Mitchell Jayne
Mitch Jayne (1928–2010) was the bass player, emcee and one of the songwriters of the Dillards, the Missouri band that moved to Los Angeles in 1962 and played the Darling family on The Andy Griffith Show. He wrote “Dooley” and “There Is a Time” with Rodney Dillard and “The Old Home Place” with Dean Webb, all first recorded by the band for Elektra, and outside music he was a schoolteacher, radio humorist, newspaper columnist and novelist from the Missouri Ozarks.
He was born in Hammond, Indiana, on 5 July 1928. After a spell at the University of Missouri in Columbia he taught in one-room schools in Dent County, Missouri, where he noted down the old words and turns of phrase, some of them going back to Elizabethan English, that his pupils used at home. In Salem he hosted a radio show on KSMO, Hickory Holler Time, whose satire drew attention well beyond the town, among it a “Tick and Snake Market Report” that quoted prices for ticks and snakes the way other stations quoted livestock.
The banjo player Doug Dillard and his brother Rodney, a guitarist, had been playing on KSMO in the late 1950s, and a home recording they made with the mandolin player Dean Webb found its way to Jayne. On a visit to his sister in California in 1961 he caught the interest of a manager, and he went back to Missouri to tell the others that he wanted to learn the bass and join them as their emcee. Webb taught him the instrument, using a tuning he had worked out on country jobs. In the fall of 1962 the four played Washington University in St. Louis, a show later issued on record, and that November they set out for Los Angeles in Webb’s Cadillac. On their first night in the city they sat in at the Ash Grove and were signed by Elektra, and a notice of the signing in Variety led to the Darling family parts on The Andy Griffith Show, six episodes between 1963 and 1966.
Jayne played bass and sang on the band’s three Elektra albums of the 1960s: Back Porch Bluegrass (1963), recorded at World Pacific Studios in Los Angeles with Jim Dickson producing, which introduced “Dooley” and “Old Home Place”; the live Live!!! Almost!!! (1964), recorded at the Mecca in Buena Park, which introduced “There Is a Time” and his “The Whole World Round,” written with Joe Stuart; and Pickin’ and Fiddlin’ (1965), made with the fiddler Byron Berline. He was with the band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963 and on its 1965 Capitol singles, “Ebo Walker” and “The Last Thing on My Mind.” His introductions were a large part of the stage show; he liked to open by telling audiences that the band were hillbillies, in case they had taken them for the Budapest String Quartet.
After Doug Dillard left in 1967, Jayne stayed on through the band’s turn to drums, steel guitar and electric bass. He played on Wheatstraw Suite (1968), recorded at Gold Star Studios with Herb Pedersen on banjo; on Copperfields (1970); on Roots and Branches (Anthem, 1972), recorded at American Recording Studios in Studio City with Billy Ray Latham on banjo; and on Tribute to the American Duck (Poppy), recorded around October 1973 and released in January 1974, which included a new version of “Dooley.” He left the band in 1974.
His first book, Forest in the Wind, appeared in 1966, while he was living in California, and Old Fish Hawk, a novel about an Osage man, followed in 1973 and was filmed in 1979 with Will Sampson. In the late 1970s he went back to Missouri and built a log house near the Mark Twain National Forest. He returned to the Dillards for reunions: in August 1979 he was among the old members and family who gathered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the recordings issued on Flying Fish as Homecoming and Family Reunion, and he later toured with the band in the United States and Europe; in 2002 the Dillards played a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall.
In Missouri he wrote a weekly column, “Driftwood,” for several of the state’s newspapers for twenty years, contributed to the Missouri Conservationist, and with his wife, the artist Diana Jayne, hosted a Sunday evening bluegrass show on KOPN in Columbia. Through the University of Missouri’s Missouri Performing Traditions project he toured the state telling stories of Ozark life, schools and language. Home Grown Stories & Home Fried Lies (2000), illustrated by Diana Jayne, gathered his memories of his pupils’ speech, and his novel Fiddler’s Ghost (2007) won the 2008 Missouri Governor’s Humanities Book Award. In September 2009 he was inducted with the original Dillards into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and played with them at that year’s IBMA awards show. He died in Columbia, Missouri, on 2 August 2010.
