My daddy and Curtis Blackwell and Haskell, Curtis’s brother, got started in this business when they done a contest with all of the radio stations all over the United States. The PET milk company out of Nashville, Tennessee, did a talent search and hosted the show. It’s kinda like American Idol is today to your new music. Back then, it was for your country, bluegrass, and that type of music. Bluegrass music wasn’t perceived like it is today. Now it’s all a music on its own, whereas back then it was combined with country. Daddy, Curtis, and Haskel won first place nationally in that PET milk contest in 1960, then they got their first shot to go to Nashville and play at the Grand Ole Opry. When they played at the Opry in 1960, it was as big as being on a national television show today. Radio used to be like television is today, and the Grand Ole Opry was the biggest thing on the radio. I remember I was three and living down on Warwoman when Daddy performed on the Opry. I can still remember how much it changed our lives, just them making that one appearance on the Opry. When they played the Opry, that really set them on fire in the music business. Curtis at that time wasn’t but eighteen years old, so he was young. Their band didn’t stay together, so Daddy went on to play with other groups.
I’d say the other most successful group in that era would have been the Chestine Brothers. They were actually nephew and uncle, but that was their name. I think Daddy told me that the first time he ever met those guys he was doing some kinda little show out there at the old high school gym, which is now the civic center in Clayton, and those two boys come that night, and that’s how they struck up a friendship and started in the music business together. They done a lot of stuff together for several years and even up till Daddy got disabled and quit playing and being on the road, so they all played together up till about eight or ten years ago.
PLATE 57 “We’ve traveled coast to coast.” Wayne and Josh, the Crowe Brothers
Today I could go play the Grand Ole Opry ten times this summer, and y’all would never know it unless it was on our website or they televised it, but the Grand Ole Opry, to our music, is still the stage you want to make it to. In country and bluegrass music, that stage is your ultimate goal. It’s not that you make that much money playing the Opry like they used to. People used to make a living by playing the Opry, if they were a member. In today’s time a country music star’s used to making half a million to a million dollars a night in these big coliseums and things, so even if they’re a member of the Opry, they can’t afford to give up a million-dollar show to go do something that’s going to pay ’em maybe four hundred dollars for the night.
The Opry served its purpose. It still does for people like us, the bluegrass people that are still able to play there. It gives you clout that you otherwise wouldn’t have in the music business. That’s the way I see the Opry today for us. We started playing there in March of ’78. The Grand Ole Opry changed our whole music career all through the eighties. Having that kinda clout does things for ya that you otherwise wouldn’t get done. Just being able to say, “Well, I’ve done the Opry so many years or was a guest on the Opry,” helps your career. I can remember hearing all the country music stars when I was growing up back in the sixties and seventies, and a lot of them’s dead and gone now, but you sit around and think about how you want to meet these people, and you just crave getting to meet ’em. In our career we not only get to meet ’em, but become great friends with ’em. I go to their house and sit down and talk to ’em just like we’re talking now because we’ve become that kinda friends.
Roy Acuff, when he died out, it changed the whole scope of Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry, and just everything about Nashville. It definitely changed our career in the sense that the whole Opry itself changed, the personnel, everything. So it’s not like it used to be. It’s still a great thing to be there, and I wouldn’t want to see it gone, by no means, because it still means too much to our business. I think bluegrass has roots in the Opry. People like us or others in bluegrass go there, and the Opry means something to us.
I’ve played on shows and with people who were my idols when I was a kid. I never thought I’d grow up and work with these people. Money can’t buy that stuff. You can be a millionaire, but it can’t buy you the experiences you’ve had. If I had an idol in the music business, that would have been Ira Louvin with The Louvin Brothers. I like the ol’ brother-style duet stuff, and that was even before Wayne and I started singing. I was twelve years old before I ever heard the first Louvin Brothers album because we didn’t have access to music like kids do today. I was at somebody else’s house spending the weekend when I got to hear that album. They just happened to have those ol’ records laying around, and he told me that he had something he thought I’d like. That changed my whole way of looking at duet music.
I remember the first thing that we ever did that I got paid money for [laughs] was there in Clayton where there used to be a Belk’s [Belk department store] up on Main Street. They had a grand opening or something there when I probably wasn’t but about eight, maybe, just really learning to chord and strum on the guitar. Wayne was already playing guitar. Our daddy had taught us how to play, and he took us that night to Main Street. I remember they paid me about eleven bucks.
The guitar’s my main instrument. I’ve done a lot of mandolin playing and bass playing. We started here in the Stompin’ Ground in ’82. In the fall of that year, a television production group come here and filmed a pilot show for the Fire on the Mountain program. They took it to Nashville, and The Nashville Network bought ’em out and started doing the filming. David Holt was the host of that show.
I have two boys, Quentin and Shelton. They are both musicians. Quentin took Wayne’s place with us there for a good little bit, and also Wayne’s son, Shane, did the same thing for a little while. For a long time, I called my group the Josh Crowe Band. In ’93 I teamed up with David McLaughlin out of Winchester, Virginia, and we worked together for about five years as Crowe and McLaughlin. Both of us still had things going on individually, too. That was a good five years with him and one of the best recordings that I ever did in the music business.
Wayne wanted to take a break and quit for a while because of all the traveling and not being at home. We’d come in a lot on Sunday night or Monday morning, wash our clothes, get ready, leave out again on Wednesday or Thursday, and be gone again. I remember that both of my boys were born in Clayton at the old hospital. Quentin, my youngest son, was born at four twenty in the morning. I was there but had to leave at eight that morning, and we was gone for two weeks. We were in Ohio doing two weekends back to back, so we couldn’t come home. That was the most miserable two weeks I’ve ever spent in my life. I said, “No more,” after that. I wouldn’t do what we did that week again.
We’ve traveled coast to coast, and David and I did some overseas things, over in Ireland and Mexico and a few other places. When we went to Ireland, we flew into Dublin, and we were about sixty miles out of Dublin in a little ol’ town where they were having this festival. Rabun County, our home, looks a lot like Ireland; the mountains are just a little higher here. It reminds me more of when you go up into Kentucky, you’re kinda in the hills, the real lush green pastures and rolling hills; that’s what it reminded me of.
I write quite a bit of our stuff. The rest of it comes from people that send us songs and different songwriters that pitch us some of their songs. The record companies want their bands to do some new material, but also do some recognizable songs, too. Some fans will let the companies know that they want to hear the same traditional songs, but they want the Crowe Brothers’ version. It’s just like Christmas songs. Every group does all the same Christmas songs because their fans want those songs, but by their favorite artists. That’s the way that record companies look at that kinda stuff, but new material is a must-have, too. Even if it’s somebody that is unknown sending you songs, you are always interested because the best song that you’ve ever recorded might be one of them that some nobody is sending you.
It’s ki
nda hard to say what the turning point for bluegrass was because there’s a lot of different turning points for it. Business-wise, to bring bluegrass to being just a type of music where you go out and play festivals, I think the International Bluegrass Music Association in Nashville and the record companies has got a sense of what they had to do in order to commercialize this music to a certain extent, and they’ve helped it in that sense more than anything I’ve seen. You can count almost on five fingers how many times that bluegrass really got a peak, and then it’d come back down. Movie-wise, it would be Deliverance. Although it was bad on one hand, it was good for bluegrass music because now if someone hears the banjo, that’s what they are reminded of. So that was good publicity. Even though a lot of people perceive the locals there in Rabun County to be that way [that was depicted in the movie], and we know that’s very well not true, but that still put bluegrass on the national map, just like Earl Scruggs did on that movie Bonnie and Clyde, when he played the “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and the more recent O Brother, Where Art Thou? has done to bring it back to the front lately. Steve Martin has done a lot to promote bluegrass. We’ve all seen a lot out of him this past year, but he’s no better of a banjo player than some of these other guys out here; some of them are probably better than he is, but he’s got that movie-star status to go along with being a good banjo player. He is good at what he does and has been for years, so with him coming in, he took bluegrass to another level that some other groups wouldn’t have been able to. His playing put him on the Jay Leno show, the Letterman show, and the list goes on, but without having that movie-star status, any other group’s not going to get on those shows that he did.
Bluegrass has definitely had its ups and downs, but a true bluegrass fan will always be a bluegrass fan. As we travel all over the country, we find the crowds are different everywhere we go. You get down in Alabama and Mississippi, and down in there, you get more in the Bible Belt area. There’s a show out in Mississippi that we played at called the Legends [of Bluegrass] Festival, and there’s two or three thousand people sittin’ there, but it’s the oldest crowd that I think I’ve played for [laughs]. There was fifty percent of them either on a walking cane or wheelchair, but they enjoyed the music to death. Then, the more you go north up into New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and around in there, then your crowd will start mixing up, and you’ll get more of the young people coming out. It’s really always been older folks in this part of the country, though. It’d be eighty percent is older, and then you may have a few young people if their parents or grandparents brought ’em. It’s one of those things of if they like it, they like it, and if they don’t, they’ll never be back [laughs].
The best thing that’s happened to our music here in the last few years is SiriusXM Radio. I don’t say that because they’ve really been good to us, as opposed to the bluegrass charts and some of these other things, but because it’s a good thing. There’s two things that’s happened in the past couple of years that I’ve never seen happen as long as I’ve been in this business. First, I’ve got paid more royalties than I’ve ever got paid. I’m not talking about a few hundred dollars; I’m talking about in the thousands of dollars. The other thing is that when I’m out settin’ up for these shows or festivals somewhere, a lot of people come up to you and say, “I want to buy your new album that’s got your hit song on it.” That’s never happened in bluegrass before, not with me anyway. That’s started happening because people’s hearing the music every day. I’ll always have people come and tell us that they’ve seen us on different television shows and heard us on different radio stations.
PLATE 58 “A true bluegrass fan will always be a bluegrass fan.” The Crowe Brothers following a concert, spending time with young admirers
We’ve had a lot of funny things that have happened to us over the years. There’s some things that I could tell ya and some things that I probably can’t [laughs]. We was going one day to Cleveland, Ohio, and it was back in the early eighties. We’d actually borrowed a van that my daddy had to travel up there in. I didn’t have nothing that we needed to drive that far, and Raymond’s rig was tore up, so we borrowed this van from Daddy. All up through Kentucky we had nothing but problems out of it. We had a water pump go out and everything else possible. All night long we worked on that van. We was stopping in garages here and there the whole way. Finally, right above Lexington, Kentucky, it was just coming daylight, and we had a bed in it. Wayne was back there asleep, I was driving, and Raymond was sittin’ in the passenger seat. It was one of those ol’ vans that when you raise the doghouse thing in the middle you was looking right down on the motor. Well, when Raymond raised that, there was a flame that shot right up to the ceiling [laughs]! We pulled into a rest area there, and it was absolutely pouring the rain. Wayne woke up and come outside in his socks in that deep water. We’s unloadin’ everything we had out of that van. He didn’t know what was going on. Finally, we got the fire out. We sat there for eight hours, and a guy we knew in Columbus, Ohio, was actually the engineer on a recording session we done with Raymond back in about ’76 for Rural Rhythm Records. Well, he and his wife came all the way from Columbus to Georgetown, Kentucky, picked us up, and took us back to Columbus. We rented a car and went on to do our show in Cleveland and somewhere else we had to be. Then another buddy of ours that was in the music business up there that was also a mechanic brought us and everything we thought we was going to have to have all the way back to Georgetown. He fixed all the wires and everything on that ol’ van, and we drove it back home. They’s lots of them old stories like that, some of them I’ve tried to forget over the years [laughs]. They’re funny now, but they sure weren’t then.
Right now, we are on the road about thirty dates a year. Playing thirty dates a year means that you’re probably on the road for sixty to ninety days. That don’t sound like a bunch, but it is if you’re out there doing it. When you look at the way things have been, Wayne and I are lucky to even be back in this business with all the talent that’s in it, and much less to have done what we’ve done in the last year and a half. It’s kinda mind-boggling to me that we could even throw our hat back in the ring and hit anywhere close. There’s just some great young kids, young bands, and a lot of things going on out there. It’s a hard time, but it’s a good time.
The Crowe Brothers’ music is available at www.crowebrothers.com.
A Story and a Song
~David Holt~
I have known David Holt for many, many years—not personally, but through his music and his many connections to Foxfire. When The Foxfire Boys, students in George Reynolds’s Foxfire music class, were just starting out as a band, they were graciously invited by David to perform on his program, Fire on the Mountain. What a treat it was to have our young students performing on such a terrific program. It gave them a wealth of experience in live performance and one they’ll never forget. Many years have passed since then, but when we decided on a music section for this anniversary edition, I just knew that David needed to be included. When our museum curator, Barry Stiles, told me that David would be performing with Doc Watson in nearby Franklin, North Carolina, I seized the opportunity to have our editors interview him, and I personally contacted him to see if he (and Doc) were willing. David immediately agreed, for which we were so thankful, and he spent a good deal of his personal time in helping us write his story—valuable and limited time, as he was traveling and performing. Unfortunately, after all the years of giving interviews for TV and radio and national magazines, Doc preferred not to give yet one more interview! We were proud to honor that wish, but Sheri Thurmond and her dad, William, sure enjoyed the performance of both of these great musicians that evening in Franklin after David’s interview. Just as Foxfire students continue to preserve a part of our Appalachian culture through oral history interviews, David has spent years of his life preserving our wonderful mountain music, as related in this short biography.
Every young man dreams of a life of adventure. In 1968, D
avid Holt found his life’s journey in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. With a passion to become an old-time banjo player, David traveled to remote mountain communities like Kingdom Come, Kentucky, and Sodom Laurel, North Carolina, searching for the best traditional musicians. Holt found hundreds of old-time mountaineers with a wealth of folk music, stories, and wisdom. There were banjoist Wade Mainer, ballad singer Dellie Norton, singing coal miner Nimrod Workman, and 122-year-old washboard player Susie Brunson. Holt learned to play not only banjos but also many unusual instruments like the mouth bow, the bottleneck slide guitar, and even the paper bag.
For over three decades, David’s passion for traditional music and culture has fueled a successful performing and recording career. He has earned four Grammy Awards and performed and recorded with many of his mentors, including Doc Watson, Grandpa Jones, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, and Chet Atkins. Today he tours the country performing solo, with Doc Watson, and with his band, the Lightning Bolts. David Holt is a musician, storyteller, historian, television host, and entertainer, dedicated to performing and preserving traditional American music and stories. Holt plays ten acoustic instruments and has released numerous recordings of traditional mountain music and southern folktales.
We appreciate David’s efforts toward the documentation and preservation of our traditional music and are honored to include him here with Curtis Blackwell and the many others who have continued throughout the years to carry on the tradition—a tradition that we are grateful for having younger folks like The Foxfire Boys and Mountain Faith to continue for many years to come.
—Ann Moore
I grew up in central Texas, where I saw some traditional music and lots of traditional storytelling. The only traditional instrument in the Holt family was a pair of wooden rhythm bones made by my great-great-grandfather in the 1850s. My grandfather and father played the bones and taught me when I was a child. It opened my ears to unusual kinds of music and made me realize early on that there are other kinds of music besides pop music.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 27