“So Bill said, ‘What would you like to sing?’ I said, ‘Well, I listened to one of the records just newly out by you and Lester, “Old Crossroads”, and I had to get my handkerchief out, it was so lonesome I could cry.’ And so I said, “Old Crossroads,” and he said ‘Yeah, let’s try that.’ So we hit it, and we got to singing, and by the time we got through, the whole room was packed, and Roy Acuff kindly raised his head up a little bit and said, ‘Hey Bill, is that boy singing there with you, is he any kin to you?’ Bill said, ‘No.’ So Roy Acuff said, ‘Doggone, he sure sounds good with you, I’ll tell you that.'”
Martin spent the next four years mostly working for Monroe. What he brought to the band was a crisp sense of timing on the guitar and a higher, edgier voice than Flatt’s, pushing Monroe’s tenor higher yet and creating, he says, the high lonesome sound. “That’s kindly where they got the high lonesome sound of Bill on that, because Lester would sing in G, and anything he’d sing in G, me and Bill would move it up in A, and anything he recorded in A, why we’d pitch it up in B and high C, you understand what I’m saying?
“Then I worked 21 days with Bill, with Little Jimmy Dickens, got to ride the bus and sing with Hank Williams. Well, Hank sung a song about ‘the lonesome sigh of a train going by, I’m blue, I’m lonesome too.’ And I learned that lonesome touch from Hank Williams; I said to myself, I’m going to put a little Hank in his own song. And when Bill sang tenor, Bill would say, ‘Well, put some of that break in your voice like that and I’ll put it in mine, you see.'”
Martin realizes that “some people might say I’m tooting my own horn here,” but a listen to the records he made with Monroe (and these include many of Monroe’s most enduring songs, from “Uncle Pen” through “On And On”) shows his claim is almost certainly justified from a musical point of view.
And yet, it’s also an illustration of why so many folks have a problem with Martin. It may be OK for fans and historians to discuss the extent to which the Father of Bluegrass had help in its creation, but it’s perhaps considered unseemly for one of those involved to openly take any credit, which Martin isn’t afraid to do.
“Bill Monroe learnt from every good musician he had,” Martin says, simply. “And I believe the public will say that, and a lot of musicians, Earl Scruggs and all that — Bill Monroe learned mandolin playing off [fiddler] Chubby Wise, off Earl Scruggs’ banjo, and he changed his mandolin playing from the late ’30s and early ’40s when he went in there….Bill Monroe’s my idol, but if I’m going to talk about something, I like to express myself. Then everybody ain’t gonna agree with me. If they did, I’d have the whole world by the tail.”
Having fulfilled his wish to sing with Monroe, Martin found himself increasingly eager to record on his own. But, having had two of his most important sidemen leave his band to go on their own, Monroe was unwilling to permit Martin to do that. The end result, played out over several years, was that Martin left the Blue Grass Boys, joining forces with Kentucky-to-Ohio transplants Bob and Sonny Osborne in 1954. The six sides they recorded for RCA Victor that year are classics in their own right, but the combination of personalities was too volatile, and before too long, the trio split up. The Brothers headed to Wheeling, West Virginia, and a long, distinguished career of their own, while Martin put together a new band and landed a contract with Decca, for whom he recorded for the next twenty years.
Though dozens of musicians have been members of Martin’s band, the Sunny Mountain Boys, two stand out for their role in establishing the Martin sound: banjoist/baritone singer J.D. Crowe and mandolinist/tenor singer Paul Williams. Crowe was still a teenager when he joined the band in 1956, but he was already a solid picker; Williams, who came on board the following year after finishing a four-year hitch in the Air Force, was an experienced musician who had recorded with, and written for, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers in the early ’50s, while Martin was still with Monroe.
“Paul was playing the guitar, so we switched him over on the mandolin,” Martin remembers. “I had to stand and learn Paul Williams some of the breaks, and then when he learned it, he could beat the fire out of me. And J.D., when he first come with me, he didn’t know how to sing baritone — but Paul did know how to sing. Paul Williams is one of the greatest singers I’ve ever sung with; he knows his harmony and knows how to say the words with you, and that’s good. Now, J.D. was really hard to learn to sing baritone, and awful hard to learn to play backup on his banjo, but now that he’s learned it, he’s got it all whipped now.
“See, J.D. and Paul lived with me and ate out of the same refrigerator for four years, and we’d just rehearse any time we wanted to. And when we come to Nashville, what we had was about a cheap little $50 recorder, and we’d tie a microphone up and get into a little room just by ourselves, and we’d have the harmony and everything down perfect.”
“Perfect” sounds like boasting, but again, as Martin says, put the records on the victrola and see if what he’s saying isn’t true. Between 1957 and 1961, the trio recorded 29 sides for Decca, and almost every one is a classic — perhaps more importantly, an incredibly hard-to-duplicate classic, and not because of speed, or fancy picking, or vocal trickery.
What the Sunny Mountain Boys had was the timing Jimmy wanted. Getting it is one of his greatest achievements. Trying to keep it is one of his greatest frustrations. And what made Jimmy frustrated was (and is) guaranteed to make his band members miserable.
