Due to extenuating circumstances that I don’t need to bore you all with, I wasn’t able to write a column for today, so I decided to repost the first half of my interview with Roland White from 2011, which was one of my first columns. It’s a rather lengthy interview, which is why it’s broken in half, but it’s one of my favorite interviews, so here goes:
Roland White, legendary mandolinist, devoted family guy, bluegrass community icon, and beloved teacher and mentor. Along with brother Clarence, just happened to help guide and shape bluegrass music into what it is today. Roland is a humble guy, a real gentleman whose calm personality belies a whip-smart mind and a blazing talent. Patient and gracious, and dare I say it, also rather mischeivious. A guy after my own heart. Marty Stuart said it best when he called Roland a “timeless musical spirit”.
Roland White simply IS bluegrass music.
What’s your idea of perfect happiness?
Well, I would be happy if I could play music until the day I die, with my wife, Diane, and my friends. I have a lot of friends in Nashville who play good music, a lot of good musicians.
What is your greatest fear?
My greatest fear is if I should lose my friends and my loved ones. I don’t fear death, you know. I want my children and my grandchildren, all my relatives, to be safe – no harm to come to them.
What was your first instrument and when did you get it?
Well, my first instrument was actually the guitar. My dad was a musician, an old-time fiddle player, and he had a couple fiddles, maybe two guitars. He was French Canadian, and he had a lot of the French Canadian style too, that he played. One day I came home from school and he had a mandolin. I heard this instrument and I walked into the house and he was playing “Rag Time Annie”, then he played “Soldier’s Joy”. Then when he finished that, I said, “What is that instrument?” And he said, “The mandolin.” I said, “How’d you learn to play it so fast?” He said, “Well, it’s tuned the same as a fiddle, it has frets so you don’t have to guess at your position, and you play it with a flat pick.” He played another tune and then he handed it to me and said, “Here!” Never gave me a lesson or anything and I just started playing it. That was my first instrument – and it was mine. It was an old one with the round bottom, we called them “tater bugs”. That was the first mandolin I had.
What bluegrass event or recording first “blew your mind”?
I went by the music store one day walking home from work after school and I asked the man, “Where can I buy some records?” He sold mostly pianos, organs and sheet music there. But he said, “Well, there’s a catalog here on the counter. What are you looking for?” I was looking for Bill Monroe but I didn’t know any of the names so I pointed out “Pike County Breakdown”. A week or so later, I went in and picked it up. I had seen 45’s but I’d never handled one before. When he handed me that I thought, “How’d he get all that music all on this little disk?” [laughs] Really that’s what I thought!
I took it home. And it just blew us away, it changed our lives. That instrumental just changed our lives, we never heard anybody play so fast.
What blew my mind is that on Christmas evening Bill Monroe was a guest on the Town Hall Party show. It was sold out but we watched them play on the television, and we saw how they did it. By this time I had a couple of Monroe records and we could hear the G run on the guitar but we weren’t sure exactly how it was supposed to go. So Clarence got to see how they did that. And I got to see the mandolin chords, that’s how I learned my mandolin chords, because all I knew were open C, G, D, open A. I didn’t know the chop chords yet. Those two things really blew my mind.
Who are you listening to these days?
A friend sent me a cd of Bill Monroe instrumentals. Really good stuff, all instrumentals that I listen to that in the car. I’ve got some early blues cds, we have a couple of radio shows we listen to, old-time blues, as far back as the 20’s. And a lot of jazz: Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. Thelonious Monk, I love his stuff, ah! All the jazz of that era. We have all of that music. All kinds of jazz. We call it “real” jazz [laughs].
When and where were you the happiest?
Right now! I was happy growing up and everything. But right now I have a lovely wife, great children and great grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and they’re all doing well. I’m just very happy.
