John Hartford

ARTIST

Folk and bluegrass singer/songwriter John Hartford, shown at Grey Fox 2000, died June 4, 2001 after a long battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Photo by Stephen Ide

Hartford remains gentle on fans' minds

By STEPHEN IDE
The Patriot Ledger

"It's knowin' that your door is always open and your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowing I'm not shackled by forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line
That keeps you in the backroads by the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind."

- John Hartford, "Gentle On My Mind"


To many, John Hartford will be remembered as the writer of the tender song "Gentle on My Mind," a major hit for Glen Campbell in 1967. But Hartford, 63, was much more than that to his fans, people who enjoyed pure music.

Hartford, who died Monday after a long battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, delighted audiences for more than 35 years. His amiable manner, his trademark black derby, soft-spoken baritone voice and innate musicality brought smiles to the faces of both young and old.

I saw Hartford several times - at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival last summer and in previous years at the same festival. It was the kind of venue Hartford enjoyed playing, a bluegrass and folk crowd, one with a sense of traditional music.

Hartford's lyrics were at times touching, at times, nonsensical. Like the rappers of today, he could speak a complex song with the best of them. And unlike today's commercially produced music, hidden by instruments and non-musical fodder, Hartford's style spoke to the common person - it was easy to understand and fun to hear.

Hartford, who came from Madison, Tenn., rarely needed accompaniment, though lately he had played with the Hartford String Band. A multi-instrumentalist, he was at home playing the banjo, fiddle or guitar and tapping his feet in rhythm to his own music. He often clogged on a plywood board he sometimes called his "whomper stomper."

His lyrics sometimes were rehearsed, sometimes seemingly made up. He often seemed to gauge the audience's reactions to whatever he sang and tailor his songs accordingly.

One year, I recall watching Hartford gleefully climbing off the front of the stage while playing his fiddle. With a wireless microphone, he played and sang and spoke as he wandered through the festival crowd, throngs of fans trailing behind him. For a few fleeting moments, city slickers in the audience shed their concerns and danced behind a musical pioneer who reveled in music's simplicity, its ability to tell stories, tap emotions and weave melodies.

Last summer, at the Grey Fox festival in upstate New York, Hartford was accompanied by a host of talented musicians. He clearly was wracked by cancer, but his musical spirit propelled him. He played, taking breaks during his sets to sit at the rear of the stage as band members played solos. When he sang, he popped throat lozenges to soothe the effects of his therapy. He assured the audience that he was going to be OK and was going to be around for a while.

The audience could sense the brutality of the disease that Hartford was fighting, but his laid-back, enjoy-the-music-with-all-its-quirkiness style reassured us. He was always that way, never taking himself too seriously, interspersing a witty comment or self-deprecating remark. Audiences remained rapt as he told stories, most resulting in hearty belly laughs.

Hartford's commercial success may have begun with "Gentle On My Mind." A three-time Grammy award winner, he certainly made enough royalties from that song to pursue whatever path he wanted to musically. He concentrated his time on the things he loved - playing traditional music, collecting original fiddle tune manuscripts and being a licensed riverboat pilot.

Though he appeared on Campbell's TV show in the 1960s, Hartford spurned Hollywood, rejecting an offer to star in a TV detective series and returning to Nashville to continue his career as a bluegrass performer.

"I knew that if I did it, I would never live it down," Hartford said of the television series in an interview last year. "Because then, when I went back to music, people would start saying, ‘Oh, he didn't make it in acting so he's gone country.'"

Born John Cowan Harford in New York City (Chet Atkins was the one who added the "t" to his name), he was raised in St. Louis, along the Mississippi River, where he learned to love riverboats.

As a youngster, he was enthralled by square dance and bluegrass music, in particular that of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. He began playing banjo and fiddle in his teens and later picked up the guitar as well.

He moved to Nashville in 1965, and his first album "John Hartford Looks at Life" was released the following year. The liner notes from that first album quote Johnny Cash, who offered an apt description of Hartford: "His music and lyrics are unlike any I've heard. He is himself and will not be told how to write or sing, because he has only his own world."

Hartford's version of "Gentle on My Mind" was from his second album, "Earthwords & Music," released in 1967. The song became a multimillion-dollar smash for Campbell and was covered by hundreds of musicians, including Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Dean Martin and Tammy Wynette. It earned Hartford two of his three Grammys.

He moved to California in 1968, landing a job writing and performing on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and also joined the cast of Campbell's "Goodtime Hour."

Returning to Nashville in 1971, Hartford released the landmark acoustic album "Aereo-Plain," which featured dobro player Tut Taylor, Vassar Clements on fiddle and guitarist Norman Blake. The album, with its cutting-edge sound, set the stage for what some call progressive bluegrass.

He won another Grammy for his recording "Mark Twang" in 1976, with its Mississippi riverboat theme. Most recently, Hartford was one of the performers on the hit soundtrack to the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?''

Hartford influenced many performers, including banjoist Béla Fleck and Grammy-winning fiddler Mark O'Connor, who wrote this month to the Boston Bluegrass Union, referring to Hartford as a "wonderful modern day minstrel one-man show."

Hartford will be missed by throngs of adoring fans, who cherished not only the man but what he brought to the music.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.