It was a long time ago when I first heard the Dillards. I don’t know exactly how I first heard of them, but I knew of them long before they were on the Andy Griffith show as the Darlings.
In the early 1960s I was a college student at U. of M. in Ann Arbor, and had been singing and playing guitar with a friend at the girls’ dorms. I constructed a 5-string banjo (which I still have, made in 1962) and was trying to learn to play it. Music was already a strong part of me, and the wonderful sounds of Earl Scruggs and Doug Dillard were calling loudly to me.
Around 1965 I quit college and began working for a living. I bought a Gibson 5-string banjo from a friend (RB-150 “bowtie,” rebuilt beautifully by him), a far better instrument than the one I’d made. With a good banjo on hand it was time to learn to play it, so I acquired Earl Scruggs’ music on several vinyl recordings. I also got the Dillards’ first bluegrass recording, Back Porch Bluegrass. It came out in 1963. Doug Dillard on banjo, Rodney Dillard on guitar, Dean Webb on mandolin, and Mitch Jayne on bass. All of them on vocals. This was GREAT music! Doug was the second-greatest banjo player the world’s ever known. Dean Webb was a WIZARD on the mandolin, matching Doug for picking speed. Fast, clean music, great harmonies, new songs…they had it all. Here’s one tune called “Liberty,” from a live performance. NOTE: This is NOT speeded up:
If that ain’t enough for you, give a listen to a song they wrote (mostly Dean Webb and Mitch Jayne) that is now a bluegrass icon. Called “Old Home Place,” it’s been covered by most bluegrass bands over the past 60 years. Here it is:
In 1964 they came out with Live!!! Almost!!!, which was again traditional-style bluegrass, and I got that one on vinyl too. Over the years I learned quite a few bluegrass tunes on my banjo, starting with “Cripple Creek” by Mr. Scruggs. With time and diligence I was able to learn quite a few of the tunes played by Earl Scruggs and Doug Dillard on their early recordings.
Around the middle of 1969 I moved in with Kim and EB. I had acquired another Dillards album called Wheatstraw Suite, with a slightly different mix of musicians. Doug was no longer with them. We three young men enjoyed that record immensely. It was not bluegrass, but something entirely different…and new. That album became our frequent dinner music, as EB and Kim and Ro (me) ate our gourmet meals and drank our excellent wines. In 1970 I bought the Dillards’ Copperfields, and that became our ALWAYS evening dinner music. And so it remained until I left Ann Arbor for Colorado, back in 1972 or so.
To this day, well over 50 years later, the opening bars of “Copperfields” fill me with peace, and bring back the pleasant times of we three friends seated around a low, circular table in the front room of a certain little house on Division Street, Ann Arbor, with full wine goblets (custom-made by a dear friend of ours), superb food on our plates, and good will for each other as we solved all the world’s problems. For those feelings of peace and all the happy remembrances, my eternal thanks go to the Dillards.
Give a listen…but first, grab your wine glass, fill it with something really good, and sit back in comfort: