Dean Webb
Dean Webb was the mandolin player of the Dillards, from the band’s beginnings in Missouri through its records of the early 1990s, and with them he played one of the Darling family on The Andy Griffith Show. He co-wrote “The Old Home Place” with the band’s bassist, Mitch Jayne, and was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame with the Dillards in 2009.
He was born Roy Dean Webb on 28 March 1937 in Independence, Missouri, near Kansas City, and grew up in a family that played music: an uncle played Texas swing on the Brush Creek Follies, and his cousins already played bluegrass on banjo, guitar and fiddle. As a teenager he heard Bill Monroe’s fast remake of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” bought a 1950s Gibson A-50 mandolin and joined his cousins, soon trading up to a new Gibson F-5. His first paying jobs, though, were on the upright bass, which he taught himself to play country music in the honky-tonks of the rural Midwest.
By the early 1960s he was playing mandolin with Lonnie Hoppers and the Ozark Mountain Boys, a band working out of Hermitage, Missouri, with regular television spots in Springfield and Joplin. Through the musicians around Lee Mace’s Ozark Opry he met the brothers Doug and Rodney Dillard, and he added mandolin and bass to home recordings they made in St. Louis; Varèse Sarabande issued them in 2006. When Mitch Jayne joined on bass, Webb taught him the instrument, using a tuning he had worked out on his country jobs. The four played Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 1962 and in November set off for Los Angeles in a 1955 Cadillac, paying their way with two months of shows at the Buddhi Club in Oklahoma City.
On their first night in Los Angeles they went to the Ash Grove, where Webb recognized the Greenbriar Boys’ Ralph Rinzler from a photograph and started a conversation; the Greenbriars invited them onstage, and Elektra Records signed them. On the band’s Elektra albums, Back Porch Bluegrass (1963), Live!!! Almost!!! (1964) and Pickin’ & Fiddlin’ (1965), Webb played mandolin and sang harmony, and “Old Home Place” was first recorded on the first of them. An Elektra notice in Variety led to the Darling family parts on The Andy Griffith Show, six episodes beginning in 1963; the first was filmed in February that year. The music was recorded in a studio, where Webb played his F-5, but for the cameras he held older-looking Gibson F-2 and F-4 mandolins.
Los Angeles brought other work. In 1963 he played bass, with the Dillard brothers and Glen Campbell on twelve-string guitar, on the World Pacific instrumental album 12 String Guitar/Folk Blues and Blue Grass, credited to the Folkswingers. During a stop at World Pacific Studios he found the Byrds struggling with the harmonies for “Mr. Tambourine Man”; at the producer Jim Dickson’s request he sang tenor and then baritone onto a tape behind Roger McGuinn’s lead, and the band learned their parts from it. Around the same time he and Doug Dillard filled in for Bill Monroe when a bus breakdown held up two Blue Grass Boys, with Webb on bass choosing “The First Whip-poor-will” as his feature.
When Doug left and Herb Pedersen took the banjo, Webb stayed for Wheatstraw Suite (1968), which includes his song “Hey Boys,” and Copperfields (1969), albums he later said had a bit of “sweetening”. He played on Roots and Branches (1972) and Tribute to the American Duck (1973), on Doug Dillard’s solo album You Don’t Need a Reason to Sing (1974), on The Dillards vs. the Incredible L.A. Time Machine (Flying Fish, 1977) and on Mountain Rock, recorded at Crystal Clear Studios in Berkeley in January 1979 with Pedersen back on banjo and Ray Park on fiddle. He was at the band’s homecoming in Salem in August 1979, issued as Homecoming & Family Reunion, and he stayed through the albums the band made from Branson: a 1984 record for Silver Dollar City, Let It Fly (Vanguard, 1990) and Take Me Along for the Ride (Vanguard, 1992). The original four reunited for shows in 1988 and toured again in the 1990s, and they played Carnegie Hall in 2002.
In 2009 he formed Missouri Boatride, a Branson band with Justin Sifford on guitar, Larry Sifford on bass, Bob Gideon on banjo and Dennis Pritchard on fiddle, and he was still playing with them in 2012. That same year, 2009, all four original Dillards were present when the band entered the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame at the IBMA awards show in Nashville. Webb died on 30 June 2018 in Branson West, Missouri, aged 81. His playing has been cited as what led Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones to take up the mandolin, and in 2022 the Dillards were inducted into the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame.
