MEETING SAM MCGEE

"Sam, this is Steve. He's the guitar player I told you about."

Charles Wolfe, the writer and roots musicologist was making the introduction and, as we stood on the porch of a stone farmhouse in rural Williamson County, Tennessee, his characteristic personable demeanor was getting us nowhere. Through the screen door, Sam McGee, past master of flat-top fingerstyle guitar and elder guardian of the eternal hillbilly speed secret, regarded us in silence.

Things hadn't been going my way since I'd risen before dawn that morning and tried to start my 1963 cranberry and white Ford Fairlane which, until that moment, had unfailingly proven itself worth every penny of the $150 I'd paid for it. The little 8 cylinder had coughed cheerily to life at the first turn of the key for excursions to Smokey The Beverage Baron on the outskirts of Jonesboro, Tennessee for another case of cold Pabst Blue Ribbon. It had growled energetically through the surrounding hills every time I'd wanted to sit for hours on the banks of the Nolichuckey, smoking and staring into middle space while some catfish worked up an appetite for my worm. It ran without fail whenever Eddie Deakins summoned me to pick up a boxful of frozen chickens or canned baked beans that he'd salvaged from some pre-dawn semi mishap while piloting his dump truck down old 11W. On this day, however when I was going to keep an appointment it had taken a year to arrange with a guitarist whose photograph occupied the place on my wall often allotted in local households to a velvet painting of Jesus Christ, the Ford greeted me with the metallic chutter of a shot alternator.

I must have gotten a brief spell of religion at that point; I shouted the name of our velvet Lord to the slowly lightening heavens. My prayer was answered...a subsequent attempt to hitchhike the 300 plus miles from Jonesboro to Murfreesboro with a concord reel-to-reel, a Gibson J-50 and a girlfriend was probably the first successful undertaking of it's kind in the modern history of country music. Charles Wolfe was too good a man to ask me why I was calling him from the Dairy Queen parking lot. He just came and got me and, after a brief stop at his place for a shower and a somewhat more sincere prayer than the one I'd offered earlier, we set out for Sam McGee's house.
The hills around Franklin, now just a suburb of Nashville, were beautiful then. As we drove through them, I got Charles to talk a bit about the man we were going to see; the guitarist Sam McGee had just celebrated his 81st birthday by playing a command performance for President Richard Nixon on the stage of the Grand Ol' Opry. He was nearing the 50th anniversary of his first recording session at which he'd recorded "Buckdancer's Choice", that velocitized watermark of pure no-frills country guitar fingerpicking that had put the style on the cultural map and became a warrior piece for any folk-era guitarist (including myself) who aspired to a loftier place in the Church of the Big Thumb.
We talked about the instinctual musical intelligence that had enabled the auto-didactic farm boy to fuse elements of rural blues, early country music, ragtime and 19th century popular song and the astounding memory that allowed him to recall and play from a repertoire of hundreds of tunes. Finally, as the sun began to set, we arrived there on his front porch...and he wouldn't open the door.

"Steve's a big fan of yours!" offered Wolfe to break the few moments of silence during which I felt aged far beyond my scant quarter century. My internal tempo slowed toward that of the old man who cracked the screen door far enough to hand out a play-worn Martin D-28 the guitar that I knew had been his working instrument for over 30 years. "I don't know if I'm a big fan of his," he said quietly. "I haven't heard him pick yet." I played my version of "Buckdancer's Choice" for the man who'd composed it, and recorded it the year my mother was born. When it was finished, the breeze-and-cricket sound of the spring evening seemed louder than before. "Was that right?" I asked. "Almost." said Sam McGee. He opened the door.


Notes:
Want to know more about Sam McGee? Sure you do. A simple Google search will turn up sources for albums and transcriptions of his music (including the ones in my book "Roots and Blues Fingerstyle Guitar). You'll have to dig a little deeper to find two important pieces of McGee legacy:
One is Document CD 8036 ("Recorded Works 1926-1934). This includes, along with great guitar instrumentals like "Buckdancer's Choice", a cross-section of his early repertoire from novelty songs and ragtime to his breathtaking 1934 version of "Railroad Blues".
The other is a book called "Three Traditional Tennessee Singers", published by the University of Tennessee Press and purportedly out of print at this time. It includes chapters on Bukka White and Clarence Ashley. The section on Sam McGee, written by Charles Wolfe, is the last word on the subject.
So, dig. I'm sure Sam would have loved the idea of a passle of 21st century guitar nuts doing internet searches on him.

May 1st, 2006 is the 112th anniversary of Sam McGee's birth.

Charles Wolfe passed away last February 9th. In addition to his writing on Sam McGee, he left us with definitive works on the history of the Grand Ol' Opry and the lives and music of Mahalia Jackson, DeFord Bailey and Leadbelly to name a few.
Thank you, Mr. Wolfe.

SJ