Bill Keith and Earl Scruggs and their collaboration to create Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (Peer International Corporation, New York. 1968).
This book, a collaboration between Earl Scruggs, Bill Keith and Burt Brent, is the first serious and certainly significant contribution to banjo players interested in learning how to play banjo the way Earl Scruggs did.
William Bradford “Bill” Keith is one of only a handful of banjoists who expanded the horizons of bluegrass music when he exposed the world to entire tunes of melodic banjo playing. This he did when he joined Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. The entire story is here, verified by Mr. Keith before it went to print in America’s Music: Bluegrass – A History of Bluegrass Music in the Words of Its Pioneers (written by Barry R. Willis and published in 1997. All rights reserved). This publication is now available digitally on this website.
When I presented the final copy of what you’re about to read to Mr. Keith, he read it through carefully and shook his head, muttering that what he says here may offend some people but it’s the truth. So we published it.
The following comes directly from America’s Music: Bluegrass and comes complete with all the footnotes associated with these quotations. Here is his story:
The contributions to bluegrass music by William Bradford Keith are legendary; they changed bluegrass music. His melodic banjo playing is often called “Keith style” picking. Tony Trischka wrote, “Earl Scruggs gave us drive, syncopation, and the smooth, three-finger right hand roll. What he didn’t provide for us, though, was a way to play scales or the long, flowing melody lines that grow out of them. With this new style, it became possible for a banjo player to pick fiddle tunes note-for-note as the fiddler would. In addition, an entirely new repertoire of exciting licks and runs grew up; and suddenly, there was something to play besides Scruggs style.”
As for using Scruggs/Keith tuners, he didn’t actually invent the method of re-tuning strings which Earl Scruggs used in songs such as “Flint Hill Special,” but he did help invent the D-tuners which make the songs easier to play and have a much cleaner look on the banjo.
Bill Keith was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1939. Around 1952, he played the plectrum banjo in the Boston/Cambridge-based Dixieland bands. He studied the tenor “Dixieland” style of banjo chord construction and music theory at Exeter Academy and Amherst College.
In 1957, he bought and began playing a $15 longneck five-string banjo. He used Pete Seeger’s instruction book and strove to learn Earl Scruggs’ style. He was influenced by Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Don Stover, Don Reno and the Lilly Brothers. He was already somewhat accomplished on the ukulele, piano, tenor banjo and plectrum banjo. His five-string style was patterned after Pete Seeger’s style for the next couple years, then he began concentrating on Scruggs style—still with a longneck banjo. Keith and Jim Rooney began playing local gigs around the Amherst, Massachusetts, area. He made his first television appearance with this banjo on a local television station near college in 1957. He also played in a local bluegrass band and soon stepped up to a Gibson bluegrass-style banjo
A significant influence on Keith was Billy Faier who played “Sailor’s Hornpipe” using the banjo in a hammering-on style. Nevertheless, “My inspiration was a fiddler,” said Bill Keith, “When I heard a fiddler playing ‘Devil’s Dream,’ I said I could get those notes to come out in that order on the banjo. I know where those notes are—I just have to play the notes, not rolls. That was the winter of ‘59 to ‘60. This was when I first played ‘Devil’s Dream.’ It wasn’t recorded until ‘61.”
Probably the actual occasion for developing this melodic style of banjo playing was due to weekly visits to Nova Scotia fiddler (living in Massachusetts) June Hall. She would play many fiddle tunes, including “Devil’s Dream” for him. That is where he decided that he wanted to play the melodic style banjo. Keith also began developing “Sailor’s Hornpipe” into a medley with “Devil’s Dream.”
In reference to some authors who had written that Bobby Thompson was playing this melodic/chromatic music while he was with Jim and Jesse several years before Keith played it with Monroe, Keith replied, “I spoke to Jim and Jesse themselves and they don’t really remember Bobby playing fiddle tunes ‘cause when I got down to Nashville (1963) there were a lot of people saying that they had never heard that before. And Jim and Jesse were among them.”
But “I never met Bobby [Thompson] until after I had worked with Bill Monroe. He had already worked with Jim and Jesse and we know that he recorded quite a few things with them including ‘Dixie Hoedown,’ one of my favorites which has a little bit of what later became his style, I think. Other things like ‘Banjolina’ were pretty much ‘Scruggsy’ rolls and not all that melodic. In fact, there are only parts of the ‘Dixie Hoedown’ that are. The fact is, when I began working with Bill Monroe in the spring of ‘63, Bobby Thompson was with the Army National Guard in South Carolina and he told me he used to listen to Bill Monroe on the Opry on Saturday nights when I was playing. I was featured on the fiddle tunes with that band on six instrumentals which had a lot of melodic stuff in them. So I feel that I could have had an influence on Bobby. But I don’t feel that I influenced him in the direction he took in the bluesy thing and the stuff on ‘Area Code 615.’”
During the early 1960s, Bill Keith started transcribing many of Earl Scruggs’ songs onto paper. He did this by using tablature. When asked if he invented this technique of teaching and writing, he replied emphatically, “Absolutely not! I learned from Pete Seeger who points out that the lute players of the 18th century used it. He adapted an earlier form of it to the banjo and the first time I saw tablature was in Pete Seeger’s book in 1957.”
Keith also learned a lot about bluegrass music from Don Stover when the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover had a band. The 1961 “lessons” were merely visits to Stover’s house—Don wouldn’t demonstrate, said Keith. “In ‘61 and ‘62, I saw heavy amounts of Don (Stover) at the Hillbilly Ranch where he and the Lilly Brothers alternated half-hours with another band. And I spent many an evening there nursing a few beers,” he told Pete Wernick in a January 1984 interview.
In September of 1961, just before Keith went into the USAF, he (banjo), Jim Rooney (guitar), Joe Val (mandolin), Herb Hooven (fiddle) and Fritz Richmond (bass) recorded “Livin’ on the Mountain.” It was released in the spring of 1962. (Between the time of the recording session and its release, Eric Weissberg’s “New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass” was released, said Keith. They played as the Berkshire Mountain Boys at Club 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and featured Keith’s melodic-style of banjo playing. One tune on the LP was “Devil’s Dream.” That same month, he won the banjo contest at the First Annual Philadelphia Folk Festival with “Sailor’s Hornpipe” and “Devil’s Dream.”
In the summer of 1962, Bill Keith started traveling. In the fall, he joined the Kentuckians with Red Allen (guitar), Frank Wakefield (mandolin) and Tom Morgan (bass) in the Washington area and at WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia; he took Pete Kuykendall’s place with the group. His association with Morgan was an apprenticeship in banjo-making there in D.C..
During this period with Red Allen, Bill Keith and college friend Dan Bump decided to go into business together building a banjo. They eventually settled on reengineering banjo tuners. They built this business up in the winter of 1963, when most of the work was done by Bump because of Keith’s touring schedule with various groups. Bump sent the first D-tuner prototypes to Keith while he was in Nashville working for Monroe. Keith showed the pegs to Scruggs who approved of them. Production of the finished product began on a more serious basis in 1964. Scruggs wanted to lend his name to the product but was under contract to the Vega Company and was not allowed to do both unless he was involved as a shareholder with the new company. They all put up money and they were on their way. In 1968, this Cambridge company began making pewter objects. Eventually Bump lost interest in business and sold the Beacon Banjo Company back to Keith about 1989. Keith expanded it to sell many musical items by mail order.
That December, while still working with Red and Frank and Morgan in D.C., he saw Earl Scruggs in concert. The concert was at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, with Merle Travis opening the show. After the show, Manny Greenhill introduced Keith to Scruggs. Keith showed Scruggs his book of tablature. Peer International had recently published a book of Earl’s tunes in music notation. Keith, able to read music, found many errors and explained them to Scruggs who could not read music. Scruggs was impressed so he asked Keith to go to Nashville to work on another book which Scruggs was asked to write for Peer. This was like a call from heaven for Bill Keith: Earl Scruggs asking for his help. Keith had literally spent countless hours transcribing Earl’s solos note-for-note and had totally absorbed all of his work. Keith joined Scruggs in Nashville in early 1963, and began working on Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo.
The book came out in 1968 from Peer International Corporation. Keith did all the tablature and exercises and did the recording of the album as well. “It was my tape recorder and my roll of tape and my microphone which was set up in his back room and we wrote out the text that he had to say on record. And since he had to play the exercises as they appeared in the book, I had to play them for him because he couldn’t read the tablature. This was something he had played, but he couldn’t tell what it was [by] lookin’ at it. Then I would turn the machine on and he would play it for the instructional record.”
Keith explained, “When we were workin’ on it he told me I would be gettin’ my share and he gave me the shake of his hand and I guess I was a little too green not to insist on having it all down there in writing. After all [he was] my hero and so forth. It was later I saw mention in Time magazine that the book had sold a million dollars retail. And I hadn’t gotten my first penny—not to mention anything for the record which was retailing for ten bucks apiece. And I knew that you can have those records pressed up for less than a dollar. Here he had zero production expense doin’ it in the back room on my machine. I just thought, ‘Hey! There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars here. Why doesn’t he deem that it’s time that I should see some of it?’ So I asked. I had always been welcome at his house. I seemed to be then until I brought that up. His wife kind of snickered and said, ‘You should have had a contract.’ I was real bitter about that and it wasn’t until several years later that I finally decided I’m not goin’ to live with this and resolve it. I went to a friend who was a music lawyer and we went through and…Earl spent a lot more money on his lawyers than what he ended up offering my lawyer…but it was a pittance on what he had implied [that I would get]. And, in the process, I’m permanently on his ‘out’ list.”
Everywhere Keith went at this point—whenever he played this medley of “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe”—jaws would drop. And in March of 1963, backstage at the Opry at the old Ryman Auditorium, Bill Monroe and Kenny Baker were back there at the dressing room. Baker came back to where Keith was and said, “If you want a job with Bill Monroe, you’ve got it.” Rual Yarbrough was Monroe’s banjoist in the Nashville area but Monroe needed a regular banjoist for touring. Del McCoury, who had played one performance on banjo with Monroe was offered a job at the same time as Keith and both men auditioned for the banjo job the same day. Monroe asked McCoury if he could play guitar, an answer which was in the affirmative, and hired him on guitar and as lead singer. Keith was then hired on banjo. Bill Keith was the first Yankee to join the Blue Grass Boys. Because Monroe didn’t want two “Bill’s” in the band, he always called him “Brad” after his middle name, “Bradford.”
Keith learned a lot about bluegrass music while with Monroe. Those days with Monroe added to his understanding of how to make music that works—to make it do what you sense it should do—rather than simply following established rules.
Monroe capitalized on the musicianship of this band which included Keith, Del McCoury (banjo and guitar), and fiddlers Vassar Clements or Kenny Baker. This helped Monroe keep his band together and helped keep bluegrass alive in spite of the decidedly folk and Beatles era. Keith stayed ten months, until December. Keith left Monroe’s band because the place the band appeared, Hootenanny, had blacklisted his youthful banjo idol, Pete Seeger. Keith quit because of a principle.
Late in 1964, Keith joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in Boston. He used his Gibson five-string banjo (in G tuning) with a flat-pick. He bought a steel guitar while with this group. Members included Maria Muldaur and later Richard Greene (fiddle). Keith stayed four years with Kweskin…and away from bluegrass music. The group disbanded in 1968.
In 1969, Keith joined Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, playing country rock for a year. He commuted between Canada and Boston for this job. He played some banjo, but mostly steel guitar. When this ended about 1970, he moved to Woodstock area where he partnered with Jonathan Edwards, made a few records, and toured. Edwards then decided to retire since he had achieved significant success with his music. Keith then joined the Blue Velvet Band with his old pal Jim Rooney (guitar), Richard Greene (fiddle) and Eric Weissberg (guitar, banjo).
Bill Keith helped form Muleskinner in 1972, which wasn’t much more than a put-together band for a Bill Monroe television gig in Hollywood, California. Members were himself, David Grisman (mandolin), Peter Rowan (guitar), Clarence White (lead guitar), Richard Greene (fiddle) and Stuart Schulman (bass). Muleskinner musicians had been practicing the previous week at their gig at The Ash Grove. As it turned out, Monroe had trouble getting there from his Sacramento gig. He eventually called and told them to go on without him. The concert video was released in 1992.
About 1975, Keith worked with Judy Collins. In 1977, he toured in Europe with Tony Rice and David Grisman. This was followed by a tour of Japan with the David Grisman Quintet with Richard Greene and himself as guests. They toured as two separate groups: one with Greene, Grisman and Todd Phillips, the other with Grisman and Joe Carroll. Shortly after this tour Keith, having spent much of his time between America and Europe, moved back to the U.S.. Bill Keith became an original columnist with Frets in 1979. In 1989, he was settled in Woodstock, New York, where he teamed up with Eric Weissberg, Kenny Kosek and Jim Rooney as the New Blue Velvet Band. With this band he made his fifth trip to Japan and occasionally toured Europe. They weren’t interested in pursuing the festival circuit fulltime and were content to enjoy a home life as well as playing their music.
His 1993 CD was “Beating Around the Bush.” In 1995, he was in Richard Greene’s the Grass Is Greener instrumental band with Greene (fiddle), David Grier (guitar), Tim Emmons (bass, whose place was taken by Gene Libbea that fall), and Kenny Blackwell (mandolin until the summer of 1995 when Butch Baldassari took his place). Tony Trischka took Bill Keith’s place in late 1995.
So there it is, Friends: the truth of the controversy which Mr. Keith wanted you to know. He told me this story so I could publicize it. I don’t think Mr. Keith was vengeful, but I do think he wants us all to know the truth according to William Bradford Keith.