In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey

Beats and Bluegrass at Amherst

16 GOING MY OWN WAY BEATS AND BLUEGRASS AT AMHERST After graduating from Roxbury Latin in 1956 I chose to go to Amherst CollegeinwesternMassachusetts.AsIsettledin,Idiscoveredotherkids like me, who had brought their record albums with them. Many of the peopleIgravitatedtowardwereintojazz,soIstartedhearingMilesDavis, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. When I went home at Christmas I went into The Book Clearing House, and looked at the jazz section and started buying those records. I tried out for WAMF and eventually got myself a one-hour weekly program. On my show I decided to play “American” music. The theme song was “Walk, Don’t Run” by the guitarist Johnny Smith. (It could have been the theme song for my life!) There were a lot of hipsters at the radio station who were into beat stuff, bebop, Jack Kerouac. I was interestedinbeingalittlebithipmyself—listeningtostuffthateveryone elsewasn’tlisteningto.Asaresult,my“AmericanMusic”showcovered everythingfromHankWilliamstoAaronCopeland;fromDukeEllington to Fats Domino; from Leadbelly to Charlie Parker; from Hank Snow to PeteSeeger.Sharingallofthisextraordinarymusicwithothersbrought me great satisfaction. Of course, in the big picture, music was off to the side. By the time I got to Amherst, I’d had five years of Latin and three years of Greek, so it just seemed to be the path of least resistance to carry on and become a Classicsmajor.Inthecourseoftimetherewereonlythreeofusmajoring, and after a two-hour seminar on Aeschylus or Plato we would adjourn to Professor John Moore’s house for a meal, washed down with ample quantities of wine, followed by hours of conversation, often joined by other teachers or students. It was a true symposium, and John Moore was the closest person to Socrates I would ever know. At three or four inthemorninghewouldstillbeinfullflightunravelingthemysteriesof whatever lay hidden in the material we were studying. At nine the next morning I would run into him bounding up the library stairs, ready to plunge into the day. I might have been a bit groggy myself. For my first two and a half years at Amherst the only music I was playingwaseitherinmyroomoratthebarinthebasementofmyfrater- 17 BeatsandBluegrassatAmherst nity.Thenonedaysomebodyintroducedmetoakidintheclassbehind me who played the banjo. His name was Bill Keith. He was playing a longneck Pete Seeger style 5-string banjo and was learning from Pete’s instruction book. The last two pages of the book had an introduction to the Earl Scruggs style of banjo playing. Bill had gotten hold of a Flatt & Scruggs album and was teaching himself this style. When we got together , I said, “I know some of those songs. I used to hear these guys called the Lilly Brothers sing them.” Bill and I started getting together, and I also showed him a Folkways album I had picked up at The Book Clearing House called American Banjo, Scruggs Style, which Mike Seeger hadrecorded.OnceBillsethismindtosomething,hewasverythorough. Having someone else around to accompany him and sing some songs gave him the impetus to really get into it. The Lilly Brothers and Don Stover were now playing regularly at a place called The Hillbilly Ranch in downtown Boston next to the Trailways bus station, so when Bill and I went home for the Easter holiday, I tookhimthere.Naturally,BillKeith’seyesneverleftDonStover’shands. Don was a powerful player. He wouldn’t have to be on mic to hear him. He was totally traditional and totally original. He could frail old-time, play driving Scruggs style, or do beautiful pedal steel-like licks on slow tunes.WatchingDonwasacrashcourseforBill.Thiswassomethingyou couldn’t learn from books or records. Right here in Boston there was a master in our midst, and Bill was eager to learn all he could from him. That summer I took a student boat to Europe and traveled around with a classmate from Roxbury Latin, Larry Casson. On my return to Amherst I immediately hooked up with Bill. I had acquired a couple of newalbums.OnewasanotherofMikeSeeger’scollectionsonFolkways, MountainMusic,BluegrassStyle. The other was of Earl Taylor, a singer and mandolinplayerfromBaltimorewhohadbeenrecordedbyAlanLomax. In the liner notes Lomax described Bluegrass as being “folk music in overdrive.”Itwasthearrivalofbothoftheserecordsthatintroducedme tothetermBluegrass.HillbillyhadbeenreplacedbyCountry,andBluegrass was on its own over in left field somewhere near Folk. I proceeded to incorporate this mixture into what Bill and I were playing, and I started to adapt some of the folk songs from AmericanSongbag to a more bluegrass or “mountain music” style. We worked up “Pretty Polly,” “John Henry,” 18 GOING MY OWN WAY and“KentuckyMoonshiner.”OneafternoonBillwasworkingatlearning aSonnyOsbornebanjotune,“BanjoBoyChimes.”Somethingaboutthe chord changes stayed with me, and I started to fit them to the words of anothersongoutoftheSandburgSongbag...