Frank Wakefield

He was born Franklin Delano Wakefield on 26 June 1934 in Emory Gap, Tennessee, about thirty-five miles from Knoxville, into a large family of musicians: his mother sang old songs, his father played guitar, and most of his twelve sisters and his brother played as well. He started on harmonica at about eight and learned guitar and steel guitar before taking up the mandolin at seventeen, on a round-backed “tater bug,” learning first from his brother-in-law Otis Shearer and then from the records of Jesse McReynolds and Bill Monroe. The family had moved to Dayton in 1950, and in 1951 he and his brother Ralph, as the Wakefield Brothers, made their first radio appearances on WHIO, playing gospel and old-time music. That same year Red Allen heard him playing on a porch in Dayton, and with the banjo player Noah Crase they formed the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, who worked the city’s taverns. He also worked for spells with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys.

In 1956 he went to Detroit to play with Marvin Cobb, and in April 1957 the small Wayside label issued his first record, credited to Frank Wakefield and Marvin Cobb, with his mandolin instrumental “New Camptown Races” on one side; a second Wayside single, with Buster Turner, followed that December. Back in Dayton in 1959 he and Allen made a BMC single as the Red Heads, and in 1960 he moved east to Baltimore, with Allen following to the Washington area, where they formed the Kentuckians. In Washington he met Bill Monroe, who heard him copying his records and told him to find a style of his own, and he gave mandolin lessons, among others to the young David Grisman. With Allen he recorded for Starday in Nashville in November 1961, with Don Reno and Chubby Wise; taped the home sessions later issued as The Kitchen Tapes in Hyattsville, Maryland, in April 1963; and cut Rebel singles at Pete Kuykendall’s Wynwood studio, including “Little Birdie” and his own instrumentals “Musician’s Waltz” and “Rondo,” issued under his name. On 21 September 1963 the Kentuckians played the Sing Out! concert at Carnegie Hall. The Folkways LP Bluegrass (1964) has Wakefield singing most of the duet leads, with Allen on tenor, and two more of his instrumentals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip.”

The partnership with Allen ended by the end of 1964, and in 1965, after a Silver Belle single produced by Grisman and Peter Siegel, Wakefield moved to New York to replace Ralph Rinzler in the Greenbriar Boys, alongside John Herald, Bob Yellin and the fiddler Jim Buchanan. His mandolin and southern lead and harmony singing are on their Vanguard album Better Late Than Never (1966), which included “Up to My Neck in High Muddy Water,” credited to Wakefield, Herald and Yellin, and he brought the Kentucky singer and guitarist Joe Isaacs into the group by 1968. In these years he began composing classical mandolin sonatas and arranging classical pieces for bluegrass instruments, and he appeared with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1967 and as a guest with the Boston Pops in 1968. The Greenbriar Boys disbanded in 1970.

On his own from 1970, he reunited with Allen for an album recorded in New York in April 1971 and issued in Japan in 1976. In November 1971 he recorded Frank Wakefield (Rounder 0007, 1972) with Country Cooking, a band that included Tony Trischka, Pete Wernick, Russ Barenberg, John Miller and Kenny Kosek; it carried two of his “Jesus Loves His Mandolin Player” pieces, a numbered series he kept adding to. In January 1975, in San Diego, Jerry Garcia produced sessions for Frank Wakefield and the Good Ol’ Boys, with David Nelson on guitar, Don Reno on banjo, Pat Campbell on bass, Chubby Wise on fiddle and Garcia singing harmony on one track, issued as Pistol Packin’ Mama (Round, 1976); Flying Fish released a second Good Ol’ Boys album in 1977. He toured with Garcia and with the New Riders of the Purple Sage and opened shows for the Grateful Dead. Around 1980 he recorded End of the Rainbow for Bay in Berkeley, with Kathy Kallick, Keith Little and Darol Anger, and an album for Takoma, and from 1989 he toured with the Frank Wakefield Band.

His stage talk, in which he deliberately turned words and sentences around and which he called “backing talkwards,” became part of his act. In 1999 he was one of the eight mandolinists, with Sam Bush, Grisman, Ronnie McCoury, Jesse McReynolds, Bobby Osborne, Ricky Skaggs and Buck White, on Grisman’s Acoustic Disc set Bluegrass Mandolin Extravaganza, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and Grisman said of him that he “split the bluegrass mandolin atom.” Later albums for Patuxent included Midnight on the Mandolin (2000), Don’t Lie to Me (2003) and Ownself Blues (2009), with a new “New Camptown Races,” a “Theme and Variations in D” and a movement from a Bach lute suite. He died at his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, on 26 April 2024, at eighty-nine.