Jerry Douglas Looks Back, and Forward, as He Prepares to Enter the Bluegrass Hall of Fame

Jerry Douglas never saw it coming.

In late June, just before walking onstage with The Earls of Leicester at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the Dobro master was told that he had been chosen for induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

Oh, and just one more thing: “You can’t tell anybody,” Douglas says with a laugh during a call from his Nashville home in late August.

Weeks after the July 17 public announcement, Douglas still wasn’t acclimated to being a Hall of Famer.

“I’m still not sure they really mean it,” Douglas says. “I walked off stage and I was like, ‘What just happened?’ I didn’t think about this … This is shocking stuff.”

Bela Fleck wasn’t surprised. The banjo virtuoso, a longtime collaborator and friend, summed up his buddy’s bona fides.

“[Jerry] has burned the bluegrass flame for his whole life, he has represented it in its glory but with an open view towards the future and towards the offshoots,” Fleck said in an email. “He is beloved on all sides, traditional and progressive. And he has produced many classic albums in the idiom. There is no person more deserving, in my humble opinion.”

That belief is held by more than just Douglas’ peers. Molly Tuttle, part of bluegrass’ new guard, echoed Fleck on a recent call from her home in Nashville. “He’s definitely someone who’s pioneered his own sound in the genre,” she said. “He’s become a real hero to so many of us in my generation. He’s just one of those legends who’s completely added to and changed the course of this style of music.”

When Douglas officially enters the Hall, during the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards on Sept. 26 in Raleigh, N.C., he will collect seemingly the only honor he hasn’t already earned.

A sampling: He has won 16 Grammy Awards as a recording artist, bandleader, producer, and composer. He was voted the Country Music Association’s Musician of the Year three times and the IBMA’s Dobro Player of the Year 10 times. The Americana Music Association presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. Douglas hopes that his Hall of Fame plaque isn’t viewed as a career-capper.

“I really hope that people don’t put connotations on that as, like, ‘Oh, we can’t have him come out and play with us. He’s in the Hall of Fame’,” he says. “[I don’t want others] to put any weight on it [or] to change me for what I am now, to them.”

Dobro Player in Demand

What he is to them, for decades now, is the preeminent player of his instrument. His commanding, lyrical style on the Dobro, or resophonic guitar (as well as the lap steel guitar), has led to an estimated 2,000 credits as a studio musician. He joined Alison Krauss & Union Station, as the band’s featured instrumentalist, in 1998. That same year, he became co-musical director, along with Scottish fiddler Aly Bain, of the popular BBC television series “Transatlantic Sessions.”

An early start and rapid development afforded Douglas the opportunity to play with genre giants such as Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. His immense skills and versatility, incorporating bluegrass, country, rock, jazz, and Celtic elements, have put him in the studio with a wide expanse of artists. He’s even played with heroes from outside of bluegrass such as Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Paul Simon, and James Taylor. Douglas has also produced more than 100 albums.

Still the go-to Dobro guy at 68, Douglas continues to collaborate with young players who are expanding bluegrass, as he has. They include guitarists Billy Strings and Tuttle, who enlisted Douglas to co-produce her past two albums. Both were Grammy winners.

“He is so great,” Tuttle says. “Not only as an instrumentalist, but he’s wonderful at playing with singers as well, and has a good ear for arrangement and writing. And he’s just an iconic producer. He was always a producer when I needed him, but also had a lot of faith in my ideas as well, and gave me lots of room to have a voice in the records … . That did give me a lot of confidence as a producer of my own music, which I hadn’t done before.”

Early Exposure to Bluegrass

When Douglas helps artists such as Tuttle, he is, in a sense, repaying his mentors.

As a child in Warren, Ohio, Douglas watched his steelworker father, John, play guitar in The West Virginia Travelers. Jerry started on guitar and mandolin. At seven, he encountered the player and the instrument that changed his life.

“I heard Josh Graves play [Dobro] with [Lester Flatt and] Earl Scruggs,” Douglas says. “He could keep up with Earl Scruggs [on banjo]. He was fast enough to keep up and keep a melody going. But he also brought this [awareness that] … the Dobro has such a human quality, a vocal human quality to it, that I think that’s what got me.”

Douglas’ childhood also coincided with the most classic of classic rock, which he heard on Cleveland radio. An older cousin who moved into the Douglas home brought his records and further education.

“I remember staying up late one night [in 1966 or ’67], and it was the first night that I’d ever heard the Rolling Stones; a whole record of the Rolling Stones,” Douglas says. “I hear Flatt and Scruggs when I get up in the morning and I’m getting ready to go to school, and at night I’m hearing this stuff. It’s like, ‘I love ’em both. How can I make ’em both work for me?’”

Marrying bluegrass with other genres became a cornerstone of his career, which began as a teen. He toured as a member of The Country Gentlemen, early proponents of progressive material, the summer before his senior year in high school. Graduation presented a choice: college or the road.

“I was soaking this stuff up. This was my education,” Douglas says. “Instead of going to university like I thought I was going to, I was getting a different kind of education. It turned out to be worth more to me than the other one would have been, I think.”

Playing in the studio and in bands such as J.D. Crowe & the New South, Boone Creek, and The Whites, Douglas befriended and collaborated with other major players in progressive bluegrass. Guitarist Tony Rice, mandolinists Sam Bush and David Grisman, and Fleck, among others, shared his restless creativity.

“Those guys were the best on their instruments that anybody has ever been,” Douglas says. “I feel very lucky to be there with them. And it’s unbelievable to actually be there with them, because the whole time you’re thinking, ‘I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.’ And you’re playing your ass off at the same time.”

They all respected their forebears, but also wanted to push the music in new directions.

“We tried our best to destroy bluegrass music, in our own way,” Douglas says. “To change it. To make it more acceptable to our peers. But we kept falling back on, you know what? The guys who did it first. … That’s the bar we were trying to beat.”

In a sense, Douglas knew the chase was futile.

“I wanted to play with … Lester and Earl,” Douglas says. “I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

He did the next best thing — in 2014 he assembled a band that could duplicate their sound: The Earls of Leicester. Their self-titled debut won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2015, but Douglas knew he had achieved something more important to him.

“I did an NPR interview,” he says, “and they did put on a Flatt & Scruggs record and then they put on our record against it, and switched from us to them, from them to us, and it was seamless. And it scared me, real bad.” He laughs. “To hear that on the radio … that’s what we were after.”

He couldn’t beat them but, in a sense, he joined them. He’s about to do it again — in the Hall of Fame.

Setting up The Set

Douglas could potentially have a huge night in Raleigh. He is nominated for three IBMA Awards: Album of the Year, as co-producer with Tuttle for her City of Gold; Collaborative Recording of the Year, for Fall in Tennessee, by Authentic Unlimited with Jerry Douglas; and Resophonic Guitar Player of the Year.

It will be a big week, regardless. Just days prior, on Sept. 20, Douglas will release The Set, his first album in seven years. It contains five new songs and six reworked tunes that might be familiar to fans. The first single was a cover of a song known around the world: The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Douglas, who produced The Set, says he was eager to record this lineup of The Jerry Douglas Band: guitarist Mike Seal, violinist Christian Sedelmyer, and bassist Daniel Kimbro. He also had a practical reason for revisiting older material.

“People are always coming up after the live shows and going, ‘Where can I find this song, and where can I find this song?’” Douglas says. “I’ve been going for a while, so they’re on different labels, so it’s hard to bring ’em all together in one place.”

Re-recording catalog tracks also served his artistic intentions. When he originally cut “From Ankara to Ismir” (from 1993’s Skip, Hop, and Wobble) he played his part on lap steel. It’s become a Dobro tune in the years since, changing its complexion. Douglas wanted to get it, and the colors added by his bandmates, down for posterity.

“I thought … ‘I have to record it again, because now it’s finished,’” Douglas says. “When you record a song, when it’s brand new, you don’t know the song. You need to play it for about a year and know it inside-out, and then record it.”

Another redo, Chris Kenner’s R&B tune “Something You Got,” reveals a side rarely seen: Douglas the singer. Clapton sang it on Douglas’ 2012 album, Traveler. This time, Douglas stepped up to the mic and performed a soulful, more playful vocal.

Douglas intends to keep taking chances. And he plans to live the rest of his musical life the way he has for years, by dividing it into a pie. A slice of the year for producing, one for playing with his band, another for The Earls, and one slice open for potentially delicious surprises.

“I just want to play good music,” he says. “With anybody.”