Josh Graves – Sliding in first time (the Resonator)
Graves notes that after Bonnie & Clyde and “The Beverly Hillbillies”, countless movies and TV shows featured five-string banjo in the background music for scenes dealing with things rural. He adds, though, that in recent years the banjo has been supplanted in many such instances by the dobro, and he voices great pride in that.
“I feel like I started it — me and Oswald and Shot Jackson [another Roy Acuff associate],” he says. “When I come in this town, nobody was playing the dobro but me and them.”
So although he joined Flatt & Scruggs as a bass player, his duties widened quickly.
“Lester loved the dobro, that sound, and the first night he said, ‘Would you mind playing a tune on the dobro?’ I remember I did ‘Train 45’ and ‘Steel Guitar Chimes’, and they wouldn’t let me quit.”
Over the next 14 years, Graves’ dobro was showcased on all of the most popular Flatt & Scruggs albums. Those were also pioneering days for country music television — and exhausting ones.
Graves recalls doing TV shows on a weekly circuit of the same half-dozen cities, in the era predating videotape. The troupe would leave Nashville, buy groceries in northern Alabama (because they had no time to stop for meals), then cook and eat on the bus on the way to perform on TV in Augusta, Georgia, the first day; the next day in Atlanta; the next in Florence, South Carolina; then Huntington, West Virginia; Bluefield, West Virginia; and finally Jackson, Tenneessee, before returning to the Grand Ole Opry each Saturday night. In or near each of the TV towns, they also would play an evening show.
Graves’ fertile memory is full of incidents, some hilarious. There was, for instance, the Opry evening in which a sideman in another band became persuaded by a friend that he could fly. Spreading his arms, he dived offstage into the second row and hit his head on the sturdy leg of one of the Ryman Auditorium’s pews.
“Blood flew everywhere, but he was too drunk or high for it to knock him out, I guess,” Graves says. “I’ll never forget [an associate] trying to get him back over the footlights. You could hear the bulbs bustin’.”
The good times, though of longer duration than with most acts, were too soon gone. Scruggs’ wife, Louise, booked the shows and did it well, judging from the prestigious venues the band often found itself playing, but Flatt demanded a check of the books and thereby initiated the 1969 breakup, Graves says.
“He wanted sympathy from everybody else, and I was sucker enough to fall for it,” he continues. “Wanted the books audited. It cost $5,000, I remember, and he wanted Earl to pay half of it. Earl said, ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ He wouldn’t pay a nickel of it. Sitting right here, I told Flatt, ‘Earl Scruggs is as honest as that sun comin’ up, and Louise is, too. They wouldn’t beat you.’
“If it wasn’t for Earl Scruggs, I wouldn’t have this house. He sold me one down the street that I could afford, and then I sold it and got this one.”
But when Flatt sat at his kitchen table and asked, “Would you work for me?” Graves replied, “Well, I’ve got to work somewhere.” For the next couple of years he labored for Flatt for, he recalls, $140 a week plus an extra $25 a week to handle the bookings.