Kenny Malone

Kenneth Morton Malone was born in Denver, Colorado, on 4 August 1938, and started on drums at five, after hearing Dixieland music; a drum given to him for Christmas started everything, he said. Four years later he was playing in a marching band sponsored by the Denver Police Department and learning jazz and classical music, and his first idol was Gene Krupa. He enlisted in the Navy at 17, toured with its bands, and eventually directed the percussion department of the Naval School of Music in Virginia Beach.

After fourteen years in the Navy he moved to Nashville in 1970 to work as a studio musician. His first session there was with Carl Perkins, and he soon began working with the producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement. He had to unlearn some habits: used to live performance, he had not known that parts could be overdubbed, and played tambourine and everything else at once until a producer stopped him. From March 1973 he was the drummer and percussionist on Don Williams’s JMI records, in a studio band with the guitarist Jimmy Colvard, the steel player Lloyd Green and the bassist Joe Allen. That year his snare work ran through Parton’s “Jolene,” a No. 1 country hit, and his cymbals and rimshots drove “Drift Away,” a top-ten pop hit for Dobie Gray; in 1977 he played on Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Over the following decades he recorded with Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Kenny Rogers, Emmylou Harris, Bobby Bare, Barbara Mandrell, Dottie West, Ronnie Milsap and Garth Brooks, among many others.

He kept his playing fresh by stepping away from sessions twice early in his career to play only live with a jazz quartet, and when he returned for good he limited himself to two sessions a day instead of the usual three or four. He devised a conga-derived hand-drumming technique, invented a clay drum he called the “og” and a hand-held shaker of metal and wood, and with the bassist Dave Pomeroy formed Tone Patrol, a Nashville quintet that mixed jazz and world music.

His bluegrass and acoustic work spanned four decades. He played drums on J. D. Crowe and the New South’s Somewhere Between (Rounder, 1982), recorded at Bull Run Studios in Nashville with Keith Whitley singing lead, and percussion on John Hartford’s Down on the River (Flying Fish, 1989), cut at Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, and on Hartford & Hartford (Flying Fish, 1991), which John Hartford made with his son Jamie. He added percussion to John McEuen’s String Wizards II (Vanguard, 1993), drums to Alison Krauss and the Cox Family’s gospel album I Know Who Holds Tomorrow (Rounder, 1994) and to IIIrd Tyme Out’s Letter to Home (Rounder, 1995), and drums and percussion to Guy Clark’s live album Keepers (Sugar Hill, 1997), recorded at the Douglas Corner Cafe in Nashville over three nights at the end of October 1996. He also worked with John Prine, Béla Fleck, the New Grass Revival, Ricky Skaggs and the Whites.

Malone died in a Nashville hospital on 26 August 2021, aged 83.