John McLaughlin The Folk Life Conversation with John Hartford

.[Following his lingering, recent death by cancer, so courageously faced, with what impeccable grace and serene, light-hearted humor, it’s been difficult to know what one could possibly add to the story of John Hartford, riverboat pilot and entertainer par excellence. We saw him at Bloomsburg State College in 1976, opening for the Newgrass Revival (his opening act, a young guitarist, Perry Leopold, said ruefully from the wings, "I don’t know what would be harder, opening for John Hartford or closing for him!"), clogging and fiddling simultaneously, incorporating Irish steps he’d only recently picked up from Eugene O’Donnell; we saw him backstage at Philly, in a gigantic fiddling session with Eugene and Norman Blake, Jean Carignan and Gilles Losier, leading the orchestra in an impromptu Vivaldi concerto before going into the Irish music; we saw him in his last appearance at Philly, in an incredibly funny, minimalist tuning-joke become waltz, with a beaming Bob Carlin and the teenage wizard-mandolinist Chris Thiele backing him up, as he fought against his frailty with all the resources at his disposal; but perhaps our favorite memory is captured in the interview which follows, backstage at The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, where he paused for a moment or two, at the top of his form, in a whirlwind tour in the Spring of ’78, to consider a couple of questions from an impertinent interviewer. Here’s what happened: if it can be considered a late bouqet for a departed hero, may it lighten your day.]

John McLaughlin: John, the first question I wanted to ask you, I’ve been re-reading "Life on the Mississippi" –

John Hartford: You’ve been re-reading it?

J: Right. And the question I wanted to ask you was this. Towards the end of the book, Mark Twain was looking at the river. And the way he sees it – and this is towards the end of the book – is that it’s always changing, it’s never final, it’s always complex, it’s always interesting, but – because he’s become a riverboat pilot, it’s too familiar to him any more for it to be mysterious, romantic, beautiful, to him. The question is: do you look at music that way?

JH: Yeah, I think that what he’s talking about there is that after you start learning all about the mechanics of piloting a riverboat, you stop seeing all the pretty sunsets and you start thinking about the weather, you know, and I would say that to a certain extent, what was beautiful music in terms of chords and structures is still that, but as you hear it you’re seeing all kinds of diagrams, all kinds of ways you’d play it, and that’s the parallel I see to what he’s saying about the river.

J: He also says that it’s always interesting too, it’s always changing, because of the floods, because of natural disasters –

JH: Well, yes, I’d say that the river in that sense is very much like music. Or anything else, really. Incredible variations on a real narrow spectrum, or perhaps range, let’s say, within a narrow framework there’s a lot of variation. Very much like the human face. Every face has got two eyes and a nose and a mouth, ears in the same place, and generally the same size forehead, the same cheekbones and everything. But there’s such incredible variations that we can look at any familiar face and know immediately who it is and all about their background and so on. But that’s incredible variations within a tight framework.

J: You know, in instrumental terms, you’re known mostly as a banjo picker, I think it’s fair to say.
But I’ve also seen you playing on the fiddle, and the clogging you do, that kind of thing. I don’t know – do you ever play the guitar much?

JH: Oh, yup! On the stage I use the guitar, fiddle, the banjo, pretty much what I can get by on.

J: Would you say that these instruments give you variations and breadth in your spectrum?

JH: Oh, yeah! Well, what I like to do is, in the period of a stage set, to be able to give them all – at least – even though I can’t give them all at the same time, if I’m even getting them separately, to try to give them all of the different tunes of a string band – which would have mandolin, guitar, banjo and fiddle. I mean, they can go around in order and take breaks! So what I try to do is go and play one on one instrument, then another on the next instrument, and so on. So you’ll have that same rotation that you’ll have with a band, though it doesn’t come around as often. But within the period of a 25-minute set, you would have all of them come around.

J: OK. Talking of something else, perhaps. You’re now a riverboat pilot – and I know we should congratulate you on that – you know the old one about "pilot’s advice – captain’s orders"? – do you ever find yourself in the position, when you’re putting together an album, and you’re not just giving "pilot’s advice," you bloody well have to be the captain?

JH: Yeah. I guess so. I think I understand what you mean. Now, I’m not a ship’s captain, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’m an apprentice pilot. I may have my license, but I’m still an apprentice, as far as I’m concerned.

J: How long does that go on, by the way?

JH: As far as I’m concerned – it may go on the rest of my life! [Laughter] It’s an art, just like playing the fiddle or the banjo. I started out to learn it a long time ago, and then I got sidetracked into playing music. And I’m going back to it now.

J: H’m. For most people – and this is a matter of primary versus secondary – but most people see you primarily as a musician, not a pilot.

JH: Well, I am, I am primarily a musician! When I was in high school I worked on the river, and I found out I was just not the temperament at the time to do that properly. Much as I loved it, I was too "artsy," too much into music at the time. I mean, it seems like it wouldn’t be, but it was a very traumatic thing, to leave it and go into music. But, that’s what it took at the time. It was just – the nature of me at the time didn’t have that practical bent – I used to work on the towboats, and I’d be on the towboats for a long time, and I’d get to playing on the banjo, and I loved it. But – well, also, the guy I’m working for now on the river understands artists!

J: Most of the artists, the musicians that I know, have a craftsman’s dedication to the music that I think many riverboat people would respond to at once.

JH: Well, I work on a boat, "The Julia Belle Swain," based out of Peoria, Illinois, and we run during the Summer, between Peoria and Liverpool, Illinois, which is about thirty or forty miles. We go down and back. And I do all kinds of things on the boat, among which I also play music.

J: Is that the stretch of river for which you’re licensed?

JH: Well, I have an operator’s license, and the apprentice pilot’s license we spoke of.
Which is, "waters other than the Atlantic coastline." Which is like a hundred gross tone operator’s license. And the next step, which I’ll go for probably in a year, is a pure "pilot’s license," for which I’ll have to draw a map of the river and so on. We’ve been making a lot of trips between Chattanooga and Peoria. Mostly the Tennessee River and part of the Ohio. And a stretch of the Mississippi and about half of the Illinois. And that’s ‘way too much river to go for a license. If you’re going for a license, you’d go for maybe thirty or forty miles, to start.

J: I must say here, I have a very poor idea of American geography. I have a very poor internal map sense of thsat part of the country. Trying to see it – shoo!

JH: [Taking out a pencil] Well, see, if we were on the telephone I couldn’t do this!

J: See – there’s some advantage to not doing it over the phone!

JH: OK. Here’s Michigan. And here’s Peoria. You go down the Illinois River to Grafton. Go down to St Louis, and down the Little Mississippi to Cairo. Cairo here – here’s St Louis, Missouri – then go up the Ohio, here, then the Tennessee River goes all the way down here to Chattanooga. Nashville’s back here, see?

J: H’m! Boy, looking at the map through a riverboat pilot’s eyes is not the same thing as
say, an airplane pilot’s eyes!

JH: It’s weird, because it’s like an ancient, almost forgotten art, still being practiced, but about the only place it’s practical is on towboats and stuff. Or big excursion boats. It’s not like piloting an airline. I mean, river commerce is at a different rate. They don’t ship the small, express stuff by river! It’s mostly big, slow cargoes.

J: Do you think they might come back to it, if conditions change?

JH: Well, there is a lot of traffic on the river, there’s a lot of tonnage on the river, but it’s all big, slow cargoes that can take weeks or months to get there – coal, iron, steel, petrochemicals, things like that – grain. You know. Whereas in the old days they had packet boats – I don’t think those will ever come back. I mean, packet boats were really the airplanes of their day. They got you there comfortably and safely.

J: Doesn’t Twain describe a packet boat race where one of them just blows up because the boilers can’t take that pressure?

JH: Well, he actually says though that as far as boiler explosions and things like that, packet boats were safer. A race was the safest time, because everybody was on their toes, watching out. The dangerous time was on a boat when there wasn’t much happening, and somebody would light up a boiler chip, and get it in the doctor pump, and then you know there’d be those kinds of problems….

J: I thought I knew that book pretty well, but I don’t recall any of that, except vaguely!
Amazing the difference! Can I ask you something else – I don’t think it’s changing the subject, though maybe it is. You have that lovely song, "Bluegrass Music Is All You Need," on one of those albums – Mark Twang? You go down that list, starting with "Tater Tate and Alan Munde" – and go all the way down, and it’s such a lovely tribute to people, it’s such fun even to listen to just the names, and try to figure out why this or that one is there….

JH: Well, what happened with that was that I was working on a rhythm thing. It was a matter of sequences of syllables, and which ones would work and which ones wouldn’t, scansion and so on –

J: Like a Gaelic lilting song?

JH: Right. I just had to put in who would fit in that sense alone. So in that way I left out lots of obvious people, put in people who were perhaps not so obvious people, just because I was writing for sounds and so on, and as soon as I wrote it I thought that I had people I hadn’t put in, so I rewrote it, and when I came to record it, it was changed again, I would make it shorter or longer or different, each time. Because there’s so many people, you know. But I had to stop somewhere.

J: OK. What is it you like about reggae music? It’s not "pickin’" music, right – I mean, it’s drums, it’s –

JH: Well, I’ve got to the point with my musical appreciation that I don’t distinguish that much between pickin’ versus bowing, or slapped, or struck, whatever, because the whole thing is that music, you see, is rhythm. I believe that time is the most important thing there is. That is the only element that you can’t withdraw from the situation and still have the situation exist. Everything depends on time. Right?

J: OK! Go on!

JH: Is that right?

J: I like it! It’s beautiful!

JH: Yeah, but do you agree with that?

J: I can agree with that, I can see that as a principle.

JH: OK. In other words, we could subtract, we could change this situation to black-and-white, it would still exist.

J: Still….

JH: But time is the one thing, even the solid stuff [touching the desk] depends on. You can’t take time away from that. OK. So how do we measure time so we can cope with it?
By rhythm. Either in rhythm that you hear, or rhythm that you see, like the repetition of all these threads in this lampshade [runs his fingers down it]. Rhythm is the way you cope with time. The best way to express rhythm is music.

J: That’s odd. Listening to reggae I got a whole West African thing with that music.

JH: I just like Bob Marley and his lifestyle! The way he came across to the press – I thought, "Well, far out!" and went ahead. I hang around with a guy in Europe who followed him around on tour. So he took his band and a bus, and they carried a professional soccer player. And every thirty or so miles they’d stop at the side of the road and have a soccer match, and I thought that was really good! And I’ve heard some of the music, and I’ve read about Bob Marley, and that’s about it. You read about somebody in a magazine or somewhere, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not they really exist like that, the point is that you get into them like real characters.

J: H’m. To me, the reggae music was a matter of colors, of light, of Caribbean light on the water. That sparkle off the water, you know – that’s what I got out of it.

JH: Well, what’s the most important organ in the body?

J: The eyes.

JH: The eyes? Well, you could be blind, and get along with them.

J: True. I guess I was assuming the existence of the brain behind them

JH: Well, it’s either the brain or the heart. Can you have brain life and heart death, heart life and brain death.

J: I see what you mean. There can be brain death, but heart life continues.

JH: That’s right. And the heart is primarily a rhythm instrument.

J: You’re right, this whole thing is based on the existence of, the perception of rhythm!

JH: Right. Actually, it makes sense that the whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals. You know what, I bet you that’s why everything is bilateral. You know, two eyes, two ears, split down the middle? Everything repeats itself and back – and maybe that’s because the lowest common denominator is two.

J: Yeah, but that also comes back to the one, ultimately.

JH: Even waltz time comes back to one, ultimately.

J: Did you ever see Wilfred Guillette clogging?

JH: Wilfred Guillette. He plays for Green Mountain Records. He usually sits down to clog. Won’t try to fiddle and clog at the same time standing up. When he won at Amherst last June, he did ask Wes Dickinson to play for him, while he clogged thank you to the crowd and the judges.

JH: There’s some guy up there who does that, though – clogs and plays at the same time.

J: Question: it seems to me that at certain points you’re hearing more, at certain points you’re playing more. The musics you heard growing up on the river – did they influence you more when you were younger or do they still influence you?

JH: Well, you’d hear whatever was on the bank – that was about it. Good too. I’ve been out a lot recently. Going around St Louis tomorrow night -- Baton Rouge for a television show – Natchez – Cairo, Illinois – Chicago – back to Washington DC fro the Cellar Door. That’s it. That’s it in a nutshell.

[And that was about our cue. John had to get ready for his show – there were other people anxious to talk with him – we’d enjoyed it, we thought the readers of The Folk Life – now, The Digital Folk Life – would too. We appreciated his immense courtesy, and we thought you would too. And now, the music…. John’s music is available through the Flying Fish imprint of Rounder Records, so you could go over to their website, and go from there. While you’re about it, you could go to the John Hartford homepage on the Web, and visit the "Tribute" page, and see the thousands of people moved by John Hartford; you might also feel moved to add your own tribute to theirs. This is ours.]