Jesse McReynolds—Rounds Eighty Years With Renewed Energy and Inspiration
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
July 2010, Volume 45, Number 1
Bluegrass Hall of Famer, National Heritage Award recipient and Grand Ole Opry star Jesse McReynolds celebrated 62 years in the music business and eighty years of life on July 9, 2009. Hundreds of friends, fans, and several former members of his Virginia Boys band turned out for Jesse’s birthday bash at the Pick Inn music park in Gallatin, Tenn., on July 10-11, 2009. The long list of performers included Curly Seckler, Jim Buchanan, Smokey Lonesome, Luke McKnight, the Chigger Hill Boys & Terri, Judy Carrier & Rens Vreeburg, and Buddy Griffin & Friends, among many others.
Strings of white lights were strung throughout the Pick Inn pavilion, candle lanterns hung in the boughs of surrounding trees, and there was cake. “Gosh, I had about six or seven birthday cakes,” Jesse says. “Everywhere I went on the road last summer, someone had a birthday bash for me.”
It’s difficult to imagine the face of bluegrass music without the inimitable brother duo from Carfax, Va., Jim & Jesse McReynolds. Their harmony was smooth and true, combining Jesse’s lead voice with Jim’s pure tenor overhead at hair-raising pitches. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder onstage for 55 years, dressed impeccably in western-cut tailored suits and neck scarves, looking slim and professional, jet-black hair combed back, and with a friendly smile on their faces. Backed by a succession of some of the finest musicians in bluegrass with their Virginia Boys, Jesse led the instrumental charge with his high energy, sometimes nearly combustible mandolin, utilizing the crosspicking and split-string styles he pioneered that few have successfully emulated.
After Jim passed away in 2002 from cancer, Jesse continues to appear on the Grand Ole Opry and tour nationally, in addition to staging events at the Pick Inn. Jesse’s current band includes three of his grandchildren. Sister and brother, Amanda Lynn and Garrett McReynolds, are the children of Jesse’s son Keith. Luke McKnight, who has been performing with his grandfather since age 14 in the Virginia Boys, is the son of Jesse’s daughter Gwen. Garrett plays guitar and sings tenor and Amanda sings high baritone or lead. Luke started out playing mandolin, occasionally surprising audiences with a little breakdancing. He plays electric bass in the current lineup, but is often featured on mandolin.
The band is as strong as ever with Gary Reece on banjo and Travis Wetzel on fiddle, but what really captures the listener’s attention is Jesse’s vocal trio with Amanda and Garrett. Their voices blend in the same graceful family harmony. The natural progression from duo to trio is pleasing audiences with a new, yet familiar sound. “The grandkids are doing real good,” Jesse says proudly. “They’re getting a different sound. Garrett is as close to Jim as anyone I’ve ever heard. He doesn’t try to sing like Jim. He just sings natural. I guess it’s just the family blend.”
In addition to appearing with the Virginia Boys (and girl), Jesse and the group are playing some dates with Bobby Osborne and his Rocky Top X-Press, billed as Legends Of The Bluegrass Hall Of Fame. Jesse and the grandchildren have a new album out called Family Harmony, and Jesse has just completed the new album Tribute To Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter—Some Grateful Dead Songs.
“I met Sandy Rothman, who is a former Blue Grass Boy,” Jesse says. “He traveled with Jerry Garcia a lot in the ‘60s and they came from California and started going to bluegrass festivals. I found out that they admired our music, but they said they were too backward to come up and introduce themselves to us. He asked me if I’d ever considered recording any of Jerry’s songs. I got to listening to some of them and Joy, my wife, is a Deadhead, I guess you’d say. She knew every song we did and had a collection of their albums. The first one was ‘Black Muddy River’ and I said, ‘Well, I think I can do that one.’ So, I tried a few more. I co-wrote one song with Robert Hunter. He sent me the lyrics, and I put the music to it.”
Eighty years is an impressive milestone. Jesse, whose mind is still as nimble as his fingers, remembers the details vividly that have shaped his music career. “I was trying to play a little bit,” he recalls. “Jim and I made a lot of music at home. Our brother-in-law, Oakley Greear, was a pretty good fiddle player and he taught us a lot. He had the first radio in the community, so everybody would go to his house on Saturday night and listen to the Grand Ole Opry.”
Jesse hadn’t settled on the mandolin just yet. “Really, I was trying to play a little bit of everything—guitar, fiddle—and I got a hold of a mandolin,” he recalls. “We just had to borrow instruments. The only thing we had around the house was fiddles. I probably would have been a fiddle player if I hadn’t gotten into singing and the duet thing with Jim.”
Jim and Jesse were apprehensive about singing in public. “We was from back in the mountains and we was just kind of bashful, I guess,” he explains. “I remember they had this contest in St. Paul, Va., which was where I went to school. They had different categories; the best duo, the best solo, the best guitar player. We went there when we were about ten or twelve. We hadn’t sung that much together, but we won a sack of flour, and it encouraged us. My brother-in-law would give us advice. He told us, ‘Your music is drowning out your singing. You’ve got to learn to get your singing out there.’ We learned to sing old gospel songs. We just started practicing and listened to records.”
In particular, the brothers were influenced by their grandfather, Charles McReynolds, a respected fiddler in the community who recorded as a member of the Bull Mountain Moonshiners at the historic RCA sessions held in Bristol, Va., in 1927. Jesse remembers his grandfather sitting by an open window in his cabin, playing the fiddle, the sound echoing through the hollow.
In 1946, while Jim was in the army, Jesse played a local radio show in Norton, Va., with a classmate Buster Pack. When Jim got home, he gave up his plans to become a truck driver and Jesse talked him into going into the music business. They formed the McReynolds Brothers, Jesse & James, and the Cumberland Mountain Boys (probably one of the longest names in the history of music, Jesse jokes). “I got a 15-minute radio show on the local station, and we started going out and playing the little country schoolhouses in Southwest Virginia. And that’s what got us started playing in 1947. We’d go down through Kentucky and book these theaters. They’d show the movie two times and between them we’d do a thirty-to forty-minute show. Admission was twenty-five or fifty cents, so if we made a couple hundred dollars, we’d split it four ways and feel like we were doing pretty good.”
The brothers had to get creative about merchandising in order to survive. “To offset our expenses, we went to a bakery in Norton,” Jesse recalls. “I got this man to make us five or six cakes. Between our shows at the schoolhouses, we’d do a cake walk. Then we’d have a ‘pretty girl contest’ and an ‘ugly man contest’ and give a cake to the oldest person there. We’d charge ten cents a vote in the contests. Sometimes, we’d have a couple of guys voting against each other, and they would bring up twenty-dollar bills. I remember one time we made about two hundred dollars on one cake.”
For the next 14 years, Jesse and his brother were on the road, playing at more than a dozen stations in at least ten states. In 1952, they were at WVLK in Versailles, Ky. While listening to a radio show broadcast from Jimmy Skinner’s record shop in Cincinnati, the brothers heard that Ken Nelson with Capital Records was in town. They gave Nelson a [demo] record, and he said he’d call them from Nashville if he could set something up. ‘‘We thought that was the end of that,” Jesse says. “But, then he did call us the next week. We got our first recording out in 1952, ‘Are You Missing Me,’ which was getting a lot of attention with soldiers over in the Korean War.”
Jesse was drafted and served in the Army from 1952-’54. He met Charlie Louvin in Korea and they played in the Dusty Road Ramblers, performing at hospitals and officers’ clubs. He came back from Korea in December of 1954, and he and Jim went to work with Clyde Moody in Danville, Va., where things got so lean that Jesse had to temporarily pawn his mandolin to pay the hotel bill where they were staying. After stints in Burlington, N.C., and Knoxville, Tenn., the McReynolds brothers moved to Live Oak, Fla. They played the Suwanee River Jamboree, Jesse worked as a DJ at the station, and they started their first television show in 1956 sponsored by Ford Tractor. “We had four or five television shows and it was before they had video tape, so we had to do it all live,” he recalls. “We had shows in Tallahassee, Fla., Savannah, Ga.; Albany, Ga.; Dothan, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla.”
The band was traveling two-lane highways 1,500 miles a week keeping up with the television shows. “Later on, video came out and we recorded a lot of them,” Jesse says. “It made a big difference, because we lost the personal contact with our audience. We couldn’t read birthdays and things.” In 1958, Jim & Jesse signed with Starday Records, recording hits such as “Hard Hearted,” “Pardon Me,” “Dixie Hoedown,” and “Border Ride.”
Martha White Flour came onboard as a co-sponsor of Jim & Jesse’s television show in 1959. “That’s how we came to Nashville,” Jesse says. “Martha White brought us in to do the Opry when Flatt & Scruggs weren’t there. They were our key to get to the Opry.” Earl Scruggs came to the McReynolds Brothers around this time to ask them about signing with Columbia Records. “I want you to know we’ll help you any way we can,” he told Jim & Jesse.
Jim & Jesse, Stan Hitchcock, and David Houston were the first country artists on Epic Records (a Columbia Records subsidiary). The duo released a number of popular albums with producers Don Law, Frank Jones, Billy Sherrill, and Glenn Sutton, including “The Bluegrass Special,” “Bluegrass Classics,” “The Old Country Church,” “Tribute To The Louvin Brothers,” and “I Like Trains.” They were honored to become members of the Grand Ole Opry in 1964. They returned to Capital to record “Freight Train.” In 1969, Jim & Jesse had a Top 10 song on the country charts with “Diesel On My Tail.”
Around 1974, the year the Opry moved from the Ryman to the new Opry House in Nashville, the duo released an album that featured one of their biggest singles, the John Prine-penned “Paradise,” on the Opryland record label. By this time, Jesse says they were interested in controlling more aspects of their career themselves. “When we did ‘Paradise’ with Larry Butler, I counted about six or seven people in the studio playing with us that we didn’t meet,” Jesse recalls. The last straw was an odd song that Butler insisted they cut called “San Quentin Quail” about a man who got sent to prison for getting an underage girl into trouble. “That was the last session we did with him,” Jesse said. “And that’s what inspired us to start our own label.”
From that point on Jim & Jesse controlled their own publishing and music, recording for their Old Dominion label or leasing masters to other labels. They’ve always managed and booked themselves. The Virginia Boys were a touring machine from the mid-’60s through the 1990s. “We were working festivals 150-200 days a year,” Jesse remembers.
They continued on television with a syndicated country show in the early 1970s, recording in Springfield, Mo., and Lancaster, Pa. (In recent years, Jesse has done several shows with Ronnie Reno for the BlueHighways TV cable network that airs on RFD-TV.)
“In 1972, we started a package show with Lester Flatt, Bill Monroe, and James Monroe, and we called it the Bluegrass Express,” Jesse continues. “We started touring all over the country, and then we did one set of TV shows. Recently, I transferred the masters to DVD, and there are three volumes with us headlining one, Lester headlining one, and Bill headlining one.” The first Bluegrass Express DVD is now available.
In addition to the cross-country bus tours, they took their music to fans in England, Japan, Europe, and Africa. “We played Wimberley (England) three or four times with Johnny Cash,” Jesse said, remembering crowds in France, Germany, and Helsinki of 60,000 or more. In Zurich, Jesse played “Never On A Sunday” on the mandolin and people lit candles in the audience. They encored four or five times, getting “pretty out of hand,” Jesse smiles. In Paris, while waiting for yet another encore, Johnny Cash was overheard to say, “I wish Jim & Jesse would hurry and get off the stage.”
In 1991, Rounder Records released the Grammy-nominated Jim & Jesse “Music Among Friends” CD. In 1993, they were inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, and in 1997 they were called to Washington. D.C., to receive the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship Award.
Jesse celebrated his 70th birthday in 1999 as he continued to perform with his brother on the Opry, and also recorded an album on CMH and played a tour with The Masters, a high-powered band that combined the talents of Eddie Adcock, Kenny Baker, and Josh Graves with Jesse and his mandolin.
After Jim’s death in 2002 and recovering from early-stage cancer himself, Jesse made the decision to continue performing—first working with tenor singers Donnie Catron and Charles Whitstein, before settling in with the current lineup. The album, ’77s So Sweet To Be Remembered on Pinecastle Records includes his last recordings with his brother. And the CD, A Tribute To Brother Duets with Whitstein, was also released on Pinecastle. Jesse released a jazz-influenced album called Bending The Rules with Travis Wetzel on OMS Records that included mind- bending versions of “El Cumbanchero” and Jesse’s original “Okeechobee Wind.”
Jesse purchased his late son Keith’s former property and Jesse and Joy renovated the house and set up the music park on the grounds. Jesse co-hosted an early morning radio show from the Pick Inn in 2008, and the property has also become a popular place to host weddings.
Jesse rounded the eighty-year comer last year and is still going strong. In addition to performing regularly on the Opry and touring, he’s promoting new albums and DVDs and producing events at the Pick Inn. He’s has taken a daily dose of a health supplement called Barley Green for the past twenty years. “I eat what I want to,” he says. “I just can’t sit down. I have an active imagination. I used to be able to jump a 10-rail fence,” he jokes. “Now it’s just eight.”
He continues to pursue opportunities to perform with his band or sometimes with old friends like Mac Wiseman or Bobby Osborne. “I think I can perform as well as I did thirty years ago,” Jesse says. “I’m thankful for what God has given me. It’s a different world now. There would be very few bluegrass bands doing anything now if people had to do what we did when we got started,” he muses. “I think success in the music business is twenty to thirty percent talent, and the rest is promotion and management. I like for our music to speak for itself. I’m still writing a lot of songs and instrumentals. I’ll never get down on tape what I want to do.”
After more than fifty recordings, countless tours wrapped around the globe, and 62 years as a professional musician, Jesse McReynolds is still in it. “I plan to keep playing. I want to be up there with the rest of them. Age is just a number. I’m not out of the business yet.”
Nancy Cardwell is the special projects director for IBMA and a member of the board of trustees for the International Bluegrass Music Museum. She freelances as a bass player and singer.
