Soap Box

This past week I attended a memorial for Randy Scruggs, a longtime friend, son of the late Earl Scruggs, and a multi-talented guitar player, producer, songwriter and performer.

It was a beautiful service - as all such events in Music City are - as the show business community at large participates in epitaphs, testimonials and, of course, some of the planets best music, as we all remembered Randy’s numerous accomplishments and contributions to the music we all love.

Some of my favorite work by Randy was the tasteful acoustic guitar he played on Roseanne Cash’s recording of her father Johnny Cash’s song “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” which became as much a part of the record as the lyrics.

Tasteful, understated, and always right in the groove and style of whatever the song was trying to say, that was Randy Scruggs approach to the music he played and Music City is a better place for having him pass through.

I had known Randy since the days when he was still in high school and played along with him and his brother Gary in the Earl Scruggs Revue, and it started me thinking about how many friends and acquaintances have gone on in the sixty years I’ve been a professional musician.

There is one of the club bands I played in that all the members, except myself, have passed away, not to mention individual members of other incarnations of bands I was part of in my early days.

The first time I ever walked on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry was in 1969, as a member of the newly formed Earl Scruggs Revue and since those days so many of the Opry Stars and country music greats have left us.

Roy Acuff, Jimmy C. Newman, Porter Wagoner, Hank Snow, Jean Shepard, Dottie West, Conway Twitty, Bill Monroe, Charlie Louvin, Bill Carlisle, Minnie Pearl, Tex Ritter, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash and the list goes on.

Relatively recently, country music lost George Jones and Merle Haggard and a few years ago Buck Owens.

In the circle of those who founded and nurtured the Southern Rock sound, we’ve lost Duane and Greg Allman, Berry Oakley, Ronnie Van Zant, Allen Collins, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkerson, Hughie Thomasson, Toy and Tommy Caldwell and George McCorkle just to name a few.

It really hit really close to home with the deaths of Tommy Crain and Taz DiGregorio, two guys who over a period of forty years contributed so much to the CDB sound and style. Both deaths sudden and unexpected, leaving an emptiness, but a myriad of memories, of miles traveled and music created and performed on the stages of the world.

I remember the studio days with the late Leonard Cohen and learning about a kind of music I had never played before and the many guests who have been a part of the Volunteer Jam who have left us, Rufus Thomas, Papa John Creech, Nicolette Larson, James Brown, B.B. King, Woody Herman, Johnny Paycheck, Link Wray. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Tammy Wynette, Carl Perkins, Dick Clark, Eddie Rabbitt, Dobie Gray and so many behind the scene roadies, techs, managers and industry folks who made the Volunteer Jam the institution it has become over the period of the last 42 years.

To think along these lines gives one pause, and invokes a special kind of sadness, especially for the ones you’ve had close relationships with, and I’ve decided to deal with it by remembering the good parts, burning jam sessions, dressing room conversations, long bus rides and late night conversations in hotel rooms, sharing our lives and times and making memories, wonderful memories.

After all, someday that’s all any of us will be, memories.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops, our police and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

— Charlie Daniels

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