Blake Williams of Williams and Clark Expedition graces the cover of the May edition of Banjo Newsletter.

Blake Williams of the Williams & Clark Expedition is featured on the cover of The May issue of Banjo Newsletter.

The cover story interview is conducted by Greg Cahill, founder of Chicago-based Special Consensus and himself, a highly respected banjo player.

The article covers everything from Williams’ 37-year professional career to his personal banjo set-up. The magazine will also feature a tab of his self-penned “Cherry Creek”.

Williams, who has been playing professionally since 1971, is a founding member of Williams & Clark Expedition and has worked with some of the forefathers of bluegrass music, including Lester Flatt and Bill Monroe.

During his career, he has performed on award-winning projects such as “Southern Flavor”, the first bluegrass album to win a Grammy.

Banjo Newsletter is a 48-page magazine covering all aspects of the 5-string banjo. The magazine has been published monthly since 1974.

The magazine maintains a Web site at http://www.banjonews.com.

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Emmylou Harris along with Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman were welcomed into the Country Music Hall of Fame April 27, 2008. Photo by Fabio lovino.

Nashville, Tenn. — On country music’s most prestigious night, the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted two of its four new members in a poignant, music-filled ceremony that emphasized family and, in a larger sense, the creative bonds that provide the foundation for enduring, celebrated careers.

Contemporary country adventurer Emmylou Harris and American stringband music pioneer Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman were welcomed into the Hall of Fame on April 27 in a two-and-a-half hour ceremony before a crowd packed with family members, friends and business associates. Those filling the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum’s intimate, 213-seat Ford Theater heard emotional stories about survival, shared goals and the close relationships that develop from those who spend a lifetime making music together.

The two careers, which occurred generations apart, both feature a visionary leader who collaborated generously and genially with other talented musicians while building a one-of-a-kind artistic legacy. Harris forged a path that merged the sounds of the mountains and the honky-tonks with rock and folk music to create a newly progressive form of country music that turned her into one of the most influential musical stylists of her generation. Stoneman helped create an audience for country music with his popular stringband recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, then went on to become the patriarch of a hard-working family band that entertained fans across generations.

“I feel like that guy in the Verizon Wireless commercial with this sea of people behind me,” said Harris as she accepted her medallion, summing up the evening’s theme of major figures who achieved greatness while shepherding the talents and contributions of others. “They’re there, to the right of me, the left of me, and backward and forward. They’ve been there since the beginning, and they’re with me still. And now they’re going to be with me up in bronze on the wall.”

Among those celebrating the inductions were Tom T. Hall and the Statler Brothers, 2008 members-elect who will be inducted in a separate ceremony on June 29.

Backing the performers were music director John Hobbs on piano and the Medallion All-Star Band, featuring drummer Eddie Bayers, steel guitarist Paul Franklin, harmony singers Tania Hancheroff and Wes Hightower, guitarist Brent Mason, bassist Michael Rhodes and fiddler Deanie Richardson.

Among the Country Music Hall of Fame members present to welcome the newcomers were Little Jimmy Dickens, Ralph Emery, Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, Jim Foglesong, Vince Gill, the Jordanaires’ Gordon Stoker, Ray Walker, Louis Nunley, and Curtis Young, Charlie Louvin, Frances Preston, Earl Scruggs and Jo Walker-Meador.

Sam Bush, Guy Clark, Jack Clement, Vince Gill, Patty Griffin, Jim Lauderdale and the Jordanaires, Buddy Miller, Old Crow Medicine Show, Jon Randall, the Stonemans and Lucinda Williams made up all-star cast honoring the new Hall of Fame  inductees.

Speakers during the evening included the Museum’s new chairman, Steve Turner, and Country Music Association CEO Tammy Genovese.

Kyle Young, the director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, began the evening by welcoming all the new inductees. “As a class, the 2008 Hall of Fame inductees represent a historical spectrum encompassing the earliest days of commercial country music recordings, the modern evolution of the country gospel quartet tradition, the arrival of more complex themes and social consciousness in country music songs, and the revival of a belief in the integrity of country music’s root forms that transcended the genre in a way that few others have matched,” Young said. “That’s a pretty complete spectrum. These artists have created a rich and enduring tapestry of music that will always recount the story of our homeland and its people over a period of almost 100 years.”

Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman

To help honor Stoneman, a list of prestigious artists performed songs he helped popularize. Those honoring him in song included Jack Clement (“Blue Ridge Mountain Blues”), Jim Lauderdale with the Jordanaires (“Are You Washed in the Blood”), Old Crow Medicine Show (“Tell Mother I Will Meet Her”) and a group featuring Clement and Stoneman’s three surviving daughters: Donna Stoneman, Patsy Stoneman Murphy and Roni Stoneman (“The Titanic”).

In a hilarious down-home speech, Patsy Stoneman Murphy spoke of how her family struggled through the Depression by playing music together and staying positive, loving and full of good humor. “When we lost everything we had and went to Washington, D.C., Daddy didn’t jump from windows in tall buildings like a lot of folks were doing,” she said. “He still had friends and family. Besides, it’s awfully hard to commit suicide jumping out of a basement window.” After the laughter subsided, she added, “Daddy worked his heart out to feed us young ’uns. We all got by because of him.”

In describing Stoneman’s important impact on country music, Young traced the multi-instrumentalist’s career from impoverished Virginia farm boy to durable cultural patriarch. “The recorded music of Ernest Van Stoneman, known later in life as ‘Pop,’ is one of our most tangible connections to the stringband tradition that still informs so much great country music today,” Young said.

Stoneman already had recorded several ballads and mountain songs by the time he joined Victor Records executive Ralph Peer in Bristol, Tenn., for the famed Bristol Sessions, which launched the careers of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in 1927. Stoneman cut more songs in Bristol than any other artist.

Having learned to make instruments from his uncles and cousins, Stoneman became proficient on several, including autoharp, banjo, fiddle, guitar and Jew’s harp. But his most notable talent was as a strong lead vocalist. Stoneman married his wife, Hattie, in 1918, after a five-year courtship and a pledge never to touch tobacco or alcohol. His family has always proudly boasted of how Pop Stoneman never cussed, drank or smoked throughout his life.

Stoneman traveled to New York in 1924 to record for General Phonograph. His song “The Titanic,” a narrative about the disastrous sinking of that grand ship in 1912, became a massive hit and earned him a five-year recording contract. He went on to record for several labels, sometimes in bands with family members, including Ernest V. Stoneman and His Dixie Mountaineers. His success allowed him to buy his family an automobile and build a home on two acres of land he purchased in Galax, Virginia.

But the Great Depression hurt record sales and brought hard times on the growing Stoneman family—Ernest and Hattie would have 23 children in all. After World War II, his career revived and he formed a band featuring many of his children. Eventually known as the Stoneman Family, the band featured Pop on vocals and autoharp, Donna on mandolin, Jim on bass, Roni on banjo and Van on guitar.

In the 1960s, the Stoneman Family recorded two albums for Starday Records and proved to be a hit at folk festivals and on college campuses. In 1966, they starred in their own musical television show, Those Stonemans. The same year, the Stonemans won the CMA Vocal Group of the Year award. In 1993, history professor Ivan M. Tribe wrote a biography of the family, The Stonemans: An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives, which chronicles the clan’s musical heritage and legacy.

Stoneman died in 1968. His Hall of Fame medallion was accepted by his daughters Donna, Patsy and Roni Stoneman. In a continuing tradition, the medallion was presented by a Hall of Fame member, Frances Preston. Before putting the medallion on the neck of eldest daughter Patsy, Preston said, “Ernest Stoneman had a lifelong motto, ‘Don’t quit.’ And he didn’t. Tonight, Pop Stoneman’s perseverance is being rewarded.”

Emmylou Harris

For Harris’ segment, the indelible veteran was surprised with performances by Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller (“Love Hurts”), Lucinda Williams (“Boulder to Birmingham”), Guy Clark (“Bang the Drum Slowly”) and a band of friends featuring Sam Bush, Vince Gill, Griffin, Miller and Jon Randall (“Green Pastures”).

“Because Emmylou Harris has chosen to share her ethereal voice and gentle spirit with the world, we now know what singing must sound like in heaven,” Museum director Kyle Young said in beginning her segment of the program. Fifty years after Stoneman’s heyday, Young added, “Emmylou Harris would lend modernist irony to traditional country themes, dramatically blend Appalachian stringband instruments with stark rockabilly and Bakersfield country rhythms and invent a new country sound for the ages.”

Young outlined Harris’ life and career, from her birth in 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama, to her present-day role as a charitable activist of the Nashville community. Young told the little-known story of Harris’ father, a U.S. Marine pilot shot down in 1952 during the Korean conflict and held as a prisoner of war for 16 months. He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1953.

Four years later, Major Harris’s distinguished career earned him a permanent post at the Marine base in Quantico, Va. After his death in 1993, it was revealed that Major Harris had served as a presidential command pilot for every president from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter. His Secret Service mission was unknown outside the immediate family.

Harris began playing guitar in high school, where she maintained a 4.0 grade point average. She grew up hearing the country albums of her brother, Walter Rutledge “Rutty” Harris Jr., but she initially was drawn more to folk music in the early 1960s. After attending the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1967, only to find the folk scene had largely disintegrated by then.

In the early 1970s, she met Gram Parsons, who would become a collaborator and mentor. Parsons showed Harris how meaningful, soulful and poetic country music could be, playing her songs by Merle Haggard, George Jones, the Louvin Brothers and Buck Owens, among others. She toured as a harmony singer in Parson’s band and joined him on his landmark recordings, including his second solo album, Grievous Angel.

Parsons died in September 1973, several months before the release of Grievous Angel in early 1974. Heartbroken, Harris dealt with her grief by continuing Parson’s legacy with a series of indelible solo albums produced by her second husband, Brian Ahern, that remain hallmarks of 1970s country music. She also began a legacy of hiring top musicians and discovering the songs of young songwriters, many of whom went on to become important pickers, artists and writers in American music.

In 1980, after being named the 1979 CMA Female Vocalist of the Year, Harris terrified her record label by releasing Roses in the Snow, a bold bluegrass and acoustic album recorded without drums that went against all the conventions of the “Urban Cowboy” era. It, too, became a hit album.

In 1983, she moved from Los Angeles to Nashville, where she later recorded the live album, At the Ryman, released in 1992, the same year Harris accepted an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry. “Her Ryman album renewed public interest in the historically important Ryman,” Young said. “It led to it being restored, and it now lives on as the winter home of the Opry and as one of the most prestigious concert halls in the world.”

Harris has been an active duet partner over the years, and she’s participated in several special recordings, including 1987’s Trio album with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt and 2001’s Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? Young also spoke of how Harris responded to the encouragement of producer Daniel Lanois, who worked with her on the 1995 album Wrecking Ball, by writing more of her own songs, which have surfaced on recent albums Red Dirt Girl and Stumble into Grace.

Clark, who co-wrote “Bang the Drum Slowly” with Harris, recalled that it was written for her father after his death. “I already was a big fan of his,” Clark said. “There’s nothing that stands up straighter than a Marine Corps fighter pilot.”

Clark confessed that he didn’t write much of the song. Instead, he said, he sat there listening to Harris come up with these beautiful, poetic lines about her father’s life and what he stood for. “I was basically the cheerleader for this song,” he said. Clark dedicated his performance to Harris, her mother, Eugenia, and Harris’ brother, Rutty.

Young cited the many artists, musicians and songwriters Harris has helped by hiring them in her famous bands or by recording their songs. She also was commended for using her music and celebrity to bring attention to the need for landmine removal, animal rescue and other causes close to her heart.

As with the Stoneman family, Harris was surrounded by family, friends and associates for her induction. Besides her mother, brother and those who performed her songs, Harris was joined by daughters Hallie Slocum and Meghann Ahern, ex-husbands and collaborators Brian Ahern and Paul Kennerley, and band members and associates Mike Bowden, Tony Brown, Steve Fishell, Tracy Gershon, Ken Levitan, Mary Martin, Barry Tashian, Hank DeVito and the Whites (Sharon, Cheryl and Buck).

Harris received her medallion from Hall of Fame member Charlie Louvin, who recalled that one of Harris’ first hits, “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” came from the Louvin Brothers repertoire and helped revive interest in the historic country duo. He expanded his statement to note how Harris has done the same for all of country music. “She takes the best parts of our music, expounds on them and makes them better,” he said. “Because of her passion for this music, she has, in a way, been a welcome ambassador for all that we stand for. With much pride, I welcome Emmylou into the circle of inductees of the Country Music Hall of Fame.”

Lucinda Williams encapsulated the special resonance the evening carried because of the honors being bestowed. “I’ve been in tears listening to all these songs performed here tonight,” she said before her moving solo version of “Boulder to Birmingham,” a song Harris wrote in tribute to Gram Parsons, which brought more tears from the crowd. “It’s just such an honor to be here.”

The event was taped for future broadcast by the Great American Country cable network and WSM-AM 650.

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Eddie & Martha Adcock pictured onstage at Ichibankan, will kick off the month of May with a string of dates on the west coast. Photo by Hiromi Chida

Eddie and Martha Adcock will spend May Day in sunny California. In fact, the duo will spend quite a few May days on the West Coast.

Their schedule for next month includes:

May 1 & 2: Granada Hills, Calif.– Blue Ridge Pickin Parlor, 17828 Chatsworth St., www.pickinparlor.com, 8 p.m.

May 3: Granada Hills, Calif. — Eddie Adcock Banjo Workshop at Blue Ridge Pickin Parlor, 818-282-9001, $50 fee, 1-4 p.m.

May 7: San Diego, Calif. — Old Time Music, 2852 University Ave., www.sdoldtimemusic.com ,7:30 p.m.

May 9: Santa Clara, Calif.– Mission City Coffee Company, 2221 The Alameda, www.fiddlingcricket.com, 8 p.m.

May 11: Montrose, Calif. — House Concert & potluck spread, 818-249-2969, noon.

May 31 Suwanee, Ga. — Everett’s Barn, 4055 Stonecyper Road, http://www.everettbrothers.com, 770-945-5628 or 770-945-9098 or 770-945-0176, 8 p.m.

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