Tag: Doug Dillard Band

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Celebration (Part 3)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s note: Read part one of Neil V. Rosenberg’s Bluegrass Memoir on the Earl Scruggs Celebration of 1987 here. Read part two here.)

Boiling Springs, NC on Saturday, September 26, 1987: My workshop in the Gardner-Webb College Library with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and the Hired Hands ended at 4:30 that afternoon when Dan X. Padgett presented Snuffy with a hat. From my diary:

Afterward I hung around and listened for a while to the Hired Hands’ young banjo picker Randy Lucas play the Bach “Bourrée,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and another classical piece expertly on the banjo.

Here’s a nice example, from Bill’s Pickin’ Parlor, of Randy’s recent work in this milieu:

Then, supper time came.

I went for some barbecue (big regional difference thing — this barbecue was red, vinegary; with shredded pork) with Tom [Hanchett] and Carol [Sawyer] and then was kind of enticed away by Dan X Padgett…

I’d met Padgett the afternoon prior, when I first arrived in Boiling Springs; a respected local banjo elder, he was the teacher of the young banjo player in Horace Scruggs’ band whom I’d met earlier today. Padgett had a long and interesting career, with deep connections to Earl Scruggs and Snuffy Jenkins, as well as memories of an earlier generation of banjo greats. He was interviewed for the Earl Scruggs Center by Craig Havighurst in 2010. 

I went with him…

…to his car (an old Cadillac) to look at various memorabilia like photos of him with various important country and bluegrass people. He also showed me a very worn copy of the very first F&S songbook and when I expressed a strong interest in copying it he loaned it to me. I also talked with him about the possibility of obtaining a banjo like one he played during the afternoon, a miniature Mastertone about the size of a mandolin with an actual tone ring, flange, and resonator. He said he’d see about it and we ended up standing at his trunk trying out various instruments. 

I was picking away on “St. Anne’s Reel” when I noticed there were some people standing around me, and when I finished and looked around there was Doug Dillard looking at me with that big smile. Quite an introduction!

In an edition of the Shelby Star a week or so earlier, Joe DePriest wrote of Dillard’s association with Earl Scruggs, telling how in 1953 the Salem, Missouri teen first heard “Earl’s Breakdown” on the car radio. It hit him so hard “he ran off the road into a ditch.” Dillard got his folks to take him to Scruggs’s Nashville home. “We knocked on the door, and he came, and we asked him to put some Scruggs tuners on my banjo. He invited us in.”

A newspaper clipping from a 1987 edition of the ‘Shelby Star’ of an article by Joe DePriest on Doug Dillard

Earl welcomed banjo pickers to his home, especially if they wanted Scruggs Pegs. In the “Suggestions for Banjo Beginners” on the first page of Flatt & Scruggs Picture Album — Hymn and Songbook from 1958, Earl invited those interested to contact him in Nashville, and many did:

The first page of the 1958 ‘Flatt & Scruggs Picture Album — Hymn and Songbook’

In 1962 Doug and his brother Rodney went with their band The Dillards to LA, where they were “discovered” at the Hollywood folk club The Ash Grove. With best-selling Elektra LPs, they toured extensively in the West and appeared on CBS’s The Andy Griffith Show as “the Darling Family.” 

In 1966 Doug left The Dillards and ventured into what would soon be called “country-rock,” touring with the Byrds and forming a band with former Byrd, Gene Clark. Dillard’s banjo playing had been strongly shaped by his close listening to Scruggs. In the ’60s when players like Bill Keith and Eric Weissberg were pushing banjo boundaries in bluegrass, Doug was pushing boundaries in a different way by finding a place for Scruggs-style banjo in rock. He fitted solid, straight-ahead rolls into pieces like Gene Clark’s “The Radio Song”: 

Dillard was heard often on popular Hollywood studio recordings and movie soundtracks during the ’70s. He even had on-screen roles in Robin Williams’ Popeye and Bette Midler’s The Rose.

DePriest’s article quoted Dillard: “During all this time, ‘I never said goodbye to bluegrass.'” He moved to Nashville in 1983 and started a band. 

The bluegrass music business was booming in Nashville. A bunch of young pickers were there, touring in bands and doing studio sessions. New Grass Revival featured newcomers Bela Fleck and Pat Flynn; John Hartford, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas — all were in town. The Nashville Bluegrass Band started in 1984; that year Ricky Skaggs won a Grammy for his version of Monroe’s “Wheel Hoss.” Up in the Gulch district, between the Opry and Vanderbilt, the Station Inn was serving bluegrass seven nights a week.

I was introduced to the Doug Dillard Band this afternoon right there where Dan X Padgett and I had been jamming. His four-piece outfit drew from a pool of talented bluegrass musicians. 

Rhythm guitarist, vocalist and emcee Ginger Boatwright was a seasoned veteran. During the ’70s she’d toured and recorded with Red White and Blue(grass), and later formed The Bushwackers, an all-female group that began as the house band at Nashville’s Old Time Picking Parlor. Her story is told well in Murphy Hicks Henry’s book Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass. Henry calls her “The first ‘modern’ woman in bluegrass” alluding to her folk revival roots, her styles of humor and dress, and, most importantly, “a softer, smoother, more lyrical quality” of singing.

Having a second guitar as a regular lead instrument in a four-piece band was uncommon at this time. When I met Doug’s young lead guitarist I was surprised to discover he was the son of Lamar Grier, whom I’d hung out with twenty years earlier when he was a Blue Grass Boy. David Grier was 26. He’d studied the lead guitar work of Clarence White (there’s a photo of him with White in Bluegrass Odyssey), Tony Rice, and Doc Watson. He was already an experienced pro.

Playing the electric bass, which was unusual for the time, was Roger Rasnake, a singer-songwriter from Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border.

In 1986 Flying Fish released this band’s first album, What’s That? (FF 377). Here’s the title cut. The band is augmented to six pieces by Vassar Clements on violin and Bobby Clark on mandolin; both played on the album. What we see and hear first is Ginger’s dynamic emcee work. Doug’s composition shows a banjo picker who knew fiddle music — a melodic “A” section followed by a punching Scruggs-style “B” part. 

Rasnake made a point of telling me Roland White had sent his regards. 

Roland was an old California friend, whom I’d met in 1964 and gotten to know when he was playing with Monroe. He’d just joined the Nashville Bluegrass Band. It was a pleasant surprise to hear from him.

Roger wanted to buy a copy of my book, so I took him up to the library and he bought one which I autographed. I signed several others during the day, including several that people brought with them.

I rested a bit before heading over to Gardner-Webb’s Lutz-Yelton Convocation Center. 

That evening was the Doug Dillard concert in the gym. It was good, with Ginger Boatwright doing the MC work, Lamar Grier’s son David picking some nice lead guitar, and good singing by Roger, Doug, and Ginger. 

Rasnake did one of his own songs from their album, “Endless Highway.” 

It’s familiar today because Alison Krauss covered it in her 1990 album, I’ve Got That Old Feeling.

There was a grand finale at the end with picking by Horace and the boys, and also fiddler Pee Wee Davis, whom I heard briefly in the back room for a while. I bought a souvenir photo of the Dillards with Andy Griffith. Home and in bed by 11.

On Sunday morning:

Up and away by 7:30, carried my bags to Tom and Carol’s dorm. We hit the road and drove to Shelby where we went, on Joe’s advice, to the Pancake House, a local place on the strip which was sure to have livermush. We went in and sat at a table and when the menu came I eagerly perused it. Sure enough, at the top of the list on the right-hand side was “Livermush and Eggs.” And, in case I’d missed it, about halfway down the same list was “Eggs and Livermush.” So I ordered that and actually ate some. Very peppery, other than that not much taste and what there was didn’t really excite me. I mixed it with eggs, like one does with grits. Maybe it’ll help my banjo-picking, who knows.

In Chapel Hill I stayed the night with Tom and Carol and had a bit of time to visit friends and relations and buy a box of instant grits at a supermarket. Next day I was back home in Newfoundland, writing up my diary.

The weekend at the Earl Scruggs Celebration brought me face to face with a music culture in which bluegrass nestled. Seeing, hearing and talking with Snuffy, Pappy, Horace, and Dan put me in touch with generations older than mine, what Bartenstein has called “The Pioneers” and “The Builders” of this music. I feel fortunate to have seen, met and heard them all. Just as important for me was hearing new younger performers like Ginger Boatwright, David Grier, and Randy Lucas.

This was my first opportunity see my folk guitar hero, Etta Baker. It came near the start of her late-in-life performance career. In 1989 the North Carolina Arts Council gave her the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award; in 1991 she won an NEA National Heritage Fellowship. Wayne Martin produced her first CD, for Rounder, in 1991. Later she collaborated with Taj Mahal. Meanwhile Music Maker Relief Foundation, an organization “fighting to preserve American musical traditions,” gave her the support she needed to pursue her career as a musician up to her passing at the age of 93.

It was also my first time to see Doug Dillard. If Snuffy and Pappy personified the era when bluegrass emerged from old-time, Dillard’s new band blended the contemporary sounds of an era when classic, progressive, and newgrass elements were shaping and blending the sounds heard as bluegrass thrived in a festival-dominated scene. 

Instead of an alpha male lead singer/emcee/rhythm guitarist, he had an alpha female. Replacing the mandolin or fiddle one expected in a band with a banjo was an acoustic lead guitar. Instead of an old “doghouse” upright the bass player had an electric. The lead vocals were shared between male and female. Repertoire ranged from bluegrass classics through old pop and rock favorites to band member compositions. The group was touring widely. State of the art bluegrass, 1987.

So how did all this fit together for me? I recalled the start of my visit when Joe DePriest took Tom, Carol, and me to visit the Shelby graveyard. 

He showed us three graves: first that of Thomas Dixon, the local writer whose The Clansmen was turned by D.W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation. Not far away was the grave of W.J. Cash, author of the immensely influential The Mind of the South. Joe and Tom pondered how the two men would have felt about being buried so close to each other; the image that sticks with me is one of Cash glaring at Dixon.

Joe gave us copies of the Greater Shelby Chamber of Commerce’s glossy full-color brochure, Shelby…it’s home. In it Thomas Dixon is identified as the author “whose novel Birth of a Nation became the first million-dollar movie” thus avoiding the fact that book and movie inspired the racist revival of the KKK. It describes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist W.J. Cash simply as “author,” not mentioning his progressive stances in print against the Klan and Nazism.

Tom wondered, what if the paths of Cash (who lived in Boiling Springs) and the young Scruggs had crossed at the time? He told us:

Cash … thought that the South had no “Culture” to speak of — what would he have had to say about Scruggs’s contribution?

Joe took us to a third gravesite, that of a local Confederate colonel killed in a Civil War battle; after detailing that part of his life its headstone:

… describes him as a lover of the arts who twice rode by horseback all the way to a far-off northern city (Baltimore? New York?) in order to hear Jenny Lind sing. This tells you where Cash’s mind was when he spoke of Culture.

The Shelby brochure ended its historical section saying “Cleveland County has also produced two North Carolina governors and an ambassador, but our most famous son is country singer Earl Scruggs.”

So much for official culture in 1987! 

Gardner-Webb’s decision to honor Earl Scruggs reflected a shifting intellectual landscape. A local musician of humble origins — a mill worker — had taken on new meaning and significance because of his national and international recognition and popular culture success. He deserved honor and celebration in his home. I was glad to help.

I don’t know if there were any further Earl Scruggs Celebrations at Gardner-Webb, but today there’s an Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, which is planning to hold its inaugural Earl Scruggs Music Festival in September 2022. 

(Editor’s note: Read part one of Neil V. Rosenberg’s Bluegrass Memoir on the Earl Scruggs Celebration of 1987 here. Read part two here.)

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Celebration (Part 1)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

I first heard the music of Etta Baker on a record in 1957. Not until thirty years later did I see her perform live, in the context of a bluegrass-oriented event, on September 26, 1987 at Gardner-Webb College’s Second Annual Earl Scruggs Music Celebration. 

Gardner-Webb (G-W) is in Boiling Springs, N.C., an hour’s drive south of Baker’s Morganton home and a few miles southwest of Shelby. Scruggs’ birthplace, Flint Hill, is close by.

In 1986 G-W awarded Scruggs an honorary doctorate. Ill health kept him from attending that Celebration, but his long-time friend John Hartford came and led a seminar about him and performed at a concert honoring him. UNC folklorists taped the proceedings. Their recordings are available online at UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection. 

After the success of the 1986 program a committee, chaired by G-W English professor Dr. Joyce Brown and including Shelby journalist and G-W grad Joe DePriest, began planning the 1987 celebration. They received assistance, a grant, from the Folklife Section of the N.C. Arts Council. 

In August, a headline appeared on the front page of the Shelby Star: “Scruggs Celebration to get return engagement at G-W.” An article by DePriest quoted Brown: “We hope to make this an annual event — the most significant bluegrass event in the country. This is the logical place to center a recognition of our musical heritage.” DePriest added: “The program is not limited to bluegrass but will also focus on pre-bluegrass string music along with Afro-American contributions.”

The article described an action-packed day of music, with a morning concert-workshop by Etta Baker; an appearance by Riverbend Grass, the band in which Earl’s brother Horace played guitar; an afternoon of performances by six bands with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and The Hired Hands opening; and afternoon workshops “on the history of bluegrass, its early radio days, and the Scruggs contributions.” In the evening was a concert by a popular new Nashville-based group, the Doug Dillard Band.

A scan of the first portions of the Earl Scruggs Celebration announcement from the Shelby ‘Star.’

By then Professor Brown had invited me to participate in the Celebration. My name and picture ran with DePriest’s article next to that of Jenkins, Sherrill, and The Hired Hands, who were slated to “head up the talent” of the Celebration. Touted as “an internationally known music scholar,” I was to conduct the workshop on bluegrass history with Jenkins and Sherrill.

I had never been to North Carolina, a formative location for the bluegrass business I began writing about in the ’60s. In 1974 the Country Music Foundation published my illustrated Bill Monroe discography, and in 1981 I began a regular column in Bluegrass Unlimited, “Thirty Years Ago This Month.” Since 1985, when my second book, Bluegrass: A History, was published, I’d been giving public lectures on bluegrass history.

My early bluegrass experience began in the late ’50s as a musician in the Midwest and northern California. Most of the history I wrote about came to me through research. I’d read Billboard from the early ’40s onward, eagerly followed the writing of people like Bill Vernon and Pete Kuykendall in fan magazines, and interviewed key figures.

I first heard of G-W in the early ’80s during one of those interviews. I asked Flatt & Scruggs manager Louise Scruggs when their first bluegrass college concert took place. She paused: “Gardner-Webb, maybe?” But she was tentative, particularly since she didn’t think it would be easy to document — she hadn’t started managing Lester and Earl until 1956. Not until my 1987 trip to Boiling Springs did I learn the full story of Flatt and Scruggs playing the first college bluegrass concert — I’ll say more about that later.

In 1976, when I wrote about my research on folk and country music in Canada’s Maritime provinces, I opened by saying “I attended many events, taking notes in my omnipresent 3 ½ x 5″ notebooks. As soon afterward as possible, a description of the event was written up in a diary-like journal.” Throughout my visit to Boiling Springs I had a notebook in my pocket. Soon after returning home I wrote a detailed diary of the six-day trip based on my notes. Direct quotes (in italics) follow.

Leaving Wednesday September 23rd, I was met at the Raleigh-Durham airport by Dan Patterson, head of UNC’s Folklore Curriculum. The next afternoon I gave a public lecture hosted by the Curriculum: “Reality and Revival in Bluegrass.” After my talk I was introduced to Tom Hanchett who, with his wife Carol Sawyer, was to drive me to Boiling Springs. We made plans for an early start the next day. Here’s what I wrote in my diary:

Tom Hanchett is in his late twenties, grew up in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and in upstate New York. Went to school at Cornell, was introduced to bluegrass by Country Cooking (Trischka, Wernick, etc.), and plays a bit of old-time fiddle. Had, until about five months ago, been working with the Charlotte (N.C.) Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission as a historian. He had organized “The Charlotte Country Music Story,” a series of concerts there which recognized the town as an early historic center for recording and broadcasting of country music. And he is now working on a Ph.D. in southern urban history at UNC. His wife, Carol Sawyer, is a curator in a Museum of Technological history.

Tom charted our trip from Chapel Hill, in the northeastern Piedmont, to Boiling Springs, in the southwest, with a route that reflected the interest in local history and historic preservation that made him a perfect guide for our trip. 

Tom had warned me beforehand that he was not an interstate man, so we followed a route that paralleled the old main railroad line (The Southern) that still runs from Washington to New Orleans.

Near Asheboro we stopped to visit Mac Whatley, mayor of Franklinville. He took us on a tour of this historic textile-mill region. I noted:

Whatley drove us out of town to the North and West, following Deep River, the source of textile mill power. We located the birthplace of Charlie Poole and looked at it from the road. There was a big “no trespassing, keep out” sign there.

We continued on toward Charlotte. 

Somewhere along here we were passed by a new Toyota 4-wheel drive pickup with a yellow and black bumper sticker that read “Ralph Stanley for President.”

>We were truly in bluegrass country, I thought. Stopping for lunch and errands in Charlotte, Tom pointed out the hotel where RCA Victor had recorded the Monroe Brothers and many others during the thirties.

We reached the Shelby Star office in the early afternoon and met Joe DePriest, who gave us a quick introduction to the local cultural landscape. A leisurely drive took us to the Cleveland County Historical Museum (lots of famous people there, mainly mill owners), the graveyard, and past the old Lily Mills building in the neighborhood where Earl Scruggs lived while working there. Heading south towards Boiling Springs, we drove past Flint Hill Church. Joe promised Horace would give us a tour of this neighborhood, where Earl grew up, later. 

At G-W, I met Dr. Brown, who showed me my room and filled me in on the evening’s itinerary. A group of us involved in tomorrow’s event would be getting acquainted over dinner at Kelly’s Steakhouse, just across the South Carolina line near Blacksburg. At 5:30 we all met outside G-W’s Dover Library to drive there. Here I met Horace Scruggs and his wife Maida. I wrote in my diary:

Earl’s older brother Horace turned out to be a very friendly and easy-going person, not as shy and quiet as Earl, though with (not surprisingly) a very similar voice and accent. His wife, Maida (pronounced May-Ida), is also very friendly. Horace is retired, he worked as a maintenance man for Gardner-Webb and later for the city of Boiling Springs. He is on the Earl Scruggs celebration committee.  

Joe and I rode with the Scruggses that night. We both asked questions. I made notes during our drive and dinner. I began by mentioning that Louise had told me Flatt & Scruggs had once played at G-W.

I asked about that and Horace said, yes, they did, that he thought it was when they were working out of Bristol (May 1948 to March 1949, according to my calculations), around 1950. It was a spur of the moment thing, in midweek, and there was not much advertising and not a full house. The crowd was a mixture of townspeople and local students. 

Over dinner I asked him a bit about his own musical career.  

… he didn’t try music because he didn’t think he could make a living at it. He married in 1941 and went into the army soon after that. His father played clawhammer banjo, and he remembers being awakened in the morning by the sound of his father’s banjo. His father would build a fire in the stove and then play the banjo. Earl and Horace would come in and sit on his knees while he played.

He told me about running the farm after his father died in 1930:

They grew cotton — a crop was 3 bales a year, which they sold at 36 cents a pound (bale is 500 lbs, so that works out to $540.00 a year). They grew corn for feed and meal. Had a mule and a buggy which was originally rubber tired but eventually they ran it on the rims.

He was Earl’s first guitar accompanist, so I asked him if people thought Earl was special as a musician back then.

He said yes, they did, people would come by the house to hear him pick, etc. And when he was still quite young, they entered a banjo contest and Earl beat Snuffy Jenkins. Of course, as Horace was quick to point out, part of this had to do with his age, the youngsters have an advantage in those contests where audience applause decides the issue.

Earl and his mother moved into Shelby when Horace went into the Army, and Earl went to work at Lily Mills. 

Earl had been turned down for the draft because he had a nervous stomach. He worked long hours for the mill but later on in the war he would take time off to play music at various places, and, as Horace recalls, was repeatedly lectured by his boss for wasting his time playing the banjo when he should be working to better himself at the mill. His mother was, Horace said, not happy either about Earl’s musical career and just as he was dropping us off at the Library, he told us that his mother had made a prediction which came true that he, Horace, had never told Earl: she said when he left to play professionally that “when I die, he won’t be able to come to my funeral.” And this happened — Earl and Louise were in an accident rushing to her bedside, she died while they were in hospital recovering.

After dinner Horace spoke of Earl’s adventures on the road:

He told me that Earl roomed with Uncle Dave Macon when he traveled to shows with Monroe and the band, and that Uncle Dave always carried with him an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel in which he kept one of his own country hams. He slept on it, used it as a pillow. And he would take it into restaurants, have it sliced and fried for him. 

Talk turned to local foodways and Maida and Horace told us about livermush.

This local delicacy consists of hog’s liver and lean hog meat ground and fried, with corn meal, salt and pepper added to taste (some people add a lot of pepper, the seasoning is very personalized); left to harden, it is then sliced and fried. They said Earl eats it, and other natives crave it. It’s found on a north/south line from Blacksburg north to the Virginia border. One native son who now lives in Oregon has a special metal suitcase which he fills with frozen livermush and flies it home with him on yearly visits. It is served at the Snack Shop in Boiling Springs, which is where Earl and Lester and the boys used to stop for meals when travelling though this neck of the woods. Joe remembers seeing the bus there when he was a student, it was no big deal at the time.

As I walked home with Tom and Carol after dinner I proposed that we go for breakfast in the morning to the Snack Shop and see about getting livermush.

They thought I was overenthusiastic I think but they agreed to go.

I had a busy day ahead — went to bed early.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg