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Rural Roots By Scott Nygaard Norman Blake’s career has taken him all over the map—musically and literally. He grew up in Rising Fawn and Sulphur Springs, Georgia, and after picking up the guitar at age 11, joined the Dixie Drifters and appeared on the Tennessee Barn Dance in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of 16. After playing fiddle, Dobro, mandolin, and guitar in bluegrass and country dance bands throughout the South (and in Panama, where he served a stint in the army), Blake found himself in Nashville in the late ’60s backing up Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and John Hartford. He participated in the groundbreaking Will the Circle Be Unbroken sessions and gained legendary status as a flatpicker with a series of influential solo albums in the early ’70s. More recently he has accompanied alt-country standard bearer Steve Earle on his comeback acoustic Train A Comin’ album, played in the studio with June Carter Cash, and released a duo album with western swing guitarist Rich O’Brien. Blake’s recorded work with his wife Nancy, the Rising Fawn String Ensemble, Tony Rice and Doc Watson, and as a solo artist constitutes one of the most varied and fascinating collections of traditional American music extant. His recordings run the gamut of rural music—from breakdowns and waltzes played on fiddle, mandolin, guitar, cello, and banjo, to story songs and ballads whose subjects range over the width and breadth of U.S. history, culture, and geography, to blues, rags, and cakewalks performed on every imaginable stringed instrument. Since 1995, Blake has primarily performed solo, and his repertoire, well-illustrated on his 1998 release, Chattanooga Sugar Babe, is as likely to include cowboy ballads, fingerpicked ragtime instrumentals, self-penned railroad songs, blues chestnuts, and old-time ephemera as it is the fiery flatpicked fiddle tunes for which he is best known. Blake maintains a stolidly original approach to traditional music and is well-recognized by the mainstream music world for the integrity of his vision; Chattanooga Sugar Babe was the fifth consecutive Blake album to be nominated for a Grammy. Blake returned to the hills of Rising Fawn in the ’70s and lives there in a three-story cabin that he and Nancy built. Blake maintains a peaceful, rural home life minutes away from I-59, the highway that guides his motor home to gigs all over the country. He has created a haven here for himself, filled with 78-rpm records, sheet music, votive candles, gig posters, antiques, and mirrors. Wood is everywhere, from the antique furniture, unvarnished kitchen sideboards, and vast store of instruments inside, to the piles of freshly chopped logs and the porch swing outside. When I visited Blake, a roaring fire in the huge, stone fireplace suffused the house with warmth. We settled into his kitchen to talk about his passions for homegrown music and vintage guitars. Were there particular people who influenced you when you were young? BLAKE Yeah, there were local people, names that would mean nothing to anyone. There were kinfolk and people around this area, fiddlers and guitar players. I liked the Monroe Brothers. I was influenced by Bill Monroe’s recordings very much until later on, but bluegrass was not a thing that we really perceived. I remember listening to Bill on the Grand Ole Opry and always wanting to hear him, but we were not aware that it was bluegrass. It was Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, but it was just another person on the Opry that played some kind of music you could stand. I like Uncle Dave Macon, and certainly Roy Acuff has been as much of an influence as anyone in that time frame. The Blue Sky Boys, Carter Family, Bradley Kincaid. I used to hear Bradley Kincaid when he was on WSM. He had a program before the Opry show. He never did anything except play the guitar and sing folk songs. I liked Bradley very much. What about Riley Puckett or some of the old-time string bands? BLAKE Oh yeah, I heard the Skillet Lickers on records. Everybody of any age in this neck of the woods knows who the Skillet Lickers are. And Riley Puckett is certainly an influence, as he is on many people. He’s one of the real unsung heroes of the guitar world. You started out playing guitar? BLAKE I played guitar first, mandolin second, then fiddle and Dobro. Were you playing two-finger–style guitar then? BLAKE I started playing with a thumb and a fingerpick. I didn’t play long before I started playing mandolin. Before that, I did not know that you were supposed to flatpick the guitar, or that you could hardly. And we didn’t call it a flatpick. It was a straight pick. I played with a thumb and a fingerpick. I heard the Carter Family, and most of the old-time people that I’d seen played rhythm that way. Even the bluegrassers, the early ones: Carter [Stanley], Lester [Flatt], and Maybelle Carter, of course. There was a fellow out here on Sand Mountain that played flattop guitar with a straight pick, and he was real good. He would do these kind of cross rolls. Some of my things are based on some of his stuff. There was a mandolin player that played with us that also played guitar that way, and he was pretty good at it too. So I saw those two guys and I had heard Don Reno on record doing some things. I hadn’t really connected it up, though. I always kind of went back to the finger thing. I was playing the mandolin that way, though [with a flatpick]. And occasionally I might use the pick on the guitar, but it seemed like a novelty. In the ’60s I was giving some guitar lessons in Chattanooga, connected with a music store up there. And this one young lady that was taking lessons asked me had I heard this fellow named Doc Watson. And I said, "No, I never heard him." So I got one of his Vanguard albums and I loved it, but I thought to myself, "Good Lord, if this is what people like, hell, I could do this. I’ve been doing this off and on and nobody took it seriously." So I started taking it more seriously. Started going on at it. That’s how I really got into flatpicking. And when you heard Doc, did you figure you could just put on the guitar those fiddle tunes you were playing on mandolin and fiddle? BLAKE Yeah, and there’s other guys who would play a fiddle tune or two. But Doc was the one who was getting the notoriety all of a sudden. It just opened my eyes to another approach that I had already done but hadn’t pursued in any active form. If I was going to play guitar, I thought you played it like Mother Maybelle or Lester Flatt or Earl Scruggs—with fingers. You’re good at digging up old songs and tunes that people aren’t playing. Do you find those from recordings or from people you’ve known? BLAKE Oh, I’ve gotten them from people. A lot of them come out of childhood because I was around a lot of old musicians. I’ve always been very interested in older music, and I have tried to research it a little further back and see what was going on before I came into the picture. Records, books, memory, and putting it together through writing myself into it. Compilations of songs, putting different versions of songs together to make one version, including writing into traditional material. I do all that. It seems like you’re one of the few people exploring a lot of different old-time music styles. BLAKE If you say "old-time music" nowadays, the first thing that comes to mind is the fiddle-and-banjo dance crowd. I feel a little bit put off by that, because while I like that very much and have certainly been involved in that, I just feel that old-time music is a broader thing. It’s sort of like bluegrass. You have this straight blinder approach of what is bluegrass too, and it’s gotten to be so generic. And I think old-time music is kind of generic now. And that’s a little sad, because old-time music is everything that’s ever gone on for the last however many hundred years. It’s certainly been more than just fiddle tunes. You’ve created your career by doing what you wanted to do even though it wasn’t in line with any of the prevailing trends. How have you managed to do that? BLAKE I never felt like I was technically brilliant. I don’t make records with that in mind. I try to make real music. I try to make music that I want to play because it means something to me, it makes me feel a certain way. If I can convey that feeling, then somebody else is going to get that message out of it. I had people tell me what’s wrong with my records for years, and I think it’s beside the point. If I thought that I was making records because I was the world’s greatest guitar player, I’d have quit long ago. I just play what’s in my heart. I think a record is just another gig, so to speak, and some days you sound better than others and some days you want to play certain things and other days you don’t want to play. And when you come up on that day and there’s a machine running, you play what you want to play and what you feel like you should play and play it the best you can, and you stop there. Because that’s all you can do. You play the truth. When the red light comes on, I try to play the truth. And that only. When that tape actually starts rolling, you leave things out and you put things in no matter how much you rehearse it. And I believe in leaving things in. I don’t believe in refining it out. I don’t go to the nth degree. I like to get things on the first or second take if possible. I don’t try to hone it to perfection. There is no such thing as perfection. I don’t fix much in the mix. I might do something once in a while, but I really don’t do too much there either. I just believe that it is what it is. I think that’s what’s wrong with a lot of music today. I think that what’s good about the old records is that they didn’t do that, they weren’t so self-conscious. We’re all paying too much allegiance to the great god of technical perfection these days. Those old records, they weren’t worried about what somebody was really going to think about this music. They just made it. I remember someone once saying, "That’s how that tune goes today." BLAKE That’s how it goes today. That’s the way I do it. That’s the gospel according to me. And you’ve got to put it down like that’s what you mean. That has got to be the gospel according to you. When I say "truth," that’s what I mean. When you go into the studio, it has to be the gospel according to you. It has to be what you think, what you feel. That’s the way it goes today. Excerpted from a longer story that appears in Acoustic Guitar October 1999, No. 82. That issue also contains a transcription of Norman Blakes's "Church Street Blues." Read about Norman Blake's instruments in the What They Play department. |
