Tag: foggy mountain boys

Bluegrass Memoirs: New Twists & Scruggs Pegs Take Off

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In December 1953, Decca released “Plunkin’ Rag” by the Shenandoah Valley Boys. It was the first recording by a banjoist other than Earl Scruggs to use Scruggs pegs: Hubert Davis. 

Born in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1932, Davis grew up in a musical family. He was already playing the banjo when, at the age of ten, his older brother, fiddler Pee Wee, brought Earl Scruggs, a co-worker from Lilly Mills, into the family home for some music. Earl had just moved to town to work at the factory. He was boarding with another Lilly Mills employee, Grady Wilkie. In Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic author Thomas Goldsmith tells how Earl’s mother prevailed on her friend Wilkie to help Earl get a job at the mill. Wilkie, a guitarist, and Earl stowed their instruments in the car when they drove to work. In a 1977 interview, Hubert Davis told Bruce Nemerov that Pee Wee, Grady, and Earl: 

…worked on the second shift. They would catch up about supper time and they’d run out to the car and get their music out and run in to the packing house. They’d play for thirty minutes or an hour and go back to work. Swaller their food whole to get more time for pickin’. And I was there, son, at suppertime every evening. I was sitting there against the wall listenin’. 

By the time Hubert was fourteen (1946), he was studying Earl’s playing with Monroe on the Opry. Occasionally Earl came home, visited the Davises, and gave Hubert a banjo tutorial: “he’d show me the parts I didn’t have right.” 

At fifteen Hubert began playing professionally. By 1951 he was working for Virginian Jim Eanes. In 1948 Eanes had been an original member of Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, but was quickly hired away by Monroe. Bluegrass historian Jack Tottle tells what happened after Eanes joined Bill at the Opry: 

His full baritone-range voice turned out to be incompatible with Monroe’s mountain tenor for duet singing. To Jim’s frustration, no matter how high he sang, it was still too low for Monroe’s high vocal harmony. 

Eanes subsequently developed a career as a mellow country singer with a bluegrass band, recording for a small North Carolina label, Blue Ridge. Soon after Hubert joined him Jim had a hit with “Missing in Action,” a Korean war-themed country song. Ernest Tubb’s major-label cover on Decca was also a hit, giving Jim an opportunity to sign with Decca. 

Eanes began recording in Nashville in 1952 with producers Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley. In October 1953, after several country-sound sessions using studio musicians, Eanes returned to record with two members of his bluegrass band, the Shenandoah Valley Boys: Hubert Davis and Bobby Hicks. 

They made two banjo instrumentals: “Ridin’ the Waves” and “Plunkin’ Rag.” These were issued on a 78, credited not to Eanes but simply to The Shenandoah Valley Boys. In “Plunkin’ Rag” Davis used both Scruggs pegs to create the melody. Chet Atkins, playing backup guitar, is heard playing responsorial licks to the melody in its peg sections, and Bobby Hicks — this was his first recording session — contributes fiddle breaks. 

“Plunkin’ Rag” was released in December. By that time Davis had left Eanes, who then advertised over the air for a banjo player. A lanky teenager named Allen Shelton got the job. At the start, Eanes said, “he could only play one tune, but he would play all the time.” An enthusiastic learner, Shelton was a fan of Davis: “he was second to Scruggs as I ever heard it.” 

When the time came for Eanes’ next Decca session in Nashville, on March 2, 1954, Davis had rejoined the band. At this point, probably in February, as Davis recalled, he and Shelton met. Both later spoke of sitting up all night in a hotel room working on “some licks Scruggs was playing.” 

It’s certain that one of the two banjos in that hotel room had Scruggs pegs. Some of the licks they were working on must have involved the pegs, for Davis came to Eanes’ session with two instrumentals that used them: “Cotton Picker’s Stomp” and “There’s No Place Like Home.” 

“There’s No Place Like Home” was the title Decca gave to Davis’s version of “Home Sweet Home.” As with “Plunkin’ Rag,” Davis used the pegs to play the melody. But this was not a new composition, but a very old song, dating back to 1823. The novelty here, its hook, was the idea of using Scruggs pegs to play a familiar melody.

A few months later another banjo picker made a recording using Scruggs pegs. Haskel McCormick was the 16-year-old banjo picker on “Banjo Twist” by the McCormick brothers of Westmoreland, Tennessee. The track was on their first single, released in August 1954 by Hickory Records, Roy Acuff’s new Nashville label. McCormick, who would go on fill in for the hospitalized Earl with Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys a few times in 1956, incorporated portions of the hooks from both of Scruggs’ hits, in this, the first of three pieces he recorded that used the pegs. Here’s a brief bio of McCormick by NCTV, which opens with “Banjo Twist:”

Columbia recognized the popularity of Scruggs’ instrumentals that fall by reissuing four of them, including all three Scruggs peg-hook tunes, in their “Hall of Fame” series. While young banjo pickers like McCormick were writing new tunes with his pegs, Earl now took another direction, using one of them in his breaks for Lester’s song, “Till the End of the World Rolls Around.” Columbia released it in December 1954. 

By then Allen Shelton, now in the Raleigh-based band of Hack Johnson and his Tennesseans, had elaborated on the idea of playing “Home Sweet Home” with Scruggs pegs. Early in 1955 Shelton recorded a version of “Home Sweet Home” with Johnson that included a vocal trio on the chorus. Their Colonial single was a regional hit. 

This prompted Reno & Smiley, who recorded for King (a widely distributed independent label) to make a cover. Reno, traveling through North Carolina, heard the Johnson single and called King owner Syd Nathan to tell him about it. Nathan ordered him to get their band into the studio right away and record it. He couldn’t get in touch with his band members… 

…so I went to the studio in Charlotte and cut it by myself. I dubbed in three vocal parts and banjo, guitar, and bass. It took me most of the night and I don’t want to cut any more like that! 

The recording was a bigger hit than Johnson’s, and helped Reno & Smiley, one of the most influential early bluegrass bands — but until that point solely a recording act — launch their touring career.

Although Hubert Davis was first to record “Home Sweet Home” (as “There’s No Place Like Home”) with the pegs, it and the other instrumental he recorded with Jim Eanes didn’t get released until June 1955, after the Reno & Smiley version. By then, Shelton and Johnson had released “Swanee River,” another old familiar song with the same juxtaposition of pegs and vocal trio. Another similar piece, “Old Kentucky Home,” appeared soon after under a new band name. Hack Johnson was gone; now, with the same sound on the same label, they were The Farmhands. 

In the fall of 1955, Earl Scruggs recorded his fourth and last instrumental with a peg hook. In it he reset his peg for the second-string so that it moved up to C from B. His hook riff went through two chords instead of one. “Randy Lynn Rag,” celebrating the birth of his son, was released in February 1956. 

By now the idea of using the pegs to play old familiar pieces had caught on. Early in 1956 Sonny Osborne recorded four tunes using the pegs for Gateway, the Cincinnati label he’d been with since 1952: “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane,” “Jesse James,” “Swanee River,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” Accompanying him in the studio were Red Allen, guitar; Bobby Osborne, mandolin and fiddle; Art Stamper, fiddle; and Les Bodine, bass. These were the last recordings made under Sonny’s name, done just a few months before the first MGM sessions by the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen.

In May Columbia released Flatt & Scruggs’ new gospel single. Earl used the pegs to play his part of the melody in the breaks to the quartet “Joy Bells.” 

It was getting radio play that summer when a letter came to Mike Seeger from Moe Asch, owner of New York’s Folkways Records, asking him “to produce an LP of Scruggs-style banjo playing.” Seeger was certain his older half-brother, Folkways star and folk banjo guru Pete Seeger, “was the reason that Moe wrote me.” 

Living in the Washington-Baltimore area, Mike Seeger had been taping bluegrass shows at local country music parks. “Most bluegrass players were establishing new songs and sounds and so didn’t record the old-time tunes that they played on shows,” he said. Seeger wanted to demonstrate “the connection of the new style to the older music” so he focused on the old-time repertoire for the album. 

He started recording that fall of 1956, with the help of local bluegrass musician and collector Pete Kuykendall. They began after a Monroe show at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, where Blue Grass Boy Joe Stuart lingered backstage to play his banjo setting of an old-time fiddle tune for Seeger’s portable tape recorder. Subsequently, eight other DC region banjoists, most of them young, were recorded. A trip south captured pioneers from western North Carolina, including Earl’s older brother Junie. Earl was not on the album. Finally, one picker from New York City’s Washington Square bluegrass scene was recorded. 

Seeger’s friend Ralph Rinzler, living in New York at the time, wrote the album notes. Here for the first time the word “bluegrass” was used in print to describe and explain the music. American Banjo Three-Finger and Scruggs Style, the first bluegrass LP, had a total of 31 tracks by fifteen banjoists. Scruggs pegs are heard on two cuts. 

On side B, band 3, Smiley Hobbs, a North Carolinian virtuoso living in northern Virginia, used the pegs to play the melody of the old folksong “Rosewood Casket” in a vocal-instrumental combination similar to Shelton’s.

The very last track on side B featured the Washington Square picker, seventeen-year-old New Yorker Eric Weissberg. Backed by Seeger on guitar and Rinzler on mandolin, he played a two-song medley, combining the tunes of the traditional ballad “Jesse James” and folk revival star Woody Guthrie’s popular composition “Hard Ain’t It Hard.” He used the pegs on the latter piece, which the Weavers, the most popular folk revival group at the time, had recently popularized. Weissberg’s mix of traditional and folk revival repertoire was a harbinger. 

In the next Bluegrass Memoir, more on Eric Weissberg.

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

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

Traditionally Speaking: Shawn Camp in Conversation with Trey Hensley

Posted on by Editor

“We’re probably just blocks from each other in Nashville,” Shawn Camp tells Trey Hensley once they’ve both joined the conference call line. We can hear the faint sounds of Camp going about his morning routine, rustling around in a kitchen cabinet, and pouring himself a cup of coffee.

Hensley gently corrects the assumption: “I’m actually out in L.A. today. We’re playing tonight at a festival. So I’m just getting around this morning, too.”

Even from halfway across the country, the two pickers, singers, and songwriters share close proximity in their musical backgrounds. Camp, the older and more decorated of the two, and Hensley, the promising 20-something, were youthful devotees of some of the same old country and bluegrass records, and their listening provoked the same response: the urge to pick up an instrument and learn the stuff. Having a firm yet flexible grasp on tradition readied them for the variety of musical situations they've found themselves in since — including Camp's Flatt & Scruggs-conjuring supergroup the Earls of Leicester and Hensley's wide-ranging roots duo with dobro master Rob Ickes, both of which have recorded new albums.

On the phone, it takes no time at all for Hensley and Camp to start trading mutual admiration with the modesty of a couple of small-town Southern boys.

You each currently count one of the world’s leading dobro players as a band mate. I’m, of course, talking about Jerry Douglas in the Earls of Leicester and Trey’s duo partner, Rob Ickes. And those two guys have even made all-dobro albums together. Is this is first time your paths have really crossed?

Shawn Camp: I met you at the Station Inn, Trey. Rob sent out an invitation when you guys played over there for the first time, and that’s the first time I ever heard you. Evidently, you’ve been around a lot longer than that. You’re really a talent. Man, I was blown away by your pickin’ and your singin’.

Trey Hensley: Aw, shoot. I sure appreciate it. I remember the night meeting you out there. I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.

SC: Are you on tour out there with Rob?

TH: Yeah, we’re playing a few gigs out here in California this weekend.

SC: Well, hey I wanted to ask you, did you write “My Way Is the Highway”?

TH: Yeah, I sure did.

SC: Good song, man.

TH: Thanks. I appreciate that very much. I’ve not written a whole lot, but I’m trying.

SC: Did you write it by yourself?

TH: Yeah, I sure did. I wrote it several years ago and just kind of threw it out there to Rob one day.

When you were both young and green, you got a taste of what it was like to be welcomed into the lineage of bluegrass tradition by first generation bluegrassers. Trey, you were just a kid when Marty Stuart brought you on the Opry to do a Flatt & Scruggs number, and Earl Scruggs showed up . There’s YouTube evidence of that. And Shawn, you originally came to Nashville for a sideman gig with the Osborne Brothers. I was unable to find YouTube evidence of you playing with them, but I don’t doubt that it’s true.

SC: There’s probably some evidence out there floatin’ around. We played on a Hee Haw episode, and I think we did a few little TV shows when I was with ‘em. I was only with ‘em about six months. I was just a green cushion fiddler between Blaine Sprouse and Glen Duncan, who they wanted when they hired me, I think. I was 20 years old when I moved to town from Arkansas. They heard me out on the road. I was working with a band called Signal Mountain, a bluegrass band out of McAlester, Oklahoma. They saw me playing and wanted me to join them for a while. So that’s how I kinda got my foot in the door in Nashville.

What did receiving that little bit of approval from first-gen legends do for you?

SC: It was an amazing little trip. I’d been growing up listening to their Decca records from the early ‘60s that my dad had. They were of the caliber of Merle Haggard or somebody, at the time. In my mind, they were at that level. So, for just a green kid dropped in the middle of ‘em, all the sudden I’m in overdrive and we’re flying down the interstate. It was exciting for me.

Since you brought up Merle Haggard … Trey, when you were a kid playing around East Tennessee, you went from playing bluegrass to playing Haggard songs with string band instrumentation to plugging in your Tele. You kept shifting in style and material. What did you learn about blending different strains of tradition?

TH: Everything that I was doing was reflective of what I was listening to. The first records I took my own money and bought were Flatt & Scruggs at Carnegie Hall! and Flatt & Scruggs did the Songs of the Famous Carter Family. For the first probably four or five years that I played music, that was mainly what I did — traditional bluegrass music. And yeah, I had the opportunity to play with Marty and Earl and do a song off of the Carter Family album on the Opry not long after I got started. I drew influence from Flatt & Scruggs at the end [of their partnership], which was not one of their most popular eras. They were doing Dylan stuff and everything else. So there was always the influence of kind of breaking out [of the traditional mold].

But there are these definitive moments, like a Merle Haggard record — I kinda knew that that’s what I wanted to do, at that point. So I started doing more country stuff. And then I got the Buck Owens record Carnegie Hall Concert and, that first guitar solo on “Act Naturally,” as soon as I heard that, I went out and bought a Tele and started working on that. When I was playing around where I grew up, a lot of people had grown accustomed to hearing a bluegrass band. It was never like I was doing anything totally different, but going from acoustic to electric did kinda jar a few people’s musical taste. I guess 2008, that’s when I started playing more electric stuff and opened up for Charlie Daniels. I liked doing electric stuff, but I like doing the acoustic stuff maybe a little more.

Shawn, you were talking about your earliest years in Nashville. You’ve ranged far and wide since then in your songwriting and performing careers, from a rockabilly bluegrass duo to the roots supergroup World Famous Headliners and the Earls of Leicester. What was appealing to you about the idea of reviving the Flatt & Scruggs repertoire with this band?

SC: It just had always been in my soul, really. I listened to [Flatt & Scruggs] Live at Carnegie Hall!, too, and had several other Flatt & Scruggs records when I was a kid. I grew up with bluegrass. I just loved Flatt & Scruggs, and it just seemed like it would be a fit. Jerry Douglas called me, and he’d been doing some stuff with Johnny Warren and Charlie Cushman, making banjo and fiddle records with them. He said they were doing a Flatt & Scruggs band and wanted to know if I wanted to be Lester. And I said [goes into his lazily drawling Lester Flatt imitation], “Well, ah, absolutely.”

[Laughter]

SC: So I did. I jumped in there. It’s been fun.

You have a distinct vocal sound. People can easily recognize Shawn Camp’s voice. So what does it require of you to play Lester Flatt?

SC: I just to try to bend the notes the way he did. It kinda adds to the sound. The whole band kinda works off of that tension of those notes being bent. I try to get the phrasing as close to the way that Lester did as possible, but I’m never gonna sound exactly like him. I’d love to, for this show, but it’s never gonna happen. But everybody’s trying their best to fill the shoes of the man that was in the Foggy Mountain Boys, so if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be doing my part, I don’t think.

I’ve seen you perform in a lot of different kinds of contexts, but I don’t think I’d ever seen you more dressed up than when I caught an Earls show at the Ryman. Was that part of it a hard sell for you? Why is the look essential to doing this stuff?

SC: Actually, I’m probably the one that kept at everybody, saying, “You know, if we’re gonna do this, we’ve gotta look the part.” You can’t do it without the ties. You can’t do it without, at least, the suit. Flatt & Scruggs wore suit jackets. It looked like a good uniform. There was just a little bit of legitimacy to ‘em, you know?

About 25 years ago, I bought an old string tie — a Colonel Sanders tie — at a junk store, still in the package. It had rhinestones on it. When I bought it, I thought, “Man, one of these days, maybe I’ll be in a band that I can actually wear this old thing.” So last year at IBMA, when we were up for several awards, I took that thing out of the package for the first time.

Trey, in your duo with Rob, there’s no set stage wear, although I did notice that the cover of your first album depicted you in a rootsy, rural scene, both of you leaning up against a rusty old truck.

TH: [Chuckles] Yeah, it kinda varies. But I love what you guys are doing, Shawn, from the look on down. It’s awesome.

SC: Well thank you, man. It’s easy to do it when everybody’s playing the part. If one spoke fell out of the wheel, we’d be in trouble.

Trey, you’d been a solo front man leading your own band for years. For just the past couple of years, you’ve been paired with a world-renowned musician. I imagine that, on some of the first tour dates you played with Rob, he was the draw and you were the unknown quantity. Is that pretty much what it felt like?

TH: Oh yeah, absolutely. My wife and I had talked about moving to Nashville for a few years. She was looking at some jobs in Nashville. Right after I’d recorded on the Blue Highway album, I had this conversation with Rob. … Rob called me up and was very nice, complimenting what I was doing and said if I ever wanted to move to Nashville and pick some, that would be great. So that just kinda gave me enough courage. It’s still cool to go to the gigs. There’s people there that know Rob, and it’s nice to play in front of fresh ears.

Shawn, you’ve been most consistently recognized for your songwriting, since you’ve had such success in that arena. What does a celebrated songwriter bring to material that’s much older than him, to songs like “The Train That Carried My Girl from Town,” “Just Ain’t,” and “I’m Working on a Road”?

SC: All I know is, it’s a nice thing to do, for me, as far as I don’t feel the pressure of doing my material. I think the ego kind of disappears, to a degree, within the band. It’s like everybody’s just trying to do something somebody else did the best that they can do. It’s just more fun. It takes a little bit of the alpha dog pressure off of your shoulders. You don’t have to lead the pack so much as just try to be a part of the thing.

A lot of times, when everything’s hinging on the words that you’ve come up with, the show is all leaning on that. You kinda feel like you’re an old rooster on a chopping block: You’re about to get it. You never know if it’s gonna work or not, so you’re kind of vulnerable.

These songs, this material, it’s been tried and true, and you can feel the power of those old songs. It’s a departure from the same old, same old that I’ve had to do here in Nashville. But I’m not done doing that. I want to come back to it and make a regular record soon.

Trey, you and Rob aren’t performing an established canon. You’re casting a fairly broad net with the material you’re assembling alongside your originals. On The Country Blues, you cover Elton John, Ray Charles, and Sonny Boy Williamson along with Merle Haggard and Charlie Daniels. What appeals to you about reuniting these parallel, rooted traditions of country, blues, and R&B?

TH: Even though there’s a lot of different material on the record, I don’t really feel like any of it feels misplaced or anything. When we’re picking songs, even just for a jam session, it all kinda fits — and, if it doesn’t fit, we can recognize that pretty quick. That Elton John song is from Tumbleweed Connection, which has always been one of my favorite records. I kinda threw it out there one day when we were picking, and it pretty much fell into place the way we recorded it.

I’m a big fan of so many different kinds of music. And a lot of the songs, even though they’re by well-known people, it’s kind of important to go on the more obscure side of things. If we’re doing an Elton John song, we sure don’t want to cover “Rocket Man.” Well, there are a few exceptions. We did “Friend of the Devil,” the Grateful Dead song, which is pretty popular, but there’s a totally different spin on it.

SC: You guys sound like a band. I mean, just the two of y’all playing together, it sounds like a band. You guys are so tight. And Rob’s playing these harmony notes against you. It’s a really full sound. I wanna just tell you that. I know you know that, but I want you to know that I know that. You know what I mean?

TH: [Laughs] I sure appreciate that. That is very nice of you to say. This record’s primarily a band, but playing in this duo thing, it’s kinda fun to jump on the bass part or to be able to play something that sounds like a drum, just fill it up the best that we can.

The new album feels very contemporary and jammy, like you were experimenting with guitar tones and effects. Is that what the recording process was like?

TH: Yeah, that’s exactly how it was. We did three or four takes of each song and, for the most part, there would be a whole take that we’d use on the record, but there might be a guitar part from a different take thrown in. We all played something different each time, because there was really no written script. We went in with no charts, no anything — just four main guys, and we had a couple different fiddle players and Ron Block played banjo on a tune. I think that came across: that we were just playing music. Although we were working on an album, it didn’t come across like we were working on an album. We were just kinda having fun.

I think it could work at a jam band festival.

TH: I’m a big Grateful Dead fan. A lot of the jam stuff from my angle comes from that. It was just us kinda jamming on what we like.

Shawn, I’ve seen the Earls circle up around one mic to perform live, like the Foggy Mountain Boys did. How does your approach to recording compare to what they did? Are you using vintage gear and production techniques?

SC: We’re recording just about the same — exactly as they would’ve done it. We’re using old Neumann mics from the ‘40s. On this new album, we used an RCA 77, which once was Earl Scruggs’ banjo mic, that I bought last year. We’re using old, vintage equipment. We kinda cut in a line with the mics kinda set up the same as we work ‘em on stage. The guys on the outside of the line may have, at times, used headphones, but mostly we’re not using headphones. We wanna hear each other naturally around the mics. And there are no overdubs. We didn’t fix anything. So if you hear anything on that record, that’s just the way we played it. It’s not, like, Pro Tools edits and stuff like that going on.

Shawn, you’re a couple of decades further down the musical path than Trey is. Got any good advice for him? Or any bad advice?

SC: I really don’t know what to tell anybody these days. I know the music business has gotten really weird in Nashville. I know that nobody’s making much money. Somebody ran up to Roger Miller one time in an airport and said, “Hey, you got any advice for an up-and-coming songwriter in Nashville?” He said, “Yeah. Keep your change in one pocket and your pills in the other, because I just took my last 37 cents.”

[Laughter]

SC: That was probably good advice. I think Trey just needs to keep doing what he’s doing. You’re doing great, brother. I’m glad you’re doing it. I’d love to hear y’all over the radio every time I turn it on. You’ve got a great voice, reminiscent of Keith Whitley or somebody. I’d love to hear more of it. Love your songwriting, too. Just keep up the good work. That would be my advice.

TH: Man, I sure appreciate it. I’m looking forward to hearing y’all’s new record. The first one, it’s been in my truck since it came out. So I’ll have to head down to the store and pick up the new one, as soon as it comes out.

SC: Let me know when you’re ready to visit one of these days here in Nashville, and we’ll see if we can’t come up with a song together.

Illustration by Abby McMillen. Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley photo by Stacie Huckeba. The Earls of Leicester photo by Anthony Scarlati.