Bill Keith

He was born William Bradford Keith in Boston on 20 December 1939. He spent much of his early childhood in San Antonio, Texas, where his father was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, and in 1945 the family settled in Brockton, outside Boston. He had four years of piano lessons, learning chord and scale theory that served him later, and took up the tenor banjo in grade school, playing it in local ragtime groups after hearing the instrumental “Cheyenne” on WWVA from Wheeling. In 1958, his first year at Amherst College, the Weavers’ records sent him to a fifteen-dollar five-string and Pete Seeger’s instruction book, which pointed him on to Earl Scruggs and Don Reno. He set out to learn Scruggs’s breaks note for note, devising his own tablature to transcribe them, and he also listened closely to Allen Shelton of Jim and Jesse’s band and to the Boston banjo player Don Stover.

The idea of playing fiddle melodies exactly came from June Hall, a Nova Scotia fiddler living in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, whom he accompanied on visits home. In the fall of 1959 “Devil’s Dream” became the first fiddle tune he worked out in the new way, and “Sailor’s Hornpipe” followed. Bobby Thompson, Jim and Jesse’s banjo player, had developed his own version of the approach in 1957 and recorded fragments of it on their “Border Ride” (1958) and “Dixie Hoedown” (1959), but Keith worked independently, and his playing gave the style its wide exposure. At Amherst he met Jim Rooney, who had a show on the college radio station; together they heard the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover in Boston, toured south to Asheville and Galax in the summer of 1960, and played Boston’s Club 47 and New York’s Gerde’s Folk City. He graduated in 1961, with a major in French literature, and served in the Air Force Reserve. In September 1962 his “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe” medley won the banjo contest at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and that year he and Rooney recorded Livin’ on the Mountain for Prestige/Folklore, released in 1963 with Joe Val on mandolin. In the fall of 1962 he joined Red Allen, Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians in Washington, D.C., his first professional band job.

Keith had been writing out Scruggs’s breaks in tablature, and when he met Scruggs after a Flatt and Scruggs concert in Baltimore he learned that Scruggs was preparing a banjo instruction book. Scruggs invited him to Nashville early in 1963 to help with it, and backstage at the Grand Ole Opry Keith played his “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe.” Bill Monroe heard him and wanted him in the band, although he had just hired Del McCoury to play banjo; after auditioning both, Monroe moved McCoury to guitar. Keith joined in March 1963, and because there could not be two Bills in the band, Monroe called him “Brad.” Within ten days he was in the Decca studio, and over two sessions he recorded seven pieces with Monroe: “Salt Creek,” “Devil’s Dream,” “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” “Were You There,” “Pike County Breakdown,” “Shenandoah Breakdown” and “Santa Claus.” Times were lean for Monroe, and the band drove from Nashville to Los Angeles and back in a station wagon to play the Ash Grove, but Keith’s playing was the talk of the Opry. He left just before Christmas 1963, after about nine months, because of his obligations to the Air Force Reserve. Early in 1964 he recorded with Red Allen and Frank Wakefield in New York for Folkways’ Bluegrass, where his break on “New Camptown Races” mixed syncopated chord licks with Scruggs runs and short melodic phrases.

Also in 1963, Keith and his friend Dan Bump developed the Keith tuner, a peg that lets a player retune a string between two preset pitches without drilling holes in the peghead, and their Beacon Banjo Company had sold more than 20,000 of them worldwide by 1985. Late in 1964 Keith joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in Boston, with Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Fritz Richmond, and stayed four years. He soon gave up the five-string there for a plectrum-style approach, learning a great deal about chords, and played on the band’s Jug Band Music, See Reverse Side for Title and Garden of Joy. In those years he also took up the pedal steel guitar.

When the jug band broke up in 1968 he played pedal steel in country rock with Ian and Sylvia’s Great Speckled Bird for about a year, then toured with Jonathan Edwards and Judy Collins, playing steel on her True Stories and Other Dreams (1973). He played steel in the Blue Velvet Band with Rooney, Richard Greene and Eric Weissberg on Sweet Moments with the Blue Velvet Band (1969), and in 1973 he was a member of Muleskinner with Peter Rowan, Clarence White, Greene and David Grisman, which made one album and a television appearance released years later as Muleskinner Live. When the producer Joe Boyd offered him “Dueling Banjos” for the film Deliverance, Keith was traveling in Europe and suggested Weissberg, who recorded it instead. In 1970 the family settled in Woodstock, New York, where he played with the Woodstock Mountains Revue.

Through the 1970s and 1980s Keith and Rooney toured the United States and Europe and built a strong following in France, where they recorded the Banjo Paris Session albums. His Rounder album Something Auld, Something Newgrass, Something Borrowed, Something Bluegrass (1976) was recorded at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, outside Washington, in the spring of 1975 with Rooney, Tony Rice, David Grisman, Vassar Clements, Kenny Kosek and Tom Gray. Fiddle Tunes for Banjo (Rounder, 1981) paired him with Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck, and Banjoistics (Rounder, 1984) and Beating Around the Bush (Green Linnet, 1992) followed under his own name. He also recorded with Bill Clifton, on The David Grisman Rounder Album, on Peter Rowan’s The First Whippoorwill and on Richard Greene’s The Grass Is Greener. He taught throughout his career, in private lessons and workshops, as a Frets magazine columnist in the 1970s, and through books and videos for Oak, Mel Bay and Homespun, among them Bluegrass Banjo with Jean Marie Redon, Pedal Steel Guitar with Winnie Winston and Advanced Banjo Workshop with Trischka.

In 2015 Fleck and Trischka hosted a Keith-Style Banjo Summit in his honor at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, and on 1 October 2015, at the IBMA awards in Raleigh, North Carolina, he accepted his induction into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. He died on 23 October 2015 in Bearsville, New York, aged 75. The Beacon Banjo Company passed to his son Martin.