Bluegrass & The Novelist

Bluegrass music is about storytelling. All music is. Rooted in ancient ballads and country music story-songs, bluegrass songs (and tunes, too, to a lesser extent) tell us about the true life blues, the little cabin on the hill, the flag-covered casket, the walls of time. All of them are perfect three-minute stories.        

Songwriting is far and away the most popular expression of creative writing among bluegrass and old-time musicians and fans, but not the only one. There are many in our tribe who write poetry, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, record reviews and so on. A few even write novels. Tom Harley Campbell, Greg Spatz and Steve Yarbrough are three such musician-novelists.     

Campbell, Spatz and Yarbrough occupy different levels of accomplishment as both novelists and musicians. One has just published his first novel; another has just finished his eighth. One plays strictly at home for his own enjoyment; the other two have played for huge crowds at major venues. What they share is a love of the written word and the love of playing music—and the love of telling stories.

Tom Harley Campbell

Satan’s Choir

“The Yale Lit published the first short story that I mailed out, in 1971, when I was twenty years old. I never received the $10 that I was promised, and didn’t write much after that for many years. Instead, I took up the bass fiddle and for seven years travelled the United States, Canada and Europe as a musician.”

Tom Harley Campbell has always wanted to write a novel. It just took a bit longer than he thought it would. In July, a month or two after his 70th birthday, Cayuga Lake Books, of Ithaca, New York, published Satan’s Choir. Set in Campbell’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio, the book is partly a page-turning police procedural and partly a harrowing account of one man’s search for personal redemption. It’s a roundhouse right of a first novel, a gripping, compelling tale of horrific crimes the Catholic church has long tried to keep buried.

  Satan’s Choir is the first in a projected series starring John Burke—a good man but a badly damaged and alienated man—looking forward to retirement from the Dayton Police Department, but persuaded to stay on for one last case.

“I wrote the first draft of Satan’s Choir in 2011,” says Campbell, “in about six months, mostly writing on the weekends. After a lot of revising and improving, I sent it out to several agents, to see if I could get somebody interested. Quite a few of them were fairly interested in it and thought it was good. But because of the pedophile priest angle, they did not think they could get it published, that editors did not want to hear about it at the major publishing houses. It didn’t go anywhere.

“I kinda gave up on it. I definitely didn’t want to self-publish it. I said, ‘Well screw it, I’ll write another one,’ so I wrote Blue Book [the second John Burke book]. I pitched the two of them together and got pretty much the same reactions. Some agents were interested in working the second book, but I said ‘Well, no. I was pretty adamant about it. It’s a series. The first one happens, then the second one happens and so on.’ So, I gave up on it again.” Turns out the answer was just down the road at Cayuga Lake Books.

Campbell has lived for the past forty years, with his wife Annie, an artist and musician, in Trumansburg, NY, a village in the Finger Lakes region near Ithaca. During that time, he has worked mostly in the trades, as a machinist, house painter, carpenter, cabinet maker, builder, and currently as a licensed home inspector, playing music when time permitted.

Campbell began his professional music career in the mid-1970s with a two-and-a-half-year stint in the Hotmud Family, a popular old-time country and bluegrass band based in Spring Valley, Ohio. “The Hotmud Family had decided to add a bass player,” recalls Harley, “and they owned a bass. Three months later I was making my living as a musician, paying my rent, and playing the Mariposa Folk Festival in Canada.” He played bass on two of the Hotmud Family’s albums, Stone Mountain Wobble and Buckeyes in the Briar Patch.

In 1977, he moved to upstate New York and joined Michael, McCreesh & Campbell, a trio with hammered dulcimer ace Walt Michael and fiddler Tom McCreesh. The highpoints of his time in MM&C included recording two albums (The Host of the Air and Dance, Like a Wave of the Sea), several European tours, creating and performing “Molly’s Not Dead” with the Pilobolus Dance Theater and playing at the closing ceremonies of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Campbell left the band in 1981, retiring from the life of a full-time musician.

Since moving to the Ithaca area later that year, Campbell has worked with a number of local and regional bands including Toivo, the Gray Sky Boys, the Razor Likkers and Mac Benford’s Backwoods Band. He has also done some session work on bass, appearing on albums by Hazel Dickens and the Fiction Brothers.

Campbell worked at making the transition from performer to songwriter. “As a bass player,” he reasons, “I had to be in a group. It wasn’t something I could do individually, sitting around playing the bass. Songwriting I could, and did, do by myself. I taught myself enough guitar to write songs with it.”

Campbell has written several songs that have become modern-day bluegrass and bluegrass gospel classics—including “Satan’s Choir,” “The Man in the Middle” and “My Name is Judas”—recorded by such prominent acts as Ralph Stanley, the Seldom Scene, Larry Sparks, Hot Rize, Claire Lynch, the Hotmud Family, Tim O’Brien, Bill Grant and Delia Bell, Dave Evans, Chris Thile and Michael Daves, Josh Williams and the Red Clay Ramblers. 

He’s also been successful in mainstream country music, with a gold and platinum record to his credit, writing hits for Neal McCoy, Mark Wills and others. For a couple of years in the 1980s, he was a full-time staff songwriter for Forerunner Music, shuttling between Nashville and New York.

When asked about the differences between writing a song and writing a novel, Campbell laughed and said, “A lot of time. Songs tend to come pretty fast. The biggest difference is this: You write a song and put it out there and play it for people and hope other people want to record it. The song then takes on a different life, beyond what you did. It now belongs to someone else. It’s still your song, but it’s also somebody else’s song. They can interpret it how they want, change it, whatever. 

“But you write a novel, that’s it. You can’t change a book. You can just read it.” For more info, visit www.tomharleycampbell.com.

Greg Spatz

Fiddler’s Dream, No One But Us and Inukshuk

“When I was five or six, my parents were reading aloud to me from J.R.R. Tolkien. Pretty much simultaneously, I heard the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I could not believe or understand how these two artistic expressions weren’t one and the same thing. Ever since, music and stories have been intertwined and at the center of my life.”     

Greg Spatz was born in New York City and spent his youth in New England. He grew up playing folk music with his parents, competing at fiddle contests with their support throughout the northeast, even recording an album with them. He now lives with his wife, Caridwen Irvine-Spatz, in Spokane, Washington, where he directs the Master of Fine Arts writing program at Eastern Washington University. Spatz started playing violin at age six; today he plays fiddle with the esteemed bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds and bouzouki with Mighty Squirrel, an “old-time world-folk stringband.”      

“Writing and playing music are the two driving forces in my life,” says Spatz. “It’s basically what I do. I teach creative writing, I write whenever I can and play music almost every day, at least a little bit. And then of course the band tours all over the place. It’s definitely a balancing act, but I think it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship between the two things.”     

A charter member of the band, Spatz has been on all seven CDs by John Reischman and the Jaybirds—John Reischman and the Jaybirds, Field Guide, Road West, Stellar Jays, Vintage & Unique, On A Winter’s Night and On That Other Green Shore. He also has recorded a solo album called Fiddler’s Dream (a companion piece to his novel of the same name); a duo album with Caridwen Irvine-Spatz, All Along the Sea; and two CDs with Mighty Squirrel, Mighty Squirrel and Sqworld Record.

Spatz was not a bluegrass fan until he went to college, at Haverford College outside Philadelphia. His tastes ran more to David Grisman and Irish fiddler Kevin Burke. One of the first people Spatz met there was Mark Vann, a fervent Scruggs-style banjo player who would go on to be a founding member of Leftover Salmon. The two played music together constantly, and it was then Spatz began digging into bluegrass.

He moved to California after graduation, and his bluegrass education kicked into high gear when he was hired by High Country, a now legendary San Francisco band led by mandolinist Butch Waller. “It was the first time,” Spatz recalls, “that somebody actually told me ‘This is what you do if you want to play like a Blue Grass Boy.’ Butch schooled me as to what I should be doing as a bluegrass fiddler. I was twenty-two at the time.”

Spatz’s love for bluegrass and the fiddle comes through most clearly in Fiddler’s Dream and What Could Be Saved. Set in 1995, Fiddler’s Dream is the story of Jesse Alison, a gifted but troubled nineteen-year-old bluegrass musician in Vermont who obsessively dreams of becoming one of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Jesse defines himself by what he lacks, most acutely his father, a ne’er-do-well musician and songwriter who supposedly now lives in Nashville.

So Jesse leaves his mother and home and decamps for Nashville, looking for a father he hasn’t seen in years. A son searching for an absent father is one of the oldest themes in storytelling; Spatz doubles down on it by having Jesse also searching for his musical “father,” Bill Monroe, widely known as the Father of Bluegrass. 

He never does meet Monroe, who’s in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. But he does finally track down his father somewhere near Jackson, Mississippi, and begins a process of reconciliation. And he begins to make a name for himself in jams at the Station Inn and around town.

  What Could Be Saved, which collects two novellas and two stories centered on the violin, is described by fellow novelist Steve Yarbrough as “a truly original work unlike anything else I can think of. It succeeds on so many different levels: as fiction, as musicology, as a primer on the art of violin-building. The prose simply dazzles.”     

The four stories are “all about people who build, buy, trade, sell and play violins,” says Spatz, “artists, grifters, builders, and so on. [The stories are] a meditation on tradition and destiny—how you can fight what appears to be the most obvious path forward in your life, or accept it—as seen through the lens of the violin world.”      

Spatz’s most recent novel, Inukshuk is by far his most ambitious novel—and his most successful. “It isn’t about music at all,” he helpfully explains. “It’s all about Arctic exploration and scurvy and history/time traveling and cannibalism and horny teenagers.” But he’s being modest here; he barely mentions main character Thomas Franklin, a troubled teenager who is ultra-obsessed with cinematically recreating the fatal last voyage of Sir John Franklin and HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in 1847. Did I say obsessed? This kid gives himself scurvy to better empathize with the doomed sailors.

Spatz is also the author of two short story collections, Half as Happy and Wonderful Tricks. He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. 

“Writing and playing music are pretty complementary,” he says. “While I’m playing, I’ll be kind of thinking of what I’m writing. And while I’m writing, whatever music I’ve been working on most recently will be playing at a pretty high volume in my head. So, there’s some overlap. In the music I play, I’m a support player, a back-up player. My favorite thing is backing up a singer. I don’t mind taking a solo, but it’s not the thing I live for.

“I think there’s a similar kind of aesthetic with my writing. I tend to write about people who are in quiet moments. There’s not a great big dramatic plot. It’s more paying attention to the small details and the nuances. I think that’s what I do in my music, too.

“There have been times in my life,” says Spatz laughingly, “when I thought that someday I’m going to have to grow up and pick one or the other—writing or playing music. But that’s just never going to happen.” For more information, visit www.gregoryspatz.com.

Steve Yarbrough

The Unmade World, Safe from the Neighbors, Prisoners of War, The Oxygen Man, Realm of Lost Chances, The End of California and Visible Spirits

“I feel a lot more satisfaction from playing something cleanly on the guitar than I do from writing a beautiful sentence. Playing anything cleanly on the guitar is hard for me. It’s a big accomplishment for me when something sounds right on the guitar. I’m not going to say that writing a novel is easy for me, but I can write good sentences in my sleep.”    

Steve Yarbrough is a true son of the Mississippi Delta, born and raised in Indianola, Mississippi, hometown of bluesmen Albert King and Jazz Gillum and boyhood home of B.B. King. He’s a celebrated novelist whose realistic, atmospheric, naturalistic and character-driven prose place him firmly in the tradition of such Mississippi writers as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Ford, Richard Wright, Larry Brown, and Willie Morris.     

He’s also a passionate bluegrass guitar and mandolin player—on a strictly amateur basis. Like many readers of Bluegrass Unlimited, he listens to music all day, plays his guitar every day, takes lessons, strives to get better on his instruments and dreams of maybe someday making a CD. He is seriously committed to his music. He just does it for fun, not money.

Yarbrough is a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, where he lives with his wife, the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. He started college on a football scholarship at Delta State University, but transferred after two years to the University of Mississippi, from which he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas.

He has been called “a great storyteller and a brilliant social observer” by the Chicago Tribune and “one of the brightest Southern writers since Pat Conroy” by the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, which further stated that Yarbrough’s writing “invites comparisons with Faulkner’s greatest novels.” 

He has received numerous writing awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award.

Yarbrough’s credentials as a bluegrass fan are impeccable. He first heard Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in 1956, in utero, when not-yet-Steve accompanied his pregnant mother to a Monroe show at the high school in Indianola. He remembers going to several bluegrass shows up until he was around four years old, including one by Don Reno and Red Smiley. “I grew up surrounded by bluegrass,” he recalls.

His musical journey on the guitar began when he was ten, on a Sears Silvertone archtop that belonged to his father. He joined his first band three years later, playing electric guitar in a country band with two adult men, a football coach and a county agricultural agent. It was just three guitars, but they got hired to play a fair number of jobs around the Delta.

“I can tell you exactly the moment,” he says “when my writing life began: I wrote a short story on spring break, on a Sunday night, my junior year in college. I sat down to write a story about a high school football player, and to my great surprise, I wrote it all the way through, about twenty-two pages. I did it all in one night. It wasn’t very good, but it was a story. It hung together as a short story.”

Though his novels have been set elsewhere (Poland, California, Massachusetts), as a life-long fan and student of southern fiction, my favorites are the ones Yarbrough sets in his native Mississippi: Prisoners of War, Oxygen Man, The End of California, Safe from the Neighbors, Visible Spirits and Bookmarked: Larry McMurty’s Last Picture Show (not a novel but it reads like one). 

His fictional town of Loring, Mississippi—located not far from Indianola, I’d guess—is a rich, earthy creation of a world peopled with lovable eccentrics, grifters of every stripe, God-haunted killers, catfish and cotton farmers, tractor drivers on the old plantations and even a few “normal” folks. If that sounds a little bit like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, well, yeah, that’s been noticed. 

In addition to his seven novels, Yarbrough is the author of three short story collections, Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men, and Bookmarked: Larry McMurty’s Last Picture Show, a fascinating combination of unflinching memoir of Yarbrough’s youth in Mississippi and appreciation of a book that greatly influenced him.

Yarbrough drifted away from bluegrass during his high school and college years, but “came back” to the music during graduate school in Arkansas. He bought a Martin D-18 and began reconnecting with his musical roots. And he heard Tony Rice for the first time. 

“I was on vacation,” he says, “and went into a record store in Colorado Springs. It had a pretty good bluegrass section, and I bought two albums: Tony Rice (Rounder 0085) and The David Grisman Rounder Album, which Rice played on. My life has never been the same since.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years thinking about how writing and playing music fit together. I tried in graduate school to write a novel based on the life of Clarence White, but it fell apart. I’ve always wanted to write a bluegrass novel but never quite managed to do it. There’s a little bit of bluegrass in Realm of Lost Chances and the novel I just finished.

“But there’s always an instrument with me in my writing study. I’ll write for a while then pick up the guitar and play for a while. And then go back to work. I’ll do that all day. 

Before the pandemic shut the world down, Yarbrough had been playing in a duet with Edmund Jorgensen, playing bluegrass “or as close to bluegrass as you can get with two guitars.” They hope to do some performing as things reopen and maybe even record a CD.

“What the music is for me,” he declares, “is something creative that I don’t have to succeed at. There’s no price to pay for trying it and not doing it well, so it feels a lot freer to me than sitting there writing a book. Writing is what I do. It’s how I’ve defined myself since I was twenty-one-years old.”   

Jon Hartley Fox is the author of King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records and a contributor to Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwest Ohio’s Musical Legacy. He has twice won the IBMA’s award for liner notes and is currently at work on a book about the mandolinist Tiny Moore. He lives in Grass Valley, CA, with his wife, musician Kathy Barwick.