The problem is that while Martin has a clear idea in his mind of what he wants — “He’s well-versed in his music,” says former Sunny Mountain Boy Doyle Lawson, “he knows exactly how it should sound and how it will sound” — he has tremendous difficulty in communicating it, to his musicians and, it seems, to everyone else.
“I just wanted something to match my voice, and musicians that could play in that same foot-pattin’ timing and not let it get away. It’s that good old timing and a real good beat and keep it there,” Martin says. “You’ve got to feel it. If you don’t feel it, then you ain’t got no timing. It’s got to come from the soul, and in your mind, and your rhythm of dancing, you know what I’m saying?”
That may look good on paper — of course you’ve got to feel it — but it doesn’t necessarily translate into useful instruction to a sideman trying to keep out of Martin’s line of fire, especially as the years went by. “‘You’re not playing timing,’ he’d say,” recalls Chris Warner, who did two separate stints with Martin, “and it took me forever to understand what he meant. To me, ‘timing’ was whether you were in meter or not, but he means rhythm, a bounce to your picking, accenting notes in the rolls [right-hand picking patterns]. That’s what sets his banjo players apart.”
“You grow up and you learn to play, and you think you know what you’re doing,” says mandolinist/tenor singer Audie Blaylock. “But to have someone that focused…sometimes he doesn’t know how to articulate it, especially if you think you’re doing it right. You don’t know what to change. His music is so powerful, but it’s not through beating your instrument, it’s more like bringing the full potential out.”
“He was inarticulate, but he never stopped trying; he was obsessed,” remembers banjoist Alan Munde. “No matter what the conversation, it would always come back to the music. The sad part is, it created an atmosphere where you were almost afraid to play around him; you’d get out your instrument to just pick, and within a minute he’d be there, making comments and trying to get you to do something. He was always a presence.”
Greg Garing, who says “I got every bit of my rhythm from Jimmy,” tells a story that testifies to the depth of Martin’s obsession. “We were at a party last year in Nashville, and Jimmy came over. We were picking and singing with a couple of guys, including a harmonica player. Jimmy asked me to do ‘Great Speckled Bird’, and he looks over at the harmonica player to take a break, and he gets into it and misses a note; Jimmy stops, and sings the note. The guy says, ‘This isn’t a chromatic harmonica, that note isn’t on there.’ ‘Onie [Wheeler] played it,’ Jimmy said, and that’s about all he would say — and he made that guy work and work, and after about 10 minutes he hit the note. Jimmy knows every one of the notes on all the instruments. He hears it.”
As if that weren’t demanding enough — and remember, Garing’s describing a party — Martin coupled his insistence on getting it right with an unwillingness to acknowledge the musician who succeeded in doing so. “He’d never give compliments,” Warner says. “His attitude seemed to be that if you compliment a guy, he’s going to get the big head and quit.” Munde adds, “He just came from a real hard-nosed school of educating people. It’s part of his management style to keep everybody on edge, and not to give rewards.”
In the end, though, the reward turns out to be the music. Much as the accounts of the difficulties in learning from and working for Martin sound the same from one former Sunny Mountain Boy to the next, so too do the descriptions of what came afterward.
“Later on, after I had time to think about what it was he was saying, I could understand it better,” says Lawson. Munde comments, “Now that I’ve been out teaching, I understand more what he was after.” Chris Warner adds, “When I realized how he taught musicians, then I began to get a grasp.” And Audie Blaylock affirms that “even now, I’ll hear something he did or said and it’ll click. Jimmy would tell me, ‘Once you play with me, you won’t be able to play with anyone else,’ and I really see what he meant. His music is so exciting and smooth at the same time. I have the utmost respect for Jimmy Martin.”
Though the musicians who have worked for him have a lot of respect for Martin and his music, staying with his band seems to have been another matter, especially in the years when he was playing a lot of dates.
“It was a great education, but I wouldn’t want to repeat it,” says Warner, who did two separate stints as a Sunny Mountain Boy, once in the late 1960s, then again in the late 1980s. Lawson, too, was a Sunny Mountain Boy twice, and the chronology of Martin’s recording sessions has almost the character of a Mobius strip, with the same names appearing and reappearing in various combinations over the years.
Apparently, it was one thing to record with Martin, and another to be a member of his touring band. Crowe, for instance, left in 1961, yet he came back to record with Martin in 1963 and 1966. Mandolinist Earl Taylor, who preceded Paul Williams and appeared on two 1956 sessions, recorded again in 1965, while Williams himself left the band in 1963 but returned for sessions in 1967 and 1968. Given such instability, it’s hard to believe Martin created as many masterpieces as he did — yet, as anyone who’s listened to the more than 100 cuts he made for Decca after 1961 will attest, that’s exactly what happened. It is, to put it bluntly, an unparalleled record of musical accomplishment.
