Category: Country Music

Andy Griffith, Art, Banjo, Bluegrass, Country Music, Creativity, Dillard and Clark, Earl Scruggs, Folk, Music, The Dillards, The Dillards7 Comments

Doug, Doc and Earl…Bluegrass Breakdown and Cry

Gary Furr

The Darling Boys are no more This has been one of the unkindest of years in acoustic music.  First, Earl Scruggs, the Founding Father of bluegrass banjo, passed away (read my post on Earl’s death here CLICK)  back in March.  Then a few weeks ago, Doug Dillard, a rollicking banjo player who blazed a trail with the banjo across genres in the 1970s when he left the Dillards to join Gene Clark of the Byrds to form Dillard and Clark. Of course, you’d know old Doug for another reason, if you ever watched the Andy Griffith Show.  He was the … Continue reading Doug, Doc and Earl…Bluegrass Breakdown and Cry

Art, Banjo, Bluegrass, Country Music, Creativity, Earl Scruggs, Music, Old-time music

Farewell, Earl Scruggs, and Thank You

Gary Furr
1964, on top of the world, with Lester Flatt

Earl Scruggs, “pioneer” as the Huffington Post put it,  of the Three-finger Banjo style, has died.  For some of us, he has been a mentor and inspiration our whole lives.   He was not merely a pioneer, he was the King.  And there are many legends on the banjo–Bela Fleck, Ralph Stanley, Jens Kruger, Don Reno, J. D. Crowe, and many greats.  But no one like Earl.

As a displaced North Carolina boy moving around the country, my Dad kept me connected to music.  He had a Silvertone electric guitar from Sears and a Harmony archtop acoustic guitar.  The electric would shock you if you played in bare feet on the garage floor so I tended to play the acoustic.  I didn’t know much about Earl Scruggs, but I kept running into him over the years.

When we moved to Irving, Texas in the late Sixties, I learned to play very slow rhythm guitar to a very slow “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (LISTEN) with my seventh grade friend,  Brad Phillips, who was the odd combination of a banjo playing Episcopalian. Continue reading “Farewell, Earl Scruggs, and Thank You”

Bluegrass, Country Music, Death, Environment, Ethics, Music, Old-time music, Technology

Weather or Not

Gary Furr

Weather.  Someone said to me not long ago, “It is humbling to consider that when you come to die, the crowd that day will be determined by the weather and they’ll sum your life up in twenty minutes or less.”  Humbling. “Shelter” is such a “taken for granted” in America that we live more disconnected from the fragility of life as it is exposed to the elements.  It breaks in on us now and then—in California, by earthquake, in other places, snow or tsunami.  Here in the South, we live chronically subject to the tornado and hurricanes. Hurricanes are different … Continue reading Weather or Not

Art, Christianity, Country Music, Jesus, Music, Spirituality, Theology and Life4 Comments

Lessons from JC (Johnny Cash)

Gary Furr

A new friend from New York reminded me of the Cash bio I read a few years back.  Like everyone, I loved  “Walk the Line,” the bio-pic of the life and love of Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash that came out years ago.  It is not a true biography, really.  Robert Streissguth’s JOHNNY CASH: THE BIOGRAPHY is where you get more than the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version. Johnny’s story was, of course, about a many coming out of hard times, his well-known descent into drugs and alcohol that ruined his first marriage and nearly destroyed his career … Continue reading Lessons from JC (Johnny Cash)

Art, Bluegrass, Country Music, Folk, Music, Old-time music

Wade Mainer, Uncle Vance and This Old Guitar

Gary Furr

Wade Mainer died this week at the age of 104.  A mountain banjo player who came out of the mountains of Weaverville, NC, Wade and his brother J. E. were part of my life even though I never met either one of them.  They split up and had separate careers after 1936, and were a big part of the foundation of what Bill Monroe fused into “bluegrass” music.  Wade became the more famous of the two, playing the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt. Uncle Vance Furr, my Daddy’s oldest brother, died at the age of 74.  He lived, all … Continue reading Wade Mainer, Uncle Vance and This Old Guitar