“It’s a two-edged sword,” he says. “There’s many things you can’t do with a flat pick that you can do the other way. My playing slowed down after playing with a flat pick. It isn’t stretched out, linearly speaking. What I do is based in the arpeggios of chords, doing cross rolls to get those arpeggio effects. You can’t do that at the same pace you can play single notes up and down on a string, which is more the approach most guys use.
“I always wanted to be self-contained,” he emphasizes. “That was the great thing about Doc Watson. He could sit down with a guitar and sing a song, and it was a complete thing; it didn’t require a band. Maybelle Carter was that way. It was full and had everything it needed to support itself.”
To find that self-contained sound, Blake lit off on a solo career that ultimately strengthened his work with other musicians. His two records with Tony Rice are landmarks of acoustic music; like the Doc Watson albums he heard in the ’60s, they’ve become touchstones for a younger generation of guitarists.
“I always thought, why the hell would I want to record with Tony Rice?” he says. “I can’t keep up with him! He’s such a modern player compared to me. It gave a lot of people insights into his playing because he had to play simpler with me.”
Blake met Nancy Short at the Exit/In in Nashville in December 1972. She was playing in a folk-rock group slated to open for Blake. “I was impressed, just like everybody else,” she says of seeing him the first time. “Back in the day, he was wild. Maybe he hit on me, but I think I hit on him. But who can sort these things out?”
Nancy had grown up in Independence, Missouri, where she studied piano, violin and cello from grade school to high school. She knew jazz as well, from her father, who took her to see Cab Calloway in Kansas City. In the midst of family difficulties, she moved to Nashville, where she finished high school and played cello in the youth symphony.
For Nancy, Nashville in the late ’60s was “like Paris in the ’20s,” and she began to discover a new/old range of stringed sounds. “I started hanging out at the old-time picking parlor on Second Avenue,” she says. “Watching Kenny Baker or Charlie Collins fiddle, seeing someone pick up an instrument and play the dog out of it — I wanted to do that! And I wasn’t sure I wanted to devote my life to keeping European traditions alive. I was trying to become the person I wanted to be.”
That journey of discovery included applying the cello to hillbilly country. Nancy may be the best-known cellist in old-time music, though she’s quick to point out that she wasn’t the first. “Maybe I was the only person at that time doing it,” she allows. “But Otto Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys had a cello in their group. Cellos were pretty common at the dances, because they were smaller than basses, and you could throw them in the back of the wagon.”
The Blakes’ records together have been called “hillbilly baroque,” which isn’t far from the mark, even if their sound has always been more elemental than refined. The albums Fields Of November (Nancy’s 1974 recorded debut with Norman), Blind Dog, and the 1987 compilation Natasha’s Waltz are like infrared photographs of old-time music, in which nuances and secret structures are revealed in clean, crystalline detail. Familiar melodies are made strangely beautiful not through complication, but through seeing and hearing into them more deeply. And through, needless to say, the musicians’ craft.
“I’ve just experimented with my own style, through different forms of tunes,” Norman says. “I’ve just been feeling my way through it. I think you could listen to Bill Monroe’s early work and the stuff he played just before he passed, and hear a wide range. I call it on-the-job training; if you keep practicing your craft, you’re going to be different.”
But by 1997 that training had taken a toll. The Blakes separated and divorced, then remarried three years later. “I couldn’t take it after twenty years on the road,” Nancy says. “I had to fall back and regroup. But we discovered after all the mess we’d been through that we still loved each other.”
They’ve rarely sounded so re-grouped, so at home and at ease as on their new record. When Nancy’s voice — deep and steady, a warm gesture — enters on the chorus of the traditional “More Good Women Gone Wrong”, she completes Norman’s knowing phrasing. When her cello fiddles along on the Civil War tune “He’s Coming To Us Dead”, she gives the ballad another layer of gravity. When she picks the mandolin on “The Star Spangled Banner”, Norman follows her lead; together, they more than redeem the much-abused tune.
“I had just heard John Kerry’s best speech of his campaign — that we need more creativity and imagination in this country,” Nancy recalls. “I needed that song saved right then and there. Somebody must maintain the ways of peace. Life is so subtle and we need small, nice things to get through life gracefully, not just destroy everything in your path.”
Onstage in St. Louis, Nancy had coaxed Norman into singing an original, as yet unreleased topical tune which warned, with humor and pathos: “Don’t send your money to Washington/To fight a war that’s never done.” The Blakes are not known for explicit statements (though songs such as “’72 Blues” and “The Highland Light” have political subtexts), but in a sense, their life’s work in music has been an argument for humane and timeless values and principles — patience, respect, honesty, peace — which seem quaint in the saying but feel alive and vital in the sounding.
“There’s a theory around in music that you just give yourself free rein and let your conscience be your guide,” Norman ponders, “but I could never quite get that hung up on my own work, that idea that what fell out of my head was better than something I could go back and relate to. But [the songs] have to have a connection. Sometimes it’s just in your own feelings. It might not be there literally; it might just be how you relate to the lyrics and how you relate to the world around you. It doesn’t have to be a literal thing.”
When ND contributing editor Roy Kasten flatpicks his 1994 Martin HD-28 he sounds nothing like Norman Blake.
