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Larry Webster and the Mule Band

In today’s world, the true individual seems to be on the endangered species list.  Technology enables musicians to sample other artist’s songs, download, digitally correct pitch to vocals, do cut and paste editing thus resulting in music which all too often substitutes slick production techniques for a lack of talent and/or creativity.  However, the individual continues to exist.  Recently I sat down with Larry Webster, truly an individual, to talk about his music and the Mule Band.

Larry Webster has been a practicing attorney in Pikeville for about 35 years primarily championing the rights and issues of the common man.  He relishes a good courtroom confrontation for the underdog and is an excellent advocate.  His down home demeanor is often tempered with a biting sense of humor.  Anyone who mistakes his easy going appearance and delivery as a sign of weakness will be making a fatal miscalculation.  Larry is as sharp and calculated as they come, as a lawyer and as a musician.

It is the old time mountain music which Larry loves most, and preserves as banjo player in the Mule Band.  However, Larry was a late bloomer as a musician.  Larry told me, “I took guitar lessons from Chuck Huffman who would later become a District Judge.  He was in high school at the time.  “I was 32 years of age.  That would have been 1977.  I just loved the music so much and I kept thinking surely this isn’t something you can’t learn.  I learned guitar and then three or four years later for Christmas my wife bought me an F-5 mandolin.  It cost $3,000.00 then and was gold plated with gold keys and pearl inlay.  Just beautiful.”  Larry is basically a self taught musician, as are most great performers.  Ironically, the fiddle was the instrument he used to teach himself mandolin.  He says, “I listened to a tape on how to play the fiddle and learned to play the mandolin by listening to a how to play the fiddle tape. Then about five or six years after that I started to teach myself how to play banjo.”

Larry and I have a lot in common as musicians.  When I get interested in music, I pursue it with a vengeance.  I study and consume every aspect, as Larry does with his music and banjo. “About 15 years ago, an old order Mennonite minister from West Virginia took me for a week, broke me down, and started me over playing old time banjo.  His name was Dwight Diller.  He was very much a student of the old music of West Virginia, which is in fact the old music of Kentucky.”

I asked Larry to define mountain music, and the history we take for granted in Eastern Kentucky.  He answered, “All the music in the mountains is a combination of influences, Scotch-Irish fiddlers, the African banjo.  The banjo came out of West Africa and it used to be thought that the mountain boys didn’t learn it until the Civil War.  That they went away and came home playing the banjo.  George Gibson, from Knott County, who is an expert researcher on the subject, has proven that we learned to play the banjo by marrying Africans.  He said before the miscegenation laws on the frontier there was much inter-marriage and we learned by marrying them.”

Larry has studied the various banjo techniques extensively.  He told me how the styles differed and developed, “The African banjo styles were percussive down stroke styles, and that’s how the early banjo was played.  There’s always been two-finger picking with thumb and a finger, basically out of North and South Carolina with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrell, Wade Manier, who is 100 years old and still alive.  They were playing two finger styles.  The rhythms that you could create with two finger styles fit fiddle tunes a little cleaner than the claw hammer lick because you could get more notes in.”

But what about the modern three-finger style that Earl Scruggs created which dominates modern bluegrass music?  Historically, Larry says, “The progression from the two-finger style to the three-finger style didn’t take long.  Earl Scruggs wasn’t the first to play the three-finger style, but he was the first that got famous.  That was about 1941.  Bluegrass started overnight.  Now, all of that is mountain music.  But the difference in mountain music today, what us players call old time music, is roughly that we go back to the down stroke banjo style.  It is claw hammer and is called knock down, frailing, but now everybody calls it claw hammer.  The style is very ancient and very rhythmic.  It all but died out in the mountains in the 1930’s and 1940’s because all the young people in the musical families wanted to play what was current.  Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe got on the Grand Ol’ Opry playing that new stuff.  They got 10,000 fan letters a week and it was irresistible to young people.  They wanted to be part of it.”

While some people may consider mountain music to be simple, it is very complex to Larry.  He has analyzed and researched mountain music until it is a vital part of him.  I asked how he missed out on rock and roll when he has such a rebellious tendency.  He explained, “When I was 14, 15, and 16 all the kids were having sock hops, and playing rock and roll.  Doing things that I wasn’t allowed to do, and I was very bitter about it.  I resented it.  So, I started hating their music without ever having listened to it as a form of rebellion.  While I was stripping tobacco in the stripping room at night, we listened to WCKY out of Cincinnati, a clear channel station.  A guy named Wayne Raney got on there every night and played old bluegrass and old time music.  I loved that music.  And I thought those guys in town wearing their damned socks hopping around can have it.  This is my music.”

Larry’s years in college only enhanced his attitude toward music and society  “When I went to college, I went to Lexington, and I’d already started to collect some of that music.  The first day I ever drank a beer, I got sick and spent all the next day throwing up.  It was Saturday night and I didn’t have anything to do, so I went by the auditorium at Transylvania and heard this wonderful sound.  They were having a bluegrass concert.  It was J. D. Crowe who happens to be the best banjo player there is.  I didn’t know it at the time, I just thought everybody was that good.  I went in and listened to that concert and was captivated.  At that time, he would have Jimmy Martin play with him out at the old North Lime Grill.  He had a guy from the mountains named Ed Stacy who would sing the old mountain tunes like the Johnson Boys and Hoe Honey Hoe.  He had a bass player named Hargus Kelly who was smaller than the bass fiddle and always kept a dime novel in his back pocket.  I heard some of the best bluegrass music quite by accident that there was.  This would have been 1963 to 1967.”

In 1982, Larry formed the Mule Band and began to take his show on the road.  He says it evolved from Friday night jam sessions at his house beginning in 1977.  “Every Friday night, large crowds would come sometimes thirty or forty people would come without invitation for a picking session.  We had a lot of big names, Ray Goins was there.  A fellow came up to me the other day and said Larry, you may not remember me, but I used to come to your house when Patty Loveless came there.  I don’t remember Patty Loveless, it was Patty Ramey then, but he swore up and down that she did, so she may have.  Five or six of us started playing in public.  We now say that the Mule Band is the longest continuously performing old time string band in Kentucky.  We’ve been playing together about 28 years.  There may be bands that have played together longer, but we don’t know of any.”

For years, Larry has arranged and scheduled music in the Pikeville City Park during Hillbilly Days.  Like the Mule Band, it is the music of our heritage.  Or, as Larry describes it, “We play music from the ragged moldy edges of country music.  It is music your grandparents would know.  More than you would think, your grandmothers.  Banjo playing was handed down, more or less, from mother to daughter.  It was a feminine instrument, so to speak.”  Some of the groups he has assembled over the years include the Chicken Chokers, the Horse Flys, and the Real Time Travelers.

As a musician, historian, and writer, Larry has developed some close relationships with other musicians.  He tells of a visitor late one night a few years ago.  “My wife was in Lexington.  About 10:00 at night there came a knock on the door.  I went to the door and there stood Bill Monroe who said, I’ve always told you I was coming to see you, and here I am.“  He came in and I set him down in the TV room.  I ran to the phone and called about three people and said for them to call others.  Pretty soon my friends gathered in.  We played music until about 2:00 in the morning.  He drank a glass of red wine, and swore it was the first wine he’d had in 40 years.”

In addition to doing the newspaper column Red Dog for over 30 years, Larry is also a songwriter with numerous accomplishments to his credit.  Larry says, “Jesse Stewart wrote a play called Vacation In Hell about a coal miner who spent his summers on the farm and his winters in the coal mines which he called his vacation in Hell.  There’s an off Broadway play about that and one of my songs was the beginning of that play.  Then, I had some songs recorded by Guy Carrowan, who is a folk singer that introduced We Shall Overcome to the Civil Rights Movement.  He was a very close friend of Bob Dylan.  Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s he put out some albums with two or three of my songs on them.  I was always honored because I would think, well Bob Dylan listened to this.  There’s an album out now called Spirit Of The Lonesome Hills by John Harrod who is a collector and player of old time music.  He and some other guys from Eastern Kentucky put out this album recently with a couple of my songs on it.”

As for Red Dog, Larry says, “After I developed a form and had kind of a pattern, I fell into that.  Writing is a craft.  If you’re writing for inspiration, it has to come.  If you’re writing as a craft it does get easier with time.  During my political and public writings I tend to put a lot of music in them.  One of my favorite columns I ever wrote, was when I wrote about the time the Kennedy’s came to Pike County to play bluegrass.  How good John-John was on that Martin D-28.  How Jackie Kennedy slapped that bass on Daybreak In Dixie, and how Caroline burned up that mandolin.  People couldn’t understand that.  It was the kind of writing they didn’t usually see in newspapers (laughs).”

For those waiting for a Mule Band CD, Larry states, “We’ve considered it, but the quality of our music is a dynamic quality.  It is performance music.  We are more entertainers than we are musicians.”

When Larry had been a guest on my radio Talk Show years ago, we ended with a word association test.  I thought it would be an appropriate ending for this interview.  I asked him to give his first response to words I would throw out to him.  Here’s the result:

DARREL: Bill Monroe.  LARRY: Rudy Julianni .
DARREL: Politicians.  LARRY: Sincerity.
DARREL: Rock and Roll.  LARRY: Depravity.
DARREL: Lawyers.  LARRY: Only Necessary When Somebody Else Has One
DARREL: Voting.  LARRY: Done By Way Too Many People.
DARREL: America.  LARRY: Barry Goldwater.
DARREL: Music.  LARRY: Somewhere Between the Spirit World And The Real World.  It Is A Passage From The Real World Into The Spirit World.

I couldn’t agree more, Larry.  Recently, I got the opportunity to perform with Larry during the Christmas holiday.  We even re-wrote The 12 Days of Christmas taking some good natured jabs at the legal system.  It was a lot of fun Larry, and so was this interview.  We’ll have to do it again soon.  Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now...

Darrel Mullins