Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 201; Rick Good interview, part 1 of 2

Q:

RICK: My name is Rick Good, R-I-C-K- G-O-O-D and I'm a banjo player.

Q:

RICK: Well, I was very interested in Elvis in Rock-n-Roll and I was about six years old and the reason I even knew about it was because I had older siblings and they were buying forty- fives and I was... I was very much interested in... in the whole idea of putting those records on a turntable and listening and... and pantomiming to the songs and um, so... so I was very much influenced by the records that my older siblings bought. And, early on uh, I remember hearing Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and I-and I say those two because in Pop music, I think, those two guys were about as switched on and connected as anybody making records those days. And the—they were like bare wires, you know, you grab a hold of 'em and you just felt the electricity. And even at six and seven years old I responded to that. I could still remember singing Great Balls of Fire and having my aunts and uncles go "how cute is that", you know? Uh, one of my brothers uh, upon graduating from high school, went to the Dayton Art Institute. And back then, in the early and mid sixties, the Dayton Art Institute was... that was where it was happening in Dayton in terms of art on many levels. It was just... I- I- it was an incubator for a lot of just... just raw creativity. It was a beautiful thing. And he got interested in alternative kinds of music, you know, like um, like, folk music. And he would be buying things, like, at first, it would be like the Kingston Trio and... and Peter, Paul, and Mary and... and folk music. A—and then he started buying Bob Dylan records. So, I was hearing those... still very young, but that's where I first had the banjo was like on a Kingston Trio record and I was immediately drawn to it. There's just the sound of it was so... so exciting and it had such drive and uh, I just responded to it and while this was all—all going on I—my grandfather and my father both had some experience playing stringed instruments, like they could make chords on the guitar. And my grandfather had a couple of guitars that he had had for years. Nice guitars too... Gibson guitars, and he had a couple of instruments that were made by one of his neighbors who was making copies, basically, of Gibson guitars only where as the Gibson's were called "The Gibson"... he called 'em "The Dayton" and now they're collector's items. His name was Charles Rousch and he lived just a couple doors from my grandfather on Apple Street where uh, the big high rise parking lot for Miami Valley Hospital is now. So, he had these instruments uh, and... and he could play some chords, and he knew some songs like "Rattler was a blind old dog, blind as he could be, and every day at supper time I swear that dog could see". I love that song. And he played that one on the guitar and he played "Just because you think you're so Pretty" and, "There's a shanty in old shanty town", and apparently, he played these songs with his brothers who would have been my great uncles in taverns around town. They were uh, he worked at NCR like almost everybody did. And uh... and they just played in the taverns for fun. In fact, every instrument I ever saw that my grandfather has was broken somewhere because he said somebody stepped on it at a tavern. My dad also played the harmonica. And the remarkable thing about that was... I mean, besides he had this beautiful tone, and his favorite song was uh, "Red River Valley", and he just made it so pretty and... and just like in the old cowboy movies, you know, they're sitting around the campfire and you hear this lonesome harmonica playing... sounded just like that. But, the remarkable thing is that he could play almost anything I would ask him to. Play "Oh Susanna", play "Old MacDonald", play uh, play the theme song to Davey Crockett, you know. And he would just play it, because he could play by ear. And I grew up kinda taking that for granted that that could happen. So, I learned the guitar chords, the C chord and the G7th, and the F chord and uh, borrowed a couple instruments from my grandfather, and one of them was a... a banjo/mandolin, which was basically a mandolin with a banjo body, so that was kinda the first banjo I ever had. But I... I started picking out tunes and, and, you know, I took it for granted that that could be done, because of my dad. And uh, developing my muscles, you know, I mean that's a... that's a large part of it is developing your... your, your fingers and your hand muscles and getting to the point where you're not squeezing the neck ten times harder than you need to and hurting yourself by doing it, you know. So, by the time I was eleven or twelve uh, I could... I could pick out a tune on the guitar. Um, maybe even figure out the chords to a simple song like uh... like "Just because you think you're so pretty". Um, so back to the records, back to listening to these records and, and, and learning folk songs off of those records um, I was drawn to the banjo and uh, and,.. and I first heard Earl Scruggs play, the great bluegrass banjo innovator on a radio station in Middletown, Ohio, WPFB, and the disc jockey was Paul "Moon" Mullins who is also a Ohio Heritage fellow and he played great bluegrass music, not only on the radio but himself, he was a fine fiddler. And that's where I first heard real bluegrass music. Um, and like the rest of American in 1962 when the Beverly Hillbillies TV show came on, Earl Scruggs was playing the theme song to that. And that was exhilarating to hear that. So, so I was definitely bitten by the banjo bug early on and my brother, Chuck, the art student at the DAI uh, bought me a banjo. It was like, I think he paid about sixty buck—sixty dollars for it. And uh, I just started teaching myself how to play it. Um, took a long time to do that and... and, and the finger style, like picking up on the strings with my fingers was the most accessible. There's another style... there's another style called claw hammer banjo or they used to call it frailing back... back in the days, but it was really hard to see what the player was doing, 'cause... 'cause it's over hand and what's going on is... is on the other side of this hand that you're looking at, so that was kind of a mystery to me for a long, long time. Although, now it's... now it's the way I play most of the time, but I had no way to learn that. There was nobody around who played that way that I could watch, so I learned how to pick with my fingers first. And I tried to play bluegrass music and like every other banjo player who ever did try to play like Earl Scruggs, which nobody ever has except for him, and I believe that's because he, basically, invented it. Those were his licks, and now everybody plays what he invented. So, nobody's ever gonna play 'em as well as he does.

Q:

RICK: Well, part of... part of these musical influences, and I would say uh... Bob Dylan, of course, he was writing his own songs, but one of the only things that I remember him expressing that wasn't ki- kind of tongue and cheek at the time was that it was important to know the sources of music that you... that you are drawn to, you know. Find out where this music comes from. Find out who the great... the great blues players were, listen to them and uh, that was not easy to do back then. I mean, there was no Googling Blind Willy McTell. Um, it was... records were hard to come by, um; information was hard to come by, so it was a treasure hunt. But, but uh, that was... that was exciting, it was very exciting. There were small record stores that sometimes carried obscure labels. And, at this time uh, uh, they were, there were labels like R. Huley and Yazoo and um, and uh, Biograph Records and, and they were... they were putting out LP's of um, uh, regional roots music and also reissues of music that had originally been recorded on 78 rpms back in the twenties and thirties and these were like old blues records and really early jazz records and rag time and... and early country music and mountain music. And... and labels were putting these out. A—a—and so all of a sudden, through the Kingston Trio that took me to Pete Seeger, that took me to Pete's brother Mike who was a member of the New Lost City Rambler's which was a band that recreated these old string band songs from the twenties and thirties into the old string band like Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Rambler's and Git Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and Uncle Dave Maken and his Fruit Jar Drinkers and... and this was just... this was just exciting, it was happening and you were hearing these ghosts from the past on these LP's but it was still the scratchy sound of the 78 and uh, it wa—it was just a window on the past. But like I say, these records weren't easy to come by. You just could like, dial a... dial 'em up on iTunes and have 'em sent to your house. You had to search 'em down and... and because of that, you might get a new record and, maybe a new album every couple of weeks or... or couple of months, even. So, so you would listen to that album over and over and over again and, and I kinda feel sorry for young musicians nowadays because there's so much music out there. There's... there's so much to listen to that... that you kinda skim over the surface and... and you don't really get really deep down into an artist. Uh, like you don't live with a... with a collection of songs for... for a long, long time and, and it doesn't kinda infiltrate, seep into your system like, like it would if it was the only new record you had. Um, also, at that time, was an—I—this wa—I would have been in high school so... or even in great—late, late grade school I got together with a couple of friends of mine who were kinda into the same thing and we started a band, of course. And uh, we were playing folk songs and... and uh, trying to write our own songs and playing at Hootin' Annie's and talent contests and we called ourselves The Lonesome Traveler's at first, which was pretty funny for three eighth grade boys. But we played all through high school, changed our name to The Free Wheeler's after Bob Dylan's Free Wheelin' album. And uh, you know, we played at pizza parlors and private parties and um, coffee houses, and even played a couple years after high school. But then, one of the members uh, went to the Air Force and the band broke up and, right about that time, was when I met the people who would be the other members of The Hot Mug Family. And they were all listening to these records too... Git Tanner, Charlie Poole, and... and The Carter Family, the great Carter family, the first family of American country music, and learning those songs, and they noticed me because I played the banjo and they all played guitars. And they thought, well, we could sure use a banjo player. So, we started hanging out together and listening to records together and learning Carter Family songs and Charlie Poole songs and... everybody tried to learn how to play the fiddle at that time. And uh, Dave Edmondson kind of went further along that direction than the rest of us so he became the fiddler. Suzanne stuck to the guitar and I played the banjo. And uh, somewhere along the line we got a gig so we needed a name. And uh, we went to astrology and found that uh? our astrological signs were Earth, Water, and Fire, which combined gives you hot mud. And we chose family because we were singing so much Carter Family material and, we just became The Hot Mud Family not ever dreaming that... I mean, this was just a gig at The Rat Skellar at Wright State, you know, when Wright State was four buildings. Um, but the name ended up following us for the next fourteen years all over the world, basically. And that's how that started.

Q:

RICK: The Hot Mud Family in its heyday played all over the country at Bluegrass festivals and folk festivals and there were a handful of, what we called the great hippie string bands of the time. The Highwood String Band and the Red Clay Ramblers, and Plank Roads String Band. And uh, we were all working the same circuit. And there were also some great hippie clog teams. Clog dancing had become uh, very popular amongst young people because it was so much fun. And uh, there was a group from North Carolina called the Green Grass Cloggers, and they were the first doggers I ever saw and the first time I saw 'em was at the Gailax Fiddler's convention in, probably, nineteen seventy- three and my face hurt it was smiling so big for so long just watching these dancers. And, sure enough, it wasn't long before we started accompanying them at festivals. We would be hired at the same festivals. So, they would... they would come up and do a set of dances, but they would need a string band to play the music for them and that's the kind of music we played. So, we got very close with The Green Grass Cloggers. And there was a community of touring bands and clog teams that... that was just like a big family all through the... the seventies, basically. And um, playing for dancers really completed the experience for me. Because, essentially, these fiddle tunes were dance music, they were dance tunes, they were for square dances and in their natural element they were uh, they were for sc—for community square dances, social dancing. Um, on stage, they became a little something different and the more we played for the doggers, the more it became clear that there were certain tunes that went with certain routines that they did. Uh, certain tunes that were—that just seemed to drive the dance along better. And so, that we—we would uh, we would know that when we were playing for uh... what was some of the names of their songs uh... The Teacup Chain would be the name of one of their things and wh—I—and, and we would remember, oh yea, fly around my pretty little mist tune. This... this works really good for The Teacup Chain, so we would play that and it would just, i—i-it would be that much better because... because they were familiar with the tune and we were familiar with the dance and the more we did it, you could feel the power on the stage increased. So, so that was my first experience with collaborating with dance. Um, at some point, Sharon Leighy joined The Green Grass Cloggers and that's where I met her./ She was a Green Grass Clogger. And, you would have to fast fur—forward several years after The Hot Mud Family broke up in the early eighties uh, she had long left the cloggers and had moved to New York um, back in more the area she came from and she was working as a professional dancer in New York City. Um, she still taught clogging and uh, she danced with a company up there for awhile. But she was uh, she was a little different in that she had some modern dance training and was... was trying to synthesize it all. She was trying to take the joy and the energy of traditional team clogging and precision clogging and footwork and use modern choreographic techniques, as well as, as production values... theater production values, good lighting and good staging and good costuming. And she was experimenting with these things with smaller groups and, and, in another company. And uh, eventually, she was invited out to uh, Indiana where uh, uh, a dance group that was based out of Bloomington was uh, they were called The Shuffle Creek Dancers and they invited her out, because they liked the direction she was going. And uh, and to make a long story short, she kind of inherited that company. She became the director and right at that time the name was changed from The Shuffle Creek Dancers to Rhythm in Shoes. And she brought me in as a... a band member and ultimately the musical director. And she started collecting um, other dancers... back then it was just Bloomington dancers and uh, p— pretty soon it was kind of half the company lived in Bloomington and half the company lived in Dayton. She moved to Dayton and um, we got married and had a daughter and combined our families. She had two sons, I had two daughters so we had five children. And uh, and we were directing this company, this dance company. And um, she hooked up with the Ohio Arts Council by applying for fellowship grants in the area of dance. And she turned out to be very fundable for the time, because of... of her connection to uh, you know, traditional Appalachian dance, but also modern dance and... and, and she was a very talented choreographer which was really clear. And, the Ohio Arts Council found it very easy for several years to award her fellowships, which made it possible for us to run this company. Um, that and then City Folk of Dayton, which was going strong... uh, Phyllis Bresowsko was the founder and director of City Folk at the time and she took a particular interest in Rhythm and Shoes and decided that because we were working out of Dayton uh, we could develop a relationship... that City Folk, instead of only uh, bringing traditional arts from other places to Dayton to present them on stage, that uh, City Folk would produce show locally for Rhythm and Shoes. So, uh, the big Victoria gala, when the Victoria theater reopened in the early nineties, it was a week-long celebration. And City Folk had half an evening to program. So, it had been like uh, maybe forty-five minutes. And, she came to Sharon and said, what would you do with forty-five minutes on the Victoria Theater stage? And um, Sharon thought, what's the most innovative thing happening in old time music right now in clogging? Wha—what would really be cutting edge? And, we thought of our friends The Horse Flies, who were an old time string band working out of uh, Tomkins County New York, which is like Ithaca, New York, Finger Lakes region. And the Horse Flies were... were... they were a straight string band of all—claw hammer banjo, fiddle, guitar, bass but, they were doing something really, really new. Uh, they started plugging in and they got a drummer and a synthesizer and they were writing music, very, very modern, kind of, kind of alternative rock-n-roll but it was... but it was deeply rooted in... in old string band music. It still had a claw hammer banjo, but uh, the player, Richie Stearns was uh, he had to put a pick up on his banjo and he was playing it through uh, he was playing it through the same processors that... that electric guitar players played it through. So, they had this amazingly contemporary sound, but it still had the drive and rhythm of old time music. So, Sharon's idea was to pick some of their songs, choreograph dances to those songs um, put our bands together... we only had a three piece band at the time so that wasn't hard. And... and bring The Horse Flies in to collaborate for this forty-five minute set. Well, the- the audience didn't know what hit 'em. It was.. it was like nothing anybody had ever seen before. And it just really set the stage. That was the first City Folk concert that Rhythm and Shoes did. And then, for ten straight years, that was our big... that was our big show for the year. Every year we did a... an annual home concert presented by City Folk and because of having... having that to do every year, it—it was like um, it was like a gift, you know, we ha—we knew we had this every year. Uh, an evening at the Victoria Theater or Memorial Hall where we could think of who do we want to collaborate with this year? What kind of show do we want to do this year? And just, every year it became more and more interesting. Um, we brought in Brenda Buffalino, who was a New York City tap dancer. Brought her in and uh, collaborated with her and she choreographed a piece for the company that we did. Uh, we brought The Horse Flies back. We did uh, a year with uh... uh, our band grew and included some really great players who could also play Irish music and we hooked up with uh, a Dayton dancer named John Tim, who was uh, an Irish championship step dancer. And he joined the company and danced with us for a few years. And, after dancing with us for a few years, he... he all along had been competing in the world of Irish step dancing. He went to the world championship and won first place. He became the champion, world champion male Irish step dancer. So, one year we did uh, a largely an Irish based show. Um, another year we collaborated with uh, Michael Bashaw, uh, not only musically but sculpturally. He created a sculpture that was built on stage and uh, and it—a-a—and the idea was all about memory and, and especially uh, forgotten wisdom uh, uh, of uh... of women healers, women who were burned for knowing how to heal. Um, and it incorporated like thirty or forty women from the community, and it was this huge piece and it sold out Memorial Hall and there were two thousand people in the audience and forty people on stage and this big sculpture and giant puppets and ug, it was only ever performed once. And that's the kind of work we did um, every year it was- it was a big show and people grew to look forward to that show, because it was one of the... it was one of the... the highlights of the performing arts season. It was... it was magic for... for ten, twelve years this went on. Um, and all the while Rhythm and Shoes was touring the country also playing i—i-in uh, uh... we played at Universities and uh, Arts councils in small communities that would have concert series. Um, we were uh, it was a... it was a wonderful time because there was funding for the arts and there was... there was funding for dance touring and... and we just fell right into that. Um, the modern dance Mecca in western Massachusetts called Jacob's Pillow um, commissioned a piece and they provided lodging and a studio in the Berkshires for... for two weeks... we went there and lived. And we augmented the company with uh, mu—handpicked musicians and dancers from the old time community and we—we lived and worked every day at Jacob's Pillow for two weeks and created a piece uh, an evening's length work it was c—co... co- commissioned by Jacob's Pillow, City Folk of Dayton and the Flynn Theater of Burlington, Vermont. And uh, we performed at all those places when... when this piece was finished and... and thi—this is the kinda work that... that... artists dream about doing, you know, to get this kinda support to be able to dream of.,. of... of the work you want to do and to bring the people together that you want to do it with, and have a place to create it. Uh, I mean they... they fed us, they put us up, they gave us the studio and, and, and all we had to do was our work. And that just does not exist in any form today.