John Hartford

Musician · 1937–2001 · New York, New York · Also a recording artist
Best known for Banjo Songwriter

John Hartford (1937–2001) was a singer, songwriter, banjo player and fiddler who grew up on the Mississippi River at St. Louis and wrote “Gentle on My Mind,” the song that won him two Grammys in 1968 and became a hit for Glen Campbell. His 1971 album Aereo-Plain, made with Vassar Clements, Norman Blake and Tut Taylor, pointed the way to what came to be called newgrass, and in his last decades he turned to old-time fiddling and the music of the river. He was elected to the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2010.

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He was born John Cowan Harford in New York City on 30 December 1937 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where he fell for two things early: music and the river. He heard the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, and hearing Earl Scruggs, he said, changed his life. By thirteen he was playing old-time fiddle and banjo, and he soon added guitar and mandolin. He took his first job on the river at sixteen and played in his first bluegrass band while still at John Burroughs School. After four years of commercial art at Washington University he went into music full time, working as a disc jockey, playing in local bands and making the odd single for small St. Louis labels.

In 1965 he moved to Nashville, and the next year Chet Atkins signed him to RCA Victor and persuaded him to add a “t” to his surname. His first RCA session was at the label’s Nashville studio on 22 April 1966, with Felton Jarvis producing, and the sessions that spring became John Hartford Looks at Life. On 3 February 1967, again with Jarvis, he recorded “Gentle on My Mind,” a song he had written after seeing the film Doctor Zhivago, for his second album, Earthwords & Music. Glen Campbell heard Hartford’s record on the radio and cut his own version. At the Grammy Awards in 1968 the song won four awards, two of them Hartford’s: Best Country & Western Song as its writer and Best Folk Performance for his own recording. Hartford often said that the song had bought him his freedom.

In 1968 he went to Los Angeles. In March of that year he played banjo and fiddle on the Byrds’ Nashville sessions for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, taking over the banjo part on “Pretty Boy Floyd” from Roger McGuinn, and he became a regular on CBS’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and then on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. He kept recording for RCA through 1970, in Nashville and at its Hollywood studio, on The Love Album, Housing Project, John Hartford and Iron Mountain Depot. Offered the lead in a television detective series, he turned it down and moved back to Nashville.

Signed to Warner Bros., he recorded Aereo-Plain in the spring of 1971 at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville, co-producing with David Bromberg. Hartford sang and played fiddle and banjo, with Norman Blake on guitar and mandolin, Tut Taylor on Dobro, Vassar Clements on fiddle, viola and cello and Randy Scruggs on bass, and the album included “Steam Powered Aereo-Plane,” “Steamboat Whistle Blues” and “Turn Your Radio On.” Its mix of bluegrass instruments, long hair and loose playing reached a young audience that traditional bluegrass had not, and Sam Bush, who first jammed with the band at Bean Blossom that year, later said that without it there would have been no newgrass. The follow-up, Morning Bugle, was cut around October 1972 at Bearsville, New York, as a trio with Blake and the jazz bassist Dave Holland.

From 1975 he recorded for Flying Fish. Mark Twang, made at the Soundshop in Nashville with Michael Melford producing, was a set of river songs such as “The Julia Belle Swain,” “Let Him Go On Mama” and “Long Hot Summer Days,” with Hartford alone on banjo, fiddle and guitar, keeping time by tapping his feet on an amplified sheet of plywood. It won the Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording in 1977, and that one-man show became his stage act for years. Nobody Knows What You Do (1976) brought in Mac Wiseman and Sam Bush, and he made two albums with Doug and Rodney Dillard, Glitter Grass from the Nashwood Hollyville Strings (1977) and Permanent Wave (1981). He earned his steamboat pilot’s licence and spent summers piloting the Julia Belle Swain on her afternoon runs and playing for the passengers at night. In January 1983 he sang and played banjo with Bill Monroe on “Old Riverman,” and the next year Jack Clement produced Gum Tree Canoe, with Marty Stuart, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Mark O’Connor among the players. Also in 1984 came a Rounder trio album with Vassar Clements and Dave Holland, and Clement produced Annual Waltz for MCA in 1986. Down on the River (Flying Fish, 1989) introduced the Hartford String Band, with Mark Howard, Roy Huskey Jr. and the fiddlers Holly O’Dell and Jonathan Yudkin.

In 1991 he started his own label, Small Dog a’Barkin’, and recorded for it with his son Jamie and with Mark Howard before moving to Rounder. His later records looked back to older country and fiddle music: Wild Hog in the Red Brush (1996) and The Speed of the Old Long Bow (1998), a set of fiddle tunes from the West Virginia fiddler Ed Haley, whose life he had been researching for a book; Retrograss (1999) with David Grisman and Mike Seeger; and Good Old Boys (1999) with the Hartford String Band. He played and narrated for Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. In 2000 he recorded “Indian War Whoop” and an instrumental “Man of Constant Sorrow” for T Bone Burnett’s soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and toured with the Down from the Mountain concerts that grew out of it. The soundtrack was the IBMA’s Album of the Year in 2001 and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002, and the IBMA gave its 2002 Album of the Year award to the Down from the Mountain concert album. His last studio album, Hamilton Ironworks, a set of fiddle tunes cut in Durham, North Carolina, in August 2000 with Jamie Hartford, Bob Carlin, Mike Compton and Larry Perkins, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

Hartford died in Nashville on 4 June 2001, aged 63. He had filled 68 spiral-bound notebooks with fiddle tunes of his own over the last twenty years of his life, and in 2018 his daughter Katie Hartford Hogue, the fiddler Matt Combs and Greg Reish of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, where the notebooks were scanned, published 176 of them as John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes. The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol. 1, produced by Combs and Hogue, followed in 2020 and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and Julia Belle: The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol. 2, made with an all-woman cast including Rachel Baiman, Brittany Haas, Missy Raines and Alison Brown, came out in February 2025. Sam Bush, who had opened shows for him with New Grass Revival in the 1970s, recorded Radio John: Songs of John Hartford for Smithsonian Folkways in 2022.

  • 1968: Grammy Awards for Best Country & Western Song and Best Folk Performance, “Gentle on My Mind”
  • 1977: Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording, Mark Twang
  • 2001: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
  • 2001: IBMA Album of the Year, as a contributor to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack
  • 2002: Grammy Award for Album of the Year, as a contributor to O Brother, Where Art Thou?; IBMA Album of the Year, as a contributor to Down from the Mountain
  • 2010: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame

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