It’s certainly true that the Grateful Dead were never a bluegrass band, starting with the fact that their lineup had not just one drummer, but two. And yet it also can’t be denied that the group’s musical DNA has a wide streak of bluegrass deep within, both in terms of licks and improvisational flair.
In large part, that’s due to the late Jerry Garcia – “Captain Trips” – who started out as a banjo player before finding his most famous calling as the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist. Before that, Garcia played in folk circles for years, and his many extracurricular collaborators included David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Don Reno, Chubby Wise and other titans of the genre. More than a quarter-century before O Brother, Where Art Thou? took bluegrass to the top of the charts, Garcia’s 1973 side project, Old & In the Way, stood as the top-selling bluegrass album of all time.
Garcia and the Dead’s bluegrass bona fides are solid indeed, as shown by artifacts like the Pickin’ on the Grateful Dead series (not to mention Grass Is Dead, a tribute act). But maybe the strongest testament to the strength of the Dead’s bluegrass-adjacent side is what other artists have made of their catalog. Countless bluegrass musicians have covered Dead songs in ways that would appeal to even the staunchest chair-snapping purists. Here are some of the best.
“Friend of the Devil” – The Travelin’ McCourys (2019)
This rounder’s tale is the granddaddy of ’em all, a bluegrass staple from almost the moment it appeared on the Dead’s 1970 proto-Americana classic, American Beauty. Long a picking-circle staple at festivals, it’s been covered by everybody from Tony Rice to Elvis Costello. But here is a fantastic cover by one of the finest family bands in all of bluegrass, captured onstage at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in 2019. In contrast to the manic pace of the original, this version proceeds at more of an elegant glide. But it’s still got plenty of get-up-and-go, with killer solos over walking bass and a great Ronnie McCoury lead vocal.
“Dire Wolf” – Molly Tuttle (2022)
Among the most acclaimed young artists in bluegrass, Molly Tuttle is a two-time Guitar Player of the Year winner from the International Bluegrass Music Association. She also won IBMA’s Album of the Year trophy for 2022’s Crooked Tree, which included the 1970 Workingman’s Dead standard “Dire Wolf” as a bonus track. Equal parts folk fable and murder ballad, it’s something like “Little Red Riding Hood” with an unhappy ending. And Tuttle’s vocal is even more striking than her guitar-playing.
“Wharf Rat” – Billy Strings (2020)
Possibly even more acclaimed as a guitarist is William “Billy Strings” Apostol, another IBMA Awards fixture (and multiple Entertainer of the Year winner) who is frequently likened to Doc Watson. But few guitarists have ever conjured up Garcia’s sound, spirit, and all-around vibe as effectively as Strings. A song about a lost soul in a seaside town, “Wharf Rat” first came out on the Dead’s eponymous 1971 live album. Strings’ 2020 live version from the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, is amazing, as Strings doesn’t sing it so much as inhabit it. The money shot is his guitar solo that begins just after the five-minute mark.
“Scarlet Begonias” – The Infamous Stringdusters (2020)
Gambling is one of the Dead’s recurrent tropes and “Scarlet Begonias” gives it a playful spin with a loping guitar riff. The original dates back to 1974’s From the Mars Hotel and it’s been widely covered in oddball styles by the likes of electronic duo Thievery Corporation and the ska band Sublime. But “Scarlet Begonias” has never had it so well as in this excellent bluegrass version by The Infamous Stringdusters, shot onstage at Seattle’s Showbox just ahead of the pandemic in early 2020.
“Ripple” – Dale Ann Bradley (2019)
More often than not, vocals tended to be the Dead’s weak link. But that is not a problem for Kentucky Music Hall of Famer and five-time IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Dale Ann Bradley. The elegiac “Ripple” began life as the B-side to the “Truckin’” single and was also a show-stopper on the Dead’s 1981 acoustic live album, Reckoning. Bradley covered it on her 2019 LP, The Hard Way, with Tina Adair providing truly lovely vocal harmonies.
“Uncle John’s Band” – Fireside Collective (2022)
One of the Dead’s folksiest numbers, “Uncle John’s Band” kicked off Workingman’s Dead at an easy-going amble – a clear departure from the psychedelic excursions of the Dead’s earliest work. This live version by the young Asheville, North Carolina, band Fireside Collective reimagines “Uncle John’s Band” as sprawling jam-band fodder.
“Cassidy” – Greensky Bluegrass (2007)
“Cassidy” first appeared on-record as a Bob Weir solo tune on his 1972 side-project album, Ace, but it’s been on multiple Dead live albums over the years. It’s always been something of an enigma, inspired by a young girl as well as Neal Cassady. Michigan jamgrass ensemble Greensky Bluegrass gets to its beat-poet heart on this version from 2007’s Live at Bell’s.
“Tennessee Jed” – Front Country (2018)
A frequent theme for the Dead was being in motion, whether traveling toward something or running away from it. So it follows that homesickness would be an aspect of their music, perhaps most overtly on this wistful song from the double-live LP, Europe ’72. California’s Front Country put “Tennessee Jed” through its paces in this 2018 version from their “Kitchen Covers” series.
“Touch of Grey” – Love Canon (2014)
If the Dead wasn’t a bluegrass band, they most definitely weren’t a pop band, either. But the group had occasional brushes with the Hot 100, most famously with the 1970 statement of purpose “Truckin’” and its “what a long strange trip it’s been” tagline (even though the group had only been together about five years by then). “Truckin’” stalled out at No. 64 and was later eclipsed by its 1987 sequel “Touch of Grey” – an actual Top 10 hit with its bittersweet conclusion, “We will get by, we will survive.”
From Charlottesville, Virginia, Love Canon strips away the ’80s pop keyboards and covers the song well as straight-up bluegrass on 2014’s “Dead Covers Project.”
Photo Credit: Old & In the Way, courtesy of Acoustic Disc.
Artist:Steven Moore & Jed Clark Hometown: Jed Clark lives in Nashville, Tennessee, originally from Searcy, Arkansas; Steven Moore lives in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, originally from Bethesda, Ohio. Song: “New Camptown Races” (by Frank Wakefield) Release Date: June 26, 2024 (video)
In Their Words: “We are very excited to share our music video of ‘New Camptown Races,’ a tune by the late Frank Wakefield (June 26, 1934 – April 26, 2024) that has become a bluegrass standard. The idea for this video began at SPBGMA 2023, when we jammed to ‘New Camptown Races’ with both of us playing it in B-flat without using capos. We laughed and agreed that we needed to record it and maybe do a video shoot of it someday. It wasn’t until a year later at SPBGMA 2024, when we met up again, that we really solidified plans to make the video happen. Our hopes were to record the video and put it out on June 26, 2024 in honor of Frank’s 90th birthday. Unfortunately, the world lost Frank two months before he turned 90, but we decided to still aim to put out the video on what would have been Frank’s 90th birthday, in his memory.
“Frank’s prowess on mandolin, evident by his years performing with bluegrass legends like Red Allen and The Kentuckians, Jimmy Martin, the Stanley Brothers, and Don Reno, is often not discussed nearly as much as his personality. Frank was known for having an off-kilter approach to everything, from how he talked to how he approached the mandolin. Stories about Frank spray painting his mandolin red (an irreplaceable 1923 Lloyd Loar signed Gibson F-5) as well as baking that very mandolin in an oven in an attempt to enhance its tone are just a couple examples of his unconventional character. Our attempt to play this tune in B-flat without capos on guitar and banjo is a bit unconventional as well, and we hope that Frank would have liked it. Thanks, Frank, for the music, the stories, and this great tune!” – Steven Moore
Video, Audio, and Video Still Credits: Daniel Kelley and Bethany Kelley of Octopus Garden Studios.
On Monday August 7, 1972, with fresh memories of Maritimes old-time and bluegrass, I drove from New Brunswick to New England to join my wife and kids, who were house-sitting for my in-laws in Norwich, Vermont.
On Thursday the 10th I headed south. A fourteen-hour drive brought me to Morgantown, West Virginia, the home of my friend and partner in research, photographer and film-maker Carl Fleischhauer, then employed at West Virginia University. We’d known each other for twelve years. (Our stories are in Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86 [U of IL Press 2001]). We were about to embark on fieldwork.
During the preceding year, when I began planning for the book Bluegrass: A History, I asked Carl to help me think about photos. In addition to documenting bluegrass festivals and other venues he, with Sandy Rothman, had recently looked for traces of earlier days in a field trip to the old Monroe home in Rosine, Kentucky. Now, we made plans for our own field trip. Carl would take photos. I would make notes and do interviews.
We spent that Friday in Morgantown looking at Carl’s photos and films and listening to LPs as we prepared for the research. At the end of the evening, my notes say,
Did some picking.
Early Saturday morning we piled in my new Toyota with our gear (cameras, tape recorder, axes, tent, sleeping bags) and headed southwest, crossing into Kentucky from Huntington, WV and snaking down through the mountains to Jackson, the seat of Breathitt County. Three hundred miles; we arrived around 2 o’clock.
There we headed just outside of town for Bill Monroe’s Second Annual Kentucky Blue Grass Festival. When I went to Canada in 1968, Bill Monroe had one festival a year at Bean Blossom in Indiana. Now he was running a bunch in other states, as were other artists. Festivals were the big news in bluegrass music in 1972. We sought to document the bluegrass festival experience.
Later others would write about this, like Bob Artis (“An Endless Festival” in Bluegrass [1975]) and Robert Owen Gardner (The Portable Community [2021]). Here’s how my notes from Jackson begin:
West of town on main hwy, down short steep road. Paid camping & Sat. fees, never did pay for Sunday. Parked & walked down to the stage area — tent set up, natural amphitheatre, uncovered stage, bad sound. Lots of cops around on Saturday.
Made contact with Pete & Marion Kuykendall, and agreed to move in next to them to camp. Set up tent, attempted to speak to Monroe but he was busy coping with the Goins Bros. problem of being hassled by the cops for drinking. Later Kuykendall said that cops had asked Monroe for $ (3 or 6 hundred) and he had refused to pay off so they were taking it out in fines. Lots of racing around on Sat. with flashing lights etal, but they stayed away on Sunday.
Listened then to IT’S A CRYING TIME, hot & exciting Japanese bluegrass band. Then back to Kuykendall’s bus/home whatall. Thunderstorm; discovery that cassette recorder didn’t work on batteries because plug distorts switch; got it running eventually. Oldest Kuykendall girl Sam/Ginger comes in with bass player of above-mentioned Japanese band, then leaves. Kuykendalls are a bit worried about this but Carl & I both notice later that a number of young girls (McLain girls, for example) are hanging around, with this group.
Dinner with Kuykendalls. Frank & Marty Godbey come in and are around for the rest of the evening. Mostly we sit & talk, though I went down to the amphitheatre to catch Jim & Jesse and the Japanese bands. Came back, then returned to catch Monroe. Afterwards listened to picking group in tent near us. Did mainly Emerson & Waldron, Newgrass Revival, Bluegrass Alliance, Gentlemen, etc. Chromatic banjo. Noisy night in Carl’s tent, as sessions went on late and busses started early. I got a spider bite.
Bill Monroe (center) and the Blue Grass Boys at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Bandmembers include Monroe Fields, bass; Jack Hicks, banjo; Joe Stuart, guitar (hidden); Monroe, mandolin; and Kenny Baker, fiddle.
I’d known the Kuykendalls since 1966. Pete, a 1996 inductee to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, was a musician, record collector, producer, publisher, and, since 1970 owner-editor of the first and leading bluegrass monthly Bluegrass Unlimited.
Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday August 12, 1972.
Pete and I had already been corresponding about bluegrass history when we met on Labor Day weekend 1966 at the second Roanoke Bluegrass Festival. Subsequently, I visited the Kuykendalls in Virginia where Pete encouraged me to write for the then all-volunteer magazine he would later own. I began with a review of the festival, published the following January — the first of eight articles I did for BU in 1967.
Photo made by Pete Kuykendall’s son Billy with one of Carl Fleischhauer’s cameras. Carl is seated at left with two other cameras on the table. This photo was made at the time of Neil Rosenberg’s (top of head above stove) interview of Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, at left, is Pete’s wife and Bluegrass Unlimited co-manager Marion Kuykendall.
By 1970 Pete and Marion were running BU full-time; I’d done an article for them earlier in 1972 (eventually I would write a monthly column) so we had been in touch recently by mail and phone. Conversations with Pete were never brief! He loved to share the business scuttlebutt and he had plenty since they were selling the magazine at festivals every weekend and had just launched BU’s own annual festival.
I think this may have been the first time I met the Godbeys. From Lexington, and before that, Columbus, Ohio, they had been following the bluegrass scene for a decade. Frank is a musician who is still performing these days. By 1972 he and Marty had begun writing and publishing photos in BU. For them, as for me, hanging out with the Kuykendalls was a good way to keep up on the bluegrass news. People were already talking about starting an industry association, though that — the IBMA — wouldn’t happen until 1986. Pete was one of its founders.
Neil Rosenberg (facing camera) interviewing Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, with an air rifle, is Pete’s son Billy Kuykendall.
With the growth of the festivals came clubs, newsletters, and magazines. Bluegrass enthusiasts (many of them musicians) followed their favorites to festivals and other venues. Paths crossed; networks grew. The politics of bands was a favorite discussion topic.
Over the course of the festival, I made note of gossip about the always changing bands. Ricky Skaggs had just left Ralph Stanley — there were rumors about where he was headed next. Was Bill working to get Ralph Stanley on the Opry? Some thought so. The II Generation was said to be splitting up. Stories were told of bluegrass festival camp followers.
At this Jackson, Kentucky festival were a bunch of bands that had been appearing at Bill Monroe’s other 1972 festivals — Monroe, Jim & Jesse, Flatt, Reno & Harrell, the Goins, Ralph Stanley — mature musicians who’d been working with this music for a substantial period of time and who stuck close to the early models of which they were, often, the authors. Classic bluegrass, one could say.
What the audience didn’t hear was the kind of stuff we’d heard from the jammers late Saturday night, like “One Tin Soldier,” The Bluegrass Alliance’s cover of a song popularized in the film Billy Jack. Their bluegrass version, with Sam Bush’s lead voice and Tony Rice’s harmonies and guitar work, was a hit, a big step on the road to newgrass.
The Japanese bands were new to the scene. Japanese bluegrass began in the early sixties. In 1971, Bluegrass 45 came from Kobe, Japan, with the sponsorship of their label, Rebel, to tour U.S. bluegrass festivals. They made a big hit at Monroe’s Bean Blossom festival with their showmanship and musical savvy. This year they were back, along with another Japanese outfit, It’s A Crying Time.
Visiting from Japan, the band It’s a Crying Time performs at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Band members include Eiichi “Ei’ Shimizu, banjo; Kazuyoshi “Kazu” Onishi, mandolin; Satoshi “Sato” Yamaguchi, guitar; Akira “May” Katsumi, bass.
Monroe had booked the Japanese bands as a novelty, something you couldn’t see just anywhere in the bluegrass world. As I mentioned in my field notes, I found It’s A Crying Time’s music “hot & exciting,” and I was not the only one in the audience reacting this way. They came to the attention of Lester Flatt, who, after watching them rehearse, invited mandolinist Kazu Onishi to join him on stage at his final set.
Backstage moment at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Akira Katsumi, Kazu Onishi, Lester Flatt, and Akira Otsuka. Otsuka was Kazu’s friend from the Japanese scene, a member of the Bluegrass 45.
This video comes from the Bluegrass 45’s appearance at Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs festival:
They are announced at the beginning of the video by emcee, writer, and DJ Bill Vernon. Vernon was here at Jackson, as I learned Sunday morning when I went down to the early morning gospel show. Pete Kuykendall introduced me to Bill there, and we had a long chat about the politics of the bluegrass industry. I wrote in my notes:
A very loquacious and complex person.
At that morning’s gospel show, the music came to a stop as a fundamentalist preacher began his sermon. At that point, I noted:
Bill Vernon cut out from the morning sermon, he’d had enough…
During the preacher’s sermon at the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. Bill Monroe (wearing a black suit) is seated in the audience area at left.
I stayed and heard some good music, noting:
The gospel section’s high point was when the Goins Bros. did “Somebody Touched Me” and Eleanor Parker came on stage & started clapping hands and singing; Monroe caught on and came up to join in too.
During the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. When the Goins Brothers band performed “Somebody Touched Me,” they were joined on stage by Eleanor and Rex Parker and Bill Monroe. Eleanor and Bill joined the Goins trio at the main microphone while Rex sang and played mandolin at the “stage right” microphone.
This kind of spontaneity, which gave festivals their appeal, was not there all the time. Jim & Jesse, I wrote, had:
A good show, with Jim Brock sounding especially good, but … a cut and dried quality to it all.
Describing Lester Flatt and his Nashville Grass, I concluded:
To me the whole band sounded tired, lackluster.
But Flatt’s final set was enlivened when It’s A Crying Time mandolinist and tenor Kazu Onishi came on stage to sing “Salty Dog Blues” with him.
During my times around the stage area, I had a chance to talk with Monroe and with some of the musicians I’d gotten to know during my years as a backstage regular at Bean Blossom, like Birch Monroe, Joe Stuart, and Roland White.
I arranged with Birch, who was busy helping Bill run the festival, for an interview, to take place later in the week at his home in Martinsville, Indiana.
Joe Stuart offstage at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.
Joe told me about his experiences playing bluegrass in Canada with Charlie Bailey. He’d even appeared in Newfoundland.
Roland, whom I’d known since his days as a Blue Grass Boy, was now playing with Lester Flatt. He told me they were working solid, playing festivals every weekend.
Here’s what I wrote about the audience:
Audience — bluegrass die-hards from Ohio, Ky., D.C., Carolinas. Few freaks. Appear to be about 50% campers, 50% local people. Certainly no more than 1500-2000, on Saturday, though figure of 3000 was bandied about. Bill moved his Ky festival to Jackson from Ashland this year because the turnout at Ashland was dropping. Fact, bluegrass ain’t as popular in Kentucky as it is elsewhere — Ohio, D.C.
Audience on the hillside natural amphitheater at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.
The festival closed with a finale, orchestrated by Monroe. At the first festivals in the mid-60s, which were created to honor Monroe, such events were somewhat spontaneous, but by now, seven years after the first one, these events were highly ritualistic. By the time it happened, I noticed that the Kuykendalls had left. They were not the only ones.
The finale performance at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. At the center, in white suits, are Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt. Here are a few of the other performers, left to right: Curly Ray Cline (on the ramp), Melvin Goins (guitar, facing camera), Kenny Baker (fiddle, white hat, wearing a suit), Joe Stuart (just behind Baker, partly hidden), Buck Ryan (fiddle, white belt), Jack Hicks (banjo, white hat, wearing suit), Paul Warren (fiddle, white hat, at microphone), Vic Jordan (banjo, facing forward), Ralph Stanley (banjo, dark suit, hidden behind McCormick), Haskell McCormick (banjo, in profile), Monroe and Flatt with Don Reno (wearing white) partly hidden behind them, Raymond W. McLain and sister Alice McLain (hidden behind Flatt), Jesse McReynolds (mandolin, wearing striped jacket), Ruth McLain (bass, behind McReynolds), Raymond K. McLain (guitar, no hat), Roland White (mandolin, white hat), Rex Parker (mandolin, striped shirt), and Monroe Fields (leaning on van).
We packed up soon after and headed west for Lexington. I was hoping to interview J.D. Crowe.
Working on CityFolk’s Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, I heard local terminology for the culture in which this music grew. “Industrial working-class Appalachian migrants” was rarely spoken. “Hillbilly” was said sometimes with disdain, sometimes with pride. The preferred in-group term was “briar.” Briars came from the Appalachian hills, transplants proud of their continuing organic down-home connections. I was told that the call letters of WPFB, where Moon Mullins had represented bluegrass for two and a half decades, stood for “We Play For Briars.”
Don Baker’s introduction to the second act of the reunion framed a dramatic shift of scene from Mullins’ milieu to a younger Dayton band: The Hotmud Family.
Inspired by the New Lost City Ramblers, this band began in 1970 playing old-time music based on pre-war hillbilly recordings. The band included Suzanne Thomas Edmundson, Dave Edmundson, and Rick Good, along with a succession of bassists. Suzanne, born in Dayton of Kentucky parents, was a second-generation briar. According to Jon Hartley Fox the Hotmuds were “perhaps the most significant band to emerge from the vibrant scene of the 1970s in southwestern Ohio” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass, 140-1).
They began including bluegrass in their sound during a 1974 appearance at the Mariposa Folk Festival. In blending old-time and bluegrass, they placed special emphasis on vocal harmonies, something many old-time bands overlooked. Between 1974 and 1981 they made eight albums and appeared widely at bluegrass and folk festivals. Here’s their 1975 bluegrass/old-time blending of “Weary Blues,” a song originally recorded in 1929 in Atlanta by Chattanoogan Jess Young’s Tennessee Band as “Old Weary Blues”:
The Hotmud Family came to be associated with Dayton’s Living Arts Center, described by Hotmud banjoist Rick Good in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (153-57). Established in 1967 by the Dayton Board of Education, this facility offered after-school instruction in the arts for grades 5-12 students in East Dayton.
In 1975 it began providing programs aimed at the local Appalachian-based culture. It turned to the Hotmud Family, now a nationally known band with an enthusiastic local fan base from their weekends at Sam’s Bar and Grill. At the Center, Hotmud gave lessons, ran a song circle, and led informal jam sessions. Once a week they held a live Country Music Jamboree, which was broadcast over WYSO, the Antioch College radio station. The Center closed in 1977, but the Jamboree continued with other performers at other local venues until 1986.
Act Two of the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion opened with a solo rendition of “Red Rocking Chair” by former Hotmud lead vocalist Suzanne Thomas Edmundson. Then came the group’s reunion, when Thomas was joined by the other founding Family members Dave Edmundson and Rick Good along with bassist Gary Hopkins. They did three pieces and an encore. During the 1980s the band gave occasional reunion performances. This was one of their last.
For Act Three, Baker’s stage directions began: “Beer Sign On.”
A borrowed neon sign hung onstage now lit up for the reunion of a band associated with Dayton’s bluegrass bar scene, the Allen Brothers.
Formed in the late ’60s to back their father Red Allen, they began performing without him and were touring in 1974 when brother Neal died. After a brief hiatus, the three other brothers (Harley, Greg, and Ronnie) carried on into the early ’80s, recording Rounder and Folkways albums. The new Smithsonian/Folkways album Industrial Strength Bluegrass — which just won Album of the Year at the 2021 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards — includes Harley Allen’s “Suzanne,” first recorded by the Allen Brothers in 1982, here recreated by Mo Pitney and Merle Monroe:
They continued to play together in the Dayton area into the mid-’80s, but by then Harley had begun a solo career, first joining banjoist Mike Lilly in a band Jon Hartley Fox calls “one of the best bluegrass acts Dayton ever produced” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass 136). In 1985 the Allen-Lilly Band closed a set at the Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival. Harlan County native Lilly led the way into “Little Maggie” with coon dog and motorcycle as Frank Wakefield watched:
Harley went on to a Nashville career as a singer-songwriter, winning two Grammys and singing on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack hit “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” before dying at the age of 55.
At the Reunion, the Allen Brothers put together a band with Harley on mandolin, Greg on banjo, and Ronnie on bass, with Wendell Barrett on guitar, and David Harvey on fiddle.
Here’s how they sounded with a similar band (different fiddler and mandolinist), with Monroe’s “Uncle Pen” enlivened by guitarist Harley Allen’s transformation of Jimmy Martin’s “G run” and a fancy ending, followed by a bluegrass trio rendition of the Paul Siebel’s classic “Louise.”
At the Reunion, they did three tunes and an encore. Then it was intermission time.
The second half began with Baker introducing Act Four, the Dry Branch Fire Squad. This band was led by mandolinist Ron Thomason, a Virginian who had migrated to the region as a child. Around since the mid-’70s, it’s still active today. Thomason came up in Dayton’s regional scene in the ’60s, working in bar bands and on the road with Ralph Stanley.
Committed to traditional bluegrass, Thomason, now living in Colorado, has had many talented musicians in his band. He is famous for his emcee work, which regularly grows into humorous monologue. Baker’s directions for this act listed two pieces (including one gospel song), separated by:
“Rap — Ron Thomason”
Here’s a sample of Ron’s “rap” — a comic speech from a 2007 California festival:
At the time of The Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, Dry Branch had four albums on Rounder, the start of a long string with that label. Like the Hotmud Family, they were folk and bluegrass festival regulars.
The band this evening consisted of Ron on mandolin, John Hisey on banjo, Mary Jo Leet on guitar, and Charlie Leet on bass. In 1987 a similar lineup recorded “Aragon Mill,” a Si Kahn song that Ron had learned while working at coal miner’s union rallies with Hazel Dickens:
Act Five brought on another performer still active today, Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers. Sparks had come up in the Dayton bar scene at about the same time as Ron Thomason. He worked with the Stanley Brothers and Ralph Stanley at the end of the ’60s and made his first album on his own in 1970s. He became a member of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2015 and has a new album out on Rebel.
At this concert his Lonesome Ramblers had a reunion dimension. Mandolinist and singer Wendy Miller, who’d played on Larry’s earliest recordings and was with the band through most of the ’70s, was back for this evening’s concert. Also in the band were banjoist Barry Crabtree and Larry’s son, Larry Dee, on bass.
They did three songs: “Dark Hollow,” “Face in the Crowd,” and “Kentucky Chimes,” all regulars from his albums and concerts. He closed with an eight-tune medley of his other hits. There are many videos of Larry’s great singing and lead guitar work. Here’s one of my favorites:
Acts Six and Seven dramatized the transformations of Dayton’s foundational 1956 band — The Osborne Brothers and Red Allen.
Act Six was all reunion. Red Allen had been officially retired since 1984, although he’d recently recorded four tracks on Home Is Where The Heart Is, David Grisman’s new Rounder album, joined on these tracks by son Harley and banjoist Porter Church, who’d been in his band The Kentuckians.
Red started this band in 1959 with mandolinist Frank Wakefield. In November 1961, in Nashville for the D.J. Convention, they cut six classic tracks at Starday with top bluegrass musicians of the day: Don Reno on banjo; Chubby Wise on fiddle; and John Palmer on bass. The whole great session is on YouTube:
Sierra Hull reprises Wakefield’s “Mountain Strings” on the new Smithsonian/Folkways album Industrial Strength Bluegrass. The track was nominated for IBMA’s 2021 Instrumental Recording of the Year.
In the early ’60s Wakefield and Allen worked out of the D.C. area, with a radio show in Wheaton, Maryland. In 1964 they did a Folkways album in New York, produced by David Grisman and Peter Siegel.
Soon after, Wakefield, whose innovative music is discussed by Ben Krakauer in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (182-183), began working with New York band The Greenbriar Boys and later he relocated to Saratoga Springs, New York. Here’s how he sounded in 2008 — still pushing the boundaries:
Red kept the Kentuckians going in the mid-’60s with a succession of great sidemen, among them banjoist Porter Church and mandolinist Grisman, who produced two albums of the Kentuckians on the County label.
In 1967 Red worked briefly for Bill Monroe and took Lester Flatt’s place in the Foggy Mountain Boys when Flatt had heart surgery. The next year he was in Lexington working with J.D. Crowe and Doyle Lawson.
By the early ’70s he was back in Dayton, working with his sons and playing locally what Rick Good calls “bargrass” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass 156). For tonight’s concert Red and Frank’s Kentuckians included Porter Church on banjo, Buddy Griffin on fiddle, Ron Messing on Dobro, and Larry Nager on bass.
During Red’s four-song set, Red Spurlock and Noah Crase, banjoists who’d played with Red during his early years, sat in for choruses with the band. A reprise of Wakefield’s famous “New Camptown Races” brought guest David Harvey, son of Dorsey Harvey, another influential mandolinist, to play harmony.
The final segment, Act Seven, featured Dayton’s Grand Ole Opry stars, the Osborne Brothers. Two days before the concert the Dayton Daily News said the Osbornes had “achieved the greatest fame of those taking part in this tribute to the flowering of bluegrass music in Dayton.” It would be hard for anyone to follow them. After joining the Opry in 1964 they’d moved from Dayton to Nashville. During the late ’60s and early ’70s, a string of country hits (“Rocky Top” is the best known today) led to industry awards for their vocal work.
With this success the Osbornes’ recordings moved toward a contemporary country radio-friendly sound, mixing pedal steel, piano, fiddle, drums, and electric bass alongside their bluegrass banjo and mandolin. Their live sound also changed. In 1967 they added electric bass; in the early ’70s, a drummer. Next came electric pickups on banjo and mandolin. They did this to make themselves heard in the big country package shows they were playing, where all the other acts were highly amplified. Their “going electric” was viewed with alarm in the acoustic-oriented bluegrass festival world, but it only lasted for a few years.
Throughout these years, their unique vocals remained a constant. They continued to record and tour. Their repertoire drew largely from decades of recordings along with newer material. They now carried a straight-ahead bluegrass band including fiddle and acoustic bass.
This evening, playing with the Osborne Brothers were Paul Brewster on guitar and third voice in the trio, Terry Eldredge on bass, and Steve Thomas on fiddle. They did four songs, all favorites from their earlier recordings, including a version of “Kentucky,” the Blue Sky Boys hit of the ’30s that they’d recorded for Decca in 1964 and which remained in their repertoire right up until Sonny’s 2005 retirement. Here’s an early ’90s Opry performance of it, introduced by Bill Anderson. The band includes future Grascals member Eldredge on guitar and third voice and Terry Smith on bass, along with second guitarist (and bus driver) Raymond Huffmaster, Dobroist Gene Wooten, and fiddler Glen Duncan.
According to Baker’s stage directions, the closing act consisted of:
“Music — Medley”
An earlier draft reads:
“[medley in B natural: each unit from each of the 7 segments chooses a song which they play when their turn comes]”
My memory of this is vague, but I think that’s just how the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion ended, in B natural. But it wasn’t over quite yet. In that day’s Dayton Daily News columnist Nick Weiser had announced:
“Following the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion at Memorial Hall, the Canal Street Tavern, located at 308 E. First St., will have a reception for the audience and the participants of the Bluegrass Reunion Show. Mark Bondurant will open the show at 9:30 with a reception to follow after the show. Many of the musicians from the Memorial Hall show are scheduled to get together and jam at the Canal Street Tavern reception. Admission is $1 at the door.”
Jeremy Stephens might be the most-featured musician in the history of this column. We’ve featured his band High Fidelity, IBMA Best New Artist nominees once again in 2021, twice over the past few years. Now he’s released a solo project entitled How I Hear It on Rebel Records.
How he hears it is how he plays it. Stephens’ banjo playing – and for that matter, his flattop guitar, archtop guitar, mandolin, bass, and beyond – is all at once effortlessly timeless and firmly grounded in the present. With acts like High Fidelity (which he founded with his wife and musical collaborator Corrina Rose Logston), the Chuck Wagon Gang, Jesse McReynolds, the Lilly Brothers, and others Stephens continually demonstrates a commitment to traditional bluegrass from long before the Bluegrass Album Band, Tony Rice, the Country Gentlemen, and other second- and third-generation groups began to eclipse their more old-timey, homespun, and gritty forebears. He has a penchant for Don Reno’s outside-the-box pickin’, and the chord-based licks, steel guitar phrases, and electric guitar back-up that were Reno’s signatures.
Even with this perspective on the music — the earliest days of bluegrass being the string band aesthetic that resonates with him the most — his playing is neither antiquated nor backwards. At times, the most striking quality of his approach to the instrument is how in-the-moment it is. His techniques and musical vocabulary are couched so firmly in the past, yet never feel as if he isn’t expressing himself wholly in each and every musical and creative decision he makes. This fact remains true whether he’s playing something well-rehearsed, replicable, and measured or something purely improvisational.
Though this column does focus on instrumental music — there are several astounding, hoot-worthy, slapdash, and gorgeous tunes on How I Hear It — it should be noted that Stephens can be just as present and in-the-moment with his banjo playing and improvisation instrumentally as when he’s singing harmony or lead, often a rare skill in banjo players. Anyone who’s enjoyed a performance by Stephens, the duo with his wife (billed tongue-in-cheek as The Stephens Brothers), High Fidelity, or any of the many bands that have featured Stephens as a sideman, will know just how jaw-dropping this talent of his can be. Acrobatic, nearly impossible Don Reno licks spat out rapid fire from his fingers while singing or playing syncopated against himself – it’s a sight and sound to behold.
How I Hear It tracks “Sockeye,” “Lady Hamilton,” “The Old Spinning Wheel,” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” perfectly capture the energy and ethereal quality of Stephens’ live playing in a way many more sterile bluegrass albums, and purposefully more modern sounding records, can only aspire to. With backing musicians such as Logston, David Grier, Mike Bub, Hunter Berry, and more, the entire project is the perfect vehicle to highlight and showcase this truly idiosyncratic — yet diversely and expertly pedigreed — style of banjo playing that’s all at both unapologetically old school and well-suited for a long, long lifespan into the future.
Twin fiddles are the bluegrass instrumental duo that get all the attention, but double banjos are really where it’s at. (Is this writer a banjo player? Why, yes. Is this writer biased? Why, of course!) It makes sense that twin or triple fiddling would end up more popular than double or triple banjos, given that fiddles are sounded by bows, so the melodic contours are more like vocal harmony, often longer phrases and bow strokes languidly and charismatically laced together. Banjos, with their rapid-fire sixteenth notes and syncopated, idiosyncratic rolls, are just more difficult to sync up. Hundreds – if not thousands – of banjo jokes devoted to rhythm and timing will certainly back that claim up.
But double banjo is an art form as old as bluegrass itself – and older, by quite a few dozen decades, if you count early American popular music, banjo orchestras, minstrel and vaudeville songs that all centered banjos before and during the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
In bluegrass, twin five-strings are at their most astounding in jaw-dropping and acrobatic contexts such as High Fidelity’s incredible rendition of the Don Reno classic instrumental, “Follow the Leader.” Famous for his steel guitar and chicken-pickin’ Telecaster licks transferred to banjo, Reno’s harebrained and wonky turns of phrase might seem like the last musical context in which one should attempt perfect synchronization, especially on banjo, but Jeremy Stephens and Kurt Stephenson defy reason, logic, and surely physics with their buttery, seamless, double banjo blend. The track perfectly encapsulates the “WHAT IS THAT!?” quality of five-string, three-finger banjo – raised to the second power.
Anyone who grew up tuning in to or has ever binge-watched reruns of Hee Haw knows the beauty of a good double, triple, quadruple, quintuple banjo number, a common feature of the homespun country, comedy, and pickin’ variety show. Roy Clark, the Hee Haw host who could tear through almost any instrument in any style, released an entire album of double banjo music with regular Hee Haw guest Buck Trent in 1978 called Banjo Bandits. “Down Yonder” kicks with all-too-rare (and certainly delicious) bluegrass piano, a delightful intro to a bluegrass, old-time, and American songbook standard that almost sounds like a carnival merry-go-round thanks to the effect of the banjos “in stereo.” Banjo Bandits is something like a bluegrass and country double banjo primer, every track a stunning example of the form.
Like twin fiddling, double banjo lends itself so intuitively to the collaborative, community quality of bluegrass music. Through many a duo album and “featured artist” slot pickers have been using double banjo tunes to bring in their favorites, their mentors, their heroes, and their peers to swap licks, rising and falling, rolling and tumbling in breakneck unison. Alison Brown’s first Grammy Award was won for “Leaving Cottondale,” her double banjo instrumental with Béla Fleck from her also-nominated 2000 record, Fair Weather. In 2007, modern banjo hero Tony Trischka released a 14-track album of all twin banjo tunes entitled Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular. Its roster included Earl Scruggs, Brown, Fleck, Noam Pikelny, Steve Martin, and more. On “Doggy Salt,” a silly, winking instrumental that reconfigures the classic chord progression of “Salty Dog,” Scott Vestal joins Trischka, leaning into the humorous, comedic quality of these sorts of duets — a quality we see in Banjo Bandits and “Follow the Leader,” too.
Do not be mistaken, though, putting together a banjo duet isn’t just a comedic or intra-bluegrass activity! Cross-genre double banjo forays are certainly just as delightful, if not rarer and even more difficult to lock into rhythmic synchronization. Those that can mesh together three-finger’s rolling right hand with clawhammer and frailing’s loping, looser right hand are true virtuosos, defying not one but two genre’s expectations that banjos are intrinsically arhythmic and constantly rushing. Old-time players like Allison de Groot, Cathy Fink, Mark Johnson, Victor Furtado, and others all make it look and sound easy, matching their bluegrass compatriots’ rhythms and syncopations with ease and not just blending in, but counterpointing tastefully as well. One such recording, “Cluck Old Hen” from Pikelny’s Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail project, features Steve Martin, once again, on clawhammer. A less traditional approach, the two play with textures and senses, not striving for perfect unison, but rather exploring what an old-time-and-bluegrass dialogue can look and sound like, expanding our ideas of what twin banjo can be.
No matter the context, genre, roster of pickers, or style of playing, this fact remains true: more banjos equals more fun. (To this writer, at least.)
My diary for Saturday September 26, 1987 — Earl Scruggs Celebration day at Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina — begins with an entry on foodways:
I meet Tom (Hanchett) and Carol (Sawyer) at 7:30 and we walk to the Snack Shop. As Joe had predicted the night before there were lots of pickups outside and quite a few people inside having breakfast. I asked the waitress for livermush and she told me they didn’t have it, that sometimes they did but today they were out of it. It wasn’t on the menu.
After breakfast we walked over to G-W’s Dover Library, Celebration headquarters. Horace Scruggs was there.
Outside Horace took me over to meet his banjo player, and he asked me to play a tune or two. I did “Cumberland Gap” and some other simple tune. The picker then played a lot of fancy stuff and told me about his two banjos.
Inside, people were setting up displays in preparation for the 10:00 opening. It was part museum, part market.
… various people were doing crafts; [an] instrument maker was there with his wife, who played guitar, and his young son (maybe 10) who was a good Scruggs-style banjo picker and played non-stop all afternoon long. They were selling cassettes of him.
Horace had brought in two banjos which Earl had loaned him to be displayed at the Celebration. One was a new Gibson Earl Scruggs model, and the other was the old banjo which had belonged to their father and which Earl had had repaired back in the fifties in Nashville.
Later, Tom would be installing storyboards about the connection between country music and the textiles industry in the Piedmont.
After Horace had set up his display Joe suggested he take us on a tour of the area where the Scruggses grew up. So, Tom, Carol, Joe, and I set out in Horace’s Fury.
‘Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo’ page 147 shows the Scruggs homeplace
He took us past the Flint Hill Church, their birthplace (depicted in the above photo from p. 147 of Earl Scruggs and the Five-String Banjo), and the house they’d moved to after their father’s death in 1930 (seen below, from p. 150).
The house has the same chimney as in the picture, but the upper part has been rebuilt with brick. A “beware dogs & keep out” sign was posted. Horace said that the family had decided to get rid of the house, but he wished they had kept it. This is the house he and Earl would walk around when practicing time — they would start a tune and each would walk in a different direction playing softly, to see if they could keep their time so they would be together when they met at the back. The right front room, visible from the road, was the one Earl went in when he figured out how to use the third finger in his banjo style.
‘Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo’ page 150 shows three Scruggs brothers, posing in front of their home
Then Horace took us down to the nearby Broad River to point out the site of Earl’s first professional gig, Ollie Moore’s fish camp.
At 10:00 the Celebration began out in front of the Library. Inoted: A beautiful sunny day which was to get up into the low 80s by the feel of it. The president opened the festivities and then Horace and his bandmates in Riverbend performed a few songs.
At last night’s dinner I’d gotten to know a couple from Raleigh, Margaret and Wayne Martin.
Both were old-time musicians. In 1984 they’d joined with two others to found PineCone, the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, “an organization that would help support traditional roots artists and present their music to the public in a professional and respectful manner.”
An experienced teacher and performer, Margaret was scheduled to workshop with Etta Baker. This was one of the high points of the Celebration.
At 10:30 Margaret Martin set up with Mrs. Etta Baker in the Library lobby and did an hour-long workshop which was very nice. Mrs. B. played banjo some of the time, showing how her daddy picked 2-finger style; then she played the guitar, a D-18 with a built-in pickup, and did her “hits” like “Railroad Bill” and “John Henry” and also some nice Piedmont-style blues like, she said, her sons played. She was low-key but relaxed and effective as a performer, and Martin ran a good workshop, assisting musically but not getting in the way.
In the middle of this Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and the Hired Hands arrived and were standing at the back of the crowd in the lobby. I had a good talk with both of them, trying to give some idea of what I wanted on the workshop.
Banjoist Jenkins and fiddler Sherrill began their careers in the ’30s playing a blend of old-time and country. Snuffy played 3-finger style even before Earl, who acknowledged his influence. Still active after nearly fifty years, they were living history. They’d watched bluegrass develop. What could they say about that? Also, I was particularly interested in having them demonstrate the kind of shows they’d done in their early years — the radio pitches and Snuffy’s baggy-pants comedy.
Unfortunately, Snuffy hadn’t brought along his rig for the full comedy routine but they said they would do some comedy.
I pursued a bit of tune research, wondering about a tune Earl Scruggs had played in his 1945 audition for Monroe. I’d heard that Earl learned it from Snuffy.
I asked Snuffy about “Dear Old Dixie,” which he did play. He told me he learned from a Rutherford County fiddle band, the Barrett Brothers — a group they always beat in contests, he said.
It was noon; Carol and Tom and I took a lunch break. As the afternoon began:
We sat out on the campus green, a broad sloping lawn with a stage at the lower end, and listened to Snuffy Jenkins and Pappy Sherrill along with their band.
The Hired Hands, all younger South Carolinians, included guitarist Harold Lucas; his son Randy, who played banjo and guitar; and Frank Hartley on bass. After a 10-song set, a young guest, Philip Jenkins, was introduced. Philip’s father Hoke was Snuffy’s nephew, a good banjoist who’d recorded with Jim & Jesse in the early ’50s. Philip, playing his dad’s fancy old Gibson, did “Train 45” and “Sally Goodin.”
Snuffy closed out the show by bringing out his “confounded contraption,” a washboard fitted with cowbell, frying pan, wooden block, and an old bicycle horn, on which he played rhythm with eight sewing thimbles as Pappy fiddled “Chicken Reel” and “Alabama Jubilee.”
Snuffy Jenkins & Pappy Sherrill on the cover of their Rounder release, ’33 Years of Pickin’ and Pluckin”
Other bands followed. I wandered around at the back of the crowd, taking in the music from different perspectives and meeting fans. Around two I went back to my room, picked up the tape recorder and headed for the seminar room in the library where the workshop was to be held.
I used the recorder, a Sony Walkman Pro cassette machine with an external mike and a C90 cassette, to record the workshop. What follows is based on a table of contents drafted soon after the event. The tape itself, like most of my research materials, is now in Memorial’s archives, out of reach at the moment.
We began at 3:00 with an introduction by Dr. Brown and a speech of welcome from G-W’s Vice President for Academic Affairs. The band opened up with their theme tune, the old fiddle tune “Twinkle Little Star.” Dr. Brown introduced me and I began in emcee style to introduce the band, a leisurely process involving a bit of humor and local place names. Although this was a workshop, Pappy and Snuffy treated it as a show, offering comic relief and virtuoso instrumentals at regular intervals.
I spoke briefly about the band as living history, mentioning that Pat Ahrens, a writer from Columbia, South Carolina, their base of operations, had written a nice little book about them, with photos, and a discography.
I told how the word “bluegrass” had taken on a musical meaning following Earl Scruggs’ years with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, and then asked Snuffy to talk about his early history. It was a question he’d been asked before. He and Homer were prepared. Their response was pretty much like the one on this YouTube clip, recorded in 1988 at the Tennessee Banjo Institute:
In 1939 Jenkins and Sherrill came together at a radio station in Columbia, South Carolina, as members of the WIS Hillbillies, a band led by Byron Parker, formerly the Monroe Brothers’ emcee and bass singer. Byron Parker and His Mountaineers, a lineup that included Pappy and Snuffy.
Their regular radio shows enabled them to make the bookings that sustained their early career at the small rural schools dotting the countryside around Columbia. Sponsored on the radio by Crazy Water Crystals, a laxative, they recorded 16 tunes and songs — eight 78s — for RCA Victor in 1940 as Byron Parker and His Mountaineers, with fiddle, guitars, mandolin, banjo and Parker’s bass vocal on the hymns. Their broad repertoire included “Up Jumped The Devil” on which Snuffy took banjo breaks which today sound very bluegrassy:
After Parker’s death in 1948, Pappy and Snuffy took over the band and changed the name to The Hired Hands.
Pappy Sherrill was the band’s emcee. He told the history of the band, calling their records “old timey stuff, no extra notes.” Many of their songs and tunes would find their way into bluegrass repertoires. I asked Homer for an example; he played “Carroll County Blues,” the fiddle classic from Mississippians Narmour and Smith that they’d recorded in 1940:
After demonstrating Snuffy’s banjo work, the band did several songs. Here’s how they sounded doing “Long Journey Home” in 1990:
On this song, Snuffy takes all the lead breaks and can also be seen playing clawhammer backup. Regrettably, Homer’s fiddle is in the background here; he usually played lead breaks. Randy Lucas brings in the fingerstyle guitar demonstrated earlier by in the day by Etta Baker. After they’d played four pieces, I posed a question to the band members — what’s the difference between old-time and bluegrass?
Lead singer Harold Lucas began with a joke: “there’s a fine line between old-time and not being able to play at all.” Then, referring to his son Randy, a master of new styles, he described the interplay between old and new generations.
Pappy spoke about growing up listening to the radio. To him, old-time is easier. Bluegrass is fast, with high-pitched singing — not the same. He stressed the importance of duets in old-time.
Randy said “it takes old fellows to play old-time music” and that he got his inspiration from Pappy & Snuffy — “they make music fun.”
As far as he was concerned, said Snuffy, “Ain’t no difference — slow and fast.” He joked about his own “mellow voice — over ripe, almost rotten.”
Returning to the question I’d posed, Pappy and Randy Lucas, now playing banjo, demonstrated the differences between old-time and bluegrass. Pappy fiddled the venerable “Leather Britches” as an example of old-time. Then Randy demonstrated bluegrass with a recent, fancy banjo piece, Don Reno’s “Dixie Breakdown.” Fluent in both styles, each took breaks on both tunes.
I asked about comedy. Pappy described the skits that were an integral part of the Hired Hands show. He said they had a writer, Billy F. Jones, who scripted their comedy pieces, making parts for each member of the band. They weren’t set up to do a skit today, but they did an old traditional musical comic dialogue that originated in 19th century theater, “Arkansas Traveler.” In 1960 the Stanley Brothers had a big record hit with a version that combined the traditional dialogue with new music, titled “How Far to Little Rock”:
Afterward Snuffy and Pappy spoke of their comedy work in the early years — making up, getting into costume, pratfalls, and so on.
Then, after Randy had played “There’s An Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor” demonstrating his mastery of contemporary banjo styles, Snuffy responded to a request and brought out his “confounded contraption,” the washboard, to play along with Pappy on the popular fiddle favorite, “Down Yonder.” Here’s how Snuffy looked playing washboard on another fiddle favorite, “Alabama Jubilee,” at a festival in 1989:
Pappy reminded the audience that they had mostly played as small local schools with audiences all ages. Their show was for the whole family. “No smut.”
Nearing the end of the workshop, I called for questions. A number came in from the audience — asking about their sponsor, the history of Snuffy’s washboard, other touring bands, and their Columbia, South Carolina, base.
Finally, Pappy explained that their shows always included hymns; he had a box full of Stamps-Baxter and Vaughn gospel quartet songbooks, and taught the parts to the group from them. They were complex, responsorial. Here’s an example from their 1940 RCA sessions, “We Shall Rise,” with Byron Parker singing bass.
On this afternoon, Pappy closed with a simpler hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” played on the fiddle.
Afterwards he thanked the audience. I concluded with remarks about the band’s role in the change from old to new in folk traditions, and the transition from home and neighborhood to stage and radio.
Just before Dr. Brown formally ended the workshop, well-known local banjoist Dan X Padgett presented a gift — a hat — to Snuffy. I did not note what the hat looked like, and that detail has escaped my memory. But there’s more coming about Dan X Padgett and the rest of the Celebration in Part 3 of this memoir.
Though it’s not that hard to find some who will argue the point, bluegrass is widely held to have originated when banjo phenom Earl Scruggs joined Grand Ole Opry star Bill Monroe’s band in early December, 1945. Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys — the possessive wasn’t just there for show — were already among the anchors of the radio show’s cast, but contemporary accounts (and a handful of bootleg recordings) make clear that, to the ears of an almost instantly enraptured audience, Scruggs’ rapid-fire banjo playing elevated the group’s sound to a new level.
Almost instantly, groups sprang up — or reoriented themselves — in pursuit of the new sound, and although banjo players and fiddlers were the most obvious converts, the truth is that virtually all of the intricacies the band brought to their sound were soon emulated. By the time Scruggs and guitarist/lead singer Lester Flatt left the Blue Grass Boys at the beginning of 1948, the quintet’s live performances and a handful of recordings had already inspired some notable followers, who, out of artistic desire and commercial necessity, quickly busied themselves in developing their own distinctive takes on the sound of the “original bluegrass band.”
As we near the 75th anniversary of this foundational origin story, BGS will be looking back across the sweep of those years — and first up, of course, a clutch of true pioneers that share a common accomplishment: they are the acts honored by induction into the IBMA’s Hall of Fame in its first five years and their plaques proudly hang at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Bill Monroe (inducted 1991)
A complex personality with a skill set that included equal measures of innovation and synthesis, the mandolin-playing Monroe (b. 1911) moved from a mid-1930s duo with his brother to assembling a hot string band during World War II to fronting that original bluegrass band — an achievement which earned him his “Father of Bluegrass” title. Though it’s easy to discern the elements he brought together in that music — old fiddle tunes; Scotch-Irish ballads; African-American blues, jazz and gospel; western swing and more — his creativity extended beyond simply stirring them together and kept him a central figure from its inception until his death in 1996.
Indeed, while his early classics are essential to the bluegrass canon, even his late-life instrumental compositions have enjoyed a growing influence among today’s hottest young players. In fact, he collected his first Grammy for 1988’s “Southern Flavor.” Monroe was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, and as the composer of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” he joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 1993, and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence in 1997.
Though he wasn’t yet 22 years old when he joined Monroe’s band at the end of 1945, Earl Scruggs (b. 1924) was ready to step into the spotlight, and, with the exception of a stretch of ill health in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, he never relinquished it until his death in 2012. Unlike many instrumentalists who change their approach according to musical context, Scruggs believed that his picking style — built around right-hand patterns called “rolls” — could fit anywhere, and after his groundbreaking years with Monroe and then Lester Flatt, his career seemed devoted to proving the point.
Having created much of the musical vocabulary for bluegrass banjo picking, he moved on to playing with his sons in the Earl Scruggs Revue, a country-rock-bluegrass fusion band that was arguably more successful — at least in commercial terms — than Flatt & Scruggs had ever been. In the 21st century, Scruggs championed a broad variety of younger musicians while continuing to play those same sweet rolls he’d created as a young man. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 2008.
With an expressive, emotive voice and an impressive array of demeanors that ranged from dry and sly to devout and down-home, rhythm guitarist Lester Flatt (b. 1914) was the perfect musical complement to Earl Scruggs, and their 1948-1969 output was at least as influential as Monroe’s. Flatt & Scruggs won a 1968 Grammy for their classic recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
But where Scruggs was not only interested in playing with his sons, but also interested in putting his banjo into a wider range of contexts, Flatt preferred sticking to the country side of bluegrass. In the aftermath of their breakup, Flatt’s drawl deepened and slowed as he presided over a series of gifted lineups that included peers like Josh Graves and Vassar Clements, alongside young up-and-comers from banjoist Kenny Ingram to a teenaged Marty Stuart. Flatt & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985.
The career of Ralph Stanley (b. 1927) and Carter Stanley (b.1925) illustrates both the profound impact that the original bluegrass band had on their peers, as well as the complementary artistic and commercial drives that impelled those successors to create their own unique style. In their first recordings, made while Flatt and Scruggs were still Blue Grass Boys, you can hear the Virginia-born Stanley brothers revamp their old-time string band approach into an approximation of the pioneers’ sound, yet within a matter of months, they had found a compelling variant.
The Stanley sound was built in part around Ralph’s stolid but driving banjo and soulful tenor singing, but even more around Carter’s mournful lead vocals and powerful songs. Over the years, while they moved from the Nashville-based Columbia and Mercury labels to scrappy (and multi-racial) Cincinnati indie, King, their sound became even more recognizable, as owner Syd Nathan hectored them into de-emphasizing the fiddle and leaning more into the innovative work of flatpicking lead guitarists like George Shuffler. The brothers’ partnership came to an end in late 1966 with the early, alcohol-related death of Carter; Ralph would continue on with his own twist on the Stanley Brothers’ sound until his death in 2016.
The first banjo player to follow Scruggs, albeit briefly, in the Blue Grass Boys, Don Reno (b. 1926) deliberately sought to create a distinct and instantly recognizable style of his own on the instrument. By the time his partnership with singer-guitarist Red Smiley (b. 1925) had settled into regular recording for King Records in the early 1950s, he had succeeded completely, and for good measure had done the same with flatpicked guitar solos, too. As Grand Ole Opry announcer Eddie Stubbs once put it, Reno & Smiley were a country band with a banjo instead of a steel guitar.
Though Reno could and sometimes would blister a banjo solo, many of the band’s signature numbers were heart songs, country shuffles, earnest gospel outings and more, including occasional flashes of rockabilly and jazz. Reno wrote many of them, sang tenor and occasional leads, and shared the instrumental limelight with their steady fiddler, Mack Magaha, and occasionally with one or another mandolin player, including his son, Ronnie. The partners split for a few years in the mid-‘60s, then reunited for a brief period before Smiley’s death in 1972. Reno continued to record and perform with partners ranging from Bill Harrell to his sons until he passed away in 1984.
Though Jim McReynolds (b. 1927) and Jesse McReynolds (b. 1929) were born just a few dozen miles from the Stanley Brothers, the music of Jim & Jesse could hardly have been a more different kind of bluegrass. The duo’s singing was smooth and refined — especially guitarist Jim’s silvery tenor — while the instrumental sound was driven by Jesse’s innovative mandolin cross-picking and their overall approach by the latter’s eclectic tastes and influences (he appeared, for instance, on The Doors’ 1969 album, The Soft Parade).
The brothers were comfortable in reaching for a more countrified sound, helped by banjo players like Allen Shelton and Carl Jackson, who were adept at playing radio-friendly licks on a dobro-banjo as well as ‘grassier fare when that was called for. Smart businessmen as well, the duo were among the first to appear on television in the early 1950s, recorded an entire album of Chuck Berry songs in the mid-1960s, started their own label in the early 1970s, and remained a popular fixture on the Grand Ole Opry until Jim’s death on the last day of 2002. As of this writing, Jesse McReynolds continues to perform — and to innovate, too, with releases like a 2010 Songs of the Grateful Dead collection.
Nicknamed “The Voice With a Heart,” Virginia’s Mac Wiseman (b. 1925) was a founding member of Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, but soon left to join Monroe (and Don Reno) in the Blue Grass Boys. By the early 1950s, he’d started his own career, recording for Gallatin, Tennessee’s Dot Records — and then going to work for the label. A consummate professional, he also served as a musicians’ union official for a time, and was a founding member of the Country Music Association. He frequently recorded material other than bluegrass, especially when rock ’n’ roll and the pop-country Nashville sound beckoned in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and throughout his career, he was never afraid to use a variety of instruments besides the archetypal bluegrass ones.
Still, as a performer, bluegrass was his bread and butter from the mid-1960s on, and rather than carry a band, he would recruit players from other acts (and occasionally skilled amateurs, too) and lead them on stage with a heavy guitar strum and a quick “watch me, boys!” Wiseman’s songbook included old folk numbers, songs he heard on the radio as a polio-stricken child, big band tunes, Music Row compositions and much more. In later years, he recorded several memorable projects that highlighted songs his mother had taught him and songs that told his life story, before his death in 2019.
Bobby Osborne (b. 1931) and Sonny Osborne (b. 1937) were among the first of what might be called “semi-second generation” bluegrass artists; unlike those who preceded them in the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, neither had performed professionally before 1950. By 1954, though, they’d hooked up with Jimmy Martin for a memorable set of recordings, and 1956 found them signed on to MGM on their own. Together with singer-guitarist Red Allen, the Brothers — Bobby singing lead and playing mandolin, Sonny singing baritone and playing banjo — had come up with an inventive new vocal arrangement that put the spotlight pretty much on them alone.
Lest that sound too cold, it should be noted that they deserved it, for not only was Bobby a formidable lead singer and Sonny brilliant in the support role, but their fearless, try-anything (the two recorded separately with avant-garde jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton in the mid-’60s) instrumental skills were profoundly original. The Brothers joined the Grand Ole Opry and signed with Decca Records in 1964, and spent the next decade fusing bluegrass and country in a way that eventually earned them a CMA Vocal Group award. Irascible, opinionated, and both artistically and commercially successful, the Osborne Brothers were at the forefront of the music until Sonny’s 2005 retirement — and while Bobby continues to perform to this day, the influence of their duo continues to grow, too.
East Tennessee native Jimmy Martin (b. 1927) hungered to perform with Bill Monroe as a youngster, then got his chance in 1949 when Mac Wiseman quit the Blue Grass Boys. As lead vocalist and guitarist, he helped to make some of Monroe’s most memorable recordings, then partnered in various settings with Bobby and Sonny Osborne before taking the helm of his Sunny Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s. A brash, colorful guy who could boast with the best and then back it up, Martin served in the cast of the Louisiana Hayride (alongside Elvis) and the Wheeling (W.V.) Jamboree before a growing bluegrass festival circuit threw him a lifeline in the absence of a Grand Ole Opry membership.
Among early Hall of Fame inductees, he may be considered more influential than most of his peers. Service in his Sunny Mountain Boys constituted the training ground for several generations of musicians, from banjo man J.D. Crowe to newgrass pioneer Alan Munde to Americana favorite Greg Garing — and his appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken was legendary. Martin was an unstoppable force of nature who knew exactly what he wanted from a musician, yet was unable to clearly explain it. Still, he did well enough that his records are instantly recognizable, even when you’ve never heard them before.
Pictured above, first row (L to R): Bill Monroe, The Osborne Brothers, Mac Wiseman, Jim & Jesse; Second row: Reno & Smiley, The Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Flatt & Scruggs
While High Fidelity is known for representing a specific niche in the bluegrass music landscape from the 1950s and early ‘60s, each member brings a diverse palate of musical tastes and styles. This playlist is a fine example of some of the diverse listening one might hear on our travels. Some of us remember making mixtapes of our favorite songs and tunes in the days of the cassette. Well, our van still has a cassette player in it! I hope you’ll enjoy listening to some of the music that inspires us, and maybe I should run off a tape of this for our next trip! — Jeremy Stephens, High Fidelity
Flatt & Scruggs – “Earl’s Breakdown”
This is probably the first song that really lit a fire under me to love and play bluegrass music. I first heard it on a red 8-track tape. I was absolutely drawn to Earl’s banjo playing and the famous section of the song where he tunes the second string down a whole step and then brings it right back up. Honestly though, the part of the tune that tore me up and still tears me up is Everett Lilly’s mandolin break. When I first heard that break, I thought it was the most incredible thing ever. Still is the best 15 seconds of mandolin playing on record. — Kurt Stephenson
Don Reno – “Coffee Cup”
I love “Coffee Cup,” because it showcases Don Reno’s banjo playing and creativity to the max. Though Reno didn’t write the song, he had a masterful arrangement of it. I believe it demonstrates nearly every signature technique that is unique to Don Reno. Each solo (they’re all banjo solos) is an adventure, and a fun one at that! — KS
Lonesome River Band – “Say I Do”
I always credit Lonesome River Band with sparking my interest in contemporary bluegrass sounds. My first LRB album was One Step Forward and my favorite song on the album is “Say I Do.” I love the groove, the harmonies, the chord structure, and especially the musical groove. Kenny Smith plays an incredible and beautiful guitar solo, which is followed by a banjo solo from Sammy Shelor. That particular banjo solo taught me so much about dynamics; especially in regards to coming out of a solo and leading in to the vocal. — KS
Reno & Smiley – “Country Boy Rock ‘N Roll”
I’m a country boy and I like to rock and roll, so this song fits. I remember picking up the album that included this song at a flea market when I was about 12 or 13, and it was my very first introduction to Reno & Smiley. — Daniel Amick
Tim O’Brien – “Wind”
I like this song because it’s a good song. It speaks to my soul. We have wind at my house. — DA
Punch Brothers – “Boll Weevil”
As a farmer sometimes I deal with crop failure, bugs, and drought. The goal is of course to problem solve and see beyond the failures to the success just on the other side, but seeing this as a story from the bug’s perspective is pretty interesting. — DA
Jim & Jesse – “Did You Ever Go Sailing”
The In the Tradition album by Jim & Jesse is the first album I remember consciously listening to, the first instance I remember understanding what an album was and what it meant to be an artist. When I would go to 3-year-old preschool, I listened to this on cassette continually and just wore the tape out. My first favorite song was this one. I still love everything about that album and this song! Glen Duncan’s fiddling, Allen Shelton’s banjo playing, and of course Jesse’s mandolin playing are just the cream of the crop, with the added bonus of Roy Huskey Jr. on upright bass. Jim is featured here singing lead on the verses and jumping to harmony on the choruses, making for an all-around awesome arrangement! — Corrina Rose Logston
Red Smiley & the Bluegrass Cut-Ups – “It’s Raining Here This Morning”
Tater Tate’s fiddling has been a huge influence on me, and it’s something I go back to over and over again for inspiration. This particular cut features Tater front and center just wearing it out! I love a song in the key of F like this, and this cut is just exceptional. Red Smiley’s flawless lead singing is like golden drops of honey. Billy Edwards’s playing out of open F on the banjo is the epitome of my happy place. It just doesn’t get much better than this for me! — CRL
Sarah Siskind – “Lone Tree”
It might surprise fans of High Fidelity that most of my “newer” music listening is outside the realm of traditional bluegrass. In fact, outside of the High Fidelity setting, my own solo artistry and songwriting is like a musical amalgam drawn from many diverse sources throughout my life. I love Sarah Siskind’s artistry and draw so much inspiration from her music. It’s hard to pick favorites but this particular song is pretty high up on the list for me! And, fun fact, Jeremy Stephens was staying with Sarah’s mom and dad the year that Jeremy and I met each other at SPBGMA in 2009! — CRL
Homer & Jethro – “Tennessee, Tennessee”
I knew I wanted to include a Homer & Jethro number, but I didn’t know just which one. I’ve always admired their ability to integrate belly laugh-inducing lyrics to some serious mandolin precision. “Tennessee, Tennessee” is one that I’ve always wanted me and Corrina to cover. That last verse makes me lol every time. — Vickie Vaughn
Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott – “Walk Beside Me”
This is the opening song to my desert island record. I just need one and this record, Real Time, is IT. That GROOVE, though. I’ve listened to this song at least a hundred times and the repeating mandolin hook paired with the mandola toward the end of it makes me feel like I. CAN. DO. ANYTHING. Thanks for that confidence, Tim & Darrell. — VV
Jim Oblon (with Larry Goldings & Jim Keltner) – “Copperhead”
I’ve known Jim for a while. I met him here in Nashville before I even knew what he was musically capable of. Friends later told me that he was Paul Simon’s drummer. Now we’re old friends and I try to be cool when I see him now and again at the gym and I try to refrain from nerding out over yet another musical discovery I had while listening to his records. Get a load of this RIFF on “Copperhead.” Not showcased on this recording is Jim’s incredible vocal prowess. Make sure you take time to find a song of his to hear that. You’re welcome. — VV
Kilby Snow – “Close By”
I’ve loved the autoharp since my Mamaw got me one for my sixth birthday from the secondhand store she worked at. I didn’t start playing it seriously until I saw my banjo mentor, Troy Brammer, playing autoharp when I was in my early teens. I’ve gone quite a few years without playing it seriously, but since we’ve all been shut in at home, I’ve been playing autoharp almost exclusively around the house for a couple months now. My favorite of all the autoharp players is Kilby Snow from Grayson County, Virginia. He played autoharp left-handed upside down, and did these open-bar “drag” notes to make it sound like the roll on a five-string banjo. This is a great Bill Monroe number played by Kilby on the harp, and it’s one I’ve found myself playing quite a bit lately. I learned to play his style right handed from his son Jim when I visited him in Oxford, Pennsylvania, in 2006. — JS
United Sacred Harp Convention – “Sherburne 186”
I first heard sacred harp shape-note singing on a 78 RPM record at Kinney Rorrer’s home. Kinney is a serious record collector and has been a mentor to me in the history of old time music. After first hearing the singing on that 78, I was hooked, and I couldn’t get enough of Sacred Harp. I learned to read and sing the shape notes and listened to many recordings of Sacred Harp conventions. Of all my listening, this recording of this tune has stood out to me, and I wanted to include it here. Hope y’all like it! — JS
Reno & Smiley and the Tennessee Cut-Ups – “Mountain Church”
There is no set of recordings that I have returned to over and over for more than 20 years, except for Reno & Smiley’s 1953 and early 1954 recordings. The tone, feel, playing, and singing of these 24 sides sum up everything that I really love about Reno & Smiley’s corner of bluegrass music. This era of their work has greatly informed what I bring to the table stylistically with High Fidelity. “Mountain Church” is one of my favorites of Reno & Smiley and we perform it occasionally in High Fidelity. — JS
Rose Maddox, the lead singer of the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America, made a significant mark in bluegrass, too, as the first woman ever to record a bluegrass album. Her incredible rags to-riches story touches on boxcars and sharecropping, the Grand Ole Opry and Buck Owens, and finally the Father of Bluegrass Music himself, Bill Monroe, who laid the foundation for that seminal 1962 Capitol Records LP, Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass.
Born on August 15, 1925, in Boaz, Alabama, Roselea Arbana Maddox arrived in a family with some musical heritage. Her paternal grandfather was a fiddler and roaming preacher, while her uncle Foncey gave lessons to locals and performed in blackface. Rose’s father, Charlie Maddox, worked as a sharecropper and hired hand. After getting stiffed for a job chopping wood, Charlie decided to skip town and finally indulge his wife Lula’s lifelong dream of living in California, panning for gold. They sold everything they had and stashed away the proceeds — just $35. The two oldest children stayed behind, while the youngest five and their parents set out for the Golden State in the spring of 1933.
How? On foot. Then hitchhiking. And after crossing over the state line to Mississippi and encountering another family who explained train-hopping, the seven Maddoxes rode the boxcars all the way west. Rose was 7 years old. They settled and resettled in various towns, with their situation once so dire that Lula had to place Rose with another family — but Rose acted up so often that the family gave her back. When Charlie got harvesting work in Modesto, the family followed and became what they called “fruit tramps.”
With some stability, the kids were putting down roots in Modesto. They collected whiskey bottles, turned them in for a penny a piece, then spent their dimes on movies. One Sunday the Sons of the Pioneers appeared in person at the Strand Theater. At that moment, Rose had found her calling — to be a singer. Her brother Fred had a similar epiphany while picking cotton that fall. After hearing that the band who’d just played the rodeo made $100, he decided it was time to get into the music business. Acting as manager, he found a furniture store to sponsor some radio spots. The caveat was simple: The furniture store owner wanted a girl singer. Thus, the Maddox Brothers & Rose were launched — with the spunky lead vocalist just 11 years old.
They followed the California rodeo circuit and played bars for tips, then won a State Fair competition that crowned them California’s best hillbilly band. However, things unraveled for a time in the early 1940s, as Fred, Don, and Cal were drafted in World War I, and Rose became an unhappy bride at 16, then a single mother at 18. Auditions with Roy Acuff and Bob Wills went nowhere. She played occasional gigs with other bands until the war ended and the Maddox Brothers & Rose reformed, with the youngest Maddox child, Henry, now joining on mandolin.
Playing dances as well as radio shows, the group shifted their sound to get people moving. Their look got an overhaul after Roy Rogers recommended Los Angeles tailor Nathan Turk, a pioneer of flashy Western stagewear. They also signed a deal with 4 Star Records, an indie label that marketed them as Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America. Their repertoire ranged from Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” to Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin'” to the gospel tune “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.” They made their Opry debut in 1949, where they met Bill Monroe, and became the first hillbilly band the play the Las Vegas Strip. That same year, however, Charlie and Lula Maddox divorced.
By 1950, various members of the family were living in Hollywood. A beautiful woman of 25, Rose took courses in modeling and vocal control, although Lula would not allow her to date. The band appeared on broadcasts like Hometown Jamboree and Town and Country in Southern California, as well as the regional show, the Louisiana Hayride. Columbia Records signed her as a solo act in 1953. With rock ‘n’ roll in full force in 1956, the Maddox Brothers & Rose sputtered, then disbanded, and not without some bitterness as Rose’s career still flourished. The Opry didn’t appreciate her first solo appearance though, when she wore a blue satin skirt that exposed her bare midriff. Nonetheless she relocated to Nashville (with the ever-vigilant Lula) and became an Opry member in 1956, but quit about six months later when Roy Acuff complained she (and not other Opry members who were touring) made appearances on too many local TV shows.
That professional setback might have given the perception that Rose couldn’t have a career without her brothers. That proved quite untrue. Hometown Jamboree in Los Angeles hired her, which led to plenty of gigs. When the Columbia deal ended, she recorded for two independent labels before signing with Capitol Records in 1959. When Lula tried to boss around producer Ken Nelson, he banned her from all future sessions. Rose, by this time 33 years old and still under her mother’s thumb, was secretly delighted. Taking things a step further, Rose eloped with a nightclub owner that December, then embarked on a European tour.
For Capitol, she made her first Billboard chart appearance ever with the honky-tonk weeper “Gambler’s Love,” climbing to No. 22 in 1959. Her first solo album, The One Rose, dropped in 1960, followed by a gospel set titled Glorybound Train. By 1961, she took “Kissing My Pillow” and “I Want to Live Again” to No. 14 and No. 15, respectively. Johnny Cash invited her to join his road show and Buck Owens asked to record some duets. Those twangy tracks, “Loose Talk” and “Mental Cruelty,” both entered the Top 10 in 1961. Her third album for Capitol, A Big Bouquet of Roses, appeared later that year.
The year 1962 proved to be the pinnacle of her career, as Bill Monroe encouraged her to make a bluegrass album. Because they recorded for competing labels, Big Mon anonymously played on the first day of the two-day session, recording several numbers from his own repertoire. Donna Stoneman stepped in on mandolin on the second day with the remainder of the material. Reno & Smiley joined the session too. Monroe later told Maddox biographer Jonny Whiteside, “The Maddox Brothers & Rose always had their own style, but you must remember their home was Alabama, and I always thought they sang a lot of the old Southern style of singin’. So I enjoyed helpin’ her on one of her albums. She had some great entertainers workin’ on it, and it didn’t take long at all.”
Maddox herself explained, “Bill Monroe has always told me that I sang bluegrass, and to me what he was talkin’ about is just what I call ‘hillbilly.'” She may not have agreed with the terminology, but she certainly adhered to the enthusiasm of the best bluegrass singers. Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass became the first bluegrass LP recorded by a woman. Its release coincided with the chart success of an earlier country single, “Sing a Little Song of Heartache,” which rose to No. 3 (and practically begs for a bluegrass remake).
Without Lula to intervene, Rose’s life on the road nearly derailed her, with infidelity, volatility toward band members, and a propensity for Benzedrene wrecking her marriage and her professional reputation. A heavy schedule of international touring wreaked havoc on her voice, too. The singles she did release were moody, if not morbid. Although she eclipsed Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells to be named Cashbox‘s female country artist of 1963, her chart momentum fizzled out after her final album with Capitol, 1963’s Alone With You. Still she continued to tour with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, with her grown son Donnie as her sideman.
Maddox occasionally recorded for small labels in the ’70s and ’80s to modest results, while her venues now included the San Francisco gay bars that embraced the Urban Cowboy phenomenon, as well as the annual gay rodeo in Reno, Nevada. She performed with the Vern Williams Band in folk clubs, too, and recorded a 1984 album with Merle Haggard & the Strangers that was funded by fans. A number of Arhoolie Records reissues helped keep her loyal audience appeased, while introducing her vivacious music to a new generation. She and her brother Fred patched things up for a 50th anniversary celebration of the Maddox Brothers & Rose in Delano, California.
Too often overlooked among the country performers of her era, Maddox landed her first Grammy nomination for her 1994 Arhoolie release, $35 and a Dream, in the category of Best Bluegrass Album. She recounted her exceptional career in the 1997 biography, Ramblin’ Rose: The Life and Career of Rose Maddox, and died the following year at age 71 in Ashland, Oregon. Remarkably, her life story has not been adapted for Hollywood, nor has she been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame or the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Yet her catalog still shines as a beacon for listeners who seek out traditional music with an undeniable West Coast flair.
On the final track of that final album, Johnny Cash intones, “I worked with Rose Maddox a lot back over the years. And I found that when she started working my show that she was probably the most fascinating, exciting performer that I’d ever seen in my life. She was a total performer. She captivated the audience. She held them in the palm of her hand and made ‘em do whatever she wanted to. The songs that she sang were classics, and I loved the way she sang and kind of danced at the same time. I thought there was, and still think that, there will never be a woman who could outperform Rose Maddox. She’s an American classic.”
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