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Doug, Doc and Earl…Bluegrass Breakdown and Cry
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 poker-faced Darlin’ Brother in the family band that descended like an affectionate blight on Andy and Mayberry every
The Darling Family, “that one makes me cry, Paw”
now and then, always intermixing their superstition and hijinx drama with some red-hot bluegrass while Paw (Denver Pyle) came along on the jug.
In fact, the Darlin’ Family were a rising bluegrass band discovered by Andy Griffith’s producer in a nightclub in Los Angeles. At the core were two brothers, Rodney and Doug Dillard, on guitar and banjo, and joined by Mitch Jayne and Dean Webb on bass and mandolin. They hailed from Missouri and had been performing on the folk revival scene when Andy found them. They moved to LA to have greater freedom to experiment with their music and its traditions.
The first bluegrass song I played was probably “Orange Blossom Special” with my Dad and Uncle Paul Furr on the fiddle on Uncle Paul’s porch. Uncle Paul exposed me to my first outhouse, although it was a little upscale, known as a “two-holer.” The second song I met growing up was “Bowed My Head and Cried Holy,” brought to me by my friend Paul in high school, while we were playing together. I loved it right away and got the vinyl album. In our current band, we learned Dillard’s version of this very old tune early on and still do it. “Bowed My Head” was an old time tune that Bill Monroe and others did in an old time style, but Dillard and Clark did it with drums, pedal steel and Byron Berline on the fiddle. It had an energy that would influence many others. The New York Times says,
Known simply as Dillard and Clark, their group, with Mr. Dillard playing guitar and fiddle as well as banjo, recorded two albums for A&M before disbanding. The albums did not sell well but have come to be regarded as among the earliest stirrings of the West Coast country-rock movement and an important influence on the Eagles and other bands. (Bernie Leadon, a charter member of the Eagles, had also worked with Dillard and Clark.)
Doug Dillard’s playing has shown up in all our lives somewhere. According to Billboard magazine’s tribute article, “the brothers still worked together in front of the camera from time to time, being part of Harry Dean Stanton’s band in the Bette Midler film The Rose.” The Dillards toured with many performers over the years– Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Carl Perkins, even Elton John. They left a huge influence on what would become “newgrass” and crossover music in groups like the Eagles and many others.
Doug could make a banjo sing. I read that when he first got his banjo he got his Dad to drive him to Nashville to Earl Scruggs’ house
Bluegrass banjo pioneer Earl Scruggs answered a knock at the door of his Nashville home in 1953 to find an eager-
Dillard and Clark, whose songs “Polly” and “Through the Morning, Through the Night” were covered by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant on their hit CD a few years back, “Raising Sand”
looking banjo enthusiast on the porch asking Scruggs to put a set of his special tuner keys on the young man’s instrument. “He was so gracious,” Rodney Dillard said of the reception his older brother, banjo player Doug Dillard, received that day from the father of the bluegrass banjo. “He sold him the tuners, then sat down at his kitchen table and installed them on the spot.” (LA Times—read the story)
The fine compilation of their hits is on a single CD called THERE IS A TIME: 1963-1970. It contains all the great Darling Family songs from the show, but also a lot of the songs the Dillards did, from folk to country, old time and blended styles. You can hear Doug Dillard’s melodic licks leap from the strings.
Anyway, I especially remember another song the Dillards did that is one of our mainstays, “There is a Time.” (Listen) It is a sad, mournful, truth-telling tune about how love is weathered down and dies in time. Charlene sang it on the Griffith show and it was one of the most haunting tunes I ever heard. Andy says at the end, “Well, that’s about the purtiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Doug Dillard, Banjo player, also graduated with a degree in accounting.
One thing is different about Doug from his Andy Griffith character, who was always poker-faccd. If you ever watch a video of Doug Dillard, he’s always smiling onstage.
Some years ago, Rodney was invited to do the song with the Dillards on the next generation of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken Volume III.” Rodney wrote a fourth verse to add to the original three that seems somehow fitting. Originally written with Mitch Jayne, who has since passed away, he sang it in a video that I leave with you as he mentions the loss of Jayne and, perhaps, fitting to hear as we think about his brother’s passing. The new lyric says, hopefully
Time is like a river flowing
with no regrets as it moves on
Around each bend a shining morning
and all the friends we thought were gone
Rest in peace, I say once more, to another banjo legend. Thank you, Doug Dillard. The Darling Boys are no more.
Tomorrow, I’ll remember Doc Watson. Two legends deserve their own mentions.
I Am a Flatpickin’ Pilgrim
Pilgrim’s Progress is one of my favorite spiritual writings to come from the Baptist and Puritan stream. The longer title of the original The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come written by John Bunyan first appeared in 1678. It was written by Bunyan while locked in jail for violating the Conventicle Act, in which the state forbid anyone but officially licensed Anglican priests from holding religious services.
I have been to that jail where Bunyan was, been to his grave in London, and visited the town where he lived as an early Baptist. It is a holy place for me. Pilgrim’s Progress is about an arduous, and highly symbolic, journey of a man called Christian who sets out from the security of his homeplace, the City of Destruction, to find the Celestial city to come. He heads out carrying a huge burden on his back, his sin, and is discouraged by others at every turn, but he perseveres.
It’s incredibly hokey in one sense, an allegory that never lets you forget its allegorical-ness. Along the way, the characters have allegory names: Faithful, Talkative, Mr. By-ends, Hopeful, the Giant Despair, Temporary, Grim and Too-bold. They represent sins, human failings and strengths in people.
And yet, the perceptiveness of the human soul, the psychological insights into inner struggle that Bunyan shows in it are powerful. It is still a resource I turn to now and then. I have felt so many of the struggles he identifies.
But something never felt quite right about calling my blog, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” First, it could be construed as a bit pretentious, as though I did what preachers always do in their sermons, make themselves the main character. I mean, am I really so sure that I am Christian, headed for the heavenly city against all odds? Why wouldn’t I just as well be Mr. Ready-to-Halt, or Heedless, or even Mr. Fearing? It’s like calling yourself, “The Deserving.” Humblebragging, as I wrote in an earlier piece.
So, since I am a musician, consider that to be a central piece of “me” and think of my art as inseparable from me, I chose 
a qualifier and the moment I settled on it, it felt right. “Flatpicker.” That may not be a term you have heard if you’re not a guitar player. Flatpicking is a style, one of the two major ways players perform melodies on guitars, the other being “fingerstyle” or fingerpicking. Most classical players are the latter.
Flatpickers have to do what finger players do with three or four alternating fingers with a guitar pick alternating back and forth at high speed. When you first start to learn it, it is hard as all get out. And there are different ways of doing it: Alternate picking, Crosspicking, Downpicking, Economy picking, Hybrid picking, Lead guitar, Sweep-picking and Tremolo picking. There are other styles—strumming and fingerstyle, with little worlds of their own.
Flatpicking guitar is a world rooted in the proud chemistry of post-puberty male testosterone. It’s often about speed, being the fastest, not far removed from NASCAR and football.
Flatpickers have their own magazine, their own heroes and a whole web of camps, festivals and venues. But the granddaddy of them all is the one in Kansas. It’s called the Walnut Valley Festival, but it’s known to Flatpickers as “Winfield”, as in, “He won Winfield.” My teacher, Glenn Tolbert, competed and made it pretty far, and he is FAST.
Three different summers I went to a camp in Maryville, Tennessee, devoted to teaching instruments to disciples, but the centerpiece is guitar flatpicking. The Founder of the camp, Steve Kaufman, a native of Maryville, and his renown is being “the only three-time champion of Winfield.” He is a legend among guitar players.
Other instruments compete, of course. A friend at camp told me of jamming with a 16 year old girl years ago who went on to win the fiddle competition. Her name was Krauss, I think, Allison I believe it was. Pretty good fiddler, he told me.
So the acoustic world is a serious little world. Humbling, because the only way you get better is endless repetitions, learning from others who are better than you, and yet still having to find your own pecuiliar style and physical adjustment.
Some people like Tommy Emmanuel, are so good at flatpicking that I imagine pride would be a great struggle. More of us, though, have to aspire to confident playing. You learn how to play with others and not play over them, how to bring out the song, do solos without always needing to attract so much attention to yourself.
Flatpicking sometimes requires that you go backwards for a while before you progress. You learn a lot by imitation, hanging out with experts, and often, being willing to crash in front of people and laugh about it.
One of the oddest phenomena I have experienced in this journey has been learning to disengage from the conscious mind. I know that sounds impossible to non-players, and I imagine it is not exactly that. Maybe it’s only “shifting to the right brain” or submerging to a more primitive kind of memory, but the way I can describe it is practicing and playing for so long that you can do it without looking at your fingers, thinking about the chords, and letting your muscles do what they know to do without much thinking about it.
It is a kind of “self-forgetting” that makes for joy in playing. It lets you look at the other singers and players in a band and smile, read what they are doing, listen to their hints, and play off their cues. It makes the song a mysterious and joyous journey in communion.
So, flatpicking seems like a perfect modifier to me for my blog, my life, and my religious journey, too. A friend of mine sent me a great quote one day: “I am still learning—Michaelangelo.” Me, too. Forget about what everybody thinks. Focus on the craft, learn the tunes, feel the rhythm, soar out on your own in a jam, learn from your mistakes, don’t do what you can’t do, and stay within the song. Follow the rules of jamming. Respect the other players. Hang in there.
So I offer you a little instrumental I created, a little flatpicking piece. It’s just me with a guitar, playing something I came up with just doodling around one day. I call it, “Possibilitating.” Enjoy, and welcome to my retitled blog. Feels more like me.
