You and I went to the same kind of boot-camp/university, learning to play music
by playing music, sitting in a circle with a
bunch of other pickers and learning from
them, imitating what they do. How did
all that happen for you?
Well, I was singing before I was playing,
listening to my mother. She was a great
singer, a great old mountain voice, almost
like Hazel Dickens on steroids, so pure
and so mountain. Of course my dad was
a singer, too, so I was singing with them
a couple years before I started playing,
in church when I was three years old. I
remember my mother carrying me up and
putting me on the pulpit with my little ol’
legs danglin’ down, and I would sing harmony with her and dad. So my dad bought
me a mandolin when I was five, but it
really freaked him out—he bought me a
mandolin and he had to go back to work,
and then he got snowed in in Ohio for two
weeks. When he came back home after
two weeks, I was singing and playing and
changing chords at the same time, and
he really hadn’t shown me how to change
chords on the mandolin. He showed me
G, C and D, that was all he knew on the
mandolin. I just had a gift to be able to
hear that it needed to follow wherever the
singin’ was gonna go.
So, I’ve been exposed to that music all my
life, and there’s nothing, nothing nothing
that can take the place of exposure. All
the training, all the sight-reading—I don’t
read music. I can read a chord chart a little
bit, but I don’t read music and I wish I did.
I really do think that it could be a wonderful blessing to me if I could.
But, there’s nothing to take the place of
exposure… sitting around in a circle, and
when it’s your time to play you play something, and you learn to honor and don’t
sit there and play solos all night long. You
learn to play rhythm, too, while somebody
else is soloing. Playing in front of people
causes other people to encourage you
and build you up, other than your dad
and mom. When you hear encouragement
from another musician, a musician that you
admire—like when Bill Monroe did what
he did for me when I was six years old,
or Earl Scruggs hearing me at age seven
backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and then
inviting me down for an audition for their
television show—those kinds of things…
there’s nothing that can take the place
of that kind of environment to grow up
around, a community of musicians.
You went from mandolin to Telecaster
without breaking a sweat.
I sweat a lot at home practicing! [Laughs]
I doubt that very much! Your mandolin
tone is chimey, it has that church bell
vibe, but your Tele sound was so soft and
buttery—how did you develop that tone?
Well, I really wasn’t even around electric
guitar players. There was a friend of mine
who had a Silvertone guitar with a Bigsby
tailpiece on it, and I would borrow that
guitar and bring it to my house and play
Ventures songs on it. I had very, very limited experience with electric instruments
back in my early childhood. But when I
started working with Emmylou [Harris],
Albert Lee was in the band, and of course
James Burton had recorded a lot of her
stuff and had been in her band before
that. So when I started travelling with
