As I’ve been writing these articles on the impact of the blues on old time and bluegrass music here in southwest Virginia, a specific image keeps coming to mind. It’s a pencil drawing by Galax area artist Willard Gayheart. Willard is also a musician and music making is a common subject of his drawings. My favorite is one titled “All In the Family” and features a veritable “who’s who” of old time, bluegrass, rock and roll and country music icons, shadowed by their influences. All of them are not white and most of them are important figures in the development of the blues.
Some of the images are folks I’ve already discussed in previous articles. For instance the Carter Family is pictured with Leslie Riddle. Actually, Riddle is pictured twice, next to both A.P. and Mother Maybelle. Riddle was a black guitarist who assisted A.P. Carter in collecting songs. He may well also have been the inspiration of Mother Maybelle's distinctive picking style. It is said that she learned "The Cannonball" directly from Riddle. Other images in Gayheart's drawing are firmly identified as bluegrass players including the genre's progenitor, Bill Monroe.
Bill Monroe was born into a musical family in Rosine, Kentucky. The man who put the mandolin center stage and is credited with creating bluegrass music (named for his band, the Bluegrass Boys, in honor of his home state), picked up the instrument more or less by de
fault. The youngest of eight children, Bill's siblings all picked up the more desirable instruments leaving Bill with the lowly mandolin. To add insult to injury, young Bill recalled that his brothers insisted that he remove four of the eight strings from the instrument so that he would not play too loudly! Monroe got the last laugh however, by fusing the influences of his two childhood mentors, Pen Vandiver (who raised Bill when he was orphaned as a teenager), and black country blues guitarist Arnold Schultz. Vandiver, Monroe's maternal uncle, played the fiddle, and had a deep repertoire of songs that Monroe drew from throughout his career. However, Schultz is credited with the blue notes and blues licks that spiced up Monroe's mandolin breaks and give bluegrass its distinctive edge. Monroe supposedly seconded Schultz on guitar as a child and rated him a primary influence in his musical growth
At Monroe's first recording session he gave energetic performance of Jimmie Rodgers's "Mule Skinner Blues." Jimmy Rodgers, known as "the Father of Country Music" and "the Singing Brakeman," turned to a musical profession when tuberculosis ended his railroad career prematurely. His career was launched at the famous Bristol Sessions (the same session that launched the career of the Carter Family known as "the Big Bang of Country Music"). When the group he came to record with, the Tenneva Ramblers, argued over who was to receive top billing, Jimmy was given a chance to sing on his own and a star was born.
Rodgers picked up guitar playing and his signature "blue yodel" from fellow railroad workers and later medicine show entertainers, many of whom were black. Indeed, many of Rodger's songs were blues outright and feature the genre's distinctive directness, feeling and imagery. In Gayheart's drawing, Rodgers is pictured with New Orleans trumpeter Louis Armstrong who, with his wife pianist Lil Armstrong, recorded with Rodgers on "Blue Yodel #9" (also known as "Standing on the Corner"). Indeed, Rodgers also recorded with black pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and was one of the earliest white artists to openly record with racially mixed groups at a time when it was strictly taboo. One such session, "Everybody Does It in Hawaii," featured a real Hawaiian band.
Speaking of Hawaiian influence, seminal dobroist Bashful Brother Kirby Oswald's career was heavily influenced by the Hawaiian sound that swept the country in the 1920s. In Gayheart’s picture the well-known dobroist (born Beecher Ray Kirby), is shadowed by the progenitor of the Hawaiian lap guitar style Joseph Kekuku. Oswald learned the style from Kekuku acolyte Rudy Waikiki while performing at house parties in Flint Michigan where lived temporarily while working in the auto plants with many other transplanted southerners. Oswald was a fixture in Roy Acuff’s Smokey Mountain Boys and regular on the Grand Ole Opry and is credited with popularizing not only the Dobro in bluegrass and country music but also the bluesy and exotic sounds of the Hawaiian style.
The history of bluegrass music is tied to not only the mandolin picking of Monroe but also the banjo playing of Earl Scruggs. Scruggs got his start in the Bluegrass Boys and his syncopated three finger picking style is credited with driving and popularizing Monroe’s music. The banjo itself is of African origin and this is illustrated in Gayheart’s picture by pairing Scrugg’s with Uncle John Scruggs (no relation). Although it can easily be argued that Scrugg’s did not invent the three-finger style, he took it far beyond any of his predecessors. When Scrugg’s and fellow Blue Mountain Boy, guitarist Lester Flatt, left the band they partnered up to form a band whose popularity rivaled their former employer’s. They did much to popularize and further bluegrass music. We know Uncle John only from a brief 1920s film clip outside a sharecropper’s cabin, playing to an audience of dancing children. It is readily available on YouTube.
Another musical icon pictured in Gayheart’s drawing is Bob Wills and his influence, Bessie Smith. Wills, “the King of Western Swing” fused the bluesy inflection of Bessie Smith’s singing with jazz chords and rhythmic sophistication to create one of the most engaging and danceable sounds in all American music. As a teenager Wills once rode fifty miles on horseback to hear Bessie Smith sing. In fact his first recording was Smith’s “Gulf Coast Blues.” His “Steel Guitar Rag” was a lap steel driven version of a black guitarist slide instrumental, Sylvester Weave
r’s “Guitar Rag,” a tune that has become a bluegrass standard.
If Jimmie Rodgers is the “Father of Country Music” Hank Williams was its first born son. The man who birthed the contemporary country music and honky tonk sound got his early musical education from a black street singer named Rufus Payne, known to the locals in Hank’s hometown as “Tee Tot.” Like Rodgers, William’s early blues singing strongly informed his country music performance with his fondness for 12 bar blues and heavy use of blue notes in his singing attack.
Finally, Gayheart’s picture features Elvis Pressley and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Elvis, also known as the “Hillbilly Cat” had his first big hit with Cruddup’s “That’s Allright Mama.” It was one of three Cruddup compositions recorded by Elvis. Interestingly, the flip side of that single was Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky. All in the Family indeed!
