John Herald
John Herald was a guitarist and singer from New York City who sang lead for the Greenbriar Boys, the Greenwich Village band that formed in 1958 and became the first group from the North to win the band contest at the Union Grove Fiddlers’ Convention. After the band broke up in 1970 he made solo records, led the John Herald Band and worked in the Woodstock Mountain Revue.
He was born in Manhattan on 6 September 1939, the son of the Armenian-born poet Leon Srabian Herald, and through his father heard Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie in person. At fifteen he met Pete Seeger at a summer camp concert, and while at the Manumit School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he listened to Don Larkin’s bluegrass program on a New Jersey radio station. By the late 1950s he was one of the Sunday pickers in Washington Square Park with Bob Yellin, Paul Prestopino and Eric Weissberg.
Herald formed the Greenbriar Boys in 1958 with Yellin on banjo, and after early changes on mandolin the group settled as a trio with Ralph Rinzler. They played the Greenwich Village clubs, and at Union Grove Yellin also won the banjo prize. They are credited on two tracks of Joan Baez’s Joan Baez, Vol. 2 (1961) and toured with her. Their Vanguard albums The Greenbriar Boys (May 1962), with Jack Cook on bass and Buddy Pendleton on fiddle on some tracks, on which Herald sings lead over Yellin’s tenor and Rinzler’s baritone, and Ragged but Right! (September 1964) followed; in between they backed the singer Dián James on Elektra’s Dián & the Greenbriar Boys (1963).
When Rinzler left in 1965 the Tennessee mandolinist Frank Wakefield took his place, and the fiddler Jim Buchanan joined. On Better Late Than Never! (Vanguard, November 1966) Herald sang lead on Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum,” its first recording, which the Stone Poneys took into the charts in 1967, and on “Up to My Neck in High Muddy Water,” credited to Wakefield, Herald and Yellin, which the Stone Poneys also released as a single. Wakefield brought the Kentucky singer and guitarist Joe Isaacs into the band by 1968, and the Greenbriar Boys disbanded in 1970, reuniting occasionally in later years.
Herald then played sessions for Vanguard and recorded a solo album, John Herald, for Paramount in 1972. He formed the John Herald Band in Philadelphia in 1976; its first album came out on Bay in 1978, and The Real Thing (Rooster, 1984) has Joe Deetz on banjo, Caroline Dutton on fiddle, Cyndi Cashdollar on Dobro and George Quinn on bass. In 1977 he played guitar and sang on Jody Stecher’s Bay album Going Up on the Mountain, taking the lead on “Wild Bill Jones” and the tenor on the title song and “Golden Vanity.” He also recorded with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt and played with the Woodstock Mountain Revue.
Roll On John, recorded in Scotland in 2000, was his first album in eighteen years; it mixes his own “Hitch Hike Fever” with songs by Merle Travis, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Warren Zevon and the Carlisle Brothers, and its title song, which the Greenbriar Boys had recorded, closes it as a live solo performance. He was working on a new album when he died at his home in West Hurley, New York, in July 2005, at the age of 65. Just Another Bluegrass Boy, drawn from recordings made at Bearsville and in Woodstock from 1983 on, came out the same year.
