Tut Taylor: Snapshots, Tapes and Broken Strings
Sarah Hagerman
Tut Taylor
At 85 years old, Tut Taylor has traveled through nearly a century’s worth of history, and the unique path he has followed has taken him straight through the heart of bluegrass music – from its early days with Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs through newgrass, which he helped pioneer as part of John Hartford’s Aero-plain Band, to spearheading The Great Dobro Sessions with Jerry Douglas in 1994, which earned him a Grammy. A skillful luthier (he recently designed the “Tutbro,” his very own Dobro, just to name but one example), dedicated archivist, and dynamic picker, even his style of Dobro playing is distinctive, earning him the nickname “The Flat Pickin’ Dobro Man.” Throughout his extraordinary journey, Taylor has always been a musician’s musician, an independent soul, and a man with an intuitive sense to capture moments. Taylor’s tapes, many of whom we have the great fortune of sharing on this very site, feature a veritable who’s who of great pickers and creative minds. So join us as we share a few snap shots from a photographic collection that could fill volumes.
“I started in 1955 with my first tape recorder,”
Taylor reflects.
“Before that I had a Philco disc recorder, and I started recording onto disc in the 40’s. I later transferred the reel-to-reel tapes, and later on to something else, but that’s the thing that first got me started. Back then [the recordings] were on disc, it was an aluminum disc with an acetate coating on it and there was a needle in it to cut the groove, like how they used to make records. This was a home apparatus that I used. A lot of stuff when I first began taping came over the radio.”
I was curious if he happened to remember the first thing he ever taped.
“Man… you talking about 1940 something, it’s 2009!,” he says with a laugh. “Well, the first thing I ever recorded was probably off the Grand Ole Opry on a Saturday night, somewhere back in the forties.”
Musical connections and friendships in the years since have given Taylor exceptional access, allowing him to capture countless shows, informal jam sessions, and rehearsals. A few of his tapes include picks that took place at the WSM radio DJ convention in Nashville during the mid to late sixties. Taylor describes the environment:
“It was a weeklong event that they invited DJs from all over America, and from all over the world. Primarily [it was for] the DJs, for them to know about what was available in music, and it gave them an opportunity to come in and meet other DJs and discuss the music. During the time they were having that, we were having a little group of us downtown in one of the hotels, and we’d come in on about Thursday, all the bluegrass folks would, and we’d all pick and jam until Sunday morning and then we’d all go home. We usually had these in two or three hotel rooms and people would just show up to pick. And of course, I always had my recorder with me, and so it was a great opportunity to listen to a lot of people.” (#20, #45, #38 side one)
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One of the pickers present on some of the tapes from the convention was Bill Monroe, who was said to have a reputation for not liking the Dobro. But Taylor is quick to set the record straight.
“I’d known Bill for a good many years before we ever met there [the DJ convention],” he explains. “A couple of occasions I got to play with him and his band, and it was pretty cool…It wasn’t that he didn’t like the [Dobro] players, he just didn’t like the instrument in his band because Roy Acuff, they were both on the Grand Ole Opry at that time, he had a Dobro player in his band, so he didn’t want to copy Roy Acuff. But he loved the Dobro. A man that has a lot of blues in his music, he has to learn the Dobro… so we had a lot of good fun together. You can put that down in black and white, Bill Monroe loved the Dobro. And put in capital letters that Tut Taylor said so! There’s a lot of misconceptions and misinformation and untruths have crept in over the years, and a lot of it just ain’t true.”
Two others whose trajectories have intersected with Taylor’s were Clarence and Roland White, who first came together with Tut to record 1964’s Dobro Country. The Kentucky Colonels were playing regularly at Ash Grove, a club in Los Angeles which was the west coast central for bluegrass shows at the time, and Taylor taped some of their shows. 2003 saw the release of Tut and Clarence Flatpicking, an album of Dobro tunes, with White on rhythm guitar that was also captured during that era. Taylor describes it thusly:
“I went out to Hollywood to record an album, that’s where I met Clarence and Roland… Back then, Clarence was just a picker like everybody else. Weren’t nothing special, you know, but he was a good picker. Real good finger picker. And as a flat picker, he set his own style. I liked him so well I asked him to make all my Dobro tunes with me.” (#26, #29)
Back in the Goodle Days
Steam Powered Aereo-Takes
Taylor first met John Hartford, Norman Blake and Vassar Clements in the artistic nexus that was Nashville in the early 1970’s. It was an environment where musical sparks were flying, strings quivering and like-minds meeting, a great magnet pulling talent and drive together from both the old school veterans and the more hippie-fied youngsters, suits and ties mingling with beards and bell bottoms, riding the second wave of bluegrass music that had been building momentum from the 1960’s revival.
1971
Taylor moved to Nashville at the beginning of the decade, to open the GTR Music Shop with George Gruhn and Randy Wood. He would later sell his share in GTR, and open the Old Time Pickin’ Parlor in 1972, with Wood and Grant Boatwright. He describes what the scene at the Parlor was like – casual, creative, and welcoming – as long as you were willing to listen of course:
“Above the music store was a repair store. Downstairs… when you go into the Old Time Pickin’ Parlor, you would take a right and go over to where we had a stage set up where we did a lot jamming and performing, and we’d have an audience come in at night. But a lot [of times] at the Old Time Pickin’ Parlour, people would drop by during the day. Anybody might come, any musician – professional, unknown, whatever – would drop in and want to pick. Of course, we were always ready to pick with somebody and make them feel at home and get them up there to pick. We would just have fun. That went on during the day, and at night was when we had little shows, not every night though. And then a little later, we’d pull in a pizza and cold beer and people would come enjoy the music. But it was a listening place. It was where you’d come to listen to the music, you didn’t come to talk. We didn’t put up with any of that, if they wanted to listen and enjoy, they were welcome, but if they wanted to talk, they had to leave.” (#21-has Aereo-plain Rehearsal and OTPP)
Jam sessions like these would take place all over Nashville during that time, including at a building that Roy Acuff owned next to the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry was held until 1974. (#35, #40, also #43 has side A from OTPP and side B from last Opry radio broadcast)
“Those were just good fun times,” Taylor says of these sessions at Acuff’s. “A lot of fun, lot of pleasure, lot of happiness. But nothing out of the ordinary. Any time you get to get to play with good musicians, it’s more fun, whether they’re professional or not. When a musician plays an instrument, the better he plays, the better you’re going to be… because he’s going to make you sound better and make you want to play better. And that happens a lot when you play in environments like that. You’re very alert, very attentive and you listen and you look.”
In the midst of this thriving Nashville scene, Hartford, Blake and Clements decided to form a band – The Aereo-plain Band. The resulting album, Aereo-plain, was a ground breaking record. Steering old time traditions down a freewheeling river, with four great musicians at the helm (who were joined by Randy Scruggs on electric bass in the studio), the album organically and lovingly re-examined Americana with quirkiness and warmth, dancing over the boundary lines between heritage and evolution. Often the best things come when you don’t force them, and the work they did on Aereo-plain is certainly evidence of that, still sounding juicy today when that needle hits the vinyl. The relaxed demeanor of the project was inspired by Hartford’s hands-off bandleader approach.
“John was a creative person,” Taylor describes. “He was creative in writing, I don’t know how many books he wrote, but he did write some books. Creative in his music, completely different. He had more rhythm in his soul than any person I’ve ever known. And he was a very free spirited individual. When we got The Aereo-plain Band together, he just told us to play what we felt – if we felt like playing a song to play, if we didn’t feel like playing, not to play. If we wanted to create something or add something to the song, we had liberty to do that. So I think that was one of the reasons that The Aero-plain Band CD has over the years become such sought after music. Because actually, [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we broke the barrier, we broke the mold. What we were playing was different than anything anybody else had ever played. It was a forerunner of the so-called newgrass movement. We didn’t know that then, that was not in our attention.”
“When all four of us got together we kind of played off of each other,” he continues. “One of us inspired the other and would inform another to play better or to play different or to be inventive, to just let the bars down and go for it. [Hartford] was very enjoyable to work with and it was a great experience. The only sad thing about it, he recorded back then on Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers never did push the album, it never got out there in the marketplace like it should have been. But even then, over the years it’s gained a lot of notoriety.”
The recording sessions were similarly relaxed, taking place at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville and Electric Lady in New York. Producer David Bromberg left the tape running the whole time, capturing the natural sonic explorations of the four musicians. Bromberg ended up choosing the tracks that became Aereo-plain, and in 2002 an album was released called Steam Powered Aereo-Takes. A friend of Hartford’s, banjo player Bob Carlin, was instrumental in getting the second album together. Taylor says, “To me it’s a better CD than the first one. But that’s because it’s a little bit more of the bluegrass. And besides, I get to play mandolin more on it.” (#28 – Electric Ladyland Studio)
“But I like ‘em both,” he reflects. “There’s nothing like that first album you know. But this second one is just a continuation of the same feelings, the same music, the same time, the same everything. Just different selections. And there’s a lot more other than that, but it’s only those that John selected to go on out.”
The band would enthrall many fans in the live setting, even bringing their music to the stages of Boston Symphony Hall, with Arthur Feidler and the Boston Pops. As Tut describes it, during a time of playing many inspiring shows, “That was the icing on the cake…that show was videotaped but it’s not available. It would be nice to go back in time and see that. But it was wonderful to play in symphony hall. We were there among the upper crust, of the musicians and society. We were just old country boys done come to Boston.” (#89)
Taylor’s work with The Aereo-plain Band brings him a palatable sense of joy, and he feels grateful that he was involved in a project that inspired so many:
“I still receive emails from people thanking me for that album, and [saying] that it was one of the first albums that they listened to that turned them on to music. It’s always nice to hear, even today from people that still like that album and how they got started in music by listening to it. I’ve met a lot of friends [through it].”
Keeping It Tut
Growing up as a young man in rural Georgia, Taylor first learned how to play more or less in isolation, being inspired to take up the Dobro the first time he heard it over the crackling radio waves, his curiosity immediately piqued. His two main influences as he developed his craft were Bashful Brother Oswald and Buck Graves, better known as Uncle Josh:
“Oswald, he started playing with Roy Acuff in 1939, and that’s the first time I ever heard a Dobro, when I heard them playing on the radio. I didn’t know what it was and I had to find out. When you live in a rural area, about all you got is the radio. You don’t have a vast knowledge of what’s going on in the world, or in music, because all you do is listen to the bands brought to you to listen to. They don’t give you a lot of information, so you just have to listen to ‘em if you like ‘em and then tune in every time they come on. Oswald was the main Dobro player I listened to, and then later Buck Graves. I got to listen to him, and he was a completely different style to Oswald’s playing, with more rolls and things, so those were the two styles that were available to learn from back then…those two guys influenced everybody in the world to play Dobro.”
Of course, Taylor had to take what he could from them, and then run with it in his own style, since he didn’t play with finger picks. But when Taylor finally met them, he remembers being a bit star struck. “Oh, I was thrilled, like any other country boy would be. And thought they walked on water and all that good stuff.”
As far as his flat-picking style goes, he received intrigued comments, but “that’s about it. It was hard to understand how I could play with a flat pick and it wouldn’t be hard to understand if a lot of people played that way, it was just the way to play the guitar.”
Although Taylor’s unique musical skills are well-respected and admired, his approach never seems to have caught on. I asked him why he thought that was.
“I’ve heard of two or three [players] but there’s not many out there,” he says. “I think it’s because people want to think they can’t play it with a flat pick. ‘Cause everyone else plays it with thumb picks and finger picks, so they figure that’s the way it has to be played. I doubt it will ever change. You know, that’s ok by me, just so I long as I can keep on picking.”
Taylor intends to keep on doing just that, and his independent streak has certainly set an example for new generations of musicians. Looking to future of bluegrass music, however, he does express a concern over the old songs disappearing.
“I have a lot of good friends, young people, that are just amazing and play some of the best music ever played, but there’s still a little difference in the young peoples’ playing from the old seasoned playing. Young people, they’ll learn the chords to a song, then they play the scales over the chords, but they don’t have the melody. This is not in every case, but is often the case, where a lot of young people don’t put enough emphasis on learning the melody to a certain tune. They’re getting good, really good. And I admire them for it, and a lot of older people, around my age, they say, ‘There’s the future of bluegrass, they’re going to carry it on! They’re going to carry in on after we’re gone,’ but they’re not because they ain’t learning the old traditionals.”
“As you listen to music and go along through the years, you can notice this change,” he continues. “And of course, they interpret it differently, so they’re going to play it differently. That’s the problem with a lot of younger people, is that they learn a tune and if the guy they’re learning it from is playing it wrong, they don’t know any difference and they learn to play it wrong too. They don’t put in the time to learn how to distinguish the difference. The music will go on, but not the music that I grew up on, knew and played… it’s disappearing.”
But he is just as quick to encourage younger pickers to forge their own path in the tradition.
“[They] copy other people, a lot of young people do,” he muses. “And they don’t develop something of their own. In other words, they don’t – ok to give you an example, a kids is going to learn to play the banjo like Earl. And he learns that stuff and a lot of times they’ll venture out and change a little or add a little to what they’ve learned…But they never come up with any original stuff on the banjo or whatever. Some do and some don’t. And so it depends a lot as to how they learn it and how they play it as to what’s going to happen to it.”
“You gotta learn what you can and then strike out on your own,” Taylor says, passing along his wisdom. “Do your own thing. Sometimes it takes awhile to do that, because you’ve gotta learn the instrument. You can’t do your own thing until you learn how to play it. But then as soon as you learn how to play it, from other people or however you learn, experiment, and see what you can do with it.”
Taylor has certainly always done his own thing, while he keeps the music he loves living and breathing, through all the snapshots, miles of tape, and broken strings accumulated along the way.
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Tut sells books and CDs at his online store.
A great intro to Tut’s live music archived here is the Tut Samplers – a “best of” composed of 7 CDs full of cuts hand selected by our Historian, Mitchell Wittenberg.
Pastor Tim Says:
