It’s fitting that the track list for Dirt Does Dylan, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s new Bob Dylan tribute album, includes “Forever Young.” Coming up on six decades since they formed as a group of young folk enthusiasts, the Dirt Band still sounds plenty spry. Revisiting the songs of Dylan, an artist who is very much part of their collective DNA, was an opportunity for the Dirt Band to reconnect with their own roots — especially the loose-limbed rundown of “Country Pie,” the penultimate track on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album from 1969.
“We started out as a jug band in 1966, and the approach to that one was very much like that, kind of warts and all,” says Dirt Band frontman and co-founder Jeff Hanna. “We didn’t have a washboard or a jug, but Jimmy Fadden was playing a tape box with brushes and had on a harmonica rack. We were all gathered around a Telefunken mike from 1947, and Bob Carpenter started everybody whistling, too. Pretty cool, like we’re a Dixieland jug band. People like to dissect Dylan, but I’m pretty sure ‘Country Pie’ is just about pie.”
Somehow it’s been 13 years since the Dirt Band’s prior studio album, 2009’s Speed of Life. Dirt Does Dylan makes around 30 albums they’ve released over the years, and it’s the first to feature their current lineup. Along with long-timers Hanna, drummer/harmonica player Jimmie Fadden and keyboardist Bob Carpenter, the 2022 edition of the Dirt Band features bassist Jim Photoglo, fiddler/mandolinist Ross Holmes and Jeff’s son Jaime Hanna as singer/guitarist. Prior to the Dirt Band, Jaime was a sometime member of The Mavericks while also playing in the duo Hanna-McEuen with Jonathan McEuen, son of Dirt Band co-founder John McEuen.
“My brother and I used to sing Dirt Band songs along with the records, and with our dad,” says Jaime Hanna. “All very informal. I didn’t really start singing seriously until after moving to Nashville when I was 19. So my dad and I have sang together for 30 years and we know how to sing with each other since we’re, you know, related.”
“Blood harmony, as they say in bluegrass,” adds Jeff.
Early on, Jackson Browne was in the Dirt Band’s initial 1966 six-man lineup before departing for solo stardom, but the Dirt Band actually had a hit before he did. Released in 1967, “Buy for Me the Rain” just missed cracking the Top 40 of the Billboard singles charts. Continuing forward, the Dirt Band evolved beyond its jug-band roots to the country rock then blossoming in California alongside the Flying Burrito Brothers and Byrds — whose 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo would be formative for generations of artists.
“Sweetheart had a huge impact on everybody, including us,” says Jeff. “So did Buffalo Springfield, and The Lovin’ Spoonful on the East Coast. Our band was right on the cusp of awkwardly transitioning from acoustic jug band to the California country-rock band that made the Uncle Charlie album in 1970, when we put our own spin on it.”
Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy yielded the Dirt Band’s biggest-ever hit, a definitive cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” which cracked the Top 10 in early 1971. They would come close to matching that a decade later with hits including “An American Dream” and “Make a Little Magic,” a period when they were on the pop charts a lot more often than the country charts.
But over the long haul, country music was where they wound up after the pop hits faded, in part because those roots were so strong. The Dirt Band’s country roots were certainly at the center of their signature album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which was released 50 years ago. Featuring a cast of country, folk and bluegrass legends — Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Carter and Merle Travis among them — Circle was an intergenerational summit that stands alongside Sweetheart as signpost for what came to be Americana music.
“The impact of Sweetheart was a mind-altering gateway for expanding boundaries in acoustic music, and it took us to Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” says Jeff. “That impact turned out to be profound. The festival scene was just starting to broaden. Everybody in the bluegrass world had to keep things traditional. But Circle helped keep open the door that John Hartford, Newgrass Revival and Earl Scruggs Revue had cracked open. It’s humbling to have been part of that.”
One of the most notable aspects of the first Circle album (there have been two sequels) was the between-song interludes of dialogue. Dirt Band manager/producer Bill McEuen kept tape recorders running non-stop during the sessions, capturing priceless spoken-word bits from Carter, Watson, Acuff and others. It made for a complicated and time-consuming editing process at the back end, and was the major reason that more than a year elapsed between the time Circle was recorded and then finally released. But it was worth the wait.
“We were still out there touring for Uncle Charlie and we kept asking when it was coming out,” Jeff says. “Bill would say, ‘Trust me.’ And he did a masterful job editing and assembling all of it. We had no idea what a treasure trove of oral history would come out of that. Just to hear Mother Maybelle, Doc and Earl and Merle Travis and Jimmy Martin talk was remarkable. When Bill finally played it for us, it blew our minds. Then he had to convince the record company that this very expensive three-record package would be viable in the market. It retailed for 12 bucks, a lot of dough in 1972. But…it worked out.”
As designed by Dean Torrence, the Dirt Band’s regular album-cover designer (and also the “Dean” in the rock duo Jan & Dean, of “Dead Man’s Curve” fame), Will the Circle Be Unbroken also had a symbol that would probably not pass muster today. It looks like the cover of a photo-album scrapbook about the Civil War, with a portrait of the obscure Union Admiral David Porter flanked by two sets of flags — American to the right, Confederate to the left.
“There was a metaphor there, about hippies versus rednecks in 1971,” says Jeff. “Now that’s a horrible way to describe our friends from the South. But we were longhairs from California, and none of us grew up playing this music on back porches in Appalachia. So here we were coming to Nashville to record with a lot of folks that appeared to be pretty conservative, although we never talked politics. But there was definitely a cultural and generation gap with the Vietnam War raging, protests in the streets. It was quite a time. And for that time, those flags seemed like an innocent metaphor.”
Artist:The Isaacs Hometown: Hendersonville, Tennessee Song: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Album:The American Face Release Date: August 13, 2021 Label: House of Isaacs
In Their Words: “When selecting cover songs for our project, The American Face, one of my first suggestions was the song ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ Growing up in New York City in the ’60s, I was a big folk music fan. I had a folk album out on Columbia Records in 1968, so I followed so much of that scene. The song was taken from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and seemed like such an appropriate song for nowadays. It was written by Pete Seeger in 1959 and released in 1965 by the Byrds. Once my family and I listened to the song, we just knew we had to record it. We wanted to do the song with The Isaacs feel to it. So, we tried to build the song with harmonies throughout the lyrics. It certainly brought back so many memories to me personally… living through the music era in the ’60s, which was such a turning point in history. An exciting time in many ways.” — Lily Isaacs
When a guy about to turn 80 sings that line, you take note. When that guy is David Crosby, who in fact turns that age on August 14… well…
“I don’t know if I would have sung it at any other time in my life,” Crosby says in a Zoom chat from his home north of Santa Barbara, California, where he lives with Jan Dance, his wife of 34 years.
But sing it he does, in the song “I Think I,” a highlight of his new album, For Free. With this, his fifth album in seven years (after just three solo albums in the earlier part of his career), he comes to his 80th in a remarkable creative run. It’s a strong collection featuring the fruits of several creative collaborations, mostly with his son, James Raymond. Among the guests are Michael McDonald on the shining opener “River Rise,” Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on the jazzy, dark “Rodriguez For a Night” and Sarah Jarosz, with whom he duets on a gorgeously spare version of the Joni Mitchell song that gives the album its title.
It’s that line from “I Think I,” though, that speaks most profoundly to the state of his life. If you know much about that life, you understand. And you might greet those words with a sigh of relief. He certainly does.
“I do feel happy now,” he says. “The thing I love about the song the most is that it’s up. It’s, you know, happy sounding. Normally I record tortured ballads that go on for days. ‘The dog died’ or ‘my truck broke down.’ This is up and happy and positive and it just captures that mood that’s around. That’s a blessing for me. That’s a great thing.”
The life leading to this moment has been well-documented and much discussed. Most significantly, Crosby created some of the most bracing, beloved, and enduring American music of the past 60 years, first as a founding member of folk-rock pioneers the Byrds and then in the various partnerships with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and/or Neil Young. Along with the essential, indelible songs CSN(&Y) gave us, there was much discord and discontent and it finally blew up, apparently for good, in 2014, sparked in part by some unfortunate remarks Crosby made regarding Young’s personal life. And Crosby’s history is marked by his years of drug addiction and a consequent prison term and liver transplant — and, thankfully, recovery. This was all covered in Remember My Name, the unflinching 2019 documentary that brought him to some painfully heartfelt reckonings.
For better or worse, Crosby’s legacy is tangled up with groups and partnerships. Asked to untangle it, he turns thoughtful.
“A lot of the musical complexity and strangeness comes from me loving jazz and world music,” he says. “I mean, I like a lot of different kinds of music, man. I like bluegrass. I like blues. I like classical music. And that has influenced me very strongly. Particularly jazz, and particularly jazz keyboard players, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, people like that. They have had a very strong influence because they played those real dense, big tone, cluster kinds of chords. And I couldn’t do them in regular tuning on the guitar. That’s what made me start re-tuning the guitar into other shapes so that I could get those kind of chords. So the jazz thing really did stack me up differently.”
That influence has been a constant facet, all the way back to the Byrds (“Everybody’s Been Burned” is almost a template for the folk-jazz explorations Tim Buckley would make) and CSN (“Guinnevere,” with its floating harmonics, was covered by both Miles Davis and jazz flute player Herbie Mann).
These days Crosby is not focused on the past, although with last year’s 50th anniversary of the CSN&Y album Déjà Vu and the expanded deluxe reissue, he’s had to do more of that than he’d like.
“I always prefer when it comes to talking about me, I like it to be somebody else doing the talking,” he says.
He’s not focused on the future, either. He says that he likely won’t tour again and with tendonitis in both hands, he expects he won’t be able to play guitar anymore within a year — a great shame as his guitar playing, with its intricate jazz voicings and inventive tunings, is as stunning as his singing, if not as widely recognized.
He’s certainly not looking forward to his birthday.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” he insists. “Birthdays are not happy when you get old. No, no, no, no, no, no! We don’t celebrate. We mourn those.”
Yet he’s utterly bubbly celebrating the new album, as well as the four leading up to it, by far his most prolific stretch in terms of making and releasing his own music. It’s not often that we can say that about someone’s 70s, let alone someone with such a vaunted career packed with songs and albums cherished dearly by millions.
“Isn’t that weird?” he says. “It’s just completely bass-ackwards. But there you go.”
To what does he attribute this?
“I got out of CSN,” he says, never one to mince words. “It was, obviously, a wonderful band and we did a lot of really great stuff. But when it when sour, it went really sour. And it went sour very fast.”
It was rough, but the silver lining shines brightly.
“I don’t make anywhere near as much money,” he says. “But I’m making good music. And that’s kind of what they put me here to do, I think.”
Cue the title song, Mitchell’s loving portrait of a street musician playing for the pure joy of it. This is the third straight Crosby album to include a Mitchell song, following “Amelia” on 2017’s Sky Trails and “Woodstock” closing 2018’s Here If You Listen. Crosby, who was an early champion (and romantic partner) of Mitchell’s, producing her debut album, Song to a Seagull, sang “For Free” on the Byrds’ 1973 reunion album. Now, though, it has a deeper resonance, reconnecting to the essence of music-making. Rather than an observer, he’s the guy in the song.
“Yep,” he says. “There I am standing on the corner. It’s squarely, smack dab in the middle of who I wanted to be, as me. I love what it says. Putting it on as the title track is also taking a little dig at the streamers. Because it is for free, man. They don’t pay us.”
Crosby had become a fan of Sarah Jarosz via I’m With Her, the group in which she’s teamed with Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. And he loved Jarosz’s 2020 album, World on the Ground.
“I called her up and said, ‘Listen, Sarah. Can we do something together?’” he says. “And she said, ‘Sure! What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I just want to sing with you.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you sweetheart.’”
Crosby quickly suggested “For Free.”
“I’ve sung it a bunch, and I’m confident with it,” he told her. “She said, ‘Oh, I love that song.’ So I sent her a tape of it that I went in to the studio and cut. James made this incredible piano track for it. Just beautiful. Sarah sent it back with her vocal on it, and it completely blew my mind out of my ear. It was unbelievably good.”
Clearly, Crosby still craves collaboration. A sense of joyful purpose is unmistakable in his voice and in the voices and playing of those who helped him make the album. Foremost is James Raymond, the producer-composer-keyboardist who has been at Crosby’s musical side regularly since 1997, five years after learning that Crosby was his biological father. His talents have been showcased not only in his father’s solo projects, but also for years with CSN as a full-time member of the touring band, and in the jazzy group Crosby and Raymond fronted off and on with bassist Jeff Pevar, cheekily branded CPR. On For Free, Raymond wrote or co-wrote seven of its 10 songs, including “I Think I” and the somberly beautiful closer, “I Won’t Stay for Long,” inspired by Marcel Camus’ haunting 1959 film Black Orpheus.
“It’s wild to watch,” Crosby beamed. “He’s gotten to be as good a writer as I am, or better. ‘I Won’t Stay for Long’ is the best song on the record. It makes me cry. It just freaks me out.”
Guitarist Dean Parks adds color to “Rodriguez” and “Shot at Me,” the latter a powerful ballad which he co-wrote from Crosby’s words inspired by an encounter with an Afghanistan war veteran, who told him of the most human costs of war. It’s a strong addition to Crosby’s deep catalog of incisive, biting topical songs.
“I seem to run into those guys and talk to them,” Crosby says. “I ran into this guy at the airport and was drinking in the bar and he looked really bummed, really sad. So sure, I talked to him.”
As for not being able to tour anymore, Crosby is sad but sanguine.
“Singing live is the great joy of my life,” he says. “My family and singing live. That’s the top of my world, you know?”
Even if the shows stop, the music won’t, right?
“I don’t know,” he says. “I can still sing. That’s why we’re doing the records, because we love making music. Right? They obviously don’t pay us for them, so that’s the only reason there could be. We’re not trying to win the ratings war or something. We’re just singing exactly the music that really rings our bell and makes our heart sing. And there you go. And if people like it, great. And if they don’t like it, great, we don’t care.”
Photo credit: Anna Webber. Album cover painting by Joan Baez.
My summer essentials list is pretty simple: A ball cap and sunscreen for a hike, driving directions and a trail map for a day trip, and more than a few reading options for the couch that’s inevitably waiting for me at the end of a long hot summer day. Gathering together all the new memoirs and taking some tips from my BGS colleagues, here are 16 top tomes to get us all — even the kids — through this sweltering season of 2021.
Rob Bowman, The Last Soul Company: The Malaco Records Story
Generous in its photography and its scope, this overview of Malaco Records explains how a pioneering independent label founded in 1962 brought a wealth of African American music to the world via artists like Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bobby Blue Bland, Z.Z. Hill, Johnnie Taylor, Little Milton, and James Cleveland.
Brandi Carlile, Broken Horses
This memoir satisfies the longtime fans who will learn what inspired the songs from her early albums, yet it’s also a candid and conversational statement about what it’s like to be a queer woman in roots music today. The cast of characters is charming, too, particularly her exchanges with Elton John and Joni Mitchell.
Brent Cobb, Little Stuff
Country tunesmith Brent Cobb has said he writes every album with his kids in mind, so transforming the song “Little Stuff” into a children’s book came naturally. But how many children’s books get their own music video? Whether you read it or watch it, the Georgia musician’s homespun wisdom shines through.
Robert Owen Gardner, The Portable Community: Place and Displacement in Bluegrass Festival Life
This scholarly look at bluegrass festival culture in the American West comes from sociology professor Robert Owen Gardner. It’s also an examination of how arts and music grapple with social and environmental change. A digital version of the academic textbook allows more room in the backpack for sunscreen and guitar strings.
Mary Gauthier, Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting
More of a memoir than an instruction manual, Mary Gauthier tells the stories behind original songs like “Mercy Now” while leaving the mystical and magical aura of writing them intact. By sharing her intimate conversations and co-writing experiences, she offers both a creative and compassionate point of view.
Howard Grimes with Preston Lauterbach, Timekeeper
Known as Bulldog, Memphis drummer Howard Grimes has propelled R&B classics like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” and Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” In this autobiography, he also explains how he wound up homeless for a time and how he’s been guided by the Bible. Fans of Stax and Hi Records won’t want to miss this one.
Chris Hillman, Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond
You can’t tell the story of country rock without Chris Hillman. Time Between entered its second printing earlier this year, proving there’s still a curiosity about near-mythical bands like The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Start at page one and turn, turn, turn to the get the whole story from this prolific Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.
Johnnyswim, Home Sweet Road: Finding Love, Making Music & Building a Life One City at a Time.
The ever-endearing Johnnyswim found an even larger following when Chip and Joanna Gaines chose the duo’s anthem “Home” as the theme to Fixer Upper. Now, Amanda Sudano-Ramirez and Abner Ramirez give fans a deep dive into their own family life with Home Sweet Road, their debut book brimming with photos, recipes, stories, and poetry.
Kimberly Mack, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
The story of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil isn’t the only larger-than-life narrative in blues music. A scholar of African American literature and American popular music at The University of Toledo, Mack writes about how similar self-made personas resist racial, social, economic and gendered oppression.
Richard Marx, Stories to Tell: A Memoir
A late ’80s pop star whose catalog still holds up, Marx writes about his life and career, including a few interactions with era-defining figures like Olivia Newton-John and Kenny Rogers. He also gives his candid perspective of what the music industry is really like. By the way, can’t you totally hear Alison Krauss covering “Right Here Waiting“?
Willie Nelson with Turk Pipkin, Willie Nelson’s Letters to America
At 88 years old, Willie Nelson is a living legend with a modern point of view. Yet, rather than ranting on social media, he’s channeled his thoughts into a series of letters, even writing one to Texas and another to marijuana. With his classic lyrics reprinted alongside these letters, the book captures his conversational charisma.
Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings
This Irish artist made an iconic music video by tearfully emoting into the lens, but there is much more to her story than “Nothing Compares 2U” and her infamous appearance on SNL. As The Guardian notes, “O’Connor also doesn’t need a ghost writer because she has, throughout all of it, rarely been at a loss for what to say.”
Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovlich, Honey & Co: Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant
In this cookbook and travelogue, the founders of London restaurant Honey & Co. are seeking out savory smoke flavors in Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Greece. And it’s not just grilled meat! Fruits, vegetables, breads and “Unmissables” are make their way into these pages, too. Find out more about the authors on BGS’s The Shift List.
Kim Ruehl, A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School
An activist and song collector, Zilphia Horton finally gets her due. Ruehl (also a BGS contributor) explains how Horton adapted folk music and hymns for empowerment and social causes, with “We Shall Overcome” as just one example. Considering the school’s ties to civil rights, this piece of Tennessee history merits the attention.
Bobby Rush with Herb Powell, I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story
A favorite on the blues scene since the 1950s, Bobby Rush remains a beloved figure in the genre, winning his second Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album earlier this year. A well-traveled entertainer at age 87, this memoir follows his remarkable life journey from Louisiana to Arkansas, on to Chicago and ultimately the Blues Hall of Fame.
Paul Simon, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy): A Children’s Picture Book
If you gotta make the morning last with little ones around, try this imaginative picture book. With song lyrics from the 1966 Simon & Garfunkel classic and vivid illustrations by Keith Henry Brown, the 24-page book captures the small details of city life by following a bunny on a bicycle — how groovy is that?
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 & ScruggsPicture 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.
Artist:The Rose Petals Hometown: Nashville / Seattle Song: “They Say You Loved a Good Man” Album:American Grenadine Release Date: April 23, 2021 Label: Envoy Records
In Their Words: “This song is about Calvin Coolidge, who served as president from 1923 to 1929, apologizing to his wife, Grace, for his shortcomings as a husband. Grace and Cal were an unlikely pair, and her friends found the match quite unbelievable. She was warm, friendly, outgoing, gregarious, and cheerful. He was quiet, austere, deliberate, uncommunicative, and sometimes glum. The Coolidges lived happily together for twenty-eight years, but when Grace was asked, toward the end of her life, how she had come to marry her husband, she said, ‘Well, I thought I would get him to enjoy life and have fun, but he was not very easy to instruct in that way.’
“So, really this song is about regret. It’s about living your life with the best intentions yet still falling short of expectations. Musically we wanted to tap into that wistful vibe, so we borrowed a bunch of tricks from some of our older influences – acoustic 12-string from The Byrds, synthesizer from the ’80s records of Bruce Springsteen, and some Beach Boys harmonies to top it off at the end.” — Peter Donovan, The Rose Petals
Artist:The Dillards Hometown: Branson, Missouri Song: “Old Road New Again” (featuring Don Henley on duet vocal; Herb Pedersen on harmony; Bernie Leadon on banjo) Album:Old Road New Again Release Date: August 21, 2020 Label: Pinecastle Records
In Their Words: “Old Road New Again is a new adventure for The Dillards, who continue to contribute to the music scene. The song is a lyrical history of The Dillards’ appearance in the music and entertainment arena. The talented friends who participated on this project were among the innovators that changed the course of music history.” — Rodney Dillard
“I was a big fan of The Dillards. Wheatstraw Suite was a very influential album in my life. In fact, I drove through a snowstorm to hear them play in Fort Worth back in 1968. They were an interesting band.” — Don Henley
Don’t look now, but we’re approaching the mid-point of June and another week has passed us by. YIKES! Luckily, we have another week’s worth of long reads for you, too!
The long-winding catacombs of the BGS annals and archives have so much to offer. As we share our favorite longer, more in-depth articles, stories, and features to help you pass the time, take a minute to follow us on social media [on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram] so you don’t miss a single #longreadoftheday pick!
This week’s long reads travel from the canyon drives above Hollywood to Pavement to a former Oregon poet laureate to everyone’s favorite five-stringed instrument. Check ’em out.
Stephen Malkmus, of the bristly, brainy 1990s indie rock band Pavement, joins a host of fellow alt-rockers in dabbling with folk and acoustic sounds. On a brand new album, Traditional Techniques, which was produced by Chris Funk of the Decemberists, Malkmus expands on the flickers of folk interest that have permeated his career, though he may not claim mastery of any of them. [Read our #CoverStory interview]
Earlier this week we celebrated Sara Watkins’ birthday (June 8, for the record) with a revisit to our recent Artist of the Month interview where she walked us through her recent Watkins Family Hour album, brother sister. For the first time in their lifelong musical careers, Sara and her brother Sean focused on creating music centered on their own duo. brother sister was the result. [Celebrate Sara’s birthday with a read]
Aoife O’Donovan’s latest EP, Bull Frogs Croon (And Other Songs), arrived in March. Our Cover Story unspooled the inspiration she gained via poet Peter Sears, the former poet laureate of Oregon, whose verse is utilized in three songs O’Donovan wrote and arranged with Teddy Abrams and Jeremy Kittel. The project is rounded out by a Hazel Dickens cover and a classic folk song, giving listeners a sampling of each of O’Donovan’s folky expertises. [Read the interview]
A new, two-part documentary, Laurel Canyon, traces the comings and goings of several generations of folk rockers down Sunset Boulevard and up into the hills. Chris Hillman (The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers), one of the canyon’s earliest and most famous residents, about the new film, the community, the music, the neighborhood, and why he had to leave. [Read the full story]
With her classic 2018 Mixtape banjoist and singer/songwriter Ashley Campbell reinforced the deeply held BGS belief that– MORE!! BANJOS!! From songs by her late, legendary father Glen and her godfather Carl Jackson to classics from folks like J.D. Crowe, John Hartford, and the Dixie Chicks, this mix has a little bit of everything and a whole lot of five-string. [Read & listen]
Splitting off from Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Boulevard runs a circuitous route through unkempt mountain acres, past the Laurel Canyon Country Store, weaving and curving for miles before finally spilling out in Studio City. Along the way small roads split off into the mountains like tributaries from a river.
Up these narrow, twisting mountain byways lived many of the musicians who, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, exerted an incalculable influence on popular music: the Byrds chief among them, but also the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Love, James Taylor, the Monkees, and Crosby Stills & Nash. Together, they transformed folk music into folk rock and singer/songwriter fare, transforming it with new sounds, new ideas, new priorities, and — it can’t be denied — new drugs.
This strange, paradoxical place — a rustic mountain paradise nestled within the purgatory of Los Angeles — is the subject of a two-part documentary on EPIX, directed by Alison Ellwood and produced by Alex Gibney. Across two 90-minute episodes, Laurel Canyon traces the comings and goings of several generations of folk rockers down the boulevard and up into the hills.
Ellwood depicts this place as something like a bucolic community that enabled and encouraged romantic and musical collaboration among its denizens. A struggling musician named Stephen Stills flubbed an audition for a TV show called The Monkees, but suggested his roommate Peter Tork try out for a role. Mama Cass introduced Stills and David Crosby to a British musician named Graham Nash, and the trio became one of the most successful groups of the 1970s. A band of freaks from Phoenix, Arizona, calling themselves Alice Cooper showed up at Frank Zappa’s cabin at 7 a.m. — about twelve hours early for their audition. The stories go on and on, too much for even a lengthy documentary to contain.
Laurel Canyon didn’t just offer a sense of community along with unobstructed views of the city at night. It also gave these musicians access to the city itself — in particular, the happening Sunset Strip clubs like the Troubadour, Pandora’s Box, Ciro’s Le Disc, and the Hullabaloo Club. It was a neighborhood galvanized by the riots in 1966, when young clubgoers protested a police-imposed curfew — a pivotal moment in ‘60s radicalism and the inspiration for Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”
The popularity of the music written in the hills above the Strip meant that Laurel Canyon’s most famous residents spent more time away from the canyon, spending weeks in the studio recording their next albums or months on the road playing their songs in front of growing legions of fans. Elwood’s documentary strays from the locale in its title, traveling as far away as Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival in 1969, which demonstrate how deeply these new musical ideas were taking across the country.
There are, refreshingly, few talking heads in these two episodes. Rather than the usual musicians rhapsodizing about their youth, Ellwood frames the documentary with remembrances by a pair of photographers, Nurit Wilde and Henry Diltz. Their archival images and films make up the bulk of Laurel Canyon, which makes it all seem more immediate, as though fifty years ago was just yesterday. In that regard it’s closer to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than Jakob Dylan’s Echo in the Canyon.
But that also makes this historical moment seem more fleeting. Around the time that Charles Manson sent four of his followers to a house he thought belonged to producer Terry Melcher, drugs started to infiltrate Laurel Canyon, puncturing what Graham Nash calls a “beautiful bubble.” Grass and booze are quickly displaced by coke and heroine, and the scene chills a bit in the 1970s, as a new wave of musicians moved in to these houses and crash on these couches.
There are many stories from Laurel Canyon that don’t get told in the documentary, as well as many songs that don’t get played and many artists who don’t get mentioned. There’s no trace of Van Dyke Parks, the eccentric L.A. arranger who affectionately satirized the community on “Laurel Canyon Boulevard,” off his 1968 album Song Cycle. “What is up in Laurel Canyon?” he asks, quixotically, like the most ironic tour guide. “The seat of the beat,” he replies to himself.
On the other hand, the film can only hold so much. And the stories that Ellwood does tell add up to something larger: Laurel Canyon is less about a place and more about an idea. It’s about how different strains of traditional and popular music commingle and mutate, how they point to an infinite set of possibilities for voice and guitar (and drums and bass and amps and keyboards and synthesizers and so on).
On the eve of the documentary’s premiere, BGS spoke with one of Laurel Canyon’s early and most famous residents, Chris Hillman.
BGS: You moved to Laurel Canyon in 1965. What took you there?
Hillman: First thing on the list was, I needed a place to stay. The Byrds were getting going and starting to gain a little ground, and I had already known about Laurel Canyon. It was purely by accident that I’m up there one day by the country store, and I run into a guy who had a place to rent. It was wonderful. It was up on this road overlooking the entire city of L.A. You can imagine how beautiful it was at night, with all the lights on and everything. Shortly thereafter, David Crosby moved up there, and then Roger McGuinn. I’m not sure where Mike [Clarke] and Gene [Clark] were. They were probably up there, too. The Byrds were very early occupants of the area.
To what degree was it like a small town in the middle of this big city?
It sorta was. But it was trying so hard not to be that. We were literally four minutes away from the Sunset Strip. So you went from this incredibly energetic, fast-moving madness of the Sunset Strip clubs, you go up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and in four minutes you’re up in this pristine, quiet environment with all these beautiful old houses. We weren’t the first ones to discover this place. People were living up there in the ‘40s and ‘50s — some actors and a lot of artists. It already had this reputation as a bohemian beatnik enclave.
There was the famous legend that Houdini had a house up there. People would be driving around and point out a place and say, “That’s where Houdini lived.” They’d point out some old wreck of a place, some ruins of an old structure. There were a lot of good legends to the place. I think that’s where Robert Mitchum got in trouble at a party in 1949 or 1950. He walked into a party and then the police came and arrested people for marijuana. He just happened to walk in at the wrong time. But he had a hell of a career after that, though, so he must have struck a deal. The musicians didn’t start moving up there until the ‘60s, and by then it seemed like a quiet mountain town that just happened to be minutes away from the heart of the city.
I always thought of it as the Woodstock of the West Coast — this retreat from the rigors of the big city.
Well, in Woodstock you’re a good long ways from Manhattan. But in Laurel Canyon you’re minutes from the Sunset Strip and maybe ten minutes from Beverly Hills or Hollywood proper. A lot of people don’t know this, but the Sunset Strip was part of Los Angeles County. It was a mile long, from La Cienega I think to Doheny. It was county instead of city, so it was run completely differently. It was patrolled by the L.A. County sheriff, as opposed to the LAPD.
Is that why they imposed that curfews that led to the riots in ’66?
The whole thing with the kids rioting had to do with the small business owners, whose businesses were being infringed upon by foot traffic. The kids were running around, goofing around, and it was killing business. I didn’t get involved in that. I just saw it on the news. I remember seeing that footage. I still lived in the Canyon then. I was there until ’68, then I moved to Topanga Canyon.
Why did you leave?
Things changed. I was still in the Byrds and I just bought a house in Topanga. No, I’ll tell you why I left. I completely forgot the most important part of the story. I’m getting older. The reason I left was, my house burned down in Laurel Canyon.
I was renting this beautiful house, and you could see the whole city. It was all wood, and I remember it was fall, then the ferocious Santa Ana winds hit. They always come around in the fall. They’re very dangerous. It was real hot that day, and the winds were kicking up, and I had pulled my motorcycle out. I was going to kick it over, but it was leaking gas and the wind blew the fumes into the water heater. It was an open-flame heater and it just ignited. It made the same sound you hear when you light an old-fashioned gas range. I literally caught on fire. Instinctively I rolled on the ground. I think I lost a bit of hair and some eyebrow before I got out of there. I jumped in my car and pulled into the dirt road. I had nothing. I had my car and that was it. I lost everything I owned.
David Crosby had just been visiting me at my house. He’d been there for an hour and left just 20 minutes before my house burned down. I think we can connect the dots! I’m kidding. I love David dearly, but I still poke him about that one. Roger McGuinn lived across the canyon from me and saw the fire. He said it looks like where Chris lives, so he starts filming it. Somehow the footage got on the local NBC affiliate. I was living in a hotel for a few nights, and I remember watching my house burn down on the TV. That was ’66.
Is that why you left for Topanga?
Well, it was starting to be the place to live. More groups were moving up there: the Turtles and Frank Zappa and Mama Cass and Peter Tork. Everything was changing. Drugs entered the picture. I ended up buying a house in Topanga Canyon, which is about 25 miles north of Los Angeles. It’s also very pristine and quiet — a little bit bigger than Laurel Canyon. A lot of people moved there, too, like Neil Young. And it was a very similar scene, with everybody interacting with each other. That should be the next documentary.
Photo of Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman playing cards: Courtesy of Nurit Wilde Photo of Crosby, Stills & Nash at Big Bear: Henry Diltz
Artist:Elijah Ocean Hometown: Los Angeles, California Song: “Good Clean Livin'” Album:Blue Jeans & Barstools Release Date: May 1, 2020
In Their Words: “I wrote this song a few years back while working a casino in Las Vegas. It started from a snippet of a conversation I overheard and ended up being about an addicted gambler who finds salvation through the modern American dream. I originally recorded a version for my barn record, but it didn’t make the cut. So I wound up recycling the pedal steel (played by my good friend Philip Sterk in Nashville) and re-tracking everything else in my home studio in LA. I was basically trying to find some middle ground between The Byrds and Alan Jackson.” — Elijah Ocean
Photo credit: Sean Rosenthal
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
