John Pilla

On Southbound, issued by Vanguard in July 1966, Pilla played guitar with Doc Watson, Merle Watson and the bassist Russ Savakus on songs such as “Tennessee Stud,” “Alberta” and “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine.” He played second guitar behind Doc on the instrumental “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and he and Doc played as a duet on “Call of the Road,” “Nothing to It” and “Nashville Pickin’.”

He played guitar on Arlo Guthrie’s second album, Running Down the Road (1969), and on Washington County (1970) played guitar and autoharp and sang harmony, and shared the credit with Guthrie for the album’s version of “Valley to Pray,” besides co-producing the album with Lenny Waronker. He and Waronker produced Hobo’s Lullaby (Reprise, 1972), which contains Guthrie’s version of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans,” Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (1973) and Arlo Guthrie (1974), and Pilla played guitar and took photographs for several of them. He produced Amigo (1976) on his own, recorded at Warner Bros. in North Hollywood, and Outlasting the Blues (Warner Bros., 1979), for which he and Guthrie chose not to use Los Angeles session players and instead recorded at Long View Farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, with Guthrie’s touring band Shenandoah and members of a local string orchestra, from January to March 1979.

John Pilla was born in 1942 and died in 1988.