Riley Baugus

2008 Sioux River Folk Festival

Canton, South Dakota

This is a companion piece to my coverage of the 2008 Sioux River Folk Festival (see Festival Coverage or Archives). It is Part I, and fleshes out what is already commonly known about Riley’s childhood and young adult years as he was learning how to play various instruments. And, it is a case study in how traditional music is successfully passed down to younger generations.

Riley is siting and playing, still working on the last song of the last set...

RILEY: I realized, when I put my picks on up there for that song, that I had never fingerpicked it before.

FAF: Which one?

RILEY: You’re Gonna Reap Just What You Sow. And I went, oh well, maybe I should have clawhammered this!

FAF: Since you’ve got it in your lap, would you tell me about this banjo you’ve been playing all weekend?

RILEY: Yep, that’s the banjo I play. Everybody says, gosh Riley, how old is that banjo you’re playing? I built it in 1996, so it’s not very old, 12 years at this point. It’s the one that I did the least amount of work to. I didn’t do anything special to it. I left glue lines and file marks and everything in it, and it turned out to be my favorite one of all of them.

FAF: How many had you built before that?

RILEY: Well, this is No. 6, my sixth one that I had built and numbered, but I built several before that, so I was probably close to 20 in terms of instruments total at that point.

FAF: And how many have you built since?

RILEY: I’ve probably got about 50 or 75 banjos out there.

FAF: Well, they’ve probably appreciated in value now that you’ve become a big-time movie person [all laugh]...

RILEY: Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if they are or not. If they are, maybe I should sell this one!

FAF: So why do you stick with that banjo? What does it have about it that you really like?

RILEY: It’s a nice, predictable instrument for me. I know how it plays and how it responds, and it has a really nice sound to me. It is the sound that I was looking for when I made my very first banjo. It just suits me. That’s why I like it.

FAF: Can you chronicle what instruments you have played down through the years?

RILEY: When I was 10 years old, I started trying to learn how to play the fiddle. They offered a Strings class that year at my school. So I decided, well yeah, I’ll learn to play the fiddle. I was in the fifth grade.

FAF: What were they teaching, classical violin?

RILEY: Well, yeah, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that there was anything you could play but country music on a fiddle. I wasn’t really putting it together that they were gonna teach anything but fiddle music. And then I got there and started taking the class and I soon discovered that Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances is not what I was really interested in. I did learn a lot about music taking that course. I stayed with the program for about five years, throughout school. It was good for my musical education. I would say that I didn’t learn enough to damage me, but I didn’t learn enough to help me a lot either. I mean, it did help me a lot; it’s just that, I didn’t spend as much time doing that as I probably should have, trying to learn proper music and writing music and reading music.

FAF: But you did learn how to read music?

RILEY: Oh yes. ... My mother passed away when I was 14 years old, and my Dad remarried the next year. We moved out of that school system. So, the school system we went to was actually further up into the mountains and they didn’t offer a Strings course at all. But I was still playing Old-Time and Bluegrass music before, while I was taking the classes.

FAF: How did that come about?

RILEY: As a kid, in the Blue Ridge Mountain community where my grandparents lived, and where my folks were from, there were lots of musicians around. There was a great band called The Red Fox Chasers that were a big deal in the ‘30s.

FAF: And where was this at?

RILEY: In Sparta, North Carolina. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Alleghany County. And, they lived outside of town. Sparta was the town, but everybody says Sparta because that’s the closest town. They actually lived in Glade Creek in the Hare community. Or in Hare in the Glade Creek community ... right next to Rich Hill – and you could see Sanders Mountain from there! [we were having some real country humor at that point with our directions...]

Now, there were musicians all around there. You had an old man named Rich Krauss, and you had Paul Miles and you had Bob Cranford and there were just musicians around everywhere. So I was always exposed to Old-Time music. Growing up, my Dad would bring home records all the time. And he loved to listen to Old-Time music, Bluegrass music, and Blues. So we had everything from Tommy Jarrell to Mississippi John Hurt to Ralph Stanley to George Jones in the house.

FAF: Was he bringing home any 78s?

RILEY: No, he was bringing home LPs. This was in the late 60s and early 70s. And that’s what he liked to listen to. He did not like Rock ‘n Roll and didn’t want me to listen to Rock ‘n Roll or enjoy it.

FAF: Was he a musician?

RILEY: No, he didn’t play at all. My grandfather tried to learn to play the fiddle one day. He went to town and bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it in one day, and found that it was so difficult that he took it to town and traded it for a harmonica the next day. So he and his brother both played harmonica. They played things like Arkansaw Traveler and Turkey in the Straw, and just those kinds of familiar mountain tunes, you know. So like I said, there was music all around.

One of my best friends, Kirk Sutphin, and I lived on the same road. And his folks are up from the Blue Ridge too. He was in third grade when I was in fifth grade, and we met on the school bus. His Grandpa was teaching him how to play the fiddle and so he was taking his fiddle to school for Show & Tell. And I had my fiddle and I was going to Strings class.

FAF: You had your violin...

RILEY: Yeah. No, it was still a fiddle. I wanted nothin’ to do with violin. That was just not what I was interested in at all. So we started playing music together.

FAF: Were these full-size violins?

RILEY: He was playing a three-quarter, ‘cause he was a little smaller than me. At 10 years old I was able to handle a full-size fiddle. So we met, and we realized we lived on the same road. I kind of knew him because I knew his brothers. His brothers were older. And so we started hanging out playing music.

And then he started going up to visit Tommy Jarrell. His Dad was taking him up to visit Tommy. And then I started goin’ up with him. And going to visit Tommy was like visiting our own grandparents because we didn’t have any of the cultural hurdles to jump over that people who came from other places did. We went there, we understood his language, we understood his ways, we understood his food. So really, all we had to do was focus on how to learn to play music.

FAF: You went together with your fiddles?

RILEY: Yep. And, that same year, I saved my money that I’d made all throughout the summer, doing odd jobs and fixin’ lawnmowers for people and stuff like that; and went to Sears Roebuck and ordered a guitar out of the Sears Roebuck catalog.

FAF: This was the same year you started playing fiddle?

RILEY: Yeah. I had probably turned 11 by that point.

FAF: When is your birthday?

RILEY: November 28. ’65. So anyway, got the guitar, it did finally come. My Dad took me out to Sears and we picked it up and I played it all night the first night I got it, trying to figure it out. Because it was very, very different than the violin, but I knew I wanted to do it.

And shortly after that, a very, very short time after that, my Dad and I built, out of scrap wood, a banjo. He took his pocket knife and a stick of maple stove wood and carved out the tuning pegs for it...I still have it, packed away. It’s somewhere in my house....We went to a music store in Winston-Salem and they had strings and tail pieces and bridges. So we just got a banjo bridge and figured it out.

FAF: And whose idea was that, yours or your Dad’s?

RILEY: Well, we couldn’t really afford to buy one... Dad laid the fingerboard, or the neck of the banjo we were making, he laid it up next to the neck of the guitar and marked where the frets should be. So, we didn’t know, we had no idea that they could work the same way. We just didn’t know anything about the science or mechanics of an instrument. We were just building a banjo, you know? We figured, people in the mountains have been building banjos forever, well, not forever, but certainly...

FAF: What kind of wood did you use for the neck?

RILEY: It was pine. We just used a pine board. And the head was made out of wood, and the back was made out of wood. We used a piece of flexible molding, just three-inch flexible molding like you would put around the baseboard, and used that to make the rim with. And it worked...it was fine. It was good enough to learn on. The problem is, I was so impatient with it. The stove wood that we carved the pegs out of was a little green yet, and I was so impatient, I wouldn’t let them dry properly. So I kept breaking tuning pegs, and my Dad would carve me a new one, and we’d put another one in.

So anyway, that’s how I started. And then shortly after that we went down to a pawn shop in Winston-Salem and bought an old Kay banjo, just some old banjo made in China or somewhere. So that’s what we did. We went and bought a banjo that was a proper, factory-built banjo and I learned to play more. I just got more and more interested in it and just played all the time.

FAF: And when you and Kirk Sutphin would get together and play, what was your configuration as far as instruments?

RILEY: We played fiddle and banjo; or fiddle and guitar, or whatever; banjo and guitar or banjo and banjo.

FAF: He was learning all of the same instruments as well?

RILEY: Oh yes. Well, see, he had instruments in his house. His Dad was a guitar player, and he was buying banjos and stuff, and had fiddles. Like I said, his Grandpa was teaching him to play Old-Time fiddle. So, we were just kids, trying to play some tunes. And many times we would set up all night long on Friday night. It was the end of the week, and we’d sit up all night eating fudgesicles and watching television with the volume down and playing tunes. They had a den that was off the rest of the house, so we could play as long as we wanted to. And his parents advocated us playing, and my parents advocated me playing, so they knew we were doing something worthwhile and we were learning something and we were staying out of trouble...

We kept playing together most all the time, probably until we were late teenagers. Finally, I graduated from high school and went and got a job. I was a welder and blacksmith for 18 years. I started playing with a bunch of other people, meeting other people around the community, playing with other people besides Kirk, and still playing with Kirk. We had a band for a long time called The Old Hollow Stringband, me and Kirk, Kirk’s Dad, and a lady named Terri McMurray, who is married to Paul Brown of NPR. She played banjo and I played guitar; Kirk’s Dad played the guitar and Kirk played fiddle. We had a gentleman, a photographer named Will MacIntyre, and he was our bass player. He used to travel with David Holt and play. [The Old Hollow Stringband] was during and after high school.

FAF: Well, do you have any lasting scars from your days as a welder and blacksmith?

RILEY: Actually, yeah. One of the reasons why I got out of it completely is because I had a thousand pounds of steel get knocked off onto my left foot the last year I was there... So yeah, I was playing music and still working a full-time job, and started playing more and more, and then started playing with a band called The Red Hots, that were some friends of mine. We did primarily square dance tunes, just Old-Time square dance tunes.

FAF: Still in the Sparta area?

RILEY: I actually lived outside Winston-Salem, in the county: Forsyth County. But we spent all my young years, and teenage years, up in the mountains. Every minute I could get away from the foothills and go up to the mountains, that is what we would do. We lived in what’s called the Western Piedmont, but it’s actually part of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So, you’re not in the flatlands, and you’re not in the highlands. You’re kind of in between.

So yeah, I kept playing and playing, and traveling and meeting people; and met Dirk [Powell] actually. Met Dirk in 1983 or 1984, at a fiddler’s convention, Mt. Airy or Galax. Not sure which one, but we met and liked each other. It was rare in those days for really young people to be playing [Old-Time] music. Now there’s kids playing everywhere. But in those days there was only just a handful of us that were young and out there playing. You had the Henry Brothers from up in Rochester. Then you had the Puryears, Jeb and Jordon, from Ithaca; and they’re the ones that started the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Music Festival, which is kind of a big deal. But they went on to form Donna the Buffalo, which is an alternative country rock band. But anyway, then there was some folks from around home: Greg Hooven, Kirk Sutphin, and myself; Brian Grimm and his sister Debby Grimm, and there were a few others around. But there was only a handful of us that were young, really young, and playing [Old-Time] music...in those days. Now they’re everywhere, and it’s great, absolutely.

Check back for Part II of my interview with Riley Baugus.

Joy H. Hance