Dan Crary On Flatpicking

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine

June 1989, Volume 23, Number 12

Even to its strongest supporters, bluegrass isn’t usually seen as a solution to the world’s problems. But in Dan Crary’s opinion, the enduring popularity of bluegrass and other forms of traditional music is one of the few reasons to remain optimistic about the future of humanity.

“I don’t mean to be too cynical,” he says in a serious tone, “but one of the last things I’m actively optimistic about is that more people are listening to traditional music. They’re standing around a campfire late at night, just like their ancestors did, with their shadows thrown up on the side of a tree; only now they’re playing fiddles and banjos. And those slightly bacchanalian revelers and banjo players give me a lot of hope for humanity.”

What’s vital and important about bluegrass and other forms of traditional music, says Crary, a musician certainly near the top of everyone’s list of the world’s greatest flatpicking guitarists, is that it provides an essential cultural experience to those who play it and those who hear it. When people experience the raw beauty and power of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs and others, they recognize and connect with the experience of something beautiful.

Bluegrass, Crary explains intently, “connects with different things. It connects with formal music learning. It is as valid and challenging and enriching to listen to Flatt and Scruggs as it is to listen to a chamber group playing Mozart. But more than that, it creates an aesthetic experience that is enriching.

“People try to revolutionize the world and make it better by religious experience, by politics, by philosophy. Now I don’t know which of those will work, but my nomination for something that’s going to make a difference is a real aesthetic experience, where you’re reduced to a state of awe over something beautiful that you’ve experienced. When that happens, you’re a human being with some perspective. It elevates you because you’re connected with something that is very big and powerful. Call it God, call it divine, call it world spirit—you can’t have an aesthetic experience unless you’re in touch with something real about the world that we don’t really understand,” Crary says.

“It connects you to other human beings that have had a similar experience. It’s humanizing and I just want to remind people that this growth in traditional music is important. It’s not just another way to spend your recreational dollars. It’s not the same as water skiing or going bowling, it’s something unique. It will bring tremendous rewards for rigorous study and participation—or from just doing it once in a while and being kind to your neighborhood fiddle player. But at any level, it’s one of the most important things going on today because of community, because of the aesthetic experience and because of how bloody crazy all the rest of the world is.”

Although he realized it late in life, Dan now says traditional music was always important to him and perhaps that is why it has such a strong impact on him now. An early period of piano lessons left him bored and he quit soon after starting. By age eleven he convinced his parents to buy him a guitar and he started taking lessons. But he lacked a clear musical goal, playing in a variety of settings during his high school years and performing at nursing homes, orphanages, city parks and other sites around his Kansas City home. In 1957, he moved to Chicago to attend the Moody Bible Institute. Living in the windy city gave Dan some exposure to traditional music, but because his religious educators disdained nightclubs, he never became seriously involved in the music scene there.

To continue his academic pursuits, Dan moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1967 to work toward his doctorate in theology. He also started working at WINN, a country music station in Indiana, just north of Louisville. Eventually, he began meeting local bluegrass musicians and started soaking up bluegrass influences in his guitar playing and singing. Making friends at various pickin’ parties, Dan was soon convinced to join a few friends in a bluegrass band—the soon-to-be-famous Bluegrass Alliance. By 1969, Crary and the Alliance had progressed from playing Louisville-area clubs to Carlton Haney’s bluegrass festival in Camp Springs, North Carolina, appearing with such stars as Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe, the Country Gentlemen and others. Dan’s standout flatpicking guitar style with the Alliance, along with the work of musicians such as Doc Watson, Clarence White, Norman Blake, Tony Rice and others, was instrumental in starting the current revolution in lead guitar among bluegrass bands. The theological world’s loss was the bluegrass world’s gain.

Since then, Crary’s highly melodic, cliche-exterminating guitar style has earned him worldwide acclaim. He has toured and recorded extensively with the superstar trio Berline-Crary-Hickman. In addition, he has recorded four albums of his own featuring his unmistakable flatpicking guitar style. A fifth solo album, “Take A Step Over,” has just been released on Sugar Hill Records and he has what he terms “sort of a New Age” album which should be released later this year. Not content to have left his mark only on the music played on guitar, Dan has even influenced the evolution of the steel-string, flattop acoustic. The new Dan Crary model from Taylor Guitars, which he helped design with Bob Taylor, departs from traditional bluegrass guitar design in a number of areas by incorporating a cutaway to allow access to more frets and a radical new bracing pattern to provide a more even, balanced sound. The result gives guitarists a broader choice of instrument to help them better express the music they feel without being inhibited by what many see as the limitations of earlier guitar designs.

Tall, distinguished with his full beard, Dan Crary is a contemplative, philosophical individual who is a college professor when he’s not moonlighting as one of the world’s most accomplished musicians. Not surprisingly for a professor of Speech Communication, he carefully crafts his thoughts and expresses his opinions, frequently examining topics from several perspectives to fully explain his thoughts. Interviewed in a small trailer on the grounds of the National Flatpicking Championships at Winfield, Kansas, a second home for him that he’s attended every year since its inception, Crary was at ease talking about bluegrass and guitar music. It is a subject he clearly loves and he’s strongly opinionated on a broad variety of topics. Few areas of flatpicking guitar or traditional music in general have escaped his attention and he feels a need to express his thoughts clearly and explicitly—much like the way he executes a dazzling guitar instrumental.

What is flatpicking?

That’s like asking what bluegrass is. Generically, it’s playing lead music on the flattop steel string guitar in the context of traditional music. There’re lots of ways to define things—historically; but the essence of it and how everything relates to that essence or that core; or you can define it by putting walls around it and saying this is flatpicking or bluegrass and that isn’t. The problem is that ‘walls’ always are arbitrary. They are always essentially negative and alienating and I don’t like to define anything that way. I don’t want to exclude anybody who believes they’re part of flatpicking from being part of it.

To me, the way to do it is historically and in that sense flatpicking starts with Don Reno’s “Country Boy Rock and Roll” and a few other people who were experimenting with the flatpick as an alternate to Carter-style picking the ’50s. The next step is you see flatpicking as a lead instrument in the Stanley Brothers trio when George Shuffler and Bill Napier alternated as their band. Ralph (Stanley) told me personally when I asked him that the guy at King Records did not like fiddle, mandolin and bass. So they wound up as a trio and that’s where flatpicking really started in bluegrass music.

The next step in the process was the appearance of Doc Watson on the scene and Clarence White playing bluegrass out in California. Clarence, I’m pretty sure was influenced by some of those Shuffler/Napier licks and passing chords from the Stanley Brothers records.

Then you talk about the personalities. This wouldn’t be a complete list, but the main personalities of the ’60s, I guess, would be Doc and Clarence early on, Norman Blake was right there and became famous in the mid ’60s. At the time I started playing with the Bluegrass Alliance, flatpicking had been a part of bluegrass, but as far as I knew, there was nobody flatpicking in bluegrass bands in the late ’60s when we went to our first festivals. I remember we went to Carlton Haney’s festival in North Carolina, in 1969 and people were astonished that we featured the guitar playing lead. So I guess that was one contribution that we made, to remind people it was possible to do what had been done in the past. Then of course, Tony (Rice) came along and made sure flatpicking would be a permanent part of bluegrass.

Now it seems like this whole population of flatpickers has mushroomed and matured. Are you seeing better players and more of them now?

Yes, I’m seeing a lot of growth in flatpickers who play well, but I’m not seeing much growth in flatpicking getting into good music—except in bluegrass. Flatpicking continues to be an esoteric approach to playing the guitar. In the first place, flatpicking is not a music, it’s a technique, so when you say someone is a flatpicker, the question remains, what kind of music do they play. In a way, the list of well-known flatpickers now is the same as it was ten or fifteen years ago. That’s indicative that flatpicking has not been exploited in music as much as you would think it would have been. It certainly is solid in bluegrass. And there certainly are some fine young pickers around who will knock your socks off. Many of them have yet to find their forum to do what they do and in that respect, I think we’re a little slow. It’s just that in the music industry, they’re not many places to fit flatpicking in, so far.

I think the issue is not flatpicking or bluegrass or folk or Dawg music, the issue is music. This is one area we haven’t grown up in very much. When I started flatpicking in a bluegrass band, not only was it not the usual thing to do, it was assumed that you—the guitar player—would shut up and stay at the back of the band. I remember playing gigs with the Bluegrass Alliance where people came up and criticized us because we featured the guitar. The attitude was, ‘You shouldn’t do that.’ And now, today, any respectable bluegrass band has to have a flatpicker in it, or so it seems and that’s good. At least we’ve advanced that far. But one of the ways we haven’t advanced as far as we should is to realize that the big issue is, ‘Are we making good music?’ I say this to contest performers a lot—to realize that as hard as you work to get your chops down, the truth is the world doesn’t care. They don’t care about hot licks, they don’t even like them very much. Judges are impressed with hot licks because they understand what it takes to do that and a really flashy passage on the guitar is good music sometimes. But another truth is that to some audiences, a flatpicking instrumental tune is weird and they wonder why you would bother to do it.

I don’t think I’m overstating this. Audiences expect to hear instrumental competence, but only as a beginning place. You can play the guitar, you can play fast and play flashy licks, now what? A lot of younger players make the mistake of thinking they’ve arrived at that point, but it’s just the beginning. Now you’ve got to move on. Are you going to accompany songs? Are you going to play breaks in songs? Are you going to be a songwriter? Are you going to contribute to a band? Every one of those is going to require you to change and adapt your flatpicking in order to be a part of it. The band, for instance, is going to require you to play it very straight and play a I-IV-V chord pattern just like they did in 1948 and you’d better do it or you’re going to make the band sound bad. So flatpickers can’t be the independent hotshots of the world and expect anybody to be impressed.

Then we need to pay attention to what other people know about music. To say I’m going to go out in the world and make my living as a musician and not know anything about anything but flatpicking is ridiculous. Listen to other instruments, find out what it is in the books. You claim to be a bluegrass player and you’ve never gone back and listened carefully to Flatt and Scruggs and listened to how they did it? There are two kinds of bluegrass players in the world—those who have listened to Flatt and Scruggs carefully and those who haven’t. And you can just about hear which ones those are. But not only Flatt and Scruggs. You mean to tell me you’re going to be a professional musician and you’ve never listened to Mozart!? Come on, give us a break! Music requires that you know what’s going on in music not just in one corner of it. So I really urge people to listen to the blues, listen to jazz, country, pop, New Age, classical. Figure out what’s going on in music, because it translates. It’s not like a chamber music group is doing anything different from a bluegrass band—it’s partly different and it’s partly the same. And you’d better figure out how to do the same or you’re not going to be very good at bluegrass. One of your fundamental jobs is listening to a whole lot of kinds of music. Guitar players who listen only to other flatpickers are digging a very deep rut for themselves. And nobody’s going to give them the time of day. Likewise, people who want to play bluegrass and listen to only bluegrass are going to be boring bluegrass players.

What’s changing about bluegrass and guitars and how is that influencing the music guitarists make?

One of the reasons the only really functional flattop guitar was the Martin for so many years was because there weren’t many people making demands on their guitars. Lead playing on a flattop guitar hardly made a dent until after the large-bodied steel string guitar had been invented by Martin in the 1930s. Nobody had seen anything like the Dreadnaught and it took twenty years to realize you could play lead on one of those guitars. There was a little foolin’ around. Hank Snow played great lead and Earl Scruggs played with fingerpicks, but by and large, it took the bluegrassers playing with a plectrum to even realize that nice music could be played on the thing. So that particular instrument and this approach to it have only been around slightly over thirty years. In that period of time, it’s taken a while for the demand for it to grow enough for people to make instruments that are different from the Martin D-28. Now that there are enough people flatpicking, you inevitably get luthiers who what to access that market. They think they’ve got a better mousetrap and want to see how people react to it. That’s good for music, because then guys like you and me start sitting around and talking guitar trash and trading ideas and opinions. I think guitar players are growing up and considering other instruments. That’s nothing against Martin guitars. The first really good professional guitar I ever had was a Martin. Some bluegrass guitar players have an ‘Only a Martin will do’ kind of attitude and I understand that. For years they were the only choice and they still make a damn good guitar. Nowadays, when you go to choose a guitar, there are alternatives. Guitar choice is an important one because not only are you going to tell the guitar what to do, the guitar is going to turn around and define what you do. All guitars have limitations and strengths. They define the kind of music you play.

Is there a real expansion of knowledge in how to build great guitars today—it can’t be better materials—yet modern guitars frequently sound better than all but the best vintage instruments.

I agree. Overall, the greatest flattop, steel-string guitars in history are being made today. The most important element is a good design. When they invented the x-brace design and the Dreadnaught-shape, the design is what made those guitars sound great. They could have made them from any number of materials, including some we’ve never thought of making guitars from and they would have sounded good. It’s amazing what awful materials you can make from a guitar that will sound good if it’s a good design.

The second most important aspect is a good execution of the design—how you build the guitar is important. It takes consistency of execution in order to test and systematically vary the design so you can tell whether any variation is valid. Then differences in materials start to come into play, but much less than people think and talk about. The reason why we have good guitars today is because we have a bunch of smart builders out there thinking about guitar design.

When I designed this (Taylor Dan Crary model) guitar, I went down to the Taylor shop I don’t know how many times. It was agonizing. Bob Taylor and I really did agonize through trying to come up with a good design.

Many of the things we tried sounded terrible and we threw them out. The first prototype guitar we took out was godawful. I pronounced it perfect when we took it out, but the equalization of tone on the sound system that night was very strange. So we had to go back and rip it all apart and try again. But we eventually succeeded because we’d get through one of these sessions and figure out what we had accomplished and Bob would say, “Well, when you come back next week, I’m going to try such and such and here’s what I predict will be the result in the sound.” And by gosh, I’d go back, he’d have made the change and it would sound the way he predicted. That doesn’t mean we always liked the result, but if he said he was going to put some more highs in a certain range of the guitar, he knew in advance how to do it.

I feel Bob Taylor is part of a new breed of guitar makers. Many of the old breed guitar makers were tinkerers. They believed in wood and careful woodworking and careful execution and tradition and all that sort of thing. And once in a while, they would make a great sounding guitar. But the next one they made might sound completely different. You never knew what you were going to get because the guy was tinkering without any system. But the young crop of guitar makers are people who have a theory. They’re fanatical about listening to instruments. They don’t even care about playing them much. A lot of luthiers I know are people who used to play the guitar, but they’re so interested in making them, they lost interest in playing. I don’t exactly understand them. I can’t imagine what interests someone about making an instrument, but I’m glad Bob made this one and I get to play it.

We live in the golden age of music instruction. What are the good and bad points of having so much material available?

It depends on your motivation for learning to play. If your goal is to play like someone else, that alone probably won’t keep you going through the hard times. It’s empty, it’s not very rewarding and when you get there, there isn’t any ‘there’ there because the world wants to listen to the original. So what will sustain you is if you love the sound of the instrument.

It’s okay for instructional materials to be specific because you want specific information out of it, you want technique. The material necessarily focuses on one genre or approach. But the fallacy is thinking that you learn to play from a teacher or instructional materials. All good musicians are self-taught. You can use instructional materials to teach yourself, or you can teach yourself by going and asking questions, or you can teach yourself by taking a course at Julliard and making sense out of what you learn there. But folks who use instructional materials in the hope it will make them a musician have been sold a bill of goods, because it won’t. We make ourselves into musicians. When someone askes me if I’m a self-taught musician, I answer, ‘Yes I am and so is everyone else who’s any good.’ If you use instructional materials for yourself as a way to drive yourself on to some kind of goal out there, then those materials will help you. If you sit there in the presence of these materials and ask them to make you into something, at the most, they will make you into a clone of what those materials are. And the difference is the disparity between someone who is doing something by rote and someone who is making music.

It’s not that there’s a big secret or that only the chosen few are born with the talent. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think the word just needs to get out that the way to become a good player in anything is to be inspired by music and go out and suck all of it up you can by listening to live music, by listening to different kinds of music. The result of all this is you’ll get music in your soul. It’s music that makes people into musicians, not the other way around. You don’t have to be born a genius to listen to musicians. It’s amazing how you can be inspired by being in the presence of good music, wherever it is and by letting that influence your bluegrass playing, or whatever it is you’re trying to play.

My motivation for writing instruction material is partly due to my experience as a kid. I had a five-string banjo and wanted to play it and I couldn’t figure it out for anything. When I finally did encounter a five-string banjo and wanted to play it and I couldn’t figure it out for anything. When I finally did encounter a five-string banjo player, I asked this yahoo some things about the banjo and he refused to teach me. He sort of turned his back and made some comment like, “When you’ve played as many years as I have maybe you’d understand.’ And that made me mad. I swore I’d never do that to anybody. If I can help somebody, then that’s my reward. My greatest satisfaction is when somebody says, ‘I heard you play and it inspired me to play because I didn’t know you could play that on guitar.’ I love to hear that and I love to help beginners figure out how to learn.

How did repertoire of flatpicking develop? Was it fiddle tunes or were they playing breaks to songs?

The early flatpickers were playing breaks to songs. Doc (Watson) was probably most instrumental in bringing in fiddle tunes. But anybody who made a (flatpicking) record made a contribution to the repertoire. On my flatpicking album that I made in 1970, there were several tunes there that are now standards and as far as I know no flatpicker had ever recorded them before. But it’s because there were so few flatpicking records. When somebody did record a tune from a fiddle player or some other source, anything you did was going to enter into the tradition.

What about bringing new tunes into the flatpicking tradition?

Just because “Limerock” was thought up on a fiddle doesn’t mean it belongs only on a fiddle. That also means it’s not my goal to play it exactly as it was played on the fiddle. Guitars imitating fiddles remind me of the joke about the nerd who wanted to not be a nerd anymore and so he was advised to go buy a great hat. And he bought the best hat he could find anyplace and went out and walked down the street and people said, “Oh look, there goes that nerd with a great hat.” So you can play a fiddle tune on guitar exactly like the fiddle player did, but it won’t work. It’s important to start with an appreciation of what that tune sounded like on the other instrument and the way you get that is you spend hours listening to it played on the other instrument to get the feel.

One topic you’ve written a lot about is practicing. What don’t musicians do right when they practice?

What they do wrong is kid themselves that what they’re doing is practicing when in many cases it’s not. There are people who say they practiced five hours this afternoon when they ran endlessly over the same tunes for five hours. Sometimes it’s stuff they knew, sometimes it’s not and they just play it over and over endlessly. That kind of practice doesn’t get you anywhere; it’s deadly. The kind of practice that gets you somewhere is when you set a small goal that’s reachable in one practice session and it’s a goal like, “There’s this one half measure that I always screw up. Today in this practice session I’m going to fix that half measure.” That’s enough. A successful practice session is one in which you reach a goal that you could have told somebody about in words before starting to practice. A lot of times we don’t get anywhere because we don’t know where we are going.

Almost all musicians who work at their music had some sort of discipline that has nothing to do with sitting around and aimlessly playing for five hours. It’s more specific and goal-oriented than that. Even so, practice alone won’t make you another Mark O’Connor. But it will work within whatever your destiny on your instrument is. For some people, their destiny is to sit around the campfire and play “Wildwood Flower” and a few country tunes and have their soul enriched by that. For some, their destiny is to be Mark O’Connor or Django Reinhardt. The task is to explore your destiny and not prejudge it before you figure out what you can do. And if you are a hungry young player who’s got some fire in your soul that is ignited by the guitar, it’s possible that you can be a latter day Django or Doc Watson. That’s the adventure of it—you just don’t know. You love the guitar enough to sit out and see what the hell you can do.

The musicians I know who have played for many years are still around because they loved the music so much that they did not quit no matter what, including destitution and poverty and having record contracts cancelled and so on. They stayed with it. I’m one of those people. The guitar grabbed hold of me and at times when I thought maybe it was not very important and didn’t give it the due that it deserved, I couldn’t let go. So everybody has a destiny. It may not be to be Clarence or Doc, but it is damn sure worth checking out and pursuing. You could find a lot worse things to do with your time.

After having been at the top of the bluegrass world for about twenty years now, are you satisfied you’ve gotten as far as you can get or do you still see challenges ahead you want to pursue?

I’ve just begun to fight. I’m very ambitious. I want to make more music to wider audiences, sell more records, figure out things to do on the guitar that will blow their hats in the creek. I love the experiences I’ve had and the music I’ve played, but I’m never satisfied. What I did yesterday was okay for then, but it’s not okay for now. I’m just pressing on. At 49, I think I’m stronger and playing better than I ever did. The stuff I’m playing now requires keeping in shape more, so I’m being more diligent and working harder.

I’ve read some biographies of some of the great musicians; I’ve heard that Arthur Rubinstein smoked cigars, drank wine and played the hell out of the grand piano. He said once that he rode through on his talent until he got to his sixties, then he realized that if he was going to keep up his playing quality, he was going to have to practice, so he started practicing hard and played his last concerts in his eighties. (Andres) Segovia and Pablo Casals were playing into their nineties, so if those guys can do it, I can. You’ve got to have the muscles working to pound the piano and you sure have to on the steel-string guitar. But if bluegrass and guitar music are still around in forty years, I intend to be there.