Read no. 32

Greetings!

I hope you all saw the Dixie Chicks on the cover of People magazine (Feb. 3). Inside, I was delighted to see a picture of a very pregnant Emily Robison playing the banjo “sidesaddle”—with the banjo on her right hip. How well I remember doing the same thing when I was pregnant! In Beck Gentry’s interview inside, she talks about being pregnant and playing mandolin. It’s not something you forget!

I guess the Dixie Chicks have entered popular culture. When Beck came down to do her interview, her sister Ellen turned me on to the mystery novels of Faye Kellerman. In her 1999 book Jupiter’s Bones, the Dixie Chicks are mentioned! Detective Scott Oliver turns the radio to a country station that is playing a Shania Twain song:

“Ever see this girl? She’s a real piece. She and the Dixie Chicks. Man, those gals are hot babes.”

“The Dixie Chicks?” [says his partner Marge Dunn.]

“I’m not making it up.”

“The Dixie Chicks,” Marge repeated. “Used to be an insult to call a woman a chick. Whatever happened to feminism?”

“Look at it this way, Marge,” Oliver said. “Dixie Chicks is a much better band name than the Hairy Armpits.”

In spite of the comments about “a real piece” and “hot babes,” I’m delighted that the Dixie Chicks are being noticed by a New York Times bestselling author. Congratulations to Emily Robison, Martie Maguire, and Natalie Maines. By the way, the Dixie Chicks showcased at IBMA way back in 1991, before Natalie joined the group and they changed their focus to more-country-than-bluegrass music.

Finding Her Voice

I was recently reminded that this year is the tenth anniversary of the publication of Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music by Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. (Hermann. The book includes a whole chapter devoted to women in bluegrass titled “Little Darlin’s Not My Name.” I’ve used this book so much it now falls open to the page that says “...bluegrass music remained an almost completely male domain during its first twenty-five years.” If you don’t have a copy yet, get one!

I am honored to be on a panel that includes Mary Bufwack at the upcoming International Country Music Conference. We will be talking about Gender and Country Music. Ronnie Pugh, author of the biography of Ernest Tubb, will be the moderator. The ICMC will be held May 29-31 at Belmont University in Nashville. All are welcome. Registration is $70. Contact James Akenson at jakenson@tntech.com for more information.

Bluegrass Divas

Inside you’ll find a wonderful, candid interview with mandolin player Beck Gentry. While she and Mary Jo Leet were down here, we were kidding around and, inspired by the Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love, we started talking about Bluegrass Divas and who might be considered a Diva. We quickly came up with some qualifications (naturally, we met them all!): you have to be past menopause or going through it, you have to be professional bluegrass woman who has made some recordings and played on the festival circuit, you have to play an instrument (no quarter given on this except for Miggie Lewis!), and perhaps most importantly, you have to want to be a Diva. We came up with a list of women who seemed like Bluegrass Divas to us. At the head of the list were Patsy, Roni, and Donna Stoneman along with Miggie, Janis, and Polly Lewis. Other women who agreed to be named were Katie Laur (“I’m damned proud to be a Diva. Finally, somebody noticed!”), Alice Gerrard, Hazel Dickens, Suzanne Thomas, Gloria Belle, Kathy Chiavola, Martha Adcock, Laurie Lewis, Beth Weil, and Sally Wingate. I would also include Sally Ann Forrester, Ingrid Herman/Fowler/Reese, and Rose Maddox. If you know of anyone (including yourself) who should be on the Diva list, let me know. Who knows where this might lead. Divas-in-Waiting? Honorary Divas? Diva Wannabees? (Not knowing I’d written the above, Suzy Thompson says, “Add me to the Divas-in-Waiting list!”)

Later, Beck sent me a definition of Diva from author Star Jones. Star says a Diva is a woman with a Delightfully Interesting Vivacious Attitude. Then Beck went on to say, “This reminds me of the attitude about women playing music back then [1970s], You could see very young males (single digit) who would be playing some instrument and touted as the next Earl Scruggs or Bill Monroe and everybody would make way for them. It took women jumping up and down in front of rows and rows of people before someone would say, “Hey, you just might be able to do something like sing.” Or it would be assumed that if you might possibly be into music then you were a ‘girl singer.’ I was not the first-choice replacement in the Ohio River Valley Boys [an all-boy band Beck joined] or even the fourth, but it was mostly because I kept showing up. I was also doing a lot of the emcee work because no one else wanted to do it.”

Inside we also feature an article about the experiences of women who play bluegrass in Tasmania (they’re frightfully familiar) and we take a look at the large numbers of women who played at the recent Wintergrass Festival. Enjoy!

—Murphy Henry

Memphis Beck

There Was No One to Tell Me I Couldn’t

“Memphis” Beck Gentry, nee Bye (b. 11/29/49), was the mandolin player, singer, and emcee for the Falls City Ramblers, a group formed by Beck and her husband Roy in Louisville, Ky., in 1972. This January, she and Mary Jo Leet drove down to Winchester from Indiana and Ohio so I could interview Beck. Mary Jo, who plays with Dry Branch Fire Squad, was interviewed for WIB #4 in 1995. She and Beck have been friends since they met at Ralph Stanley’s bluegrass festival over thirty years ago, and Mary Jo is godmother to Beck’s son Orville, now 27. We had a fabulous time hanging out and I only wish I could present the four-hour interview in its entirety.

From the beginning, the Falls City Ramblers had an eclectic sound—their first recording, Ain’t Nothin’ In Ramblin’ (Vetco 1975), included clarinet, saxophone, and washboard! Their second album, Early Indiana Days, was on Palm Tree Records (1977), and their third was on Kanawa. Beck and Roy also made two recordings, Old Photographs, for Vetco (1984) and Blues on my Trail for Papa Lou (1993) before parting company in 1995. Beck now works as a psychiatric nurse in Jeffersonville, Ind., and counsels people with drug and alcohol problems. Her nickname, Memphis Beck, comes from the fact that she loved the blues singer Memphis Minnie, who finger-picked the guitar, which was unusual for a woman. Beck got teased about that, and the teasing soon solidified into a nickname.

Beck, the oldest of four children including a brother and two sisters, was born in Hardinsburg, Ky., and grew up in Jeffersonville, Ind., and McQuady, Ky. Her mother, who was the strong influence in her life, “worked all the time”—at a bank, at a car dealership, for the city of Hardinsburg, and as a seamstress. As Beck said, “That was highly unusual because back then women didn’t always work.” Her dad, who had some problems with alcohol, didn’t always have a job.

Beck’s maternal grandfather played fiddle in a dance band even though he had lost his right hand in a corn grinder in his early twenties. He accomplished this by tying the fiddle bow to the stump of his right wrist with a bandana. All her aunts and uncles on her mother’s side played music and sang, and her aunts and mother all played the piano. Today her mother, at 74, is organist for two churches. Her mother also played some

guitar with her fiddling father, a form of accompaniment they called “seconding.” She taught Beck her first guitar chords when Beck was twelve. Beck also started piano at the tender age of five, picking out melodies by ear. In high school, Beck formed a folk music duet with another girl, with Beck playing guitar. They played for school functions and at 4-H shows. “It never occurred to me that women couldn’t play,” is how Beck put it.

We’ll pick up the interview here and let Beck tell the rest.

When did bluegrass come on the scene ?

That came in around 1969. I graduated from high school in ’67 and the same year I graduated, I went into nurses’ school so I moved to Louisville. I was 17 years old. So you knew you wanted to be a nurse early on.

Right. I knew I wanted to be a nurse from when I was six years old. I operated on all my dolls. My poor dolls, I mean, they had amputations, and their hair was cut off when I did brain surgery on them.

So you are now in nursing school at age 17 in Louisville.

And I was going to a Catholic nursing school. And interestingly enough, that was when guitar masses started coming out. So when the nuns figured out that I could play for guitar masses they would cancel my dates or anything. The expectation was that I would be there to do that. So I did play for a lot of guitar masses. And I’ve seen some of the girls I went to nursing school with and the primary thing they remember about me is that I would sit—I had a little turntable and I had records and I would listen to stuff over and over again and then learn it and that’s always been my method to learn. And I had a big rendition. Some of the girls’ boyfriends had gone into Vietnam and we would sit around and play songs and they’d ask me to play Leaving on a Jet Plane and I’d be singing it and they’d all be crying. But that’s how they remember me.

So where does bluegrass come in ?

In ’67, although I couldn’t do much then. But once I figured out the music scene, then I started playing in coffeehouses in ’68.

Just you and your guitar?

Just me and my guitar. Then I met up with this other lady and she played guitar and so I kind of got involved with her and her brother and we had several things going on in the big coffeehouse scene there. Then, I had gotten this job at a place called The Round Table and I was doing folk music one night a week there. And on the weekends there was a band called the Ohio River Valley Boys and my ex, Roy Gentry, was playing in that. So I would go out and see them and that’s how I met him. And there was enough similarity to some of the tunes that I grew up with so I didn’t seem like a stranger to that music. It was like, this is just another form of music. I really hadn’t heard that much bluegrass band music. I mean I was very familiar with a lot of the tunes because they went back to what I grew up with. But a lot of the stuff that I knew as folk music was being done in bluegrass style. And when I saw the mandolin I'm going, “Oh yeah.” When I met Roy, he would loan me records and so I was listening to, gosh, the Carter Family. He had quite an extensive record collection. And then, I was in the process of graduating from nursing school [April 1970]—I was twenty. It was a three-year program all year around. And the last three months I begged my mother to let me quit. ’Cause at that point, I felt pretty stifled. I felt like everybody was telling me what to do and the nuns were running my life and everybody was running my life and I was ready to break out. I hadn't really gone through what I think of as adolescence, you know. ’Cause I was the oldest and I was the real responsible one. So I had this stack of Roy’s records and I wouldn’t see him, I wouldn’t call him, wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I wanted to get out of school, and didn’t know what I wanted to do. So we toughed that period out and then I did call him. So we kind of got back together but in that interim I ended up with this mandolin that he had. It stayed at my house for a while with a whole bunch of his records. And while it was there [laughs], I picked it up. Didn’t know anything about the way it was tuned, didn’t know anything about anything, and I started listening to those records, and the very first tune I worked up was Fisher’s Hornpipe. In D. It was on some fiddle record.

So when we got back together and he came over I said, “Look, I worked up this tune.” And he goes, “Well, what is it?” And I played Fisher’s Hornpipe and he goes, “How did you do that?” And I said, “I don’t know, I figured it out.” Then I must have worked out Blackberry Blossom and all those fiddle tunes. I’d hear them and I would go, “Okay, I can play this.” And there was no one to tell me I couldn’t.

So what did Roy play in the Ohio River Valley Boys?

He played the banjo. But something came up and he could no longer play in the Ohio River Valley Boys in The Round Table. He couldn’t go back in that bar. So he said to

me, "They’ve got to have somebody in the Ohio River Valley Boys.” So the upshot was they found somebody else to play the banjo and then they moved me onto mandolin. Okay, so there were no problems or qualms about having you in the band, being a woman.

No, no one ever said, “You can’t do that.”

Did that feel strange to you at all?

No, it didn’t feel strange to me. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t think anything of it that I could hear a tune and sit down and figure it out. I didn’t think that was any kind of big deal until I was out and exposed to other people and I found out my learning method was a little bit different from theirs because I could hear a tune and I could pretty well go by it note for note. I now realize that is a gift. But I didn’t at the time. Growing up in music, I just thought that was the way things were.

[Beck and Roy got married in December 1970. Beck was still playing with the Ohio River Valley Boys and working as a nurse.]

During this time did you and Roy play music just for fun at the house?

Yes. You know, we had lots of parties where lots of musicians came over and there was always that stuff going on.

When you were doing parties at your house, were there other women players that were picking or singing?

Not until I met Mary Jo. I would be the only girl. And that was when I started figuring out that I was kind of an outcast. ’Cause I’d be outcast from the women because they didn’t like it that I was going and I was a musician.

’Cause you were hanging with the men, their men!

Exactly!

So how did the women treat you ?

They wouldn’t talk to me. It was like a snubbing kind of thing. There was always this underlying opinion that there has to be something other than the music. You know what

I mean? If you’re a woman and you’re playing, why are you there? You know, “Who do you think you are? What are you doing being involved in this?” Then I got some of it from men because their opinion was you can’t possibly be able to play and keep up. Did you find that they challenged you musically, like they’d play fast tunes or try to trip you up ?

Well, yeah!

So in a jam session, they would try to pick something really hard to throw you, so you couldn’t play?

Right.

So they could say, see I told you she couldn’t play.

That was exactly it. I don’t know if I had a certain naïveté about it or what, but I didn’t feed into that. There was a peripheral part of me that knew that was going on and I would choose to ignore it. I’d say, I don’t have to play this game. But it did make me kind of on my own path.

So if somebody suggested a tune that you didn’t play, you would just let it roll off your shoulders.

No, I would say to them, “Hey, play that for me and I’ll see what I can do.” I never said, “No, I can’t play that.” Now I would be in jam sessions with certain musicians who would refuse to play a song because they didn’t know it. I was of the opinion that I could learn anything. And never felt intimidated in any way musically. I might be intimidated other ways, but not musically.

Once you started playing the mandolin did you feel like you were a better musician than Roy, or were you about equal or was he better and did that create any problems ? I have never had that competitive feeling of music. That so-and-so is better than me, or I’m better than so-and-so.

How did you miss getting that gene?

I don’t know how I did that. I could see that one-upmanship happen a lot with guys, and I think they tried to play it on me. But I don’t know, I just didn’t. I think that is more of a personality thing.

You said that Mary Jo was the first woman you met in bluegrass.

Yeah. I mean I was going to bluegrass festivals and I’m seeing the Lewis Family and Wilma Lee Cooper. You know, there were women out there.

Who else did you see?

There weren’t that many of them. I saw Gloria Belle. Those were the primary women that I was seeing. Now, I was listening to the Carter Family, I mean Janette and Joe Carter, and, of course, in folk music I listened to women all the time. Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary.

And how I met Mary Jo was through a mutual friend of ours. I had met this guy and he kept telling me you’ve really got to meet Mary Jo Dickman. I had started going to bluegrass music festivals in the spring of 1970, and Reidsville, North Carolina, was my first bluegrass festival. And I want to think it was Ralph Stanley’s festival that I met Mary Jo. So, we’re there and all of a sudden it’s like meeting somebody you’ve known for a long time. And we went yak, yak, yak, yakking,

Mary Jo: Somebody else that knows the tune, somebody else who knows who Ralph Stanley is. You didn’t have anybody to talk to about that. I hadn’t had anybody to talk to about that except for maybe a couple of people who came in for the weekend. And I was just ate up with bluegrass.

And that’s the way we were. I mean we talked nonstop. And of course at the bluegrass festival you would have all these things that happened after the show closed down. Then you would go from place to place. You’d see a bluegrass jam going on. I’d carry my mandolin around and I would stop and I would listen to it for a couple of minutes and I thought, “Okay, this looks pretty cool.” I’d take out the mandolin, I’d turn my back, I’d tune it up, and I’d turn around and I’d go, “Hey.” Sometimes I got elbowed out and sometimes I didn’t. If I got elbowed out, I’d stand right outside the circle and I’d play and whoever was standing in front of me, they’d have to hear it.

God, you were gutsy. How did that make you feel when people would elbow you out? Well, I just figured, hey, they don’t know me.

Gosh, you’re too nice, Beck. It would have pissed me off so bad. I would have just been livid. Did it ever happen that once you’d been elbowed out and you’d stand behind somebody and play, they would realize that you could play?

Yes, sometimes that would happen. You know, all of a sudden, they’re going, “Oh, she really can play.” But in those jams it was still very seldom that you would see females playing. You just didn’t see it. Every once in a while I would come upon a jam that would have a woman in it. But usually it was somebody who didn’t play in a band and mostly they played with their partner and knew enough to back them up.

And that would be a bass player?

Or a guitar player. But you just didn’t see women playing, even in those jams, much. [In 1972, Beck (mandolin) and Roy (banjo) formed the Falls City Ramblers in order to play music that wasn’t just traditional bluegrass. The original group also included Jim Webb on guitar (not the famous songwriter), and Bob Wood, who had played bass for the Ohio River Valley Boys. By 1974, the group also included Robin Rose on Dobro and washboard. The group had been together about two years when Roy had the idea that they should all pitch in and buy a place together. They bought a farmhouse in China, Ind., about an hour and a half from Louisville and moved there in June of 1974. In the long run, this decision did not work out well for Beck. By now, the band was a working road band who was playing all the time, and Beck had quit her job as a nurse.] Where was the band playing ?

We played a lot in Louisville but we were also playing in Dayton, Ohio. We did a lot of club work.

Does that mean bars?

Yes, that means bars. Then we had some places we played in Indiana. When we were playing in Indiana back then, the law was women couldn’t sit at bars. You could sit at a table. I could play music across from the bar, but I could not sit at a bar. Even if you were a musician, you couldn’t order a drink. Only thirty years ago, ladies. Women couldn’t order drinks.

Were these blue-collar-type bars or were they college, hippie-type bars?

We did both. Now, when we were playing in Dayton, it was more the college, hippie type. We actually appealed more to those people because by then we were starting to do other music beside bluegrass. So we have this farmhouse. And we were living there and I was doing the booking, pretty much. Except everybody kept trying to meddle in it. How did you end up being the one who was doing the booking to begin with? Because I would get on the phone and call people. I was the one that got our Vetco recording contract. That was a cold call to Lou Ukelson in Cincinnati. And he said, “Come on in and let me listen to you.” And the rest is history.

But part of it was like being a band mom. You had to round everybody up and make sure they were going to be there on time. We were living on a shoestring. All the money we made went to pay for the farm. But we were actually making a living and at that point in time we were playing probably 52 weeks a year. We didn’t take any time off. There wasn’t any. It was mostly weekends but it was three nights a week. We didn’t have weekends. And things like the Kentucky Derby weekend, most of those festivities went on for two weeks. That was some of our highest paying jobs.

Talk more about being band mom. ’Cause that’s definitely a gender thing. [Yes, it is.] You wouldn’t have been band mom if you had been a guy.

No, but we would have people who would say, “Well, we’re not going to eat in fast food places.” Which actually makes sense. But that meant you carried food on the road. There was no staying in hotels because we couldn’t afford them. Couldn’t even afford the one room. But we’d go stay with Mary Jo, say. She was kind enough to put us up for the weekend. By this time, the music festival business was growing but there were different kinds of music in there. There was old-time string band music and then I started seeing more women who were out playing. But that was from the old-time. Now every once in a while you might be in some place that they might bring some local gospel group in and there were women in that. But even then they weren’t people you saw on a regular basis.

Were you beginning to see the strangeness of what you were doing? Like being a woman in bluegrass?

No, because at that point in time, I think the music scene was changing and you were actually seeing more college kids becoming more involved in it. More people who wanted more variety in music, promoters who not only would book bluegrass bands in but would book Star Spangled Washboard Band.

At what point in all this is your son born?

He was born in August 1975. His name is Orville Gibson Gentry. He was named after the founder of the Gibson Guitar Company, Orville Gibson.

Was that your idea?

No, it was not. I was wholeheartedly against it. Because why put a handle like Orville on somebody? So then I figured out that there was not going to be any discussion about it, you know. The only other one was Christian Frederick Martin and I didn’t think that was very good either.

How did having Orville change your life?

Well first of all, I played music until I was eight months pregnant. And you were laughing about somebody playing banjo on the side. [Emily Robison with the Dixie Chicks.] That’s the way I had to play. And probably the last month I was on the road, I had to sit out some songs because I couldn’t stand for five hours and not get off my feet. I mean that’s a grueling schedule. But I would have to sit down every once in a while. And I can’t say that the other guys were so very kind about it. They thought I was being a wimp, a wuss, or whatever it was.

So, didyou sit down or did you sit out? I mean did you just not play or did you get a chair?

I sat out!

Was sitting down not an option?

It was never considered.

Okay, so you had Orville...

And two weeks later I was back on the road.

Lord have mercy! Well, I guess I did the same but it seems...

Mary Jo: I had a bassinet for that baby and for about six weeks I was just following their jobs and trying to make sure I didn’t get fired from my job. But that baby, I was like, “Are

you going to take that baby into a bar?" And I was so nervous about a new baby. I didn’t know anything about a new baby. He was so little. Talk about those diapers. Yeah, I didn’t use disposable diapers. That was back when they were just coming out. And they were talking about the ecology and what plastic diapers did and I was horrified. I’m killing the earth if I use them. Now I changed later because it got to be... Ridiculous.

Right. I was doing diapers, I was doing laundry on the road. He slept in the guitar case, literally.

How much help did Roy give you with this ?

Actually, he wasn’t as much help when Orville was a baby because you know when you have little babies not anybody but Mom can be that mom.

Mary Jo: Orville would scream during the set and I would walk far enough away with him so that he didn't disturb the show and then when she got back between the sets then he would calm down and she held him.

Murphy: The stress of that, I cannot imagine. Did you ever think about quitting playing? Let the record show that she shook her head “no.” [Large laughter.]

Well, it was like we were committed to this. Once we signed the contract for this farm, I was pretty committed to making that work.

But you could have made that work by going back to your job as a nurse.

See, I didn’t think about that. At that time, I was so involved in the music that I really had no plans to go back to nursing.

Can you articulate a little bit about Orville? There aren’t so many women who have done this.

Mary Jo: The crux of women playing music is that child.

I didn’t really have anybody to leave Orville with because by that time we were living up in Indiana. I actually had a friend who was nursing her son and it was the wet nurse kind of thing but that could only happen for one night. Every once in a while. But bottom line, until he was seven months old he was not away from me for more than a couple of

hours. At seven months old, he weaned himself and demanded that he eat with a fork and a glass.

Was he talking by that time? Did he say, “Fork, glass, please, Mom?”

No, he was sitting on my lap and all of a sudden he just wouldn’t nurse and he would reach over and grab my fork and eat off of my plate. You know, you try to substitute a spoon for a fork, he wasn’t having no part of it. At that point in time I still didn’t leave him much. That wasn’t really until he was like two when Roy broke his hand and couldn’t play and so he stayed home and I was on the road. But that was a whole different circumstance. Bob Wood got out of it after one year, so that left the core of us still paying the farm payment, minus one.

So he just pulled out, left the band and left the commitment to the farm. He left everything, just walked out.

Did you sign anything to disentangle him from the farm?

He just showed up gone. We didn’t know what to do, so we just kept doing what we were doing. In the meantime, [somebody] was supposedly doing taxes

I don’t think I want to hear this.

Well, you know what happened. That money went. And we ended up with the IRS knocking on our door and demanding $2,500 and at that point the music was no fun. And we had to go out. I remember being on the road for five weeks and in the meantime, I don’t have Orville. Roy was taking care of him at home. We were driving around in upstate New York and it was hard.

Mary Jo: You guys really changed at some point where you really did a national circuit as opposed to a tri-state or quad-state program.

I don’t know how that happened, it was just this kind of mushroom thing. I talked about playing at the Washington Press Club. And I actually had my picture on the front of the New York Times entertainment section. Me and Norman Blake.

That is awesome. Who was booking you?

I was doing bookings.

Wow. Guess you got pretty good at it.

It was a hardship because we were doing booking and there was nobody at home to do whatever. During that time, that was when we had so many band members. ’Cause we had people leaving.

Who was responsible for auditioning and filling in the band members? Did that also fall to you?

Sort of. This was more like you’d call up the Musician’s Union and they’d find out what kind of music you played and they’d send over Russ Barenberg, Alan Senauke, Bill Evans.

Did you ever have any other women in the band?

No, no. Now the closest it ever came was, remember Ginny Cleland that played in the High Woods String Band? She played bass and she played a couple of jobs with us. I want you to talk about the guy who was undercutting you by saying you couldn’t play the mandolin.

Well, along about the time when I was pregnant—and of course when I had Orville—I quit drinking. I quit doing anything. Wouldn’t even take an aspirin. And so, I was pretty healthy. And I was starting to realize that I probably could have a problem with alcohol. And I read Eric Burns’ I’m Okay, You’re Okay and I’m going, “Ah!” I actually felt like I was allowed—and had— some control of my life. Up until then, I felt like I was kind of at the whim of everybody, that I didn’t really stand up for myself or didn’t really say what I wanted to do or not do. I was kinda the good girl and I tried to please. I was a real pleaser at that point in time. And an enabler to boot.

So, the Falls City Ramblers were really, really playing a lot. We were on the road. And there was a lot of drinking. And it wasn’t just us, that was kind of the norm. You know, we’d see all these bands and that was the big thing. They might not drink during the show, but after the show. And I used to have a lot of energy to keep up with everybody but when I had Orville, I didn’t feel that. So I’d bow out and it was actually a good excuse.

So when you would “bow out” you didn’t feel like you were missing something ?

No.

Say a little bit about how the guys in the band were jealous of you because you got more attention.

Well, we were supposed to be like a democracy but at the same time I was starting to come to the terms that it really wasn’t. I was doing a lot of things. I was doing the emcee work, and I was doing the front work. It was usually me that people took the picture of and there started to be some real jealousy, especially over people who thought they were better musicians. And somebody told me, after the fact, that when [one guy in the band] was doing the sound, he was turning my vocals and my mandolin down. Then he started playing with my head by telling me I couldn’t keep time. He would turn around right in the middle of a song and glare at me and say, “Keep that time,” like over the microphone. Call me out in front of the audience. And I wouldn’t know what to do. I would be at a loss. It was one of those things you were so shocked that somebody would do that to you to begin with and there was no retort. I would say to him off stage, “Don’t do that in front of an audience.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” But then it would happen again. It happened repeatedly. By that time, I was starting to feel that I was so sucked into the band legally, with everything that was going on that if I were to step out, you know, hey! So it ceased to be fun. It ceased to be music for the pleasure of music. Do you think that you got more attention because you were a woman and a

good-looking woman, too?

It was because I was a woman and it was also because I laughed on stage. I obviously had a good time. Because that was me. I was always struck by the bluegrass bands that you could look at and you couldn’t tell if they were having a good time or a bad time. I mean they would just be so stony-faced. And my personality is such that you know if I’m having a good time or a bad time. I can’t cover that. But my opinion was this music was show business and show business meant you went out and entertained the audience and nobody else in the band had that, I don’t think. It came down to me and I would be the focal point.

Mary Jo: You were the singer in that band. Partly because [so-and-so] decided not to sing.

Oh, I forgot that. The prima donna kind of thing where you would up and decide that you weren’t going to do this thing anymore on stage. You know, work with all this material and then get up on stage and say, “I don’t want to do that.”

Mary Jo: “I’ll play guitar but I won’t sing."

Murphy: I’ve never heard of that before. How screwed up is that?

Pretty much and Mary Jo was my support. She was the person I would call up in the middle of the night if I was out on the road and something was going horribly wrong and she’d go, “It’ll be okay, honey. It’ll be okay.”

It sounds like you were around a bunch of really strange people.

Well, it’s true. But at the time you don’t think about that. Plus, if I spent much time feeling sorry for myself I would have been drawn down into that vortex and that is not a luxury that I thought I could afford. And the bottom line is I didn’t want to be like that. So how long were the Fall City Ramblers together? Was there a cut-off point? Actually, Orville started school in 1981 and I went back to work as a nurse. Essentially I was accused of being a traitor. [To the band?] To the music and everything. I said, “I’m not living like this anymore.” We were living on a farm with no running water, had no phone, sometimes we had a vehicle and sometimes we didn’t. When we went out and played, someone else would pick us up to take us there. And I said, “I’m done with this kind of life.” And I didn’t want Orville to be living like that either.

So I went back to work as a nurse in 1981 and then he started to school and from then on, music became a secondary thing again. We still played all the time, and I was giving music lessons. We’d play every chance we could. We actually did another record after that.

When did you first see another woman playing the mandolin?

It would have to be in the ’70s.

And who was it?

I’m trying to think. Who would I’ve seen playing the mandolin? ’Cause there weren’t many women mandolin players. I’ve seen women fiddle players and I’ve seen women bass players and women banjo players and women guitar players, but I didn’t see any women mandolin players.

Isn’t that interesting? The only one I can think of that you might have seen would have been Alice McLain. Do you remember seeing her? [Yes.] What did you think about her stuff?

Well, I was not a fan of the McLain Family although they were fans of me. But they were children. They were just in that formative, children stage and actually I was the kind of person their parents were protecting them from at that point in time. I was kind of a wild woman then. Then I would see the White’s and Buck and they were big fans of us then. I was always really honored when they would come up and sing.

What about Hazel and Alice? Did you ever listen to their music?

Yes, in fact that was some of the first people I listened to. But they usually weren’t on the festival circuit. At least at that time.

What did you wear when you performed and why did you wear it?

Actually, when I first started playing it was jeans and boots, kind of the traditional cowboy look that a lot of bluegrass bands play. But I actually started dressing up and wearing dresses and skirts. I would look for stuff that maybe was a little on the outrageous side. I would wear hats and it was kind of fun to get ready for a show. I’d put on makeup and do that kind of stuff. And it was actually kind of a ritual for me because nobody else did that. Maybe they would change their shirt, maybe they wouldn’t. You would dress up even when you had a bar gig?

Yes.

Was it kind of like putting on a stage persona? Did it help you get in the mood? A little bit. It helped me get in the mood. You know, it was a transition. I didn’t really think that I did a lot of what I call “girlie” kind of things. But when I started doing that, even when I would pack and go on the road, I had x amount of, I called them my stage clothes. I didn’t wear them for anything else. It was for that.

Did you do that partially because you thought it was your job as an entertainer to do that, it was part of the entertainment package that the audience wanted to see? I think that was part of it. And I think that was one thing that did draw attention to me—the fact that I did dress up and did my hair up and wore a hat. Looking at Patsy

Montana, you know people like that. They had the stage persona. And I thought, well, if people want to come and see me in my jeans, they can come to my house. But if folks are coming out to pay to see a show...Now, the other guys’ opinion was that the music would carry it. But I don’t think so. I think you have to have something more than music or else tons of people could do it. I know tons of tremendously talented musicians who cannot appear on stage. Because they have no social skills! [Huge laughter.] Being a musician does not qualify you as having social skills.

Or being a good musician doesn’t qualify you to be on stage and think you’re an entertainer. They’re two different things!

They’re two different things and I think that was where some of the jealousy came with the guys in the band and they tried to translate it over into the musical piece of it ’cause they didn’t know what else to do. So instead they were going to make fun of my timing or whatever. One of my best friends is a drummer and he would tell me all the time, “You have impeccable timing. Don’t be listening to that guy.” He was nice enough to realize how undermining that was and periodically he would call me and say, “You’re not listening to him, are you?”

Let’s talk a little bit about your mandolin style. You said that the first mandolin player you heard was Jethro Burns.

Yes.

Would you listen to his stuff and try to copy it?

No, I think instinctively I knew there was no point in copying somebody else’s style. For one thing, I couldn’t do it, ’cause I think your style is who you are. That’s how you come to that music, you know. And sometimes I was creeping around trying to find my style. But I finally settled on it and my style is not to play like fifty gazillion notes to show how many notes I can play. My style is my melody. I stay with a melody line. ’Cause I think if you alter it too much, it becomes another song, and we see examples of that all the time. Where you’ll see a song that’s called one thing and then you alter it a little bit but it’s still the same song, but now it’s got a new title.

Mary Jo: A fiddler’s trick.

Murphy: A Bill Monroe trick!

And I had found this guy named Mr. Mandolin who I still talk to. He is 84 now and he lives out in Tyler, Texas, and his name is Dave Martini. And he was a fiddle player but he had recorded some mandolin music and the guy who recorded it nicknamed him Mr. Mandolin. Of course, when I would ask people if they’d ever heard of Mr. Mandolin, first of all they would get all upset because how could somebody call themselves Mr. Mandolin, you know. I’m going, get over it!

But I actually got to go out and meet him and sit around and play music with him. I had three of his records and I would turn them on and then I was trying to learn something. I would try to play clarinet pieces on the mandolin. I would try to play piano pieces. I was listening to a guy named Teddy Wilson who was a piano player for Benny Goodman. There were a couple of pieces I was trying to learn from him.

All by ear?

All by ear. Although I read music.

But not enough to hurt your playing? [Laughter.] Have you ever read music to play mandolin?

As a matter of fact, my mom and I play for church stuff.

With her playing piano and you playing the mandolin.

Exactly.

Oh cool! Get to play in those piano keys. B-flat, E-flat.

But see, that was the other thing. I never realized that I couldn’t play in other keys. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t. That...

Mary Jo: ...it has to be in D!

That it has to be in D. I did get a certain amount of “We have to do it in the key of F because that’s where it was recorded” kind of thing. What was really bad was—because of the singing—if I was learning a song and it was traditionally from a guy, I almost always had to change keys. And they didn’t like that.

I’ve often wondered if that wasn’t one of the things that kept women in bluegrass from learning the traditional bluegrass repertoire. Because one of the ways you learn is

singing along with records. And it’s hard to sing the lead when it’s in a low-key, so you end up singing the tenor and you don’t learn leads. Or you learn Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms, but you’ve got to sing it in D which changes the banjo break completely. Completely!

Then all of a sudden it’s not what you...

Mary Jo: It sounds different.

Murphy: It sounds different! And it took me a long time to understand, so what if it sounds different? It only sounds different to musicians. Audiences don’t care. They just want to hear the song Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms.

Mary Jo: It certainly doesn’t matter to an audience. I think you get a lot of that in jams. An amateur jam session, [Beck: Yes.] where those guys have learned it in that key and they can’t transpose it and they’re like, “You can’t sing it in that key. ” Murphy: Right. Why? “Because I can’t do my banjo break because, hello, I’m limited as a banjo player.”

Mary Jo: But it never gets that far. It’s just, “You can’t do it. Oh, you can’t change the key. ”

But I think that’s where the value of listening to Jethro Bums came in.

Mary Jo: Also, “Weh, weh, weh, I don’t like to play with girls because they change the key. ”

Oh, yeah.

Murphy: And the part that doesn’t get said is, “And I can’t keep up. ”

Mary Jo: I was going to say, “I’m not really sympathetic to you. Call somebody who cares.” [Huge laughter.]

Murphy: But back to Jethro. Keys didn’t bother him.

Keys didn’t bother him.

Mary Jo: I remember when you met Julian and were playing and I remember you saying, “Oh yeah, we played that song for two hours.” Two hours? “Yeah, we played it in all the keys.” [Beck laughs loudly.] That was a new concept to me.

Yeah. He was a fun guy. Julian Cramer. He was my mandolin-playing buddy. [Julian was born in 1905. He played on the Beck and Roy album Old Photographs.] He used to play all the time. He lived up in Martinsville, Indiana. We actually met him when we’d gone to see Jethro Bums who was doing a Washburn mandolin thing up in Indiana somewhere. And then we got to be big buds. He’d come to the house or we’d go stay there and he and I would just sit and play for hours.

What kind of stuff were you playing?

A lot of the stuff that’s on the album that he played on. We’d sit around and play it in every key. Our fun was we’d start out in G then we’d move up to G-sharp and then we’d move up to A and then move it up to B-flat and C and then go to C and work all the way up the scale. That was our fun.

To be continued in the next issue. Thanks to Pam Bock for transcribing this interview!

IT’S THE SAME THE WIDE WORLD OVER…

Coincidentally, as I was working on this issue, my husband Red forwarded me an email message from the Co-Mando Discussion List. Sue Dilley was talking about women mandolin players in Tasmania, Australia. I was intrigued by what she had to say, and wrote to her, asking her to expand on her thoughts for WIB. She did so beautifully. As I was reading what she sent, I was amazed by how what she was saying echoed what Beck Gentry had to say. The same things are happening now in Tasmania that had happened in Kentucky thirty years ago. Sigh. And that brought to mind the first line of the chorus of the song Big Jim Folsom as sung by Gamble Rogers. I thought it would make a good title. The last line of that chorus is also appropriate: “It’s a lowdown and rotten shame.” Ain’t it the truth?

MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER— IT’S A GIRL THING

By Sue Dilley

I got a phone call the other week from a woman I’d seen at some local jam sessions and she said she’d had an idea. She was going to organize a women’s session at the local pub and was I interested. Was I? You bet. Finally, a chance to meet with and play music with other women players.

As a relatively new mandolin player on the session front it had become pretty obvious to me that acoustic music here in Tasmania [Australia] is generally speaking a “boy thing,” especially where playing an instrument is concerned. This was the first time an all-women jam had been proposed in Hobart and about a dozen women responded to the call. It was quite a mix, with fiddles, mandolins, and banjos outnumbering guitars, which meant that bluegrass tunes also got to outnumber the Celtic airs and soulful ballads. In between the songs and tunes, stories also began to emerge about the women’s experience of playing music. Encouragement was given to beginner players and connections were made about playing opportunities, teachers, playing tips, recorded music to seek out, and more. In fact, there was more communication at the session that day than I’d seen at all of the musical events that I’d been to previously. The stories included some of frustration, discouragement, lack of confidence, and musical isolation, through to reminiscences about great gigs and musical connections made in the unlikeliest of places, such as with Burmese refugees in Thailand (apparently bluegrass banjo went down a treat with the traditional musicians there!). I heard stories of men playing loudly over the top of women singers or players, of drunk men trying to chat women up when all the women wanted to do was play music, or conversely, of men worrying that it’s more than just a tune or two that you’re looking to share with them. (Why else would you be there— the instrument is obviously just a front!) Of the teacher who liked to put his hand on the female student’s knee to encourage her. Of trying to lead a tune or song in a session and having the men groan about the chosen key, or worse still, all the men getting up and going to the bar when a woman starts to play. Of going into music shops and being treated like an ignorant girl, not a “real” musician. But there were positive stories, too, of encouragement from experienced male players, of good male teachers, of women’s success, but generally it showed that to be a woman musician meant traveling a fairly rocky road and required stamina.

The opportunity to play among other women, instead of in the weekly “blokey” sessions in the bar downstairs, gave the women a rare chance to show what they could do, without fear or favor. It appeared to be a completely non-judgmental atmosphere, which was a breath of fresh air to all. No one player dominated and it wasn’t down to who could play or sing the loudest or fastest as to who got to play next. But best of all for me was that I now knew what I’d always suspected, that there were more than two or three women players in town. Not that you would ever guess. Go to the sessions on any given day and you’ll see, if you’re lucky, two women among a dozen men (and lots more women in the background watching). Go to see a concert and you’ll be sure to see more males than females on the stage. The local annual folk festival is well attended by

women, but not many of them will you see on stage, especially with an instrument other than a guitar.

So if you’re wanting to listen to or play with other women instrumentalists, you have to turn to recorded music, or travel away to festivals. Certainly, when I went last year to my first interstate bluegrass and old-timey festival, I was thrilled to see a few women playing upright bass, the occasional banjo, and, of course, fiddle and guitar, but was truly disappointed that there were no women on stage playing mandolin and no women taking any of the instrumental workshops. At the jam sessions, men well and truly outnumbered the women instrumentalists, if there were any there at all. But on a brighter note, some enterprising women organised an all-woman scratch band that brought the house down at the main concert—likely now to become an annual feature! The huge response they got from the mixed-gender audience was a strong indication that it’s not just women who want to see more women performing and playing confidently in public.

These experiences contrasted strongly with my experience of singing for years in choirs, where women dominate and men are a rare breed and highly sought after. So many women sing, but where are the women instrumentalists? I believe that many women in past times were singing and playing home-grown music. My own aunts performed in their family dance band that toured country towns in the ’40s and ’50s to local acclaim, and I know a woman in her seventies who played slide guitar in a professional dance band two to three times a week during the Hawaiian music craze that swept Australia when she was a young woman. But now, it’s hard to even find out about women players, previous or current. With the scant publicity given to women instrumentalists, it would not be surprising to find that many women think that it’s a male preserve and that they should stick to singing for their musical activity. Recently the mandolin discussion list that I sometimes visit listed more than eighteen top women mandolin players across different genres. It was truly a revelation to me, as I’d only heard of a few of them.

I love to sing and to hear singers, but crave to hear and see more women players, especially in bluegrass music. I listen to lots of great male (and female) players, but when I see photos of them in their all-male bands, and hear them talking of their favorite players who have inspired them (all men usually), I can’t help but wonder if maybe I don’t fit in this scene. I wonder how many others have thought the same. I’ve been lucky to have met males in the music scene who have encouraged me and no doubt others have too, but as far as role models go, it’s been hard to find women players that I can look to and think, “If she can do it, so can I.” So it’s hard to keep motivated—maybe

that’s why many will give up trying. But newsletters like this one, and other resources made by women musicians will help to encourage new and upcoming players. I’m hoping that there’s going to be another women’s session soon. Although it won’t stop me playing music with men, I now know that it surely can enrich our experience, make new connections, and encourage more women to keep going on their musical journeys.

Sue Dilley, 40, plays mandolin and sings harmony in an old-timey/bluegrass trio called Lou-Lou and the Southern Belles, “in which the women outnumber the men 2:1.” A relative newcomer to bluegrass and the mandolin (five years), she has a classical background in French horn and piano. She limits her day job at a youth research center “to the bare minimum in order to pursue my musical passions."

Wintergrass Salutes Women

This February, I had the pleasure of teaching banjo workshops at the Wintergrass Festival in Tacoma, Wash. This was the festival’s tenth anniversary, and to celebrate, directors Earla Harding, Patrice O’Neill, and Stephen Ruffo focused on women in bluegrass. Putting their money where their mouths were, they hired lots of bands that featured women. A friend told me there were so many women on stage that when one of the all-boys bands appeared, it seemed odd! Isn’t that a switch? Taking my info from the Wintergrass program, here are the bands that featured women:

WOMEN-LED BANDS

Alison Brown Quartet

Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek (with Vicki Simmons)

Hazel Dickens Band

Kathy Kallick Band (with Amy Stenberg)

Laurie Lewis and Her Bluegrass Pals

Lynn Morris Band

Mollie O’Brien and Nina Gerber

Rhonda Vincent and the Rage

ALL-FEMALE BANDS

Stairwell Sisters: Lisa Berman, Martha Hawthorne, Evie Ladin, Stephanie

Prausnitz, Sue Sandlin

Flat Mountain Girls: Rachel Gold, Lisa Marsicek, Caroline Oakley

Fletcher Girls: (all sisters) Connie Fletcher, Brenda Hanson, Jeannie

McCullough, Kelli Medhus, Holly Fletcher

Misty River: Chris Kokesh, Carol Harley, Laura Quigley, Dana Abel

Rodeo Lagoon: Alicia Healey, Liz Savage, Kathy Humphrey

Noteworthy: Patty Clayton, Linda Erickson, Carol Martin, Nancy Katz, Mary Maass

MIXED-GENDER BANDS

American Fiddle Ensemble (Darol Anger’s group) with Brittany Haas

Dry Branch Fire Squad with Mary Jo Leet

Williams and Bray with Vivian Williams and Shera Bray

Chicken Dinner with Candy Goldman

Tom Landa and the Paperboys with Shannon Saunders

Crossfire with Sharon Messina

Athena and the River City Boys with 13-year-old Athena Patterson

Dunton Sisters with sisters Jen and Bev and mother Gae

Knott Brothers with Suzanne Pearce

Red Dirt Road with Linda Erickson

Slowdrag with Koralee Tonack

Hakanson Family with Ellie and Amy Hakanson and Kathy Fetty

Emerald Valley Boys with Nikki Clevenger

Looking Glass with Rachel Mackey and Joan Smith

Jake Henry and Bill with Luanne Fugal

And in a category all by herself, Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music! There were also seven all-male bands, plus a couple of singles.

This year the directors made sure that the segment of the show called Pupville (David Grisman and kids) featured a young woman. Now, that’s proactive thinking! First you have to see that there is a problem! Nine-year-old Frankie Nagle, from Mountain View, Cal., who picks lead guitar and sings Jimmy Martin songs, was chosen to perform with David and three young men. They got a standing ovation! Congratulations and thanks to Patrice, Earla, and Stephen for this bold move.

Inspiring Quote

Hazel Dickens to Doyle Lawson: “Modulate!”

Spoken at the Wintergrass finale, an on-stage, mixed-gender jam in which the song Will The Circle Be Unbroken was being played in a guy's key, preventing any of the women on stage from stepping up and singing the lead to a verse because it was too low. Way to go, Hazel!

Women in Bluegrass has always been supported by The Murphy Method. I just thought I’d start mentioning it. We sell instructional videos and DVDs for all the bluegrass instruments. And we have three women teaching: Murphy Henry, Casey Henry, and Lynn Morris. (And several guys.) Check out our website: www.murphymethod.com.