The little instrument that went to war

Updated: Sep 1, 2023

Mention Kentucky anywhere in the world and the name conjures a whole range of associations--the Kentucky Derby. Fried Chicken. Basketball. And, of course, bluegrass music.

Mention bluegrass music and most people think of high harmonies and guitars and fiddles and banjos played at breakneck speed. Even people who know little about music immediately link the word to Bill Monroe, whose chiming, driving mandolin, with its F-sharped curlicue at the top, defined the genre.

But there's a whole near-forgotten history of the mandolin that has nothing to do with bluegrass. Classical musicians composed for the instrument, including Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi, and it's deeply embedded in the folk traditions of Eastern European countries. Its resonant double-course strings give it an unexpectedly large and uniquely adaptable sound.

The mandolin was the most popular instrument in America in the early part of the twentieth century, just ahead of the ukulele. Immigrants to the US brought their folk songs with them and created entire orchestras comprising just the mandolin family of instruments—the mandolin, its larger sibling the mandola (the same size and tuning relationship as a violin to a viola), the even larger mandocello, and the ludicrous-looking mandobass.

Mandolin orchestras emerged as social clubs for labor organizations, simultaneously bringing their homeland's folk music into the New World and celebrating the new right to collectively bargain. At one time there were scores of such orchestras scattered across the US, some with dozens of members, and a few dozen mandolin orchestras still exist. Louisville has a very active one, even commissioning new works for it to premier. The repertoire of most is classical or semi-classical, but something about the mandolin (though not the mandola or its obscure larger siblings) always seems to drag the little instrument back into the folk tradition. In that light, Bill Monroe's innovations seem less revolutionary than evolutionary.

The mandolin was popular because of its small size and its rich voice, so popular that the Gibson company made a special "Army-Navy" mandolin for soldiers to take into World War I. These were cheap, unadorned, extremely durable, and shaped to fit into a gunny sack or sea bag, and nicknamed "frying pans." They had flat tops and no fancy binding around the edges or any other embellishment. Thousands were manufactured and sold for around $20 each in PXs and general stores.

The frying pan design fell out of favor after the war and, once bluegrass music hit, everyone who wanted to play bluegrass or something like it also wanted a mandolin that looked just like Bill Monroe's. (The exceptions, though rare, were classical musicians and urban Jews playing Klezmer or other ethnic music—they tended to stick with traditional A-shaped mandolins.)

In the 1980s, the Army-Navy style mandolin design was revived by the independent Colorado-based Flatiron company, which released some beautiful mandolins and mandolas before the company was bought by Gibson and the entire line killed. These Flatiron instruments, though simpler to make than carved-top models, were made with such care and attention that they're prized today for their unique voice and projection.

The folk music renaissance of the 1960s helped keep the instrument popular despite the Beatles turning every teenager into a would-be guitar player. The Beatles' producer, Sir George Martin, had no problem supplying whatever unusual instruments the four lads requested on their songs but had an aversion to mandolins. "[Martin] said every time he heard the mandolin, it sounded awfully much like an Italian wedding or funeral. He didn’t like what he called a 'plectrum' instrument, the 'diddle diddle' sound."

But the little mandolin keeps getting rediscovered, and, aside from the Beatles, there doesn't seem to be any kind of music it hasn't found some role in.

Shape-note singing

Updated: Mar 13, 2023

Our family's gospel group, formed the generation before mine, didn't rely on standard musical notation but on the seven-note (or sometimes four-note) "shape" system common in the American South, which grew out of the Sacred Harp tradition. The image of Amazing Grace is from the Broadman hymnal, which we used in our little Missionary Baptist church. "Singing schools" (which my father taught many times) attracted a large number of people wherever they were held across Appalachia, and many hymnals used this notation, which was easier for those untrained in music to grasp. It tends to sound strange to modern ears at first, but there was something uplifting and often chilling about it. To the left is an example of how it might have sounded.

The Virginia Rambler

Updated: Apr 20, 2023

My maternal grandfather Dewey lived a short walk from our house in our tiny coal camp when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time with him. He subscribed to the apocalyptic Awake! magazine, published by the end-times cult evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong, and Dewey was certain the end of the world was coming but never set foot in church. He also didn't let the impending doomsday deter him from having a good time. He read True Detective and Confidential and similar magazines, and as a young child I would curl up under a table in their house and thoroughly enjoy reading about murder and mayhem. He taught me to play solitaire and poker and to use a little machine to roll cigarettes for him from a Bugler tobacco tin.

Dewey carried a bullet on his keychain and let me play with it. I loaded it into an imaginary gun and pretended to fire it at a fierce animal. One day (later, when I was older—I wasn't there) he had been drinking and for some unknown reason decided to put the bullet on an anvil and hit it with a hammer. I have no idea what possessed him to carry a live bullet around, much less to strike it with a hammer, but he did so, blowing off a portion of his thumb.

Dewey was a disabled coal miner and had been an official with the United Mine Workers Union local chapter. He was also a gambler—cards mostly—and for a while kept a moonshine still up in the hills south of our little town. He had been a talented fiddle and banjo player in his younger days, though I didn't hear him play much banjo and never the fiddle because my grandmother didn't approve of it. He'd been a rounder in his youth, playing with a well-known dance band in bars and social halls, but eventually put the fiddle up on a shelf and sold the banjo. Many years later my parents, knowing my interest in music, bought the banjo back from the cousin who'd bought it from Dewey and gave it to me.

After he died they gave me his old fiddle too, complete with a lucky rattlesnake rattle inside. The fiddle wasn't an expensive instrument, with plastic tuners rather than the normal friction pegs, but I was glad to have it, for sentimental reasons. Back in the 1930s, when he would have acquired it, you could buy fiddles at many general stores or through the ubiquitous Sears and Roebuck catalog. It had nicks and stains all over it from a lot of careless handling, in his case the rough and tumble of playing in bars and dance halls.

The banjo was a better instrument though also not expensive. As a small child I loved to run the back of my little fingernails across the strings to hear their distinctive chime. The banjo is very heavy, with a removable wooden resonator or "pot" on the back that gives a banjo its timbre and volume. The back has a painting of a rose, marred by scratches from belt buckles and whatever surface Dewey would have laid it on to switch to his fiddle or have another beer. The calfskin stretched across the front of the banjo's drum would originally have been cream-colored but had been darkened by cigarette smoke and dirty fingers and the tracks of droplets from spilled drinks.

Long-faded now, tiny cellophane letters spelling out Virginia Ramblers left little reverse shadows, a touch lighter than the rest of the calfskin.

When I got the instruments the bridge of the fiddle was broken and one of the tuners was bent, and the banjo was missing one of the screws holding the pot in place. I had a friend fix both up enough to be playable. I still have them, and still occasionally play the banjo. I decided not to replace the calfskin head—I like seeing the dirty calfskin and imagining where Dewey had "rambled," and all the revelry and roughhousing he and those instruments had seen.

The original Otsego Quartet

Updated: Jul 24, 2023

Even at his lowest, in the lean, hard years after his service in Work War II, my father loved to sing, always had. As a boy bringing in cows from the hillsides on the family farm, in church, around the house, it didn't matter. It helped that there were other good singers in the family, a sister and two cousins especially, who were also taken with music, though none had any training in it; it was just something in the air, born in that great silence of the 1920s, before voices began to magically whisper from little boxes.

There was little music during my father's time in the second world war, other than Taps; the soundtrack was shells and gunfire and clipped military orders. He brought home souvenirs—PTSD, an untreatable fungal infection, and liver disease, and it would take him years to regain his health.

Now the war was over and he was back home, with a loving wife and a new baby. He worked in the coal mine, the only job he could find, always on the night shift to spare his family his recurrent nightmares. He knew he was in no shape to be a good father or husband. He started going to church, to the same relatively tolerant Baptist sect our immediate family had always belonged to. He found he could sing there and not think about anything, his tenor joining in with the congregation's.

Our large family was close and he soon met back up with a cousin on his mother's side and her husband, a soprano and bass respectively, both friends from childhood. The trio sang together and soon recruited my father's baby sister Kathleen on alto, to make it a quartet. They sang at each others' churches and were invited to sing at the many community events that welcomed free music. My father learned and then taught classes in the traditional "shaped note" singing that was more popular than standard musical notation in that region, in that era.

The cousin's daughter, who'd gone off to college and come back home to teach music, was recruited to play piano for them. Their repertoire expanded to cover much of what was popular then, from the beautiful simplicity of "In the Garden" to the most mawkish altar calls. Their sound was a little different, with my father and his sister flipping the tenor and alto parts in unexpected places; not being trained musicians, sometimes one would get lost and the other would take up their line to cover for them. They also imitated some other Southern groups who had begun syncopating their songs—there was nothing about it in the Bible one way or the other. Although the group was raised in the southern shaped note tradition, their style was more modern, with odd harmonic touches and the piano player dropping in major sevenths or other jazzy ornaments here and there, little grace-note amens.

In 1950 the five of them were offered a live half-hour weekly show on tiny radio station WWYO, which had been licensed the previous year. Most of the time the little studio's thousand watts reached no more than twenty miles, but when atmospheric conditions were right the hollows acted as an amplifier and carried the voices and music as far as Bluefield. Short sets of fifteen or thirty minutes were common filler then, before the age of prerecorded commercials; the gospel songs were palate-cleansers between hardcore old-time hillbilly acts like the duo Scotty and Tar Heel Ruby and their band The Dixie Border Boys, all the shows culminating in the evening-long "Wyoming Hayride" on Saturday night. Most of the station's content was live, since the process of cutting material to acetate was relatively expensive and time-consuming, so the musicians and announcers worked a lot. My father's family group was sometimes called to fill in for other acts, but only accepted evening work so he could sleep during the day.

As the Otsego Quartet performed together, my father began to look forward to those evenings at the station. He would be due for work at ten each night, just a few miles south of the studio, so would be singing during his "morning" before descending into the mine for his shift. I always wondered if those sessions were a kind of dawn prayer against roof falls and short fuses and high voltage.

One night at the studio late in 1951 someone—there are vague memories of a youngish man in a nice hat—heard the group sing and thought they should make some records. The Carter family had hit it big a decade earlier, selling thousands of records and broadcasting their twice-daily show on a megawatt border radio station out of Mexico, where the owner shilled fake medical cures using goat glands. My father and aunt's foursome had similar harmonies to the Carters, as many groups did at the time.

The next week the young man was back at WWYO, and the quartet and pianist gave it a shot, using the studio's Presto recording equipment to cut six songs direct to acetate discs, each in one take. He took the discs and said he'd let them know. A few weeks later the man sent the acetates back. They sounded terrible. The manager's explanation was that the engineer, his name now lost to history, was drunk; he was fine for running a live show but, apparently, not the close work of recording.

The quintet hadn't expected anything to come of it anyway and never tried again. Soon the arrival of more children (in my father's case, my sister and then me) and hard jobs and caring for their aging parents left all the cousins little time for making music. They gave up the radio show and saw each other only at occasional family get-togethers. In the meantime, radios got better and smaller and my father sang more than gospel around the house—Johnny Cash, snatches of pop tunes.

I'm sure he wouldn't have traded his time with his sister and cousins for the world. He got what he wanted out of those many hours, just learning to be a human being again.

The acetates sat atop each other in a closet for decades and were damaged in a flood before being digitized. Not much could be done to improve their sound, considering their age, scratches, and their original engineering.

Click on the disc above to listen to an excerpt of the Quartet

Drifting with the Coasters

Updated: Apr 11

The vast majority of musical acts—soloists, bands, vocal combos—never have a hit. A few have one hit and build an entire career out of it; Norman Greenbaum has lived comfortably on the royalties from his only hit, the ubiquitous "Spirit in the Sky" since 1969.

Some groups, on the other hand, have numerous hits but don't write their own material, the group being a vehicle for non-performing songwriters (like Leiber and Stoller) or a producer (like Phil Spector). Members of these groups come and go, while their group name lives on, with or without some connection to the original lineup. These groups typically make a living job by job, at state fairs or festivals or on ocean cruises that attract seniors who were teenagers when the group was hot.

Parkville, West Virginia, lies deep in the heart of coal mining country, a little beyond the middle of nowhere. I found myself there in the spring of 1981, unhappily teaching middle school to save up money before hitting the road again. The town had only a few thousand people spread out over a series of rugged hills and there wasn't much to do. It was too far to travel to a bigger town for basic entertainment, so the small, dark Phoenix Club was the default for anyone wanting to party.

I'd fallen in with musician friends who hung out there. Sometimes their bands played and sometimes we just drank a lot of beer and listened to the half dozen other decent bands from the region.

One of the guys I played music with, Bill, was from a wealthy local family. He was a talented keyboardist and especially loved music from the 1950s and early 60s. Bill decided to bring one of his favorite groups, the Coasters, to perform at the Phoenix.

The Coasters had a string of hits—"Searchin'," Yakety Yak," "Charlie Brown," "Poison Ivy," and many more. But by the Beatles era the Doo Wop group sound, with the same weary four chords and too-familiar swooping harmonies, was dated. The Coasters' last studio album was in 1972, but the group swapped members in and out through the 1970s and soldiered on, weathering disco and urban country and stadium rock by taking whatever work they could get.

Which led the Coasters to the tiny Phoenix Club, in the heart of coal mining country, in 1981. All of us musicians loved the band and I have no idea what Bill had to pay them to come all that way. I know he paid them in advance before settling down in the front row and starting on the first of many drinks, completely happy to have such legendary singers on the stage right in front of him.

I assumed the Coasters, all Black men in the middle of a hundred and fifty white people, many of them coal miners, were trepidatious when they took the stage. But I also assumed they had played to plenty of all-white audiences over the years. Just another paycheck. They put on a great show, with tight vocals and choreographed dance steps to go with their five-voice harmonies.

I was one of those odd kids who pored over record album covers and liner notes and read Billboard magazine at the local department store, until the manager kicked me out for standing there for hours reading but never buying anything. (We'd go through the same routine each Saturday.)

But many of the Coasters' albums had no liner notes and didn't list the group's members, nor who produced the album unless it was a famous name. When I finally saw the Coasters up close I didn't recognize anyone in the group from their album covers, but I attributed that to their getting older and to new members coming and going. They sure sounded like the Coasters.

They played a great show without introducing anyone by name. They did one encore—"Young Blood"—and thanked everyone and packed up quickly. Their van was waiting just outside and all their equipment was stashed away in a few minutes and they didn't have much to say. The lead singer shook Bill's hand and they were gone, on to another show in Virginia Beach or Biloxi or Pittsburgh.

A group like the Coasters didn't own the copyright to their songs, so their only income came from live performances. They weren't big enough to headline a casino residency or become the house band at some club. Instead, they made their living through an endless series of one-night stands, paid in cash and often sleeping in the van as they made their way overnight to the next job. Back then, a fake group could be in and out of a town before anyone got wise.

Soon I read that the Coasters of that era still had several of its founding members, including the core of their original sound--Carl Gardner on lead vocals, Ronnie Bright on bass vocals (that's him growling "Don't talk back!" on the song "Charlie Brown"), with long-time member Thomas "Curley" Palmer on guitar. Gardner claimed the rights to the Coasters trademark and spent a lot of time trying to stop rival groups from using the name.

Counterfeit Coasters were common--former Sha Na Na frontman Jon Bowzer called the Coasters, Drifters, and Platters the "three most valuable group names of the Doo Wop era… It's no accident that those are the victims [of impersonation], because how many hit records did those three groups have, in aggregate? Well over 100 hit records between the three groups."

Over the first half-century of the Coasters' existence, almost two dozen singers rotated in and out of its official lineup, but countless more called themselves "Coasters" for a day or a week or a package tour. Often these groups had names such as "The Original Coasters" or "[Original or part-time band member name]'s Coasters."

Sometimes they were just "The Coasters." Because the legalities were so murky, many original members of the band could credibly claim the right to use the name. Lawsuits were as common as an E-flat chord.

Promoters hired pseudo-Coasters because they were cheaper than the actual group and few fans noticed the difference. A theme that occurs over and over in American popular culture is the appropriation of Black music by white artists, and that era was no different. You only need to look as far as the countless songs originated by Black musicians but made hits by white singers, Elvis Presley being only the most obvious example. Few Black artists could afford to enforce the copyright for their songs, and recording contracts and performance opportunities were tightly controlled by white executives.

American Bandstand host Dick Clark was also a promoter and record company executive and could make a song a hit, but was notorious for knowingly employing fake versions of groups. He was sued more than once for it but got away with it a lot; in many cases, the original groups had changed members so many times that no one knew what the "real" band looked like or who had the rights to the name anyway.

Of course, all this was a lot easier in the days before the Internet. But to this day I don't know which, if any, of the original Coasters I saw.

Lawsuits were at least bloodless, but worse trouble seemed to follow the "real" Coasters. Their saxophonist had been murdered in 1971 and in 1980 the group's former manager was convicted of murdering one of their original singers. The manager eventually died in prison. Ten years later another of the group's early members, Cornell Gunter, was murdered in Las Vegas.

The group got a boost in 1995 when it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The "real" Coasters kept going, with original member Carl Gardner claiming ownership of the name and bringing new members in as needed. For many years he was the only original Coaster in the group. He retired in 2005 but the group he authorized to continue soldiered on without him. In 2007 he wrote a memoir about his time with the Coasters and his fight against the fake groups, called "Yakety Yak – I Fought Back."

When Gardner died in 2011, he left the legal right to the Coasters name (incorporated as "The Original Coasters Inc.") to his widow, Veta, who had managed the group since 1986. On his death his son by a previous marriage, Carl Jr., began using the Coasters name and trademark.

This prompted Veta to issue a legal warning that only she controls the Coasters copyright. According to Veta, "Carl Gardner Jr. has chosen to take his career in a different direction, which no longer has any association, or connection, or legal right to the name/mark of the Coasters. We wish him well."

In other words, Coaster buyer, beware. And the band plays on.

Photo courtesy Capitol Records.

Brothers of steel

Updated: Jun 2, 2023

"Dobro" is actually a brand name for a type of instrument (a "resonator guitar") invented by the Slovenian immigrant John Dopyera and his brothers in the 1920's (their innovation thus being named after them, "DoBros"). Standard guitars had always been the quietest instrument in any band, by the laws of physics—it couldn't compete with the ring of a banjo or the wail of a fiddle or even the double-string courses of the mandolin. John and his brothers had the idea of adding a metal plate to the front of a guitar, giving it a deep resonance.

Other companies began making similar instruments, so while all Dobros are resonator guitars, not all resonator guitars are Dobros.

To add to the confusion, there are two types of resonator guitars, one with a rounded neck that can be played like a normal guitar (such as Eric Clapton sometimes plays) and another version with a bulky square neck and strings raised so far above the fretboard it can only be played with the instrument sitting in your lap, using a steel bar to slide up and down the strings. The latter type of ap-style instrument is what people usually mean by the generic "dobro."

On a regular guitar the notes are stopped at precise locations by frets (so you're playing say a G or A or whatever note exactly). On a squareneck dobro, because of the high strings, a steel bar is used to slide anywhere on or between the notes, making it tricky to play a note exactly. The tradeoff is that using a bar eliminates the friction of fingers and the sound can glide effortlessly up and down between notes.

The dobro can create a rough, rootsy vibe or a slippery, sometimes haunting sound very close to the human voice. Dobros are prominently featured in folk, country, and bluegrass music, of course, and in films such as O Brother Where Are Thou, but soundtrack composers also use its odd timbre in unexpected ways, such as in horror movies and gangster films. Director John Sayles said he loved the dobro sound in his movie Matewan because the dobro's notes "bend into a question at the end."

Next time you hear an unusual but sliding sound in a movie soundtrack you might have the Dopyera brothers to thank.

I love finding unusual musical instruments...

Updated: Feb 26, 2023

...especially at yard sales or flea markets. This one's a charango, with ten strings, typically used in South American music. Its paired strings are tuned GCEAE (low to high), with the middle E strings having the same note an octave apart. The back is an armadillo shell. Left is a demonstration of how one sounds.