KD: What do you mean?
AM: Oh, you know, it’s really easy to hurt the feelings of a very young enthusiast.
KD: What did he say to your tender heart?
AM: You know it’s so funny. Here I am 70 years old and I still remember this. He had a “real” banjo. I just had a …
KD: …a starter.
AM: A Vega Ranger. But he had a Gibson Mastertone. I remember it was a RB-250 Flathead with the bowtie inlays. After the lesson I had to wait for my dad. I’ll say it was another hour. He’s allowed me to play on his banjo, so I’m playing. I’m sure it was very irritating and he said, “Why don’t you put it down.” He made some comment which meant: “I’m tired of hearing you so why don’t you put it up?” You know, all I wanted to do was play the damn thing. I understood and I put it up. I appreciated playing it. Ever since then when people play, I try never to tell them to stop. No matter what, even if they’re out of tune or anything. I’m always go the extra mile for them because I know what it means.
KD: I know how you feel because whenever I play the banjo my husband always says, “Can’t you wait til I’m in the shower?” (laughter) So I know what you mean. So after that you’re home, you’ve got your Vega practicing doing those rolls. What’s the next step?
AM: I needed another banjo. There’s an old WC Fields movie called The Fatal Glass of Beer. Once you’ve tasted beer, you can’t un-taste it, is the essence of the story. The guy had his fatal glass of beer and became an alcoholic. It was like that for me on the banjo. As soon as I played somebody’s “for real” banjo…I’ve mentioned this to you before. You can’t just have your banjo and be satisfied with it. There’s always that “next thing.” I had to have a better banjo.
So I saved up my money and also my grandmother, my father’s mother, loaned me some money. I paid her back. Once again I bought one from Slim Richey. This time it’s a put-together affair, which I think is called an RB-11. It’s a Gibson banjo that doesn’t have tone ring but it has a little brass hoop. It has a resonator on it that has plastic on the back in a stenciled design. People were making reproductions of that sort of design nowadays. It was a better banjo. I used it for quite a while.
When I go to college, I’m still playing with Brian and Len. There’s an event at college in the early ‘60s. It’s a folk music thing and it’s still going. It was for people who played guitars and sang songs. There was an event called “Friday at Four.” Amateur students would audition and get featured at the event. I would go sit in the audience because they had guitar players that I would watch and try to learn something.
Len, Brian and I auditioned and went and played. I should also mention that another group that had recorded, and I was really interested in the ‘60s, were the Dillards. They had recorded an album with a fiddle player named Byron Berline, who was a student at University of Oklahoma. I didn’t know him but I knew he was around there somewhere. So we’re playing at the Friday at Four and we play a tune called Hamilton County Breakdown, which is the very first cut on the Dillards’ record with Byron, called Pickin’ and Fiddlin’. Unbeknownst to us Byron would sometime frequent the event. He came by and heard us play. He didn’t stop or say anything but eventually I met him at Mike Richey’s Guitar Center. He came in there and recognized me and asked me to play some. We started buddying around .
At that time he was on a country music TV show in Oklahoma City, which featured a banjo player named Eddie Shelton. For me, Eddie was a really fine banjo player in a lot of ways. He could be rough sounding to a certain extent. But what he played to the ear of someone at my level was certainly sophisticated, more knowledgeable and much hipper than what I was playing. He was from Tennessee originally, but grew up in Texas. He worked for the National Cash Register Company and they would move him around. From time to time they would send him back East for training in Dayton, Ohio. He would tell me about seeing the Osborne Brothers, Jim & Jesse, or Bill Monroe. He played with Dorsey Harvey who’s David Harvey’s dad. David Harvey is a great mandolin player and works for Gibson.
So Eddie was one of my conduits to the real world of bluegrass. Also, Byron had been to the Newport Folk Festival and met Bill Monroe and Bill Keith. He had acquired tapes of the Kentucky Colonels and Bill Monroe shows. We would sit in his dorm room. He was an athlete, and for a while, he lived in the athlete’s dorm. That was how I started to get into the thick of what was bluegrass.
KD: This takes me back to today with people using the internet, YouTube and videos might not have the thirst we had to have and the lengths we had to go to find the music or bump into people who also liked it. It wasn’t a community at that point. I can really picture you two listening to tapes because many of us did that kind of thing in our search for Holy Grail that was bluegrass.
AM: Oh yeah. I remember riding with Byron in his car. We would be somewhere on Friday or Saturday night. We would turn on the Grand Ole Opry in hopes Bill Monroe or whoever would be on. I remember one time we lost the radio signal so we turned around and drove back to where we could pick it up again.
I guess one reason gold is so valuable is that it’s hard to find. If you could go in your backyard and turn on your water hose and gold came out of it, you wouldn’t think much of gold, would you? That’s kind of how it was. Bluegrass was really hard to find. When you found it, you clung to it and did everything you could to find more of it. I think the internet is great. I can go on there and find a lot of stuff. I remember seeing one of the history of bluegrass videos on which Mac Wiseman said he got a guitar, but it was a year before he could find anyone to tune it. It wasn’t that bad for me.
I remember when I worked for Jimmy Martin, he would talk about walking great distances to find somebody to show him chords on the guitar. It makes the music, for me anyway, really, really important. I would hope the players of today can come up with that same feeling of importance about what they’re doing.
KD: There were a few small groups that you and Byron played with. The Stone Mountain Boys? Who was in that group. You were sort of big fish in a small pond.
AM: Yes, it was a real small pond, just a shallow spot in the earth. Eddie was from Dallas and he had friends who played music down there. The main one was Mitchell Land, a mandolin player. He and other players would make a weekend trip up to play music with Eddie. Byron would go and he would invite me. I didn’t play too much; only a tune or two. Mostly I sat and listened. That was cool for me.
Eddie moved back to Dallas and sometimes I would take the bus down there to play. Mitchell had a brother named Lewis, but Bosco was what they called hm. He played guitar. Once again, we played just around the house.
One time I missed the bus home. Eddie had driven me to the station so he headed out on the highway and caught up with the bus. He pulled up next to the bus and waved him off to the side and the bus driver pulled over! I got on the bus, bought my ticket and rode home. It was a different time. I don’t know if they would do that now.
I look on Eddie as my mentor. I was an apprentice. That’s sort of an older view of how you got educated. You apprenticed yourself with a master bricklayer, shoemaker or whatever. You signed on for 7 years until you were done and joined the guild and then become a master. That was sort of how that went with Eddie. When he was in Oklahoma City, he would just come get me. One time he had a friend from Tulsa who came down and wanted to play music. We played all night. I mean literally we played all night. Finally we just went to sleep on a cot out in the garage. When I got up the next morning the guitar player was gone. Eddie said he left because he didn’t need any more banjo lessons. Eddie would play something, and I’d stop him and ask questions, and he would show me.
Another thing that Eddie could do was he could sing the main theme of his banjo solo. Not the rolls and all, just the main theme. What it did for me was develop a sense that there’s a melody buried in all these notes. Eddie’s singing would highlight that for me. When you play you want to have that main theme survive all those notes.
What I’m describing are the rare little times you find the diamond buried in the mud. The rest of the time the music I heard was pop, country and western swing on the radio. I would also go out and play with other people who played other types of music. There was a hairdresser in Norman that I would get together with and play. She played electric piano and did songs like Bubbles in My Beer and San Antonio Rose. They didn’t say, “Oh the banjo is bluegrass.” To them the banjo was just another instrument of country music.
One of my few music gigs when I was in college was with a jazz guitarist named Doyle Salatheil. He came from a Greek family. He played in New York City in the ‘40s with all the great jazz players of the era. He was living in Norman. He had a brother who went by the name Merle Lindsay. He was a big-shot band leader there in Central Oklahoma who had a dance hall named LindsayLand.
This Doyle Salatheil had a barbeque joint there in Norman. He wanted music every day. I went there and played music with whoever else he had hired. It was usually a guy who sang and played guitar. Lots of country music: Six Pack to Go was one I remember doing, which was a Hank Thompson song. Doyle would come up and have a music contest. He would play a jazz chordal version of some popular song and if you could guess it you won a pitcher of beer. Nobody ever got it because his idea of songs was more mature and sophisticated.
So I was around different kinds of music. I also belonged to the Columbia Record Club because I liked musicals like My Fair Lady. Looking back on all of it, I’m attracted to beautiful melodies and lush chords. That’s how I think of it. Not bluegrass but I liked it.
KD: You certainly were an ear opener for me in that you had all these different styles and influences. Like the song Sabrosa. I wasn’t going to hear that from an East Coast band. There were geographic influences and different songwriters that weren’t played in the Mid-Atlantic and it made for interesting listening. Let me ask a technical question. Playing different styles with all these different people, what is changing at this point about your playing?
AM: My approach to music never changed. When I was in Nashville playing for Jimmy Martin, I focused on what he wanted, which is how it should have been. But my musical interests have always been wide. At the time, bluegrass and country music was pretty much a three chord music. If you were in the Key of G, you played G, C and D. If you played in D, it was D, G and A. But your Western Swing and Bob Wills’ stuff, was influenced by early jazz players like Benny Goodman and Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grapelli. I couldn’t do the soloing part but what stuck with me was the harmonic richness of it. That’s what I think I picked up on — the richness of the chords.
One time when I was with Jimmy Martin we played in Hugo, Oklahoma. There was a guy there who was well known in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s and he’d been on satellite radio for a while named Bill Mack. He was at WBAP and it sort of competed with WSM. It was one of those clear channel stations. WBAP out of Ft Worth was all over the southern part of the United States. They used to play the Texas Rangers games and I’d listen to them coming back from Nashville. He was the truck drivers’ DJ at night and he wrote a song called Drinking Champagne Feeling No Pain. Somebody had a big hit on that song. He had been hired to come up and be the announcer and he wanted to do that song with the band. If it were in C it would have been C to C major 7th to C6th then maybe to D minor then on to G7 and back to D minor. It was a little more involved than three chords. Here he is in front of Jimmy Martin’s band. I played what I thought was appropriate chords and afterwards Jimmy congratulated me on being able to do that. He said that’s the kind of musicians I want to have, not that I do that but I want other people to know that you can do that. But I don’t want you to do that behind me.
KD: Let’s talk a little bit about Jimmy Martin. It must have been tough to follow the banjo players he had. They had set the bar pretty high and he made everybody else hop over it.
AM: Once again this is music and musicians of a different era. If you wanted to be in bluegrass as a banjo player, and you looked around and ask what bands hire banjo players, it was Bill Monroe, Jim & Jesse, the Osborne Brothers did not need a banjo player, Flatt and Scruggs did not need a banjo player, Reno & Smiley didn’t need one, and Jimmy Martin did. Bill Monroe, Jim & Jesse and the Osborne Brothers were the only ones I knew of growing up in Oklahoma. The thought of my putting a band together and going out on the road wouldn’t have entered my mind.
I went to Nashville with some guys from Norman to go to the DJ convention in 1969. I had heard through Sam Bush and Wayne Stewart that there was going to be some bluegrass picking at the Noel Hotel, which was just a block from the Grand Ole Opry House, and apparently a place where a lot of musicians stayed. Tut Taylor was responsible for this party. On the 3rd floor it was wide open, like the current IBMA FanFest and Trade Show. You go up to a floor, all the doors are open and there’s musicians all over the place.
It was there that I met Vassar Clements. He and I, Sam Bush and Wayne Stewart jammed there for quite a while. For me that was really outstanding. I met Al Osteen who was playing with Jim and Jesse. He told me that Chris Warner was leaving Jimmy Martin and asked if I was interested in being in that band. Why not? That’s what I want to do. Al introduced me to Jimmy, who said he’d come back the next night and give me a try out. He and Gloria came back the next night and I think Doyle Lawson, too. They auditioned me. He said I’m leaving next weekend and we’ll get started.
I went home to Norman. By then I had a car – a 1960 Buick LaSabre, it was like a yacht – drove back to Nashville and got in touch with Jimmy. We left on Friday night at midnight.
The whole time I was with Jimmy, when we would head out on a trip, we would always leave at midnight. I think for a lot of people that’s the worst time to leave. Can’t sleep before you go. You leave and you’re tired. It was always kind of rough. It was me, Jimmy, Doyle Lawson, Vernon Derrick, and Gloria Belle. We drove in Jimmy’s 1949 Flexible Bus up to Hamilton, Ohio. I remember a couple of things about that first trip. I’m a big baseball fan. We drove through Cincinnati early in the morning. The road was elevated for some portion and I could see Crosley Field, where the Cincinnati Reds played. I could see between the levels of the stadium. There it is! Crosley Field. I love it. We went on and played that night. The first Jimmy Martin show I ever saw, I was in. I’d certainly heard his recordings but I’d never seen him.
KD: Between your audition and leaving at midnight about a week later, had you worked out any business details? Do you mind sharing what your salary was?
AM: I’ll certainly do that. I had no earthly idea what my business arrangements were. He never said a word to me and I never cared. It’s so funny as I think back on that whole time I was with Jimmy. Money. I needed it but it was the last thing I thought of. He paid, I think, the union rate which at that time was $35 a show. He was supposed to, I learned later, pay a per diem for meals and stuff like that. But he never did. He did provide rooms. I think the whole time I was with him it was $35. That was it. So if you left at midnight on Friday and you drove to Hamilton, Ohio and got a room later in the day so he would only have to pay for one night’s room. You played the show and the next morning you got up and came back Sunday. You’re back late Sunday night. You got $35. Every trip was like that. And that’s how it was. If we sold records he would give us 10% of what you sold. You could make a few extra dollars. Back then you would put the selection of records under your arms and you would walk through the audience hawking the records.
KD: Sort of like the peanut man at the ball game. You know Doyle Lawson told me once that the concept of the merch table was introduced to bluegrass by the Lewis Family. He must have been hawking records for Jimmy, too. He told me he looked over, and there were the Lewis ladies sitting at a table and people were coming to them. Other bluegrass bands saw how smart that was and that was the start of the merch table.
AM: It very well may have come from that. They would be the ones. They had the system down. At festivals we would have a merch table. I found a used record rack at some store and bought it for him. I stayed from October 1969 to October 1971 so it was almost exactly 2 years.
KD: Where did you live on a $35 a show salary?
AM: Gloria Belle and I lived at the same boarding house near Old Hickory in a little area called Rayon City. I think it had originally been the company town of a DuPont Chemical plant. I lived on Rayon Drive in Rayon City. All the street names were related to the DuPont plant somehow. A room there cost me $40 a month. That was just for the lodging. The lady who owned it was Mrs. McDonald and her husband. They were in their 50s or 60s, and were from Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee. She was not supposed to feed me. I would come downstairs and she would feed me, even though I didn’t pay her just because she wanted company. She would tell me these stories like Linda has taken up with Bob, but Bob is still married to Alice. I finally asked her if these people were her family members. And she would say, No, no, no. This is the TV. She was watching those soap operas and was just really into them.
KD: What made you leave?
AM: A lot of it had to do with $35 a show. I didn’t have any money to do anything. I had a really great time and so much of it was with no money at all. Literally, no money. In Nashville there was a place called Bobby Green’s Dusty Road Tavern, which had bluegrass picking. I was just a single guy so I was looking for some socializing. I would go down there knowing that I didn’t have enough gas to get home. I didn’t have the money to buy gas at 33 cents a gallon. I would take a set of strings that I had and hopefully be able to sell it to somebody there in order to get $1.50 for gas to get back to where I lived.
After working with Jimmy for a while I was disappointed that we didn’t work more than we did. I can’t remember how many dates we did but there never was enough. I think he had made a fair amount of money earlier in his career while his wife Barbara was booking him, but they were split when I was with him. His booking agent during my time was the Buddy Lee Agency. Hank Williams Jr. was his star act for a number of the package shows he booked. I think Jimmy was hoping that every package show that Buddy Lee booked, he would be on as the bluegrass act offering some diversity. Also, he thought that being with Buddy Lee would help his chances of getting on the Opry as a regular. We played it several times as guests during my stint with him, but as most people know, he never made it as a regular. It was a big disappointment for him all the way till the end.
Although Jimmy paid the $35 a day, a union minimum, we just didn’t work enough to ever get ahead money-wise. I worked other jobs – substitute teacher, painting, pumping gas, and a few pick-up music gigs. I think my total income each year I was with him was just over $2,000 (including other jobs) which translates to around $13,000 in current dollars. Although I was too naive to have worried about the lack of money, I slowly came around to realizing it was not going to work for me. I enjoyed the challenge of the music making he required, but just couldn’t make it on that little bit of money.
KD: Before we get too far down the road. I skipped over a big part of your story. Let’s talk about when you moved to Kentucky to play with Wayne Stewart and Sam Bush.
AM: There’s a guy in Lubbock named Junior Vasquez and he was telling his story like I’m telling mine. He would say, I met so and so, and that lead to meeting so and so. Finally he said, it’s just that one thing lead to another. As I tell this to you, that’s exactly how it is. They talk about networking and it’s so vital to everybody’s story. Mine is no different in that sense.
But back to the story. This is ’67 or ‘68, I think. There’s a festival in Mountain View, Arkansas and I think it’s called the Arkansas Folk Festival. When a friend and I got there, I got out my banjo and start playing. People come up and start playing. I find out one of them was Courtney Johnson, a banjo player from around Bowling Green, Kentucky.
I was playing some fiddle tunes in what then was seemingly the rage — Bill Keith style of Devil’s Dream and songs like that. I had worked up some on my own. Courtney recognized it for what it was, and was real interested. He was there with a group from Kentucky. We played all weekend and when he went back home he told Wayne Stewart and Sam Bush that he had met this banjo player from Oklahoma who played this new, modern way.
KD: What was that called at that time? Was it called melodic or chromatic or what?
AM: I don’t really recall but I’ll say melodic. So anyway, I got a phone call from Wayne Stewart. He says he’s going to California and heard I was a player, could we get together and play? So he stops by my parents’ house and we sit and play. He actually spends the night and leaves the next day. Rather than going out to California, he goes back to Kentucky. He called me again and says, there’s a really great player here named Sam Bush. We’re getting a group together. Would you be interested in playing banjo? I was still in college and I would have to wait til I graduate. In the meantime, Sam is a really great musician.
KD: And he’s really young at that time, right?
AM: I think he’s 14 or 15. He’s already won the Junior National Fiddle Championship up in Weiser, Idaho. He met Byron up there. There’s a fiddle contest in Liberty, Missouri, which is near Kansas City. I was good friends with Byron’s dad, Lou Berline. I would go with him to fiddle contests. Somehow or other I connected up with Lou and we went to Liberty, Missouri and met Wayne and Sam there. This was ’67 or ’68, somewhere in there. We spent the whole weekend playing music together, had a great time and cooked up this idea about forming a group, which will be called Poor Richard’s Almanac. Wayne is probably 2-3 years older than I am. Sam is 5-6 years younger. I finish up at school and move to Bowling Green, Kentucky after I graduate in ’69.
I’m not there hardly anytime at all before I get my draft notice. This is right in the thick of the Vietnam War. I have to report so I don’t have much time in Bowling Green. We recorded sort of a keepsake on one hand and on the other, in our naïve way, something we hope might appear on an album. We recorded a bunch of tunes that ultimately appears as Poor Richard’s Almanac.
KD: You did that in Wayne Stewart’s garage with blankets nailed up on the walls…
AM: That’s absolutely right. Wayne is from Hopkinsville, KY. His mother had a little bit of money. They owned a big house on Main Street. It was the only house on Main Street that had a Rural Mailbox because it was so far back from the street to the house. Back behind the house was the servants’ housing, which was unoccupied. That’s where Wayne and I were staying. We did tack up quilts because somehow we knew that’s what we were supposed to do. We only had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder. I don’t know what kind. Whatever was the standard of the day. We recorded these tunes. The sound of them is pretty weak but the playing is pretty interesting. That’s early ’69.
We recorded Molly Bloom, which is a tune that I wrote kind of in the melodic style and a tune Sam wrote called Poor Richard’s Blues. Also some other fiddle tunes. I’d have to go back and check to see what all’s on there. We recorded it all over the weekend. Prior to that, I always thought this was funny, we had made a little recording. Probably on that same reel-to-reel but we didn’t have quilts tacked up. We fiddled around to try to get somebody interested in recording us. There weren’t that many record labels at the time. I think we sent one to Dave Freeman, County Records. I don’t think he ever responded. One company was Uncle Jim O’Neal. He had a label called Rural Rhythm. When I went out to California, I actually met him and he was a real character. Rural Rhythm label is still around to this day run by Sam Passamano.
KD: They’ve relocated to the Nashville area.
AM: He worked for this Uncle Jim O’Neal so he knows this. I visited with him and he agreed that Uncle Jim was a real character. Anyway, we sent him a tape and he wrote back and he said, “How dare you! This is obviously professional musicians. How dare you try to pass this off. This is way too good. This can’t be. You can’t be this good.” As if we plagiarized it. We thought that was real funny. So we did it ourselves and ultimately connected with a company called American Heritage Records, which was put together to record fiddle players. Lonnie Pierce was a fiddle player that Sam and Wayne knew, who started the Bluegrass Alliance. He put in a good word for us and got it eventually published.
KD: Has it been re-issued?
AM: Slim Richey had a label called Ridge Runner. He re-issued it many years ago. The tapes are long dust. They don’t exist.
KD: So you said this was about the time you got your draft notice.
AM: I go back to Norman and ultimately they turned me down because my blood pressure was too high. I was overweight. I was a real chunky kid. They turned me down, which was a wonderful day in my life. I remember sitting there with a Navy doctor. I looked over at the page. One side said “Physically Fit” and the other side said “Physically Unfit.” When he circled “Physically Unfit” I was sorry I had that medical condition that lead to problems later on. If I had been drafted, you would be talking to a dead man because I wouldn’t have survived basic training.
KD: I think something that happened the night before your physical might have had something to do with your being rejected.
AM: I’m glad you reminded me. Living there in Norman, I was playing with whoever I could play with. There was a gentleman named Carl Sossman. Now there’s a Sauceman who had some renown in the history of bluegrass. His name was spelled Sauceman, like a sauce. But this man’s name is Sossman. He and his family did Gospel music. He was a really great guy and I still see him from time to time.
My last day before I had to go get my physical, they wanted me to play at a church with them. We went and played music and then they had prayer offerings for people who were sick or having problems. Carl goes up there and says, “I would like to offer up a prayer for this young man playing the banjo. He’s going to the Army tomorrow. I’d like for us to pray that they find something wrong with him. Nothing deadly, just something wrong so he doesn’t have to go.” They offered up a prayer for me and sure enough, who am I to say?
KD: So you came back home rejected, but not dejected. What did you do then?
AM: I needed a job. I didn’t have any money. That’s sort of a theme here.
KD: You graduated from University of Oklahoma. What’s your degree?
AM: I have a degree in Education, secondary Social Studies. It’s what I was trained in but I knew when I did my student teaching that I wouldn’t mind being a teacher, but I was just way too young and that I didn’t know anything. My whole life I’m always behind. I should have been more mature than I was each step of the way. I realized I was too naïve to be a school teacher.
Anyway, I needed money so I went out and applied for jobs around town. I got two jobs because one was during the day and the other was at night so I could do them both. The daytime job was to this day was one of the best jobs I ever had. I loved it. I was a shipping clerk at the OU press. We got a 15 minute break in the morning and a 15 minute break in the afternoon and I would sit on my desk and read whatever was in front of me. Gunfighters, Myth and Reality. I’ve still got it here somewhere. I’m looking. Frontier Justice. They did a lot of Western stuff. The XIT Ranch. Matador Land and Cattle Company. I just read them all in little 15 minute spurts. Charles Goodnight’s biography. They did a lot of South American archeology books, too. I didn’t read those so much. There it is… Frontier Justice. There’s my XIT Ranch book. I see that I still have that. Here’s a really good one I still have: The Texas Republic, a Social and Economic History.
I loved the building it was in. The whole side of the building was windows and I had a good view of things so it was really, really good. Then, in the evenings I was a janitor at John Roberts class ring factory in Norman, Oklahoma. I was there all by myself and I would sweep up stuff, vacuum and whatever else they told me. At both jobs I made a nickle above minimum wage, $1.50 an hour. I went to work at 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning and got off at midnight.
KD: And making more than working with Jimmy Martin.
AM: Probably so. I heard there was an opening for a banjo player at Shakey’s Pizza in Oklahoma City. Here’s the cool part of it all. I went up there and auditioned and got the job. They had a piano player and a banjo player and a screen where they would show the words to songs and people would sing along. It was a Dixieland-ish kind of thing.
KD: I know it’s true but looking back it seems impossible that all over the country we were singing along as we ate our pizzas.
AM: They had big long picnic tables so everyone sat together. Anyway, I went up there and auditioned. As I would play I would mute my 5th string and strum with my thumbpick like a Dixieland kind of banjo player. The guy who played the piano was younger than me. He was only 18 or 19. According to him, he had run away from home. He was a great piano player. He would come down to Shakey’s during the day. They had a player piano. He would put money in the player piano and watch the keys and listen to the song. He was able to somewhat reproduce that. Sometimes those player rolls play things that are impossible because they’re mechanical. He would get the essence of it and he would play it.
KD: Sort of his version of slowing down the 33-1/3.
AM: We would also use fake books. They were books that were illegally issued, no royalties paid. They would be a melody line, chord symbols written above a verse and a chorus. Somebody could request a song. We didn’t know it but he could open the page and read the melody and chords, yell them to me as we were playing. It was really good. To this day I’m still really impressed. The thing about that job was it was a 5-hour shift, maybe 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. and it paid $5 an hour. Minimum wage was $1.50. Little did I know at the time was that was the best job in music that I ever had! (laughter)
KD: Well, ignorance is bliss. So you stayed with music, huh?
AM: Yes. I thought, “Man! This music business is really good!” It got that money because of the Musicians Union. That was the deal. When we talk about unions, and I understand many of the problems the unions have and the bad name they get, but they have an upside, too.
KD: At this point are you still using your second banjo?
AM: Let me think. I think I had by then bought an even better banjo. It was still just a bunch of parts. I bought it from a guy named Doc Hamilton who I met in Texas when I would go down and play ..
KD: Doc Hamilton as in Doc’s Riverboat Reel?
AM: Yes, yes. Doc is a really fine musician. Sometimes photographs of his show up on Facebook. Pictures of classic moments. He went to a lot of events and took pictures. It was a little more authentic and had a tone ring and was a little better. It was the banjo I was using on the first recordings I did with Jimmy Martin. I think Poor Richard’s Almanac was with that banjo, too.
KD: I’ve heard banjo players referred to as the hot-rodders of bluegrass because the instrument can come apart and have other replacements put back in. That seems to be a main conversation with banjo players. What’s the tone ring? Is it a flattop or archtop? Things like that.
AM: The other instruments are glued together so they’re much hard to re-arrange where the banjo’s components are bolted together so it’s pretty easy to swap things out. I never owned in my entire life an original Gibson. There’s always been pieces and parts. Just a point of this, when I was with Jimmy, I had dropped the same banjo we’re talking about and broken the resonator. Some of the laminations came apart and some of the side broke out. I had taken it to Randy Wood in Nashville and asked him to put it back together, he asked how I wanted it to look. I said I don’t have much money. He said he could glue it all back together and he just glued the pieces back in. It was pretty rough looking. I sold that banjo to Bill Holden or maybe it was that Bill Holden wound up with it eventually. He changed things around.
One day I was in George Gruhn’s shop in Nashville years later and he said, “I’ve gotten a banjo in and I was told it was your banjo. Can you take a look at it and confirm that? It had a different neck and it was now an archtop. The only thing that was left was that resonator that was broken. I think that’s why experts like Charlie Cushman and Jim Mills have arisen, people who can recognize all the parts. Some people will say “this is a 1935 Gibson” and then pause “but it’s got a Huber tone ring”. All my banjos are Stelling and they’re all original.
KD: You told me a story about a student who asked to play a banjo. He played to a few minutes and when he handed it back he said, “It sounds like mine.”
AM: Where that story comes from is from the time I was with Jimmy Martin. We played a festival where JD Crowe was also playing. He had just come off stage. JD is he guy that everybody holds up as the ideal in tone and everything. He’s way, way up there. Some kid came over and asked if he could play JD’s banjo and JD said go ahead. He took it off for 10 minutes and when he brought it back he said, “it sounds a lot like mine.” I always thought that was the perfect illustration of how much the player adds to the instrument. It is preferable to have a good instrument but you still have to play it and bring up the sound of it the best you can.
KD: We started out this conversation talking about that November 2016 Banjo NewsLetter birthday tribute to you. Almost all of them talked about your playing melodic with drive, which a lot of people thought wasn’t possible until you did it. How is your style evolving?
AM: I think on Poor Richard’s Almanac, it was pretty good. I can listen to that and not be real embarrassed. But I can see some shallow spots in my playing. Things that I could have done better. When I went to work with Jimmy, what the banjo was in his band, I think was a harmonic drummer. He wanted this certain timing. You played chords and notes rather than percussive stuff. It had to have a certain timing and a certain clarity. A certain kind of attack with your roll. For me a lot of time when he would complain about my playing I would always identify the right hand, you know the roll, but since I’ve gotten away from it I think a lot has to do with the left hand. He would talk about it but I never quite got it. If you’re playing a series of straight eighth notes, the only thing you can do to change that, if that’s where you are, is what you do with your left hand. If you put your finger down on a string in a certain part of that roll, there’s got to be a reason you put your finger down to have that note at that spot come out. If you’re playing all the notes with your right hand and you’re playing at a pretty good clip, it’s hard to make your right hand do much more than what it’s already doing.
He would talk about making notes either quick or lazy. So quick would mean if you were doing a hammer-on to make it really pronounced and really quick. There’s an episode in one of the videos of him trying to coach a fiddle player who was playing Fire on the Mountain. That’s what he’s saying to him: “No, that’s too slow. It needs to be quick. You need to make that note quick.” In his mind, and I think ultimately as a banjo player, I think I can illustrate it. But when I was with him I don’t think I could.
On slides it’s either quick or you can do it a little slower. So with him in the context of these equally spaced notes, put your fingers down some of them go down quick and some of them go slow. The other thing is that you can articulate the notes, have them stand out more if you if you put your finger down on the string and hold it down for as long as you can before you have to take it off, you get one kind of sound. If you put it down and let it up before you have to you get a different kind of sound.
When we speak or sing, we divide sounds into syllables. You do that by shutting down certain sounds so there are short sounds and long sounds. If you do that on your instrument even though you’re playing all these eighth notes, certain ones of those notes that you want sort of stand out a little bit more. Those become the syllables of the words. When you’re playing a melody on the banjo, you’re not just playing the notes of the melody, you’re also playing short and long sounds that are controlled by the amount of pressure of the fingers of your left hand. So you hold down and leave it, or let it up. I can demonstrate it but that’s the best I can describe it. If you have a string of eighth notes in a line, it makes certain ones of those stand out.
Jimmy might use the word punch. When Jimmy said punch, I would think the right hand but really it was the left hand. Just doing a kick-off to a song he would say the timing’s not right. I would once again look at my right hand and wonder how can that be, there is no more. I should have directed my attention to the left hand. He would talk about JD Crowe and Bill Emerson. Of the two, when he was with Jimmy, I think Bill Emerson played more like Jimmy directed. Or it was my sense of what Jimmy directed. Bill really caught on to it.
If you listen to the tune Sweet Dixie with Bill Emerson on the banjo, he plays a lot of notes that are fore-shortened. They’re staccato. If he had left them long, it wouldn’t sound as interesting. If you shorten them in the right way, it’s really wonderful. It makes all the difference in the world. It’s more syllable-ized. I think that’s one thing that ultimately I got from Jimmy. I watch Earl Scruggs doing it on old videos. You can see him shorten the note. He lifts his finger where there was plenty of time for him to leave it down longer than he did. But he doesn’t; he shortens it. It makes the music more syllable-ized.
I think ultimately that’s one thing I got from Jimmy. He didn’t just want everything quickened. I think a lot of banjo players have gotten that. I hear them on the radio. They’ve got the rolls down real well and the melodies really pop out. I think it’s really taken hold where it wasn’t that obvious early on.
I didn’t get it when I was with him, I don’t think. One difference between my playing on Poor Richard’s Almanac and when I was with Jimmy Martin is my roll is more solid and more even and things are quicker.
KD: Does that come from there being plenty of bluegrass-based college-level education now? You were involved for over 20 years with one of the firsts, South Plains College in Levelland, Texas.
AM: I would think it’s made a difference. I know East Tennessee State has one and there’s one in Kentucky where Raymond McLean is at and there are others. Berklee now has that. I do think that there’s more thoughtful attention to playing the banjo with a nuanced approach to it. That’s made a difference. There’s also a lot more examples now.
Early on Earl Scruggs was the best at it. When he played Blue Ridge Cabin Home you really got a sense of what the melody was. It wasn’t just a rat-a-tat-tat of eighth notes. He had a real syllable-ized way of playing. If you have straight eighth notes going on the whole time, it would be like if you had a tongue that just wagged up and down in rhythm (chuckle) and you had to form the words by closing your lips and the entire time your tongue is going in an eighth note rhythm. If you had this one sound and you had to form words by clipping them and letting some of the sounds go long and some go short, then you’d have an idea of having to do that on the banjo in the traditional approach.
With Jimmy Martin’s music he wanted the roll going all the time. My favorite two recordings of Jimmy Martin’s for banjo playing are both JD. They are I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes and John Henry. Both recorded in the same session and really fine examples of what I’m talking about.
KD: I remember the first time ever hearing about the Country Gazette. I was at a dinner party and they were selecting music to play during dinner. Someone held up an album and asked if I had ever listened to it. It was Traitor in Our Midst. I replied, what is that? They said it was bluegrass. THAT album is bluegrass?? (chuckle) The album cover itself was an astonishing wonderfulness. Is that a word? For me, one of the most influential groups I ever heard was the Country Gazette.
AM: When I was with Jimmy, and was getting ready to quit, I won’t say it was a dead end but it was kind of for me. I would always be Jimmy Martin’s banjo player making $35 a show. I suppose it’s the same reason any of them quit. There was nowhere to go. Financially and musically to a certain extent. All the songs would be put through the crucible of Jimmy Martin’s mind.
When I was with him we recorded a song called Chattanooga Dog. It’s a Tom T. Hall song. The song doesn’t go like Jimmy did it. The melody that Jimmy sang was John Henry. The melody of Chattanooga Dog that Tom T. Hall wrote is something else. I can’t remember what it is but it is not that. But when Jimmy sang it, that’s what fell out. He thought it sounded cool and he just kept that. Everything he did he just pushed it though personal style.
I love his music. I was listening to it just this morning because I love to hear Bill Emerson, JD, Chris Warner, Mike Miller and all those banjo players. I loved the style and I loved Jimmy’s singing. I loved the tightness of it and how professional the presentation was. But if I had been with him 20 years it would have been the same thing. I wanted to do something different, so I quit.
I had written to Byron Berlin and said if there was anything going on in California, let me know. He let me know that they were trying to get a group together: Roger Bush, Byron and Kenny Wertz and they were going to call if Country Gazette. They needed a banjo player so I moved to California in 1972 and started playing with them. That’s how I got there.
And this is that one thing leads to another thing. Byron and Roger and been playing with Kay Starr through the Doug Dillard Band. Doug quit and Byron and Roger said they wanted to do something different so they got hooked up with the Burrito Brothers, which is a whole long story unto itself. They had some business connections that were beyond what seemed to me to be normal bluegrass. When I got there and joined what was to be Country Gazette, they already had a manager named Eddie Tickner and a recording producer named Jim Dickson. They worked together as kind of a team. They had been instrumental in getting the Byrds going and other musical things going out in California.
They had a deal with United Artists Records in 1972. United Artists was really flush with money because they had a big hit with Don McLean’s American Pie. They had a lot of money and were willing to try different things. They thought Country Gazette would be a hip addition to this West Coast country-rockish kind of scene. The Eagles were just starting and also Asleep at the Wheel. Asleep at the Wheel and the Country Gazette were signed up at the same time.
United Artist had just brought on from their art department a guy called Norman Seff. He was South African. He had done an album cover for the Rolling Stones. He was a hot shot and they were more excited about him than they were about us. For our first album they gave him basically unlimited resources. He could do anything he wanted and what he hit upon was this. There was a Thelonious Monk album called Undergound. He won an award for it. I don’t know if it was for the album or the artwork. On the cover it had Thelonius Monk with a machine gun strapped on his back as a French Undergound-sort of character in a barn with a piano, and a damsel in distress, and a German general tied up there. It was sort of like he had pulled off some mission and now he was back playing music for his fair maiden.
Norman liked that idea so they took us to a place I think was called Western Costumes. It was huge. A multi-storied, multi-block building which was full of props, movie paraphernalia and costumes. Basically we would walk through with them and they would say, “Try this on.” They tried river boat gamblers, military stuff, and finally we got around to the Mexican Revolutionary stuff with big sombreros. We liked that. They outfitted us all in costumes with bandoleros. They got props like grenades and I don’t know what all. In fact the collar of the shirt I wore, said Charlton Heston. He wore that in some movie.
