Rodney Dillard

He grew up with Doug on a family farm in the Ozarks, near Salem, Missouri, without running water or electricity, and the brothers played music with family and friends, among them a teenage John Hartford. As the Dillard Brothers they made home recordings in 1958 and 1959, some with Hartford, and performed on a St. Louis radio station; in 1960, as the Dixie Ramblers, Rodney sang and played guitar and Dobro on a K-Ark single of “Banjo in the Hollow.” Dean Webb came in on mandolin after Rodney traded him banjo lessons for a dog, and Mitch Jayne, who hosted a radio show in Salem, joined on bass and as the band’s emcee. Rodney left college after a year to play music full time.

In the fall of 1962 the four played Washington University in St. Louis, a show Rodney produced as a recording, and then drove to Los Angeles, working a club in Oklahoma City on the way when their money ran out. At the Ash Grove they were invited to play and were signed by Elektra, and an Elektra notice in Variety brought an audition for The Andy Griffith Show, where they played the Darlings in six episodes; they reprised the parts in Return to Mayberry in 1986. On the band’s Elektra albums, Back Porch Bluegrass (1963), Live!!! Almost!!! (1964) and Pickin’ & Fiddlin’ (1965), Rodney sang and played guitar and Dobro; he sang on the first recording of Webb and Jayne’s “Old Home Place,” and he wrote or co-wrote “There Is a Time,” “Dooley,” “The Darlin’ Boys” and “Ebo Walker.” The band played the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963 and the New York folk clubs, where Bill Cosby and Pat Paulsen opened for them.

After Doug left in 1967, Herb Pedersen took the banjo chair, and Rodney and Jimmy Hilton produced Wheatstraw Suite at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, with Rodney on guitar, Dobro and steel guitar and Buddy Emmons, Joe Osborn and the drummers Toxey French and Jim Gordon added. Some bluegrass listeners objected, and the band is credited with helping set the stage for country rock; in the early 1970s Rodney’s Laurel Canyon home gave room and board to younger musicians on that scene. He produced the band’s Tribute to the American Duck, recorded around October 1973, and, with Don Gallese, its 1977 Flying Fish album, and he recorded two Flying Fish albums with Doug and John Hartford, in 1976 and around 1980.

He settled near Branson, Missouri. In 1984 the Dillards, with Steve Cooley on banjo, Webb on mandolin and Beverly Cotten-Dillard on banjo, recorded an album for Silver Dollar City, and in 1990 and 1992 Rodney made two albums for Vanguard as the Dillards, the first, Let It Fly, produced by Pedersen. For about ten years he ran a recording studio in Branson, cutting local performers such as Andy Williams and Roy Clark. As Rodney Dillard & the Dillard Band he recorded two albums for Rural Rhythm: I Wish Life Was Like Mayberry (2010) and the gospel album Don’t Wait for the Hearse to Take You to Church (2011), on which he sang and played guitar and resonator guitar. In 2020 came Old Road New Again, the first album under the Dillards’ name in twenty-five years, produced by Bil VornDick, with Don Henley, Ricky Skaggs, Sam Bush, Bernie Leadon, Herb Pedersen and the Whites among the guests.

The Dillards were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2009, the year Rodney and Doug were the first inductees of the Missouri Music Hall of Fame, and into the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame on 24 September 2022, when Rodney, the last surviving member of the original four, accepted the honor. Missouri State University gave him an honorary doctorate in May 2023.