” a contemporary folk hit. I’d been playing it with David Satterfield in our Bloomington bluegrass band. Dave, an IU Grad student from Columbus, Indiana, had lived in Greenwich Village a few years before and done some singing with Dylan at that time. This song was in his repertoire.

I loaned Gary a copy of Sing Out! that had Dylan’s words and music so he could work on the arrangement. At this point he suggested inserting the sound of the Scruggs pegs, the musical hook in Flatt & Scruggs’ “Flint Hill Special.” Scruggs had added two additional tuning pegs to his banjo. They had cams which pushed on the second and third strings, enabling him to raise and lower the pitch of each string while it was being plucked. That created a slurred note sound resembling that of a slide guitar or a pedal steel.

Gary had heard that sound when we were at Oberlin and thought its riff with the strings being tuned down and back up would make a nice introduction for my banjo part. He enjoyed the challenge of arranging the sound of the pegs for the orchestra.

The performance at the fair went over well, and soon after that someone — maybe Sutherlin? — suggested we try doing a banjo + big band LP. Thus the Delmarti 45, intended as a demo, was born. The recording was made, as the label indicates, by Don Sheets. Sheets had a recording studio in Brown County on Highway 135 halfway between Bean Blossom and Nashville. He did custom recording work — high school bands, choirs, that sort of stuff — and specialized in jingles. I worked for him there occasionally. A gold record for one of his jingles hung on the studio wall.

The recording was made on the IU Bloomington campus in August 1964, at the Indiana Memorial Union building’s Alumni Hall. The band was on the hall’s stage. Sheets set up his recording equipment on the floor in front of the stage. What I recall most vividly about the recording session is how solid the rhythm section was. “The Marti Mae Singers” was Don’s wife Marti, who overdubbed the harmony voices in his studio afterward.

The record was published in the fall of 1964. Our banjo + big band idea didn’t find any takers at record companies. At the time, bluegrass banjo crossover projects like this one were already up and running, and the heyday for Scruggs pegs had passed.

Earl Scruggs invented his pegs in 1952 after recording “Earl’s Breakdown,” an instrumental that incorporated as its hook a musical trick he’d been playing since boyhood — making a slur by plucking the second string (a B note), tuning it down while still ringing to an A, and then quickly back up to B, right in the middle of an instrumental break. A quick twist! He and Lester recorded it in October 1951. 

It was released at the end of the year on a Columbia single, the B side of “‘Tis Sweet To Be Remembered,” the first Flatt & Scruggs title to make the Billboard charts. All winter long, Columbia advertised the single as a best-seller. The band, then based in Raleigh, was playing it on the radio and the road daily. 

The tedium of having to retune the string by ear every time he played it prompted Earl to invent a labor-saving device. He installed a tuning peg with an adjustable cam on it in the banjo’s peghead between the first and the second string. Turning the peg up made the cam stretch the second string up to B. Turning it down loosened it to A. That enabled him to play these peg hooks accurately every time.

At the same time as he installed the new tuning peg he placed an identical one between the third and the fourth string so that the third string could be moved down from a G to F# and back.

Earl did this because moving the second and third strings down is a natural part of tuning the banjo from an open G chord (the default, for Scruggs-style) to a D chord. This boyhood musical trick came from something he did whenever he played at a dance — change tunings. Certain dance pieces were in G, the most frequently used tuning. Others were in C or D, each with its own tuning. Scruggs used all three throughout his musical life.

In the spring of 1952 Earl could use his new tuners not only for “Earl’s Breakdown,” but also to move quickly from G to D in order to play “Reuben,” the old-time tune that had launched him as a three-finger picker, which he often picked with the band. 

Tablature for “Flint Hill Special” from Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo, p. 103

That fall, just after moving to Knoxville, they recorded “Flint Hill Special,” Earl’s newest composition. It used his new pegs for the tune’s hook.  This riff came at the start of the recording and was repeated at the end of each banjo chorus. That’s what Gary Potter incorporated into his charts for our version of “Don’t Think Twice.”

Released within weeks as the B side of “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke,” “Flint Hill Special” was advertised by Columbia as a best-seller all spring of 1953. It got a lot of radio play. 

At the end of August, not long after Lester and Earl started broadcasting for Martha White Flour in Nashville, they recorded another new peg hook instrumental, “Foggy Mountain Chimes.” In the second half of each chorus Earl tuned both strings down, changing the banjo’s open chord to a D, then played harmonics — “chimes” — in that key before tuning back up to G. 

“Foggy Mountain Chimes” was released in November 1953. The following month Decca released a single recorded in Nashville by the Shenandoah Valley Boys. On one side was “Plunkin’ Rag,” a new banjo instrumental with yet another Scruggs peg hook. 

With the pegs as with every other aspect of his music, Earl Scruggs was being listened to in Nashville and copied by young banjo players everywhere. “Plunkin’ Rag” was just the start. More about that next time!

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

MIXTAPE: Daniel Rodriguez’s Songs of Authenticity

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I love all types of music and song. How beautiful a thing to hear the invisible insides of someone shared outwardly. A culmination of dynamic forces, experiences and sensibilities dialed into pulsating, Pythagorean waveforms, giving color to the space in between. The only catch is we have to trust what we’re hearing is authentic. Whether it’s the tonal intention of a singer or the specific touch of an instrumentalist, the song has to move me in some way or else I’m changing the station. Authenticity is subjective to each listener where no authority exists, though goosebumps, tears, movement, lofty notions and inspiration have always been my litmus tests to playing something thrice or more.

Here’s a list of songs that have moved me in some way worthy of mention. Also, if you’re so moved, check out my album Sojourn of Burning Sun out on August 28. — Daniel Rodriguez

Bill Monroe – “Uncle Pen”

From what I hear, this song is Bill giving gratitude and paying tribute to his actual uncle, Pen [James Pendleton Vandiver]. Pen played the fiddle at family gatherings and inspired Bill to join the musical world. The song structure of “Uncle Pen,” though only a few chords, is kind of complex. It’s a jubilant song with a great melody and has those goosebumping, Appalachian harmonies that Bill and his band often showcased. Probably what I like most about the song is that it appears to skip a beat before the head of each verse. It happens during a G run directly after the chorus that impossibly lands at the head of the next section. Simple genius.

Gregory Alan Isakov – “Amsterdam”

I like pretty much all of Gregory’s songs and his recordings. Catching his band live or him solo is a remarkable experience. I’m lucky to call him a longtime friend and I keep my fandom of his music separate from that. Gregory paints imagery that is most times not specific, which leaves you, as a listener, more in an abstract state of mind. Yet he threads a powerful emotion throughout, which his voice and arrangements unavoidably invoke. He uses imagery of a woman often, which comes across as more a mythical character of the sacred feminine, rather than one of a romantic endeavor. This is apparent in “Amsterdam”: “That howling wind, she’s waving hi, her other hand’s in mine.” The song ascends towards the end in some epic way when Greg moves his voice up an octave and sings “Churches and trains, they all look the same to me now / They shoot you some place, while we ache to come home somehow.” Goosebumps to follow.

Bruce Springsteen – “Youngstown”

The Boss has never failed to paint us the pictures of the struggling American working class. Our popular culture seems to only highlight the celebrities and billionaires, and yet The Boss celebrates and sheds light on the untold stories of the common man, the backbone of our culture. His stories are always rich with the American story, full of its hypocrisies and triumphs. “Youngstown” paints a very real picture of the uphill and endless bogging down of industry and war. The arrangement has a suiting Americana feel, stripped down and intimate. The pedal steel and fiddle give an eerie voice to the emotion of the character in the story who sings, “My sweet Jenny, I’m sinking down, here darling in Youngstown.”

John Prine – “Lake Marie”

When John Prine passed on earlier this year I cried constantly for three days. I’ve been lucky enough to catch him live more than a few times at festivals that we both played. The authenticity in his delivery has healing properties that only a few possess. John touches on all the hidden sadnesses and joys of humanity, and gives color to the seemingly opaque hidden corners of the human condition. “Lake Marie” is a special song with all the ingredients: New love, tenured love, relationship struggles and cold-blooded murder. John delivers this story in a very light-hearted and humorous way. He speaks the verses and accentuates certain parts, which become vital to the song’s DNA. The chorus is maybe the best chorus ever written, beautiful and joyous, juxtaposed with a very brutal and tragic story.

Levon Helm – “The Mountain” (written by Steve Earle)

Just like any song that Levon sings of someone else’s, he makes it his own. That is very much the case with “The Mountain” by Steve Earle. Steve recorded a great version of this song with Del McCoury, but my favorite version is the one Levon sings. It’s about the coal industry brutalizing the natural wonder of a homeplace. Removing mountaintops from where once majestic mountains stood. Filling in swimming holes that you once could cool off from the summer’s heat within its cool mountain runoff. Levon brings you there to those mountains, and he takes you to that swimming hole, and then he shows you the pain of it being no more.

Gillian Welch – “Everything is Free”

When speaking of Gillian’s songs it would be prudent to also mention David Rawlings. The line is blurred when trying to understand who wrote what — and it’s fitting that their voices in harmony become an entity of grace and grit that is alive and well. “Everything Is Free” is a song that hits home for the majority of musicians and artists who are at large suffering in an age where the fruits of their labors are taken for granted. This is certainly reflected by our culture, which would ironically feel the worth of music in its absence. In regards to this, Gillian sings: “If there’s something that you wanna hear you can sing it yourself.”

Leon Bridges – “River”

I’m not a religious person, but I am spiritual. Even though Leon uses biblical terminology in this beautiful song of yearning, and being cleansed from your sins — it’s the intention of the song that shines through and transcends all the negative connotations that might come with organized religion. It’s the true Christian values that are evoked here, of actively wanting to become a better person. It sounds like it was recorded live around one mic in a big room and really captures a beautiful moment of music.

Bob Dylan – “Murder Most Foul”

Bob is my favorite artist and songwriter. I love all the phases of his expression. I don’t subscribe to picking a favorite era or compare everything he creates to what he produced in the 1960s. This brings us to “Murder Most Foul,” a recent release of his. It is a nearly seventeen-minute song that talks about the day and days that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Bob beautifully describes this tragic and heightened moment in history, giving us a stream of consciousness of images peripherally and directly happening around the time of the assassination. The production of this song is very minimal which allows the lyrics to be absorbed and breathe.

Mandolin Orange – “Wildfire”

Growing up and residing in the hills of North Carolina, Mandolin Orange has lived and been more than aware of the culture that exists below the Mason-Dixon Line. Not buying into the rhetoric of those holding on to the nostalgia of the Confederacy, Mandolin Orange gives a historical and psychological look at the wildfire that unfortunately still is fueled today. “Wildfire” is a bit of medicine to us all, and carries a hope that some who might need the medicine most. Listen to this song that is served in the musical genre of its commonplace.

The Del McCoury Band – “Hot Wired” (written by Shawn Camp)

This song is a hoot. It’s very well-written, witty and might even spark a belly laugh or two. It talks about all the things the author’s girlfriend is capable of hot-wiring. My favorite lyric is “She might hot wire your Chevy, she might hot wire your Ford / And if she ever gets to Heaven she might hot wire the Lord.” Del breaks the bluegrass rules on this song and introduces an electric guitar after singing about his girlfriend hot-wiring his acoustic guitar to play like the “doggone Rolling Stones.”

Billie Holiday – “Strange Fruit” (written by Abel Meeropol)

This song is so powerful. Billie Holiday recorded it in 1939. The emotion and dynamics of her timing are delivered in a powerful and haunting way. The fruit that hangs from the trees is not fruit at all. [The song’s titular analogy references lynchings of Black folks.] It is perplexing to me that humanity can stoop so low to such an evil as to think one is inferior to another, where murder is rationalized within such a vitriolic mindset. In this specific case it is rationalized within the minds of pale complexion below the Mason-Dixon line. How those trees still stand and the fruit still hangs, though embedded within policy, social structures, the psychology of an unexamined people and history books with whole chapters missing. Music and song throughout time has been utilized to pass stories down and convey emotions. This is a song that passes down and conveys a traumatic truth; its shockwaves still crash on the shores of our everyday.

Josh Ritter – “Girl in the War”

This is one of my favorite songs. I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to play a bunch of shows with Josh and actually back him up on this song with my old band. I’ve heard him say in an interview that this song is about America. I’ll take his word for it. I’m not quite sure what the song is about myself, but I do know it’s a goosebumper. The recording of the song is stunning and I sure do like to play this song around the fire at gatherings.

Photo credit: Jesse Borrell

Artist of the Month: Bettye LaVette

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The very definition of persistence, Bettye LaVette is among the newest inductees into the Blues Music Hall of Fame, yet she pulls her material from nearly every imaginable corner of music. In addition to her distinguished R&B output that dates to the 1960s, she has interpreted the greats of folk and country music, ranging from Bob Dylan and Patty Griffin to George Jones and Dolly Parton. Now the five-time Grammy nominee is honoring many of the Black women who inspire her with Blackbirds, a collection that takes its name from the Beatles standard. However, as LaVette has stated before, Paul McCartney wrote the song about a Black woman (as British slang refers to a girl as a “bird”). In LaVette’s rendition, though, she is the one who’s been waiting… and waiting… and waiting for this moment to arrive. And, in a specific allusion to this moment in history, to be free.

Set for release on the venerated Verve label, Blackbirds alights on August 28, though the Detroit-raised diva has already issued a stunning rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” as well as Nina Simone’s “I Hold No Grudge” and Sharon Robinson’s “One More Song.” (Songs recorded by Ruth Brown, Lou Rawls, Dinah Washington, and jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson are featured on the album, too.) Read our two-part interview — part one here, part two here — with this candid and compelling entertainer, who’s now based in New Jersey and enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist of August’s Artist of the Month, Bettye LaVette.

 

BGS 5+5: Eliot Bronson

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Artist: Eliot Bronson
Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland
Latest album: Empty Spaces (July 24, 2020)

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

It’s impossible to name just one. I’ve had so many teachers. Dylan influenced everyone who picked up an acoustic guitar. Jackson Browne showed me how powerful honesty can be, and how to talk about complicated emotions while staying direct. I learned to play with language by listening to Tom Waits. Lucinda Williams reminds me that the simple songs are best. There are so many more.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Probably the last one. When I’m not in the trance of creativity, songwriting seems like the most difficult thing in the world. Every time I finish a song, it feels like it’s the last one I’ll ever write.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

It’s hard to say what impacts my work directly. Being in nature certainly speaks to a deep part of me. I’m obviously not alone in that. Mountains particularly captivate my imagination and sense of wonder. I was lucky enough to trek in the Himalayas for a few days, several years ago. It was a mind altering experience.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

Carl Jung’s dream theory says that everyone (and everything) in the dream is an aspect of ourselves. I think that’s true of songs too — at least the good ones. You can’t write about a character without knowing them intimately. You either become the character or the character becomes you.

I wouldn’t say I hide, though. My songs are always about seeking. They’re about finding the places I hide and inviting what’s hidden to come out into the light.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I really want to go to Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo one day. If Bob Dylan wanted to come along, I guess that’d be OK.

Photo credit: Jenna Shea Mobley

BGS 5+5: Bill Kirchen

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Artist: Bill Kirchen
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Latest album: The Proper Years (July 24, 2020)
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): First band name, 1965: The Who Knows Pickers, an acoustic jug band. One gig only, we shared stage with The Iguanas, Jim “Iggy” Osterberg on drums.

Which artist has influenced you the most… and how?

I have to go all the way back to Pete Seeger. I learned my first string instrument, the 5-string banjo, from his instructional book and record, and had lots of his recordings from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. He was an ecstatic singer, very successful and influential songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Soft-spoken on stage, he was most definitely outspoken politically his entire career, always for racial equality, workers rights, and freedom of speech. In the early 1950s McCarthy era, he went up against the powerful but later utterly disgraced House Un-American Activity Committee. He earned himself a career-hijacking blacklist that lasted years by asserting his constitutional rights and refusing to name names and implicate others. He never backed down. His performing career spanned nearly 70 years. I saw him in the mid-’60s many times, then again in the ’90s.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I wanted to be a musician as soon as I figured I could sing a song. I have early memories of being a toddler lumbering around, singing along with my cardboard record (yep, they existed!) of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” At 8 I learned trombone, then played it in orchestras and bands until the mid-’60s folk scare lured me away. As for wanting to be a professional musician, I guess getting my first paying gig in ’64 or ’65 cemented that desire. I certainly never thought, “I’ll just do this for a bit then quit and get a job.”

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Not clear on the concept here, but it sounds interesting and I’ll give it a try. I certainly never had a mission statement, rather I just got in the canoe and now here I am and where I’ll be next, I don’t know. So here are my suggestions to the young me: Bill! You know you love listening to, singing, whistling music all the time. That’s super important, don’t let go. Learn to play an instrument as soon as they’ll let you, then learn some others. Play with folks, preferably better than you. Take any opportunity you can to go hear live music. Now don’t blow this one: you liked the 1963 Blues at Newport record and Mississippi John Hurt. Well, you are within hitchhiking distance of the ’64 Newport Folk Festival, he’s gonna be there, Dylan too, go do it. Sleep on the beach, whatever, it’ll all work out. Then do the same in ’65, trust me. Many of the extraordinary people you will see will be gone less than 10 years later. Then before the ’60s are over, move away from your Ann Arbor hometown. Try San Francisco. Travel everywhere and play as much you can. Pull up roots and move across country a couple more times, find more kindred spirits and play with them. Just get in the canoe. You’ll be surprised.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

The toughest time I always have writing is making myself sit down and do it. I love the process when I get rolling, but I don’t have a burning desire to bare my soul in verse and melody, then buttonhole folks and make ‘em listen. But I enjoy making up my own songs, lots of perspiration plus a little inspiration. Then again I wouldn’t mind just singing Haggard and Dylan songs all day. Couldn’t really ask people to pay for that, I know. As the great Roger Miller said writing a hit song is just like taking candy from a gorilla.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

I hid behind characters a lot early on. Wrote a lot of truck-driving songs, though I’m not and don’t want to be a truck driver. It was a legitimate sub-genre when I discovered country music, and I do come by a love of the road and travel honestly. As for finger-pointing songs, I’m usually not a big fan. And you know what they say, when I point my finger there are three more pointing back at me. Oops.

I didn’t let myself write songs that were more personal and closer to the bone until I started making records under my own name in the ’90s. When I went to England to record my first record for Proper, Hammer of The Honky-Tonk Gods, it was with Nick Lowe and the band with which we’d recorded and toured the world several years before. Nick is one of my favorite songwriters and I remember thinking, dang, I can’t just show up with a bunch of I’m A Burly Truck Driver songs. I’ve got to get closer to the bone and try a little harder.

Photo credit: Valerie Fremin

Billy Strings Brings Nine Shows from Five Nashville Venues to Your Screen

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It’s rare for Billy Strings to play a show in Nashville. This month, he’s doing nine of them.

The reigning IBMA Guitar Player of the Year will be hopping from venue to venue as part of a livestream series that serves as a fundraiser for important organizations, as well as a reunion with his band. He’ll launch the series at Nashville’s newest venue, Brooklyn Bowl, for a pair of shows on July 16 and 17. The run concludes on July 26 at 3rd & Lindsley. (Get the details.)

“Those are my boys and I’m just lucky to play with them,” he says of mandolinist Jarrod Walker, banjo player Billy Failing, and bassist Royal Masat. “I haven’t been able to hang with them a bunch. We went from being around each other 24/7, for months and months and months on end, to never seeing each other, period. So I’m just excited to get back together with my band, and not only play music, but just to be with them, and hang out, and make jokes. I just love those guys, you know?”

With time off the road, Billy Strings says he’s been redirecting his attention to his other hobbies, including fishing and hot rods. Looking ahead, he’ll also compete for IBMA’s 2020 Entertainer of the Year – his first time nominated in that category. (He’s also the reigning champ in the New Artist category, as well as Guitar Player of the Year.) In between visits to the lake and the garage, he called in to BGS.

BGS: Do you think you’ll approach each of these nine shows differently?

Billy Strings: Yeah, we usually try to do that anyway with the set lists. Each show has its own set list and its own vibe. It depends on where we are and where we’re playing. When I write the set list, a lot of times I take into consideration geographic locations or famous people that may have lived around there. Anything like that I can throw into the set to make it relevant. So, yeah, for each show, we’re going to approach them just like we would in that way.

Also, we might cater to the specific venues. We’re playing the Station Inn and that’s a classic bluegrass place, so we might play a bunch of bluegrass that night. We’re playing Exit/In and City Winery and those are different vibes. City Winery can be our real classy, Frank Sinatra show, and at Exit/In we can get really psychedelic and rock out.

You’ll have an international audience tuning into these shows, so this is a chance for people who have never been to Nashville to see what it’s like. For those who may not understand the diversity of the music community here, how would you describe it to them?

It’s a big melting pot. Like you said, it’s very diverse. And there’s a lot of younger musicians that are on fire! Marcus King and Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull… just so many people that are killing it. They all live around there. It’s a really great place to be as a musician. There are always people to make music with, and to pick with, and write music with. We’ll see if we can get a couple of guests to come down. Yeah, Nashville’s just crazy, man. You walk into the grocery store and you run into your favorite musician.

There’s money being raised through these concerts, and one of the beneficiaries is Backline, which supports mental health in the music industry. What is it about Backline that made you want to include them?

I, myself, personally have struggled with anxiety and panic attacks on tour, on the bus, on stage, and there’s a lot of people in the industry that suffer with the same shit. A lot of people may not speak out about it, or try to hide it, or don’t know who to look to for help. We just lost Jeff Austin and we just lost Neal Casal. There are a couple of other folks that are good friends of mine, that are traveling musicians that have been working so hard, and I think that has a huge deal to do with anxiety and depression.

I mean, when you’re in the limelight and you’re on stage and everybody wants to take your picture all the time, a lot of times it almost can be lonely. You never get any alone time and it can get weird. I know Jeff probably struggled with that. He told me about how he struggled being in the limelight and everybody critiquing his every move and everything he does is under scrutiny. That’s not a good place to be. …

The music industry can be really tough, believe it or not, for people who are on the stage and for people who are in the crews. There are plenty of organizations that help with that, whether it’s getting musicians health insurance or dental work or finding somebody a therapist. Backline is a huge, generalized hub where you can research and find all those different organizations and read about what is the right direction for you. You can even get with somebody on Backline and they’ll help you figure it out.

You also have the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as beneficiaries of this event. Why was it important for you to include them?

Well, because there’s a huge movement happening right now that I think is very important. Black people have been treated like shit, a lot, for a long time. And I just want to be on the side of history that is not an asshole. I got a lot of Black friends and my niece is Black. I’ve got family and friends and people that I love — and it shouldn’t even matter. …There’s a lot of miscommunication, a lot of divide, a lot of crazy shit going on in the country right now. I’m just all for love, man. I’m all for equality, I’m all for peace, so I wanted to donate a portion of the proceeds from these events to those organizations, just to help out.

Who are some Black musicians that influenced you?

Jimi Hendrix, definitely. Right off the bat. That’s the first guy I think of. He was amazing. Mississippi John Hurt, you know, he was a huge influence on Merle and Doc Watson. That’s who I grew up listening to, and I heard all that Mississippi John Hurt flavor in Merle Watson’s playing. That comes from the blues, the Delta blues. It goes on to Muddy Waters, B.B. King, all those cats. James Brown, come on!

I mean, without Black music, would there even be rock ‘n’ roll? I don’t even know if there would be bluegrass! Bill Monroe learned the blues from Arnold Schultz, a Black man who got him his first job. If you think about “bluegrass” – the word “blue” is in there from the blues. It’s got blues notes in it. A lot of bluegrass is just fast blues. And that’s Black music. Arnold Schultz taught Bill Monroe about that, and then he incorporated it into his music. All the music that we’re all inspired by has roots in Black music.

You mentioned Doc Watson, and of course he was loved by the folk community and the bluegrass community. Did folk music influence you, coming up?

Yeah, I think there was a point where I really got turned onto Bob Dylan and his lyrics. A lot of the old songs that I grew up playing is considered folk music. The Carter Family stuff and a lot of the Doc Watson stuff. …My friend Benji’s family used to have these gatherings, like family reunions, where they would all play bingo. I went to one of those and won a bingo, so I got to go up to the table and pick a prize. And I picked Blonde on Blonde. …I started really getting into those lyrics and all of those words.

That’s where I started realizing, OK, I like Doc Watson a bunch because he’s such a beautiful guitar player and singer, among many other reasons. Bob Dylan does what Doc Watson does on his guitar with his words. … And then I got into John Hartford really heavy, and if you listen to John Hartford’s early music, man, it is some of the most lyrically proficient stuff you’re ever going to hear! It’s amazing! There’s that old saying, “Three chords and the truth.” I really think there’s something to that. A lot of those old folk songs are so simple, but what they’re saying is so real that it cuts you.

Photo credit: Jesse Faatz