by Tom Piazza
He looks me in the eye and smiles faintly. “I’m looking for you,” he says, and gets in behind the wheel.
From the Oxford American’s Second
Annual Music Issue, Summer 1998
The following is the first piece I wrote for the Oxford American. The magazine’s editor, Marc Smirnoff, had been in touch with me after the publication of my story collection Blues And Trouble, inviting me to contribute something to an upcoming OA issue focusing on crime. I appreciated the invitation, but I was working on a novel and I had no special ideas about crime at the time, so I declined.
Some months later he got in touch again. They were planning their first music issue, and he wanted me in it. I wasn’t in the mood, and I hit him with an idea that I doubted he would accept. If they would send me to Nashville to find the bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin, I’d do a piece for him. Unlike Bill Monroe or Ralph Stanley, Martin was more or less unknown outside the tightly knit world of bluegrass musicians and fans. To my surprise, Smirnoff said to go ahead and do it.
My reasons for wanting to write about Martin are explained in the piece. When “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass” came out in the first OA music issue, it became a minor phenomenon in the country music world; musicians faxed it back and forth all over the country, and for years whenever I was around country musicians, somebody would ask me for more details on that night at the Opry. Jimmy was an amazing performer and a very difficult man, and I was very grateful to be able to catch him in action.
Following “True Adventures” is a short piece I wrote for the OA after Jimmy’s death in 2005. He really was the last of a breed.
True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass
1.
It’s pitch-dark and cold and I’m sitting in my car at the top of a driveway on a small hill outside Nashville, trying to decide what to do. In an hour and a half, the Grand Ole Opry starts, and I’m supposed to attend with the King of Bluegrass himself—or, rather, the King-In-Exile, the sixty-nine-year-old Black Sheep of the Great Dysfunctional Family of Country Music—Jimmy Martin, veteran of Bill Monroe’s early-1950s Blue Grass Boys and one-time Decca recording star in his own right. Inside the nearby house, which is totally dark, Jimmy Martin is submerged in some advanced state of inebriation, waiting for me. Outside my car, two of Martin’s hunting dogs are howling their heads off in the cold, black night air in a frenzy of bloodlust.
I’ve hit the horn a few times, but no lights have gone on, no doors have opened. The Dodge van and the Ford pickup are there, with the coon-hunting bumper stickers (“When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops”), as is the midnight-blue 1985 Lincoln stretch limousine in which we took his garbage to the town incinerator yesterday, so I know he didn’t run out on me. Finally, I tentatively open my door to see if I can make it to the house, but one of the dogs comes peeling around the front bumper and I close it again, fast. I decide to pull out and call him from the gas station on the corner of Old Hickory Boulevard.
It’s kind of beautiful out here, actually. Hermitage is an eastern suburb of Nashville, about fifteen minutes out Interstate 40 from downtown. Rolling hills, shopping centers, subdivisions, plus the usual swelling of motels and fast-food joints around the highway interchange, like an infection around a puncture wound. The main attraction is President Andrew Jackson’s house, the Hermitage, where historically minded Nashville tourists can go for a couple hours’ respite from the Eternal Twang.
I have always wanted to meet Jimmy Martin. I’d heard that he was a difficult person, but I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for the past two days. But you may not even know who Jimmy Martin is, so first things first . . .
One night in 1949, a completely unknown twenty-two-year-old singer-guitarist from Sneedville, Tennessee, walked up to Bill Monroe backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and asked if he could sing him a song. Monroe agreed, and before an hour had passed he invited the young man on the road with his band, the Blue Grass Boys. At that time, Monroe and his mandolin had already pioneered the sound that would become known as bluegrass, a form of country music reaching back to earlier mountain styles and adding an emphasis on instrumental precision and virtuosity. Monroe’s two most famous sidemen of the 1940s, the guitarist-singer Lester Flatt and the banjoist Earl Scruggs, were as important in many ways to the music’s development as Monroe; when they left the Blue Grass Boys in 1948, they were stars in their own right.
Martin’s arrival brought another element into the group; his high, strong voice, stronger than Lester Flatt’s, gave a new edge to the vocal blend, and his aggressive guitar added a stronger push to the rhythm as well. His early-1950s recordings with Monroe, including “Uncle Pen,” “River of Death,” and “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” are classics. After five years with Monroe, Martin went on his own, first teaming up with the very young Osborne Brothers and then forming his own group. The 1957–61 incarnation of the Sunny Mountain Boys, as he called them, with the mandolinist Paul Williams and the banjo prodigy J. D. Crowe, is widely regarded as one of the greatest bands in bluegrass history.
Martin had a string of hits in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including “Ocean of Diamonds,” “Sophronie,” the truck-driving anthem “Widow Maker,” “You Don’t Know My Mind,” and his signature tune, “Sunny Side of the Mountain.” Martin’s vocals—high, plaintive, and lonesome—wrung every bit of meaning and feeling out of the lyrics. Like many country performers, he was capable of astonishing sentimentality, musical crocodile tears, like his duet with his young daughter on “Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?” But at his best, his phrasing, the impact of the urgency behind his long, held notes, could be staggering.
Although his early recordings are considered bluegrass classics, to my ears he seemed to take more chances and gain in expressiveness as he got older. In 1973 he received a gold record, along with Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, and Maybelle Carter, for his contribution to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s first Will the Circle Be Unbroken album; his performances are arguably the best thing about that record.
Despite all this, Martin has remained a kind of shadowy figure, with much less of a public profile than some of his bluegrass peers, like Ralph Stanley or the Osborne Brothers. He is seen in Rachel Liebling’s excellent 1991 bluegrass documentary film High Lonesome, but the glimpses are only tantalizing. In some ways Martin doesn’t fit into the categories that have evolved in the country music world. He is too raw for the commercial and slick Nashville establishment, and in a way too unapologetically country in the old sense—mixing sentiment and showmanship with George Jones– and Hank Williams–style barroom heartbreak—for the folk-revival types to whom bluegrass was, and is, essentially folk music. On top of that, the King of Bluegrass, as he called himself, had a reputation as a heavy drinker and a volatile personality. As I asked around, I began to realize that Nashville insiders traded Martin stories back and forth the way 1960s Washington insiders used to tell Lyndon Johnson stories.
Still, his obscurity was hard for me to fathom. When I got into bluegrass, after twenty-five years of listening to jazz, Martin seemed, and still seems, to be the greatest. On heartbreak songs he could tell it like it is, with no posing, only pure truth . . .
Tomorrow’s just another day to worry.
To wake up, my dear, and I wonder why
Must a sea of heartache slowly drown me?
Why can’t I steal away somewhere and die?
He sang to the hilt, as if the full weight of a human life hung on every line. His phrasing was alive with expressive turns, his voice breaking at times, or falling off a note he had held just long enough. His nasal, reedy tones reached back all the way to country music’s deepest Scotch-Irish roots; at its highest and lonesomest, his voice conveyed the near-madness and absolutism of bagpipes in full cry. The only comparison in my experience was to the keening sound of certain jazz players, the altoist Jackie McLean or, especially, the tenor giant John Coltrane. Why, I always wondered, wa
sn’t he everybody’s favorite?
I did some digging and got his phone number and in early October of last year called to try and set up an interview. From the first he was guarded, suspicious, and it was clear that he was in no rush to have me visit. His voice was unmistakable from his records—high, nasal, and deep country—and he spoke loud and in italics much of the time. After some confusion over my name (“Tom T. Hall?”), he gave a series of grunted, grudging responses to my initial comments about why I was calling. When I told him he was my favorite bluegrass singer he shifted gears a little, thanking me and saying, “I can’t tell you how many thousands of people have told me that over the years. When did you want to come up and see me?” I suggested a date in November, and he began hedging, saying that he would be spending a lot of time out of town coon hunting. We agreed that I’d call him in a week or two to see how his plans were shaping up.
A week and a half later I called him again to try and zero in on a date. It was immediately obvious not only that he didn’t remember our previous conversation (“Tom T. WHAT ?”), but that he was drunk. I started explaining that I wanted to write a piece on him, but he cut me off in mid-sentence.
“Whut . . .” he began, dramatically. “Is in this . . .” Another dramatic pause. “For Jimmy Martin?” His speech was heavy and overdeliberate, rather than slurred.
Before I could answer, he broke in and said, “Publicity?”
“Well, yeah . . .” I began.
“I mean,” he said, “what kind . . . of money . . . is in it?”
“Well,” I began, again, realizing that he probably hadn’t had a lot of magazine articles done on him lately, “magazines don’t really do that. They don’t pay the subjects of—” And here he broke in again—
“You’re . . .” he said, “telling me . . . what magazines do?”
Uh-oh, I thought.
“I’ve had all kinds of write-ups,” he went on, cranking up, his voice suddenly seething with a weirdly intimate rage. “I’m the KING OF BLUEGRASS, and you’re . . . telling me . . . what magazines do?”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to this, so I kept quiet.
“I’m just saying,” he went on, picking up a little speed now, as if there were a response expected of me that he could see I was going to be too dim to get, so he was going to have to lob me the serve one more time, “is there gonna be a few dollars in it for Jimmy Martin to buy himself a fifth of whiskey?”
This, I began to sense, was some kind of test. Feeling my way, I said, “I tell you what . . . If you want to do the interview . . . I’ll bring you the fifth of whiskey myself. ”
“ALL-right,” he hollered, sounding hugely pleased. “COME ’n’ see me. When you wanna come up?”
I suggested a date in mid-November, and he said it would be fine. Then he said, “Listen . . . I gotta go. I got a black girl here tryin’ to talk to me. You know what . . . every white girl I ever went with, she got a home offa me. Now I’m gonna see about a black one and tell the others to kiss my ass. How does that sound to you?”
I said it made sense, and he said, “Good. Call me closer to the time,” then he hung up and I sat at my desk, shaking my head. After that call I had a pang of misgiving about the whole idea, as if I might be getting myself into something I’d prefer to stay out of, but I was too curious to give up. Boy, I thought. Whatever you do, don’t forget that whiskey.
Over the next month we talked two more times. The first time, he sounded sober and friendly, even asking me one or two questions about myself. He had a happy memory of New Orleans, where I live (“I played down there when Johnny Horton had his hit on ‘Battle of New Orleans.’ We played ‘Ocean of Diamonds’ and ‘Sophronie’ and tore his ass to pieces”), and we were able to set a date of November 20, a Wednesday, for me to come up, but there was only one hitch. What I had to do, he said, was call the weather report for Richmond, Indiana, that week and see what the temperature was going to be. If it was going to be in the thirties up there, it would be too cold to go coon hunting and I could come see him in Nashville. But if it was going to be in the forties or fifties, then I might as well stay home because he’d be in Indiana, hunting. I had no intention of calling the weather report in Indiana; I decided to just call Martin again a few days beforehand.
On November 17, the Sunday before I was to go up, I called him to confirm, and he was the old Jimmy again; he grumbled, chafed (“Now, that’s how many days you’re taking up?”), but I finally got him to agree that I would drive up on Wednesday, we would visit on Thursday, and then we could take it from there. Thursday, right? Yep. Okay. See you then. Hang up.
That’s it. I was going.
The drive from New Orleans took ten hours. As soon as I arrived at the Holiday Inn in Hermitage that Wednesday night, I called Martin.
“Oh, hell,” he said, gloomily. “I was fixing to spend tomorrow rabbit hunting. But I guess I’ll spend it with you . . .” He sounded like a teenager forced to bring his kid brother along on a date. We agreed that I’d come over at ten in the morning; he gave me directions to his house, and that was it.
Thursday dawned grey and raw; yellow leaves blew around the motel parking lot. I had breakfast and ran through some of the things I wanted to ask Martin, but I was already realizing that the questions I wanted to ask him weren’t really the point of this trip. Whatever I was looking for I probably wouldn’t find by asking him a bunch of questions. But it was a place to start, at least.
His house, it turned out, was closer than I realized, and five minutes before ten a.m. I pulled up to the big iron gates he had described, at the foot of a long blacktop driveway leading up to a large, ochre-colored ranch house on several hilly acres of land. At the top of the driveway I could see a figure moving. I made my way up the driveway and parked in some mud off to the right, the only paved spots being taken up by a couple of vans and a long, midnight-blue stretch limousine, the rear license plate of which read KING JM. Across the lip of the limo’s trunk, yellow and orange letters spelled out the title of his best-known hit, SUNNY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN. The moving figure was, of course, Martin, attended by two dogs that bayed lustily at my approach. Martin didn’t stop what he was doing or register my arrival in any way; by the time I opened the door of my car he had disappeared into the limo, and as I got out his taillights squeezed bright and the limo started to back up.
I grabbed my stuff and approached the limo, the tinted driver’s-side window rolled down halfway, and there was Jimmy Martin looking up at me, unsmiling, suspicion in his red and slightly watery eyes, his head as big as a large ham and very jowly, with long grey sideburns and thin grey hair combed straight back and left a little bit long by the collar of his black nylon windbreaker.
“Leave your bags in your car,” he said. “I gotta do an errand here; you can come with me.”
By the time I climbed into his passenger seat, Martin was trying to maneuver the limo into a five-point U-turn so that he could get it out of his driveway. He worked the gear shift, which was on the steering column, with dogged concentration and without saying a word. The hood was as big as a queen-sized bed. On the first leg of the turn the limo stalled, and Martin cursed and restarted it with effort. The car stalled twice more before he got it through the turn; at one point he spun the wheels and they splattered mud all over my car, which was about twenty feet behind the limo. Finally, the turn was completed and we coasted down the driveway with the engine gurgling uncertainly, and out onto the road.
Once we were under way I tried a few conversation openers, but it was like trying to play tennis in the sand. It took three long minutes, driving at about fifteen miles an hour, to get to our destination just off the main road; the back of a one-story brick building where somebody was busy throwing wood and other garbage into an incinerator.
“Wait here,” Martin said, getting out and slamming the door. For the first time I turned and looked in the back area of the limo, which was upholstered in blue velvet, but not very well
cared for, littered with scraps of paper and junk. In the middle of the back seat were two giant bags of garbage and a broken crutch. Martin opened the back door, grabbed the garbage, and closed it again. I watched him bring it over to the guy; they stood around talking, inaudibly to me, for about five minutes while I sat in the front seat.
When they were finished Martin got back in without any explanation, and we headed back to the house, with the limo stalling only once more.
The dogs were really whooping it up when we arrived, and Martin hollered at them as we got out and they skulked away quietly. At the end of the driveway stood a big STOP sign, with stick-on letters added, reading BAD DOG WILL BITE TAIL. I grabbed my bags out of my car and followed Martin inside.
We walked under a carport and through a storm door into an unheated den, where the floor was piled with boxes of cassettes, CDs, an upright bass, sound equipment, and other stuff. I followed him up a few steps, through a door and past a daybed, where a collection of mesh caps of all sorts was displayed, then through another door into a vestibule with a bathroom and a bedroom off of it, which led directly into the kitchen. It was obviously a bachelor’s house: clothes were set out to dry on a chair by the heater, and at the Formica kitchen table space would have had to be cleared amid papers, mail-order catalogs, letters, and empty cassette cases to make room for a second person to eat. I unpacked my cassette recorder and notebook while Martin wordlessly looked through some mail, but before we got started I was going to give him the whiskey I had promised him.
I had put some thought into the choice, actually. I had initially bought him a bottle of Knob Creek, a very good Kentucky bourbon. But after I bought it I wondered if there wouldn’t be some state loyalty involved in Martin’s whiskey preference. He had begun life in Tennessee, after all, and had spent the past twenty-five years living there. Tennessee was the home of the Grand Ole Opry, etc., etc., and for all I knew some kind of horrible blood rivalry might exist between Tennessee and Kentucky. So I went back to the liquor store and picked up a bottle of Gentleman Jack as well, to cover the Tennessee base.
