John Shuffler
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
July 1997, Volume 32, Number 1
Those devoted to the bluegrass music’s first generation could compile a list of great sidemen whose names and stories are unfamiliar even as their work lives on in reissued recordings and in the playing of younger musicians who learned from them. Former Clinch Mountain Boy John Shuffler, born in Valdese, N.C., on January 16, 1931, is an example of the best of these early sidemen, one who learned to play his instrument borrowing ideas from the most exciting music around him, and who eventually adapted those ideas into bluegrass music. Although bluegrass music was “born” with a walking bass, the Shuffler brothers, John and George brought the music an ambitious new style of walking bass which furthered the state of the art on the instrument and came to be associated with the Shuffler name. (George—although six years older than John, actually succeeded John as a Clinch Mountain Boy.)
If John Shuffler hasn’t become a household name, it is likely due to the fact that he chose to retire from full-time playing and touring at an early age. By the time he settled into a day job and music on weekends in his early 20s, John had been a professional musician for over a decade, playing both bluegrass and western swing-inspired music.
John recalled his early influences: “Bob Wills sold a bunch of records around here. Of course they never toured around here, just a few bands out of Nashville. I’ll tell you someone we used to like awfully well, too, was Ernest Tubb and Little Jimmy Dickens. Jimmy played kind of a western swing, back when he had ‘Thumbs’ Carlisle and those boys with him. And old Ernest Tubb always carried some musicians that could carry a tune. They toured these bigger places like Hickory. My favorite bass picker was, and still is—I think he may be deceased now—was Joe Zinkan, who used to work with Roy Acuff. He also helped Johnny and Jack record some of that rhumba stuff. At one time, Roy carried two bass fiddles, Joe Zinkan and Velma Williams, on either side of the stage. He also had two drop thumb banjos, Oswald and Rachel.”
John’s first experience came at age 12 with a band organized and instructed by older brother George, who by age 18 had performed with Opry regulars the Bailey Brothers. “The name of our band was the Melody Mountain Boys [the band existed from 1943 to 1949]. Lester Woodie and I grew up together, we’re about the same age. I started playing rhythm guitar and Lester played mandolin. George tried out several bass players—Lester’s brother was one of them. Then Lester went to fiddle and put me on bass.
John began learning on a crude instrument, but with an older brother as instructor, he had little choice but to learn fast: “I had a homemade bass fiddle made out of plywood, about a size bigger than a full-size bass. It had a big neck that was like trying to chord a telephone pole. I remember all I could do was carry either the tailpiece or the neck and one of the boys with a guitar would have to help me carry that thing. We hauled it in an old Pontiac, and you could hardly get that bass in there, and they were wide cars back then. We’d lay the thing up on the seat and Lester would sit on one side and me on the other. I’ve slept many a mile with that old bass fiddle and Lester Woodie on the other side.
“George is the best teacher that’s ever been. Even if his patience wasn’t that long. He’d show you one time, and expect you to get it. If you’d get just a little bit out of time or start rushing some time, he’d stop and tell you to get in time. If it hadn’t been for him, me and Lester Woodie would never have amounted to much. We’d want to get out and play baseball and shoot marbles, like a 12-year-old kid will do. Now if you picked in his band, you practiced, son. George more or less ‘raised’ a band and taught us the basics.”
John recalled the other band members: “Merritt ‘Curly’ Williams played steel and we played country-western music. We had Perry Duncan on the twin fiddle part. We had two lead guitar players: Hunter Pitts, who lived in Lenoir; then we had a boy come off the West Coast that could burn one, son. Paul Abernathy was his name. He lived around here in the Morganton area and he moved to California and stayed for a while—he played for some of the big wheels out there—then he came back here and played with us for a long time.
“We did instrumentals like ‘Oklahoma Stomp,’ Bob Wills’s ‘Faded Love,’ and songs like ‘Cattle Call.’ George is the world’s worst critic, and he liked it. When he’s critical of something, it’s pretty well right; he knows that much about music.” The Shufflers apparently made an impact on bluegrass music even before their work with the Stanley Brothers: “Back before they started it around here, we used a high baritone. I used to sing tenor and Curly would sing high baritone, George sang lead and Lester a bass on our hymns. We’ve had people come through here and pick up some stuff, back in them days. For instance, ‘Cabin On The Hill’—we arranged that particular tune with a high lead; when they [Flatt and Scruggs] came through Hickory to hire [fiddler Jim] Shumate, they got that song from us and rearranged it and it worked out well.”
Both before and after John went off to work with the Stanleys, his playing attracted the interest of several bandleaders: “Jim Shumate had a Saturday Night Jamboree in Hickory, we done it probably for a couple years. We done harmonies, a lot of the Sons Of The Pioneers stuff. Johnny and Jack, they were in Raleigh, we passed up an audition with them at WPTF in Raleigh. I was 16 and Lester was 16, our dads wouldn’t let us go on the road. Johnny and Jack came in there, they done well. The Bailey Brothers were in there, and the Johnson Brothers out of Knoxville, Hack and Clyde. Allen Shelton played the banjo with them in Raleigh on WPTF, one of the bigger stations, as big as the Grand Ole Opry; it was a 50,000 watt station.”
The Stanley Brothers came through the area at a time when Carter and Ralph needed help. “Carter and Ralph heard us in Wilkesboro. Carter and Ralph was needing a fiddler, and Leslie Keith had left, and Lester [Woodie] went in with them in 1949. Lester and me had already passed for the service then. We were like 20 years old. He went on in 1949 [to the Stanleys] and I went in ’51 [to the Stanleys]. I had to leave for the service in June. I went to Korea the same year, but I was with the Stanleys five or six months then. George took my place with them while I was gone. Carter always said it was the best band he’d ever had. Pee Wee Lambert on mandolin, Carter and Ralph and Lester Woodie on fiddle. When I left Carter and Ralph in ’51, they told me that when I got home I would have my job waiting on me. They were always very nice to me and the best people you could pick for.
“When I got back [out of die service] I went to work for Burke Mills. I worked there three months and I got tired of that. I called Carter and Ralph at Farm and Fun Time and told them I was ready to come back, and he said, ‘Meet me in Bakersville tonight, and you can have the job’—that’s how fast it was. Jay Hughes, the first bass player they had, had left. Carter said he’d never do without a bass, and George took my place with them.”
John recorded only four sides with the Stanleys, at a session on November 26,1953. “We had Ralph Mayo playing fiddle, Jim Williams playing mandolin, and I played bass. We cut it in Nashville for Mercury at the Castle studio [in the old Tulane Hotel]. We recorded with Dee Kilpatrick [the artists and repertoire man] for Mercury. We recorded ‘A Voice From On High,’ ‘Dickenson County Breakdown,’ ‘Poison Lies,’ and ‘I Long To See The Old Folks.’ I played a walk-type bass that came from western swing. Carter and Ralph thought it went awful good with their music. I heard a lot of that sound in Bob Wills’ music, and Spade Cooley, they had a walk-type bass.
“Dee Kilpatrick called me down for playing too much bass fiddle at the session. He came in and said ‘Boys, I tell you what. You’re playing stuff over peoples’ heads. You need to keep it simple so they can understand it.’ That’s the reason on [the instrumental] ‘Dickenson County Breakdown’ I didn’t play too much. He turned me loose a little bit on some other stuff, like ‘Poison Lies’ and ‘How I Long To See The Old Folks,’ I could walk that part pretty good. But I had ‘Dickenson County Breakdown,’ I thought, dressed up—it was too much dressed for him! Carter said, ‘That’s what I want, exactly—what he’s picking.’ But it didn’t go. I recorded that on several cuts but he didn’t want them. Jim Williams had a more serious problem at the session: [he] dropped his mandolin on the cement as we were going into the studio. It put a crack in the mandolin, and we had to do ‘Dickenson County Breakdown.’ We cut that thing 12 or 13 times. He had a vibration in his mandolin and he had to stop and get a piece of cardboard and put down into the crack to keep it from vibrating.”
For a time, John was the only constant in the band aside from Carter and Ralph (much as in later years, when George Shuffler referred to himself as “The Clinch Mountain Boy”). In John’s second stint with the band, “we didn’t have a fiddle. Jim Williams was on mandolin and Ralph Mayo had been helping on some dates, then Joe Meadows came in. Joe called us like on a Monday, and said ‘I’d like to come down and audition for you boys.’ Carter told him to come on down—Joe was about 17 and lived in Princeton, W. Va., and we were working at WCYB. We were on twice a day, at lunch then again around 1:30, and we transcribed shows if we had to be somewhere playing. When Joe got there, Carter handed me his guitar—this was at the A Studio in Bristol—he said ‘take this and go back there and see if he can play a fiddle.’ I told him to play Katy Hill. It’s one of my favorite tunes and I knew how the tune went. Joe shucked her son, he really burned that tune up. When he hit those high notes, he’d suck his breath in—‘shwhooop’— sometimes you could hear it on the mike; Joe went in and recorded with the Stanleys after I left, and Dee Kilpatrick called him down for making that sucking noise when he slid up on the high notes.
“[At that first tryout in Bristol] he played about three or four tunes, including the ‘Orange Blossom Special,’ and Carter asked me ‘Can he fiddle?’ I said, ‘Put him on.’ He put him on the show that day, and Carter showed that gold tooth the whole time Joe was fiddling. He was tickled to death.”
Before long, John found the life of a touring sideman incompatible with other responsibilities. “My dad was sick a lot. I came home one time and decided I didn’t want to go back. That was about the time rock and roll came in. Bill Lowe came in and played mandolin after I left and they didn’t have a bass for a while. George went back in and helped them do almost all their recording after that.
“After I left the Stanleys, I went to work for the Better Homes Furniture Company. I went to work for them and picked with L.W. Lambert out of Statesville on weekends, from the mid ’50s for around ten years. I helped him do his dates almost every weekend. I played with him for eight or nine years altogether.” More recently, John has played bass with fiddler Jim Shumate on occasional show dates and three recordings, and as rhythm guitar with the band Cedar Creek.
John Shuffler’s story is a reminder that some of the finest musicians are to be found working regular day jobs, confining their music to the living room or to weekend performances. The few cuts that he recorded with the Stanleys demonstrate just what the wider bluegrass community missed out on when John Shuffler opted for a more regular life closer to home.
The author wishes to thank Grant Colby, an excellent photographer and historian of bluegrass music, for his help with this interview.
Jeff Vagelgesang lives in Madison County, Va., and is the mandolin player with Alvin Breeden and the Virginia Cutups.
