Kenny Baker & Josh Graves — The Best Years of Their Lives
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
January 1988, Volume 22, Number 7
You walk up to Kenny Baker at a bluegrass festival and introduce yourself and explain that you’d like to interview him for a possible feature in a music magazine. He listens quietly, but courteously, and replies, “Maybe later, I’m kind of busy now.”
You do the same thing with Josh Graves, with the same results.
The next day you see them together, and you approach and speak. After exchanging pleasantries, Josh says, “If you don’t mind we’d like to be interviewed together, we are a team now.”
They have been together three years as of October 1987. Their getting together wasn’t planned, it just sort of happened. Josh explains, “Kenny was playing for Bill Monroe. I had been on my own ever since I left Earl Scruggs and I was getting about ready to quit. I was getting tired of hanging out by myself and driving by myself. Then I heard a rumor that Kenny had left Bill. We’d been friends for 35-40 years. We recorded two albums together in ’73-’74.
“So, in late 1984 I was going up into Kentucky to do an album and they needed a fiddler. I said, ‘How about Kenny Baker.’ They said, ‘Can you get him’ and I said, ‘I’ll try.’ I called Kenny and asked him if he’d left Bill and he said he had. I asked him if he’d go up to Kentucky to do this album with me and he said yes. So, I said, ‘Would you want to do a show on Saturday night after we do the album and he said, ‘Yes.’
“So I booked a Saturday night and it went pretty good, so I asked him if he’d like to do a few shows and see how things worked out. I think he was about ready to quit too. It has worked out real good for us,” Josh declared.
“It is kind of unusual to team a fiddle and a Dobro, but maybe we’ve got a first,” he laughed. “It took us a while to adjust to each other’s music, but now we’ve got it to where each knows what the other is going to do.”
Josh grew up a Jimmie Rodgers fan. His father bought Rodgers’ records for him. On a few of the records he heard Cliff Carlisle of the Carlisle Brothers, who played the Dobro. “He didn’t play anything fancy, just the old slides, but I liked what he was playing and he was my idol,” Josh explained.
“We formed a little group when I was in school and one thing led to another and I wound up in Knoxville, Tennnessee, working for Esco Hankins, and the Tennesseans, this was in ‘43. Before that I went with the Pierce Brothers—we had a Saturday network show in Knoxville. We’d work some Friday and Saturday night shows.
“Everybody had a good job but me, they wound up giving me their money,” Josh kidded.
“Then in ‘43 I went to work for Esco Hankins, on Cas Walker’s programs. I stayed with him until I quit in ’47. I went back home and went to work and played banjo until ‘49 and then went back to Esco and stayed about a year.
“I ran into Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, who were working out of Wheeling, West Virginia, over WWVA and I stayed with them for four years and then went with Toby Stroud and the Blue Mountain Boys,” Josh explained.
Mac Wiseman, lived in the same trailer park as Josh. He needed a musician and asked Josh if he’d like to work for him playing bass and doubling on the Dobro. Josh worked with Mac through ‘54. Then he went from Mac to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys and stayed with them until ‘69 when they split up.
Lester formed Nashville Grass after the split with Earl Scruggs and Josh played with him two years. When Earl formed the Earl Scruggs Review he left Lester and played with Earl two years. “I got tired of switching around and decided to do it on my own until I ran into Kenny,” Josh explained.
Josh and his wife Evelyn have three boys and one daughter and raised a granddaughter. They all play. “They didn’t play with toys like ordinary children,” Josh kidded, “they had to pick up instruments. Bill Troy, plays country, Josh Jr., has a group and the youngest who will be twenty-one soon has a rock group. You hear some pretty good arguments in my house. Nothing too serious happens, but I have to listen to them.
“I’m proud of them and want them to play what they want. I believe everybody is free to play what they want to and I don’t knock it,” Josh declared.
Kenny picks up the dialogue: “My father, Paul Baker, was an old-time fiddle player, and I played guitar with him, and I learned some old-time tunes, but I hated old-time fiddling.
“I started out playing guitar and didn’t play the fiddle until the forties after I went into the Navy. I was on Okinawa and the Red Cross was giving a square dance and no one knew how to play the square dance fiddle.
“I had learned a couple of square dance tunes on the fiddle and I played those two tunes for four hours at that dance,” Kenny laughed. “That was the last of my guitar playing. From there on I had to play the fiddle as long as I stayed in the military. After that I went back home to Jenkins, Kentucky, and worked in the mines a long time.
“Then I went with Don Gibson. I never played professional fiddle until 1953, that’s about when I met Josh. I worked with Don until ‘57, then went with Bill Monroe. The last time I went with Bill Monroe was March 14, 1967 to October 12, ‘84. I was with Monroe three different times,” Baker declared.
“I’d like to tell you something about Kenny that a lot of people don’t know,” Josh interrupted. “As long as I’d known Kenny I didn’t know he played the guitar as well as he plays. He asked me to go to Chicago and do an album with him. I thought he was just going to do fiddle tunes,” Josh explained.
“At the time, Kenny was with Monroe, and I was with Lester, and the two groups did a show together. Kenny and I rode back together, and he said we
ought to work on that album a little bit. I saw him get the guitar out and I thought what’s he doing? The featured thing on the album was the guitar, a lot of people don’t know it, but he plays a mighty fine guitar. He liked to have killed me in B-flat,” Josh laughed. “Something else that a lot of people don’t know, is that he played a lot of western swing fiddle with Don Gibson.
“When Kenny was with Bill Monroe, no disrespect to him, and when I was with Lester Flatt, you had about twenty tunes that you played. And you had to do that everyday, and you get tired of doing the same thing. Here’s what I like about what we are doing now. We go out and if we want to stay a month, we’ll stay and do what we want to do and play what we want to play…things that we never got a chance to play before. I think it works better that way,” Josh said.
“After twenty-four years you get tired of playing the same music,” Kenny added.
“You play the ‘Wabash Cannonball’ for twenty years and you won’t want to play it anymore,” Josh laughed. “Now when we go on the stage we might have run over the opening tune, but when we get out there we don’t know what we’re going to do. I never know what Kenny is going to do and he never knows what I’m going to do. We do what comes handy,” Josh declared.
“Kenny and I have talked about this quite a bit, but these three years together have been the happiest time I’ve had in show business. We’ll stop along the roadside at a produce place and get some tomatoes and cucumbers and sit down and eat them. Just like the old days when we first started.
“All the years I’ve played, and God knows I’ve put enough in there, the last three years have been the most pleasurable times of my life,” Kenny asserted.
“If we want to be an hour late, we’ll be an hour late,” Josh said, “I got so sick of wearing a tie, I felt like I was tied up,” he laughed. “If I want to wear one I do, but I don’t have to. I think you can dress too much above the people. They come to see you and they feel like you should be at their level. They are the ones that put you there in the first place,” he concluded.
“Kenny grew up around Jenkins, Kentucky, and I’m just down the road from him (Monroe County, in east Tennessee) and we didn’t get to the Grand Ole Opry ‘til Tuesday,” he kidded. “We’ve never changed our beliefs and the way we feel about the people. And I feel like you ought to go out and meet them and talk to them. If it wasn’t for the fans, you wouldn’t be there to start with,” Josh explained.
The duo toured seven countries in Europe [Belgium, Holland, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany] in October ‘86. Josh said they ate a lot of cheese. For breakfast they’d set out a board with luncheon meats and cheeses and butter and bread. After about two weeks that got old. On stage they presented the pair with a plaque, and a dozen black tulips each and three pounds of cheese.
“Kenny lost ten pounds and had to borrow one of my belts,” Josh said. “It is so different, their music is about twenty years behind ours. They even liked my singing. I told Baker that I might stage a comeback,” Josh laughed.
Kenny and Josh planned to go to Japan in the spring of ‘88. Josh has toured Japan before. “I love it over there; they love our kind of music,” Josh explained.
“I remember a Japanese promoter coming to my home after I’d been to Japan. My wife didn’t know what to fix for him to eat and I told her just to fix a regular southern dinner. So the guy came out and every time she’d come in the room he’d get up and bow.
“She doesn’t drink, but I have a bar in my house and I asked him if he’d like a drink and he said maybe one. So when my wife came back into the den, the promoter told her that in his country I was God. She said, ‘I don’t drink, but I believe I’ll take one now,’” he laughed. “They really treated me well in Japan,” Josh observed.
Kenny noted that he didn’t have a lot of time off when he worked for Bill Monroe, but even now he still has time off. “I’m busier now than when I worked for Bill,” he asserted.
“Kenny has a big farm out of Nashville where he raises cattle, and he has to be there once in a while to see about them. I live in town, but we try to schedule so he can be there when he needs to be. I take care of the booking so that keeps both of us busy. He loves to take off in December and I love to take off in January to dodge the snow,” Josh concluded.
So, two veteran musicians, who especially love to play without the constraints of a band, may have found the formula that will allow them to continue to delight audiences all over the world. The formula? A fiddle and a Dobro in the hands of Kenny Baker and Josh Graves.
