Owed to Odell
Lexington Virginia, the 70's, & Old-Time Music — How Lil’ Dobson Got to Swim with The Duhks
Just about a year ago, I did my first public #PayItForward act as part of my Bonus Round following a horrific, and so far successful, battle with cancer. Having circled the drain for the better part of a year, I had determined that I should start finding homes for some of my children… No, not the biological kind. My musical instruments.
Music is magic. And musical instruments, though inanimate, are Keepers of the Flame of one of our most beautiful Muses. We transfer them in the equivalent of slave markets — bought and sold as if mere chattel. The truth is that musical instruments have a Life of their own, lived out in the Good Karma, or lack thereof, accumulated during the instrument’s own lifetime of being playable and played. Good instruments have, or should have, the longest and most active lives as they are lovingly protected and passed from one “owner” to another.
This is a story about one instrument’s journey.
While the initial intent of this tale was to provide provenance data to its new caretaker, the heart of this story is about one amazing man, Odell McGuire, and how he touched my life in a way that has now led Lil’ Dobson to “swim” with The Duhks.
The child I needed to find a uniquely special home for was Lil’ Dobson; a small-but-vocal 3/4 or “student” size Dobson banjo. Its tailpiece patent number put its life starting somewhere in the late 1880s. This little beauty likely sold mail-order for a few dollars to an aspiring banjo player in the southern Appalachia mountains around the turn of the last Century. Its comfortable size and sweet sound make it a love-at-first-play seductress.
About this time last year, my soulmate wife Timlynn and I had started crawling back to something close to a normal routine. And we were feeling up to going out for some entertainment. When I found that The Duhks were performing at a venue around the corner from us in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an electric shock of instant insight crackled through my body as I knew who I wanted as the next “adoptive parent” of Lil’ Dobson.
Photo: Lief Norman
Leonard Podolak is the inspired leader of The Duhks and a wonderfully talented clawhammer banjo player. I was certain that he could provide the kind of home that Lil’ Dobson deserved.
Clawhammering, by the way, is a strum-hand technique of banjo playing nearly driven to extinction by Earl Scruggs’ innovations in playing which spawned the modern banjo sounds heard in bluegrass. The “invasive” nature of bluegrass was helped along by the power of early radio and television. The public airwaves sent this culture-shifting revolution into the backwoods and rural communities which for so long listened and danced to do-it-yourself “porch music.”
Leonard and The Duhks are part of a sustainable indie roots music scene that, in part and in no small way, owes its existence to the efforts of a few inspired individuals who helped keep Old Time mountain music from going the way of the Dodo bird. I’m writing this piece so Leonard, and by extension any readers of this piece, will know more about a True Happy Warrior in the battle to keep Old Time mountain music alive and kickin’ during the 1970's in the southeastern United States.
19 January 2014 at CSPS, Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids, IA.
Photo: Timlynn Babitsky
So now back to last year… I popped up to the stage during The Duhks’ intermission and pleaded my case for adoption. After picking his jaw up off the floor—this was not the conversation he was expecting stage-side—Leonard managed a broad and grateful smile. The deal was sealed. We both slept soundly and happily that night as Lil’ Dobson left Iowa for its new wintery home in Winnipeg.
Tonight, Leonard and The Duhks are coming back to Cedar Rapids. Timlynn and I will be getting together with Leonard after the show. I’ll have a chance to tell him more fully about the long, strange trip of Lil’ Dobson… at least the part that I know about and lived, and that took place in the early 1970s in Lexington, Virginia.
My instinct was to dig into our photos and memorabilia to see what we might surface to provide Leonard with some provenance data as he welcomed Lil’ Dobson into his extended banjo family. While my initial thoughts were about documenting the instrument, its source and condition; what I soon realized was, like me, Lil’ Dobson’s Life had been touched and transformed by passing through the Rip-roaring Aura of Odell McGuire, a genuinely Extraordinary Human Being.
As an undergrad at Washington and Lee University in the early 1970s, I first met Odell as a brilliant educator and scientist. While his “day job” was Geology Professor, Odell’s true calling was to serve as Culture-crossing Pied Piper leading cohorts of urban/suburban W&L student-hippies into the deepest “hollers” of the rural Virginia and Carolina mountains. There Odell introduced The Horde — as we called ourselves — to Kindred Spirits that were at once incredibly exotic and unfamiliar, yet somehow mutually accepting and comfortable. And the common bond of this cultural exchange was music… Okay, for some of us there was moonshine and psychedelics thrown in like the crowning sprinkles on a gourmet sundae… but it was the music that was the tie that bound us all together.
Odell died a few years ago. His passing sent a shock wave of sadness through the scatterlings whose lives he touched. And that sadness, I’m sure, was especially deep for those who learned the love of Old-Time music from him.
As I scoured our boxes for photos and keepsakes, I did a quick Internet search to supplement my memories. What I found were two pieces of eulogizing prose that say more about the Power of Odell than I could if I sat and wrote for days between tears of happiness, for having known him, and sadness for fully realizing our collective loss.
So, rather than say more of what is already said so well by others, I’ll finish this piece by citing the words of Douglas Harwood, James Leva, and Walt Koken — supplemented by scans of some photos and memories that will be with me forever. Any redundancy in the facts and opinions expressed in their words are further testimony to the universal and indelible impact of this exceptional man.
The Rockbridge Advocate on Odell McGuire
Douglas Harwood is Editor and Publisher of The Rockbridge Advocate, the fiercely independent and unique news and commentary magazine based in Lexington, Virginia and covering the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Douglas was also a long-time friend as well as colleague — Odell’s riveting historical writings have graced the pages of the Advocate. Here he writes in memoriam:
“Odell S. McGuire:
1927–2008
Odell McGuire was sitting in the White Column Inn one night about 25 years ago. There was nothing unusual about his being there. But that particular night it was snowing, with great white flakes falling down past the old brick buildings and street lights onto the deserted sidewalks and Main Street.
Odell was leaning back in a wooden chair near the corner between one of the big windows facing Main and the fireplace and chimney that had long since ceased being able to draw smoke. There was a tall glass of bourbon and ice and water sitting on the window sill, and he was sipping from it a little more slowly than usual.
There wasn’t much of a crowd that night. Most folks with any sense at all had gone home before the snow piled up on the roads. If Odell was worried about getting home to his little cabin in Bird Forest at the foot of House Mountain, he didn’t let on. Instead, he reached down, took his banjo from its case, quietly tuned it, and began playing “Ducks on a Millpond.”
In the dim light and the snow falling outside, Odell, with his beard and banjo and glass of whiskey didn’t just seem like a character from another century. That night, he was a character from another century, and he took everyone who heard him, and everything that could be seen around him, back in time a hundred years or more.
Odell McGuire died in December. It’s hard to imagine he’s gone. He was one of those people who seemed to spring up out of the earth itself and live in geologic time.
He was born in Knoxville, was wounded in the Korean War, held geology degrees from Columbia and the University of Illinois, worked for Texaco looking for oil in Canada, and was hired to teach geology at W&L in 1962.
When he was hired, Odell was — or at least appeared to be — a soft-spoken, conservative, three-piece-suited man who would fit right into a conservative college in a conservative town.
And then he went to a fiddlers convention.
Odell showed no signs of musical interest or aptitude when he was growing up. But at the convention, he was smitten by the sounds of an old-time banjo. And when Odell was smitten by something, he didn’t let it drop.
Before long, he was traveling down to the hoots and hollows of West Virginia and North Carolina, visiting families of old-time musicians and learning everything he could. And a tribe of students began going with him. They didn’t know they were about to launch a musical wave.
But they did. Musicians from all over the country — and all over the world, for that matter — began coming to town, to the White Column Inn (which was owned by Odell’s ex-wife, Mata) to stay a while and listen and play this strange Appalachian music that seemed as old as the hills.
It seemed perfectly natural that a geology professor who knew as much about the mountains as anyone, and a great deal more than most, would take to the music of those mountains. (Mercifully, Odell’s studies of the Alps did not induce him to take up yodelling.)
And it seemed perfectly natural that a man who knew so much about the mountains would move up into an old cabin and raise goats and a garden and live close to the land in what appeared to be a fairly simple life.
But there was nothing simple about Odell. He was fiercely intelligent. He was genuinely, not idly, curious about nearly everything. He had a way of asking questions that cut through the fog, and if the answer was murky, he’d give a look that made it clear he expected something better. He was a voracious reader, and he had an attention span that tended to run years.
Odell delighted in discovering things about the world around him.
When W&L bought a snazzy new mainframe computer back in the mid-70s, he figured out how to program it to make haiku, and he’d bring reams of print-outs to share with the customers at the White Column. (Some were captivated. Others felt they were being held captive by a deranged drunk.)
When he was dissatisfied with translations of ancient Greek works that mentioned geologic formations, he taught himself ancient Greek and translated them himself.
His knowledge of the geology of the mountains led him to wander through the history of their human inhabitants, and he let his wandering take him where it would.
One place it led was the Revolutionary War, and Odell spent months pouring over old diaries, letters, pension applications and official reports. It started when he began wondering about the place of the mountaineers of Rockbridge County in the Revolution, and one thing led to another and to another. By the time he was finished, Odell had written an incredible piece of history, “Many were Sore Chased and Some were Cut Down: Fighting Cornwallis with the Rockbridge Militia.”
It was published in early 1996, and contains the definitive history of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Odell always said that the purpose of writing is to explain. But the work does more than that. In explaining, it carries the reader into the midst of the battle. You can practically smell it and hear it, so much so that it seems Odell was reaching across time to transport you back two centuries, so much so that it seems he must have been there.
Odell didn’t leave a large paper trail. And there aren’t many recordings of his banjo playing. What he left, instead, were all the lives that he touched and all the lessons he taught simply by being himself. Odell was a living connection to the history of the world around him. He may be gone, but Odell, like ducks on a millpond, left plenty of ripples in this world.”
Source: The Rockbridge Advocate, used by permission
The Old-Time Herald—Final Notes on Odell McGuire
The Old-Time Herald is a magazine dedicated to Old-Time music, celebrating grassroots or home-grown music and dance. The Final Notes section of the magazine is one that you don’t want to be covered in editorially. But if you are, it is a true honor. Final Notes are the memorial editorials eulogizing the passing of significant figures in the Old-Time music world.
It took two authors to do justice when it came time to reflect on the immense contribution of Odell McGuire to the Old-Time Music Revival Movement started in the 1970s, as well as to mark the passing of a true and rip-snorting gentleman.
Lexington-based multi-instrumentalist, friend of Odell, and member of The Horde, James Leva writes:
Odell S. McGuire, a professor emeritus of geology who taught for 32 years at Washington and Lee University, and a banjo player who spearheaded a revival of traditional Appalachian music in Rockbridge County (Virginia) in the 1970s, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on April 19, 1927, to Odell S. and Winifred Claxton McGuire. He could trace the migrations of his family from the Rockbridge area in the 18th century on through Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. Odell served in the Navy during World War II and in the Army in Korea, where he was wounded and received the Purple Heart.
Professor McGuire joined W&L’s faculty in 1962 as an instructor in geology, became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1994. In 1964 and 1965 he served as a visiting assistant professor at the Virginia Military Institute. McGuire’s scientific interests and publications covered such topics as paleontology, geologic mapping, environmental impacts and land-use planning, geology of the Appalachians, hydrology, evolutionary theory, geo-morphology, geo-hydrology, and stratigraphy.
Photo: Peter Clayton
Odell and his former wife, Mata Battye McGuire, have three children, Melanie, Forrest, and Jesse, and three grandchildren, Rosa Puryear, Nicole McGuire Gilbert, and Killian McGuire, and a great-granddaughter, Dorothy Rose Gilbert.
Odell was also a transformative figure as he guided a generation of young musicians into the mysteries and joys of traditional Appalachian music. He learned to play the banjo in the old-time clawhammer style. He met and befriended a number of the older generation of traditional musicians, including Burl, Sherman, and Maggie Hammons and Mose Coffman of West Virginia, Wade Ward of Grayson County, Virginia, and Tommy Jarrell and Dellie Norton of North Carolina. Odell introduced many young musicians to these great keepers of the tradition, thereby inspiring the young, bringing new meaning and purpose to the elders and their music, and ensuring the survival of the traditional music for another generation.
Source: 1972 W&L yearbook. Photo: Pat Hinley
Odell’s passion and guidance helped transform Lexington/Rockbridge County into a hotbed of traditional music in the 1970s. The influence of this new wave of old-time mountain music was felt and recognized nationally and nurtured musicians of renown who have made lasting contributions to the genre. With Odell’s wife Mata running the White Column Inn in Lexington, the McGuire family enriched the lives of many with their energy, intellect, and humanity.
Odell saw the links in all human striving for comprehension, from the ancient Greeks (he taught himself to read ancient Greek), through the sciences, to the encoded wisdom and beauty of a fiddle or banjo tune. A conversation with Odell could range from a discussion of chaos theory and fractals, to his tracing the lineage of soldiers from Rockbridge County who fought with Daniel Morgan in the Revolution, to an analysis of Appalachian paleontology, to the destruction of Longstreet’s reputation for questioning Lee’s decisions at Gettysburg, to the writings of Thales and Herodotus, to the stylistic peculiarities of a West Virginia fiddler. His intelligence, endless curiosity and unassailable obstinacy will be missed, and folks will be telling Odell McGuire stories for a long time to come.
Source: The Old-Time Herald, used by permission
The Old-Time Herald Contributing Editor Walt Koken, himself a talented musician and dedicated Keeper of the Old-Time Music flame, went on to add:
“June 1971 was one of the highlights of my life. Mac Benford, Bob Potts, and I traveled east from the Bay Area on a musical pilgrimage, and one of our destinations was the fiddlers’ convention at Marion, Virginia, where Mac had seen Tommy Jarrell a couple years previously.
Photo: 1972 W&L yearbook, Pat Hinley
We camped at the Hungry Mother State Park, and at the festival we met many wonderful local characters and musicians, and were quite well received. Amongst the shifting crowds of onlookers that weekend was a person who stood out like a sore thumb. He had bushy black eyebrows and mustache, and was wearing a worn-out old black top-hat. His name was Odell McGuire, and he turned out to be a very interesting person, quite sincere and serious, a wonderful talker, didn’t smile much, but when he did laugh, his toothy grin brightened things up.
Odell was an aspiring banjo player, so he said. He didn’t play with us that weekend. Said he was a professor of Geology at Washington and Lee University, an occupation that afforded him an opportunity to make occasional field trips in the neighborhoods of various old-time musicians and fiddlers’ conventions, especially in West Virginia. He generously invited the three of us to stay over at his house up the road in Lexington after the convention.
We took him up on his offer, invaded his household, and enjoyed the cooking of his wife Mata. She was more than just a faculty wife, and in their sleepy little town the stage was set for this couple and their three young children, Forrest, Jesse, and Melanie (also called Bird), to form the center of what was to become a major old-time music scene. Odell was very interested and well versed in the lore of the old-time things, and his stature as a professor in a “straight” insititution lent credibility to our vagabond and alternative musical lifestyle, and thus we became good friends.
Mata opened the White Column Inn in Lexington, a restaurant which became the center of it all, providing both real and musical livelihoods to however many it could support, as cooks, wait staff, carpenters, old-time musicians and dancers. Mata seemed to be the queen bee, and musicians came from afar to live in the area. Odell continued to develop his playing, restored an old log house, and seemed to quietly enjoy it all. Many present-day musicians around the country were once either part of or touched by this scene.
It’s hard to describe just what he did to create the stir around Lexington, and I’m sure he was only a part of it, and he might not have known he was doing anything, but he planted the seed, and was the very core. In that little Virginia city, that small and “straight” center of Old South intellectualism as well as martial education, there blossomed a family, a whole community, of old-time musicians, dancers, music lovers, and other alternative types, almost none of whom were born into the tradition, which continues in some form now, almost forty years later. Thank you all, McGuires, and especially Odell.
Like so many others I’m saddened at the thought of not seeing him again. He’ll always be one of the heroes of the old-time revival to me. Somewhere there’s a photo of him in that top-hat.”
Source: The Old-Time Herald, used by permission
Owed to Odell
So, Leonard, this is the torch that is passed to you with your adoption of Lil’ Dobson. You join a hopefully never-ending chain of musicians, dancers, and listeners whose toes tap, ears perk up, and lips smile at the sound of a clawhammer banjo, of things with strings picked, plucked, and hammered-on, in tunes as universal as the day someone felt the inspiration to bring that melody to life.
I do hope that the world rewards you, Leonard and those like you, with the ability to make a living while staying true to your calling. You are on a Long and Winding Road, not unlike the journey of those whose words I have passed on in this reflection. While we all “stand on the shoulders of giants” to better see the horizon ahead, we take comfort in knowing that folks like Odell McGuire helped ensure that there is still an Old-Time music path—no matter how unbeaten it may get at times—for us to follow.
Thank you Odell, for everything you gave the World… and for helping Lil’ Dobson to swim with The Duhks.
With Immense Respect and Gratitude,
-: Jim Salmons :-
AKA “Chico” so long ago…
Notes
A Call to Contribute
This is an open call to any who knew and loved Odell and who have photos and memories they would like to share. PLEASE let loose here with your anecdotal marginalia as a living tribute to Odell. Medium.com is the perfect channel to capture and reflect our collective appreciation for this Great Man.
If you have photos of Odell or the 1970s music scene in Lexington, Virginia, and would like to share them please leave a comment and let’s connect. I would LOVE to enhance this piece with more photos and memories. (Pat Hinely, I’m looking at you, sir! :)
A W&L J-School Challenge:
Tell the Lexington Music Story
One of my undergrad majors was Journalism. Next to Odell and music, my J-School activities are among the most memorable of my time at W&L. To my fellow current J-school colleagues, “Who is up to telling Odell’s story?”
There is an fascinating story to be told about a legendary W&L faculty member and his singular contribution to Lexington’s exuberant music scene of the early 1970s and beyond. Odell’s is a story intertwined with Lexington’s “hippie invasion,” when CHAOS ruled and change was in the air.
You J-School folks have such truly unbelievable digital storytelling tools at your disposal, and the Internet to enable your research. If you are up to a seriously fun challenge, here’s a pointer to a resource to get you started… this includes Odell’s own recollections of the Lexington Music scene… “The Complete History of the Plank Road String Band and the Lexington, VA Music Scene” on The Field Recorders’ Collective web site.
Is there a digital Ken Burns among you?
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