A mysterious stranger's homecoming

by Jack Neely

One sound you don't ever expect to hear downtown is slide guitar. It sounds hotter, swampier, lustier than Knoxville ever feels any right to be. Downtown Knoxville in 1999 is brisk, businesslike, buttoned-down, inhibited, and, except for the street preacher's angry ecstasies, pretty quiet.

For the past few weeks, though, a thin, tangly-bearded man in a black beret has been playing slide blues on and around Market Square. Jerry Winther is originally from San Diego and enjoys the company of a big dark dog named Arrow. He's an aficionado of his music's history. As he plays, sitting on his plastic milk crate, he's happy to talk about it.

Both of his guitars are antiques. The discolored steel guitar with the hand-rolled cigarette in the frets is a 1931 steel National brand. Jerry says he bought it from a lady who found it in the Mojave Desert, and cleaned it up. The other is a genuine 1934 Dobro.

With its wooden body and big round steel resonator, Dobro can seem as foreign here as sitar. For years, when a documentary or movie tries to evoke the Deepest, Darkest South, the cypress swamps of Florida and the sharecroppers' shacks of Alabama, they lay it over with a soundtrack of thick Dobro or steel-guitar music. You might think the Dobro emerged like a cottonmouth from the Louisiana swamps or the crickety Mississippi Delta. There's something about the Dobro's whang that's elemental, feral, carnivorous. You don't necessarily think about Knoxville.

You can live here for years and never even hear the word. But then you hear a guy like Jerry playing one, and the very same day you get a fax from a friend, like disc jockey and old-time music authority Paul Campbell.

That was what happened to me, anyway. What Paul sent me was an article I might have missed otherwise, a feature from the January issue of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. Atlanta author Tom Gray wrote the piece, which happens to be all about the origins of the Dobro.

Which are more recent and exotic than I would have guessed. As musical instruments go, the Dobro's not very old. Some Metro Pulse readers who send me corrections by e-mail are older than the oldest Dobro. It was invented in 1929, as a refinement of the steel guitar, which is also strictly a 20th-century instrument, invented in response to the national Hawaiian-music fad that also bred the ukulele. Well, three Slovak brothers in California thought there was money to be made by putting a round steel resonator in a wooden-body guitar.

They liked what they came up with. Their last name was Dopyera, and they named their new invention after themselves, the Dopyera Brothers. They called it the Dobro.

The Dopyeras tried to market it in the West, the Midwest, the Northeast—everywhere in America, in fact, except in the South. It arrived accidentally in the mid-'30s, when Hawaiian-style guitarist Dave Trask moved from San Francisco to Knoxville, toting what may have been Tennessee's first Dobro. Here he performed Hawaiian style with his partner Alma Cox, who was said to play as well as he did. And he taught Dobro.

Knoxville was already thick with young, hungry string musicians looking for a gig on the radio or in the street and curious enough to try an odd-looking new instrument. According to this article, Knoxville bred some of the country's first Dobro heroes.

Born in Possum Hollow, Clell Summey was a skinny steel guitarist who tried to make a living off pocket change in the Knoxville streets. When he heard his first riffs from Dave Trask's unusual piece of California luggage, he put his steel down on the sidewalk and gave the Dobro a try. He ordered his own and played it in a band led by local fiddler Roy Acuff called the Tennessee Crackerjacks, a.k.a. the Crazy Tennesseans, who played for passersby at Doc Stevens' drugstore on Broadway and at Thompson's Garage in Lonsdale, and later on WNOX and WROL. In early 1938, when Roy, Clell, and the boys tried out for the Opry, Roy sang an old Knoxville street number, "Great Speckled Bird," as Clell accompanied him on that mysterious Dobro.

The Crackerjacks got the job, moved to Nashville; Summey got to be the first to play Dobro on the Grand Ole Opry. When Clell quit Roy's band over an artistic dispute not quite a year later, Roy sent off to Knoxville for still another steel guitarist: Pete Kirby, a Sevier County native who'd been working in a Knoxville bakery. As "Bashful Brother Oswald" Kirby would become one of the best-known Dobroists of all time.

Meanwhile, back in California, wartime steel shortages forced the Dopyeras, who probably never meant their invention to be used for Opry purposes anyway, to cease production. Nashville began turning away from Dobroism after the war, and according to Gray, the Dobro's Slovak-Hawaiian origins had been plumb forgotten by the 1950s, when it was sometimes recalled as an "old-time" instrument.

But hereabouts, a few stubborn souls kept whanging away at the things. Cliff Carlisle played on WNOX and influenced other aspiring Dobroists who tuned in. Among them was Buck Graves, who played on WROL in the '40s and later joined Flatt & Scruggs, introducing a sound then new and alarming in a bluegrass band—but one that eventually defined Flatt & Scruggs' sound. Earl Scruggs nicknamed Graves' Dobro "the Hound Dog."

So when did Knoxville lose its reputation as a hotbed of the Dobro? Actually, we didn't. As it happens, some of the nation's best-known Dobroists today—Phil Leadbetter and Tut Taylor, to name two—live in the Knoxville area. You may have to go out of your way to hear them, though, and chances are you'll have to buy a ticket.

Lately, it has taken another visiting Californian to bring the Dobro back to the Knoxville streets, where we first heard it over 60 years ago.