The Bigger Picture
Long Journey Home: The White Brothers and the Birth of Country Rock
by Bob Moses
For non-players (and those guitarists who despair of ever emulating Clarence), the book also presents Roland’s first-person narrative of the brothers’ shared experience. First as The Country Boys, then as The Kentucky Colonels, the premier urban bluegrass group of the time, they played around California and then the world, often onstage with mentors such as Doc Watson and Bill Monroe. Though still quite young and raised far from the hills and hollers that were the bluegrass birthplace, Clarence’s playing drew immediate notice. Jerry Garcia, who followed the Colonels’s first East Coast tour, observed later that, “He brought a kind of swing – a rhythmic openness – to bluegrass, and a unique syncopation. His feel has been incorporated by a lot of other players, but nobody has ever quite gotten the open quality of his rhythm. In the bluegrass world, the instruments characteristically are on top of or slightly in front of the beat. Bluegrass is a kind of forward-leaning music. Clarence’s playing was way in the back of the beat, and so added an openness that was really breathtaking.”
The Kentucky Colonels
When I asked Roland about Clarence’s rhythmic innovation, he replied, “I’ll tell you what turned him on to that. We were heavily into Earl Scruggs’s banjo playing. We listened to it constantly. I got a brand new Gibson banjo back in the ‘50s just to sit down with the Scruggs records and see what in the world he was doing. Clarence would get the banjo and try to figure it out, too. Not to be playing the banjo, because he could not play with fingerpicks. He just didn’t want to. He just did it with a flatpick and his middle finger for triplets and stuff.” To try to figure out what in the world Clarence and Roland are doing, check out the video below, made from a 1973 appearance on Bob Baxter’s Guitar Workshop, and collected on DVD by Sierra Records.
The brothers separated for a time as Roland hewed closer to bluegrass traditions, touring with Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, and Clarence evolved his now-revered electric technique. Clarence’s prodigious talent and application of the crosspicking and string bending he learned from bluegrass and country elevated him as one of the most in-demand session players in L.A. In 1967, he used his new electric skills to expand his musical boundaries with what is arguably the first country-rock group, Nashville West. That group’s residency at the club of the same name drew such fellow travelers as Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman (who brought the other Byrds), and Sneaky Pete Kleinow, and the band presaged the emergence of The Flying Burrito Brothers. Gene Parsons, in an interview with Ben Fong-Torres, referred to sessions Clarence played with Gram Parsons, Gene Parsons, Chris Hillman, and Gib Guilbeau as a “prototype Burrito Brothers” (Gene Parsons and Clarence were reportedly asked to join the Burritos when Gram Parsons and Hillman left the Byrds).
“I met him when he'd been playing the electric guitar about a year, and I was amazed at what he could do,” Gene Parsons remembered (as quoted on ebni.com/byrds). “He’d just taken the capo off it and was starting to learn to play barre chords up and down the neck. Once he pulled the capo off he really got down to it. He was bending strings all over the place and trying to make it sound like a steel guitar.” Clarence himself maintained in an interview quoted in Frets magazine that, “It wasn’t so much that I was getting bored with acoustic bluegrass. I could feel so many new things in the air. I wanted to get in the stream of a new kind of music that combined what you could call a ‘folk integrity’ with electric rock.”
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