The John Hartford String Band: What Would John Do?
Hartford's banjo
Songs and Snapshots
With such an amazing catalog to pick through, choosing the songs for Memories was no easy task. There were certain tunes that Sharp knew he wanted included on the disc – “Delta Queen Waltz,” “MISIP,” “Three Forks of Sandy, ” “Homer the Roamer.” The other band members were involved with coming up with the final list as well, from Combs’ input on the which fiddle tunes to use, to Schatz’s inclusion of the poem he had written around the time of Hartford’s funeral, entitled “For John.”
Sharp also opened it up to the fans on online forums. Posting on “banjo hangouts and different places,” he simply asked folks what their favorite Hartford tune was.
“That confirmed that ‘Lorena’ needed to go on it,” Sharp says. “They were doing me all kinds of obscure songs, and I would have loved to have been able to do them. I looked for all of them and listened to all of them, and had to narrow it down [from] a lot of the songs.”
recording vocals in the studio
Many of the songs brought up strong recollections for the band members. Sharp especially remembered struggling with “Delta Queen Waltz” in a packed house in Washington, Missouri when Hartford brought it out onstage for the first time.
“It was in the key of F,” he recalls. “I had no idea where this thing was going, but it was really brutal. That’s the only song, when I was in his band, when we got back off the road that I made the point to find the recording of it and learn it. The whole time I was playing with him, I never did that, but that song I could see that I needed to learn it. Plus, it’s such a beautiful melody. I wanted to know exactly how to play it.”
A song that Hartford wrote but never recorded called, “She’s Gone and Bob’s Gone with Her” get a particularly raucous showing on the record. It has the feeling of a half-in-the-bag, late-night-on-the-tour-bus kind of number, as the band whoops, hollers and laughs in the background, coming together to rowdily sing the chorus of, “She’s gone/And Bob’s gone with her!” Carlin is cagey as to its origins, but does concede that it’s at least partially based in truth.
“Well, I came up with the bright idea of doing a song that you know, as John says, wasn’t written about me, but was obviously inspired by an incident in which I was involved [laughs],” he says. “I won’t tell you what it’s really about, because it’s old history, but needless to say, it was inspired by something that happened to me. John, when he was working on it, we were sitting on his bus while we were out playing somewhere, and he was like, ‘Do you want to hear this song I’m working on?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and he sang me the first couple of lines, which were obviously about me, or inspired by me, and then he paused and said, ‘But it’s not about you.’ Which was pretty funny, because it was, obviously.”
“But you know, he always used to say his songs contained bits and pieces of a lot of different things thrown together,” Carlin muses further. “And no one song was about a specific thing. There’s a line in ‘Gentle on My Mind’ that’s about his first wife, there’s a line in ‘Morning Bugle’ that’s about his mother, but by and large [those songs are] a mixture of images and bits and pieces from various places.”
What Would John Do?
When the conversation turns to Hartford’s personal influences on both Sharp and Carlin, it’s understandably a huge question and it produces more than one answer.
“Boy, that’d fill up a book!” Sharp says. “Nobody’s influenced me more than John Hartford. If I live to be a hundred years old, I’ll still be digesting stuff I learned from him. He was the greatest performer I’ve ever seen standing on the stage. I’ve seen him take a crowd full of people that had been drinking beer at a beer tasting all day long and quiet them down to nothing. Which I thought was unbelievable, but he had an uncanny way that he could quiet a crowd. He was way above me when he’d start talking about music theory and stuff like that. He was completely over my head always. He was one of my very best friends. Anytime I called him, he always stopped anything he was doing [and said], ‘Hey Chris! How are you?’ Didn’t matter what, that was just the way he answered the phone every time I called.”
He pauses, and says quietly. “I have one of his hats here. It’s the only decoration I have in the recording room in my studio. It’s a treasure.”
Sharp and Carlin with Hartford
“Musically, I think the thing that John did for me was he gave me permission to take a lot of different things from disparate places that I’d been experimenting with, and blend them into a cohesive style,” Carlin reflects. Although he had been friends with Hartford ten years before playing with him, joining his band was, “Really a big step forward for me. I came out of that experience with a much more personal way of approaching the instrument, a much more cohesive style, a much more progressive way of playing. There are a lot of other subtle little things. I learned a huge amount about songwriting, obviously, from listening to his songs and watching him write. I learned a lot about stage craft. By watching him, you also learned a lot about what not to do [laughs heartily and affectionately] as well as what to do, as much as you do with anybody. But he could get away with a lot more than I ever could because you know, he was John Hartford. He had permission to do certain things, to just be John Hartford.
“He was just a really brilliant guy,” Carlin continues. “A really inquisitive guy, someone who was interested in knowledge and in music, and had wide-ranging musical tastes. And even when he wasn’t around me, he’d call me on the phone – well he’d call all of us on the phone – and talk for hours. It was a big hole in my life when he was gone. It took a long time to really feel like playing music again and really enjoy it. Big hole.”
Hartford left us at the cusp of the iTunes/mp3 era. But his inventive approach to music fits perfectly in an era where sonic diversity is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, for newer bands. Where others saw strict genre definitions, he saw building blocks, polite suggestions to be shrugged off with a winking grin.
“Music doesn’t have to be confined into a box, and it doesn’t have to have a set of rules on top of it,” Sharp says. “I think [there are] a lot of problems with generalizing music, and putting it into genres and putting formulas on it. ‘It’s not bluegrass if it doesn’t have this or that.’ I think musicians could stand to learn to think outside of the box, which is what John did. He had an ability to think outside of the box and remain in it at the same time. He was always true to his love for Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe’s music. And there was always part of that music that never left his music no matter how far out he went. He was still grounded in that. But he also stretched music in ways that people would be afraid to or wouldn’t think to do it.”
It bears repeating that no matter how experimental he got, Hartford was a man who educated and immersed himself in traditional American cultures thoroughly, and with deep respect. It was precisely this approach that made the past not an anachronism or worse, a gimmick, in his music. Instead it was a relevant and living experience, as important today as it was then.
Memories of John
“I think the lesson to be heard in his music is that you need to know about the old music before you can make the new music,” Carlin emphasizes. “You need to really be grounded. You need to really work at your instrument. Besides having knowledge of musical form, you also need to have technique. He had this saying, and he had any number of little sayings he would have, over and over, and then get some new ones, but one of the ones he had was, ‘I’m trying to get my hands to do what’s in my head.’ I think he called his fiddle video something like that. It was all about translating what he was hearing, immediately, into being able to play that. That’s the ultimate goal for all of us, to be the type of reactive musician that can hear something or feel something and immediately be able to produce it in music.”
Carlin mentions at one point how Hartford was always great in a band camp environment, and it’s a shame he didn’t get to share more as a teacher. There are a lot of lessons that musicians of all ages, but especially those growing up in this environment of quick and easy musical consumption, could take away from Hartford. Perhaps the greatest hope then for a project like Memories of John is that somewhere, a youngster might hear a song – perhaps on his iTunes – and be inspired to learn more about the man behind the music. That they might go into the world with boundless creativity, piercing intelligence, and a sincere love of music and keeping our history alive. That they may ask themselves, ‘What would John do?’
The John Hartford String Band will be celebrating the release of Memories of John at The Station Inn in Nashville, Tennessee tomorrow night, June 18th. Tickets are $12 and doors open at 7pm.
You can purchase Memories of John here.
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