My bluegrass quest

Since I was 4 years old, I have dreamed of playing in a band.  In high school, I was in a group of square-dance pickers – Bill Brown, Starkey Duncan, Ben Adams, Joe Collier, Fred Beasely, my brother Barney and two others.  After highschool, we went our ways and lost track.  Twenty years later, Bill Brown assembled a group of friends to play a square a dance at Brentwood Academy, where he was headmaster.  At the time, I was trying to learn banjo, which turned out to be the main melodic instrument in his band.

The highlight of the evening was Jerry Reed joining in for a couple of songs.  That band included Bill, his brother Larry, Allen Wallace and me.  Rob, Jonny and Coleman, the singing Harwell boys soon joined, then an extremely talented banjo player, David Hickman, who would be our star.  Tom Shriver and Sam Shannon joined soon thereafter.  Alex Shipley joined later.   In 1976, we were invited to perform a stage show on the War Memorial Plaza for the Bicentennial Arts Celebration.  Riding to that gig, Coleman started talking about a sign in the Union Station that read “Outbound Freight”, and suddenly the band had a name.

The OBF was invited to perform at numerous civic events.  They played the same songs at every gathering, so I sought opportunities to sit in with groups on stage at various Nashville taverns: Dusty Road, Station Inn (the Red and Birdie era), Golden Nugget, Bluegrass Inn, Kindly Keep it Bluegrass, Trinity Lane x Dickerson Rd.  I played with some country pickers in a VFW dance band.  One of them died of a gunshot wound received when wooing a married woman.  One of them had an interest in Nashville’s dirtiest dive, “The Wigwam”, and he dragged us down there a couple of times after VFW gigs.  It was on 3rd Ave next to Cathy’s Massage Parlor on one side and worse on the other.  The 300-pound proprietor was always in overalls, shirtless and seriously malodorous.  He was proud of his ability to draw a pistol out of the cash register if needed.  He often slept the night on a pool table in the back room, parked in the middle, so people wouldn’t fall through the 2'x2' hole, covered also by a rug to keep out varmints and cold.

The Wigwam people asked me to perform in a special event to be filmed for a documentary.  The song was new to me, so I faked my way through it, embarrassingly.  I saw and heard the result for the first time several weeks ago.  The man smoking and drinking in the foreground was Townes VanZandt:  Heartworn Highways.