Norman Blake

He got his first guitar at about eleven. Roy Acuff’s records, with Brother Oswald’s Dobro on them, and those of the Carter Family were early influences, and a cousin nearby who played fiddle, guitar and banjo gave him his first chance to play with other people. After some five years of playing alone or with relatives he left school at sixteen to play mandolin with the Dixie Drifters, a bluegrass and rockabilly group led by Ronald and Donald Everett. The band was heard on WNOX in Knoxville and the Tennessee Barn Dance, had a television program on WROM-TV in Rome, Georgia, and recorded for Sun.

In 1960 he joined Hylo Brown’s Timberliners, based in Wheeling, West Virginia, and heard on WWVA. His first studio session, for Capitol, came with that band; its four songs went unissued until a Bear Family reissue in 1992. The Army then took him from 1961 to 1963, as a radio operator in the Panama Canal Zone, and off duty he played mandolin and fiddle in the Fort Kobbe Mountaineers.

Back in Tennessee he taught as many as 150 guitar students a week, recorded Twelve Shades of Bluegrass with banjoist Bob Johnson’s Lonesome Travelers, and toured with June Carter. Through her he met Johnny Cash, and from the fall of 1963 he played on many of Cash’s Columbia albums, starting with I Walk the Line; he later appeared on Cash’s network television program, which ran from 1969 to 1971. The Cash connection led to more Nashville session work in the middle and late 1960s, including an appearance on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and in 1970 and 1971 he toured and recorded with Kris Kristofferson and Joan Baez.

In 1971 he joined John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain band, also known as the Dobrolic Plectral Society, with fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobro player Tut Taylor, and took part in the Aereo-Plain album; when that band broke up he stayed on with Hartford and recorded Morning Bugle in 1972. In August 1971 he had also added Dobro to seven tracks of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s three-album set Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which earned him a gold album.

Working alongside Kristofferson and Hartford set him to writing songs. At the end of 1971 he recorded his first solo album, Home in Sulphur Springs, named for his boyhood home in Georgia, and despite very limited distribution it sold 30,000 copies. He gave his first solo performance in 1972, and that fall he became a musical consultant and Wednesday-night performer at the Old Time Picking Parlor in Nashville. In 1973 he joined Red, White & Blue(grass), a progressive bluegrass band from Atlanta, and gave its first album two of his compositions, “Ginseng Sullivan” and “Johnson’s Crook.” Other bands took up his songs as well: the New Grass Revival recorded “Ginseng Sullivan,” and the Seldom Scene put “Last Train from Poor Valley” on Act II.

Nancy Short joined his act on cello in 1974, and the two married in 1975; they have been billed since as Norman and Nancy Blake. In 1979 they added fiddler James Bryan to form the Rising Fawn String Ensemble. Through the 1970s he recorded for Rounder, Flying Fish, Takoma and County, with albums including Fields of November (Flying Fish, 1974), Whiskey Before Breakfast (Rounder, 1976) and Live at McCabe’s (Takoma, 1976). A multi-album contract with Rounder in 1979 kept him on that label through the following decade, for two Rising Fawn String Ensemble albums, the solo records Original Underground Music From the Mysterious South, Nashville Blues and Lighthouse on the Shore, and Blind Dog, billed to Norman and Nancy Blake.

Near the end of the 1980s he made two albums for Rounder with guitarist Tony Rice, Blake & Rice (1987) and Blake & Rice 2 (1990). In the 1990s the Blakes released a series of projects on Shanachie, and he made several instructional and concert videos, among them Norman Blake’s Guitar Techniques. BMI credits him with about 200 published compositions, co-compositions and arrangements, “Fields of November,” “Green Light on the Southern” and “Last Train from Poor Valley” among them, and his playing is heard on the soundtracks of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, Inside Llewyn Davis and Walk the Line.