The John Hartford String Band: What Would John Do?
John Hartford
“I think he was both living in the past and living in the present you know?” Bob Carlin says as he remembers friend and former band leader John Hartford. “To make music with real depth you have to understand the form you’re working in, or at least you’re working out of. You have to have listened to the old masters, and you have to have a deep understanding of what people have done before you to have depth to your music. To have that immediacy, you have to also be aware of what’s going on now, and you have to be excited about playing music.”
“A lot of people get bored with music and just get – you fall into this kind of road show, you know what I mean?” he reflects further. “There’s a lot of acts, when they have to reproduce their hits every night, they get real stale, it’s real mechanical. [But] even though John played a lot of pieces that were old and that were from his catalog, he was always reinventing them and keeping them fresh. They were familiar enough so people recognized them, but new enough so he kept being excited about doing them. After all, he understood that you had to play that stuff. You’re an entertainer, you’re playing for the audience, you have to keep the audience happy. But he also pushed the envelope. When I was with him, he was constantly trying to come up with new ways to play old music to make it interesting to current audiences. That was his big thing. He involved all of us in that. He used us as a laboratory.”
That “laboratory” Carlin is referring to is the group of musicians who accompanied Hartford on stage and on his studio albums for Rounder Records during the last years of his life. Memories of John (released May 2010 on Compass Records) brings Carlin and his bandmates – Matt Combs (fiddle), Mike Compton (mandolin), and Mark Schatz (bass), and Chris Sharp (guitar) - back together as The John Hartford String Band to honor his music with a 15-song collection. Produced by Sharp, who also spear-headed the project, it’s a beautifully-captured, lovingly-rendered tribute that will excite die-hard geeks and new converts to the good gospel of Hartford alike. The album features old favorites (such as “Lorena” and “Delta Queen Waltz”) as well as previously unrecorded material (“You Don’t Notice Me Ignoring You,” “She’s Gone and Bob’s Gone With Her,” “Homer the Roamer” and more). Many of the unreleased songs were intended to be on the album Hartford was working on when he passed away, so it’s a genuine treat to have them captured here with such joy and care. The SPPS had the fortune of speaking to both Carlin and Sharp to get the back story on the album, some of their own memories of John, and their thoughts on Hartford’s enduring legacy.
Making Memories
It all began last April, when Sharp returned from a trip to Japan and decided to call the band members with a proposal to do a Hartford album.
“We all wanted to do it, we all thought it was a great idea,” Carlin says. “In fact, I’d been thinking about something similar for the past nine years, but this was just the right time and Chris was the right person to do it. He managed to get everybody on board, and I guess the stars were in alignment. Just generally there was a synergy, because things did fall into place fairly easily. And on top of that, people that I wouldn’t have expected got really excited about it and bent over backwards to help.”
The album was recorded live in a classroom at a school in Nashville where Combs teaches. Over the course of a couple days, with desks pushed to the side and blinds drawn across the huge glass windows, the band set to work. It was often an emotional environment, as Carlin describes:
The John Hartford String Band
“During the whole sessions, [John] was there, we were talking about him. As Tim O’Brien said in the notes, we were constantly thinking WWJD, which is ‘What would John do?’ Constantly thinking about him and trying to figure, ‘Were we being true to his spirit and true to his music and true to what he would have done?’ He was constantly in the room with us. There were some teary moments, and some funny moments. It was a good spirit and definitely, he was there.”
Hartford is also literally present on the album. There are snippets of him talking worked into the tracks, which Sharp pulled from the Good Old Boys album session outtakes. Seamlessly blended in, they create the impression of Hartford’s presence in the studio. What adds to this effect is, as Sharp explains, “Aside from one person, everyone on this record was on those sessions. So you can hear Bob talking, you can hear me talking, you can hear Mark Schatz talking. I think you can even hear Mike talking, or at least tuning his instrument. I finally decided it was going to be nicer [to use these particular outtakes] because it was an illusion. Like there’s ‘She’s Gone and Bob’s Gone With Her,’ and right at the end John starts talking. But it works itself out so whenyou listen to it you’re thinking, ‘Hey that’s weird.’ “
Besides these samples, Sharp went through hundreds of 46-year-old-demos to find the right musical tracks to incorporate. Out of 900 demo tracks, ten were ultimately taken into the studio, and the band picked four to work with from there (excluding “Fadeout,” which was clearly the standalone album closer). Working with the demos proved to be challenging, and didn’t always produce work that Sharp felt would do Hartford justice.
In the studio
“We tried to record to them, but only one of them I felt John would be happy with,” he explains. “It’s kind of hard to record along with him because they were just demos. He didn’t think they’d see any light, really. Since I had narrowed it down to ten, when we picked the four [in the recording sessions], I didn’t really have time to go and edit John before the next session started the next morning. So I couldn’t really get the tracks in good enough shape so that we could do a really good job playing with him. He might rush a little bit here and he might drag a little bit here, normal things a musician would do, but when you’ve got five musicians and each of them are trying to anticipate what he’s going to do and each of them are trying to anticipate it differently, and you’re cutting it live, it starts to become fairly impossible. I spent a month and a half trying to work on one song, trying to make it work and it didn’t, so finally I just gave up. The one that we did use [“You Don’t Notice Me Ignoring You”] features Mark. Since it was just Mark trying to anticipate what John was going to do, it was much easier. I think I only edited one note, maybe two notes, [but] Mark was able to go over it a lot of times and get real familiar with the track before he recorded it.”
After “You Don’t Notice Me” was edited and ready to mix, Sharp decided to add a bonus touch – the dancing of Schatz’s wife, Eileen Carson Schatz. The founding director of Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, she was also an old friend of Hartford’s and was happy to lend her feet to the song.
“I was trying to find a place to put feet on, and we were talking about different fiddle tunes and it struck me that that song was already real sparse and it was done so why not put the feet there?” Sharp says. “Once I decided to put feet on that track, I wanted it to be an illusion like it was John doing the feet. So I wanted to make sure Eileen did John’s step exactly like John did it. She’s a wonderful dancer. I just told her what I was looking for; I didn’t need to coach her. In fact, I think she helped John develop that stuff to begin with.”
The album features several other noteworthy guests like Alison Brown (banjo on “MISIP”), George Buckner (banjo on “Lorena”), Bela Fleck (banjo on “Girl I Left Behind”), Alan O’Bryant (vocals on “Delta Queen Waltz”) and O’Brien (vocals on “Lorena” and “MISIP”). Bringing these heavy hitters on board was a somewhat nerve-wracking experience for Sharp.
“I was responsible for making sure I didn’t destroy any of [their music],” he says. “That was quite a load to bear with all their music, and keeping in mind who they were and what they’d done, and how much of an honor it was for them to have enough faith in me to allow me to work on their music.”
In turn, Sharp received nothing but enthusiasm and support from these musicians.
Bela Fleck recording for "Girl I Left Behind"
“Pretty much when I called all of them and told them what I was working on, they were all very responsive,” he describes. “‘Yeah, sure whatever you need, come down and get it! Yeah I’ll play on record, anything you need!’ A lot of the humbling stuff was that they didn’t care if they got paid or not, and in some cases, they refused to be paid. Everybody had that kind of a spirit you know? ‘Whatever. Pay me or not. I just want to do it!’ And they didn’t do it for me, they did it for John. I mean, they might have done it for me, but I want to believe they did it for John, and I’m sure they did.”
Producer, engineer and musician Mark Howard, who worked with Hartford on several projects, also played an integral role in the album by loaning Sharp Hartford’s banjo.
“He was exceptional,” Sharp says gratefully. “As soon as I called and asked him about using John’s banjo he was like, ‘Sure, come get it!’ He actually let me borrow the banjo and bring it back to Asheville, and let George Buckner get used to the neck on it, because it’s got a completely different inlay than a Gibson banjo, for example. He trusted me with that banjo enough to loan it to me, to let me carry it 200 or 300 miles away and keep it for two to three weeks.”
Carlin describes how this supportive attitude continued once the recording process was over. Compass came on board as the label for the record, and radio and Internet word-of-mouth has been gradually and organically building momentum from there. Now, folks are “falling over themselves,” as Carlin says, at the prospect of joining the group on stage or at IBMA showcases.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Carlin says. “I know that John has lots of fans out there. But I think if we had tried this five or six or eight years ago, it just wouldn’t have happened the same way… I mean I can try to analyze it, it’s all speculation, but I think that some of it is inevitable. Who knows why the cosmos align the way they do? [laughs]. But I think that before, it was too close to his death. People were still processing, and it was just too soon.”
With the tenth anniversary of Hartford’s passing coming up next year, the time seems right for Memories of John.
“We’re going to be doing some things at Americana [Music Association Conference] and hopefully at IBMA,” Carlin says. “And there’s some other events that are going to be very John-centric in the year 2011, so really we didn’t expect to be going out and touring this summer, were really looking at 2011, which is the anniversary year [of his death] as the time that we want to be out and in front of people. So that’s what we’re looking forward to. I think that my main goal is that this record is the catalyst for The Year of John 2011. We want to make 2011 The Year of John Hartford, the year we all celebrate him, the year he gets recognized, he wins more awards and people start to talk about him. And a bunch of new people that don’t know about him get inspired to play his music. Just go out there and sort of reinvigorate that memory.”
Continue reading for more on the John Hartford String Band…
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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