Crowe on the Banjo: The Music Life of J.D. Crowe

 

Marty Godbey’s Crowe on the Banjo: The Music Life of J.D. Crowe (2011) makes a nice addition to the library of even the most knowledgeable of bluegrass music fans.  For Marty (who sadly died before the book’s publication) and her husband Frank, the book was a labor of love.  Both were fans of J.D. Crowe’s music long before they began to think about producing the banjo player’s music biography.  The book is filled with details and memories culled from numerous interviews with the musicians who worked with Crowe for more than half century (and from hours and hours of conversation with Crowe himself), resulting in a clear picture of J.D. Crowe, banjo picker and band leader.  As the book’s subtitle implies, the biography pays less attention to Crowe’s early life or to his life not directly associated with music.

Crowe, born and raised around Lexington, Kentucky, was thirteen years old when he decided that he wanted to play the banjo.  That inspiration came in the person of Earl Scruggs, who along with Lester Flatt, often performed on the Kentucky Barn Dance.  Crowe learned by studying Scruggs as often as possible and soon was playing with local bands and on radio shows himself.  One of those radio performances lead to a six-year job with Jimmy Martin & the Sunny Mountain Boys that ended in 1962 when Crowe decided to leave the band for a solo career.

Those years with Jimmy Martin were valuable.  Crowe modeled his own work ethic and style around what he experienced with Martin, resulting in an incredibly tight band filled with musicians capable of producing superb instrumentals and harmony vocals second to no one.  Crowe finally came to national prominence in the 1970s when he formed the New South, a band whose original members were Tony Rice on guitar, Ricky Skaggs on mandolin, Jerry Douglas on dobro, and Bobby Sloan on fiddle and bass - a band filled with future all-stars.

J.D. in Owensboro, KY - ROMP 2009 (Photo Sam Sattler)

But it was in 1975, with the release of Rounder 0044 (titled J.D. Crowe & the New South), that the real impact of J.D. Crowe upon bluegrass music was first felt.  The trendsetting album so successfully morphed country, folk, and rock songs into a bluegrass treatment that bluegrass music itself was changed forever.  The sound was so successful that it even led to a breakthrough into mainstream country music for rising star Keith Whitley, a member of the New South by the late seventies, who so sadly died of alcohol poisoning just as solo success was his for the taking.

Crowe on the Banjo, which includes some 25 black and white photos and a discography, is filled with the details of J.D. Crowe’s musical evolution from the moment the thirteen-year-old first discovered his love for banjo, right on through every band that he worked with or put together from that point onward.  It is far from being a personal, or complete J.D. Crowe biography, but it is a first-rate take on the banjo picker’s “music life” that will be much appreciated by Crowe fans.

J.D. Crowe & the New South were fixtures on the bluegrass festival scene for decades, and I consider myself lucky to have seen him as often as I did before he finally retired for good. J.D. died on December 24, 2021 at age 84.