Jimmy Martin – In the Hall of the Mountain King
In considering the situation, Martin himself seems to waver between resentment and equanimity. “That’s the hardest thing in bluegrass,” he says, “is keeping a band. See, in country music, it’s not all that bad to a certain extent. They have to be good, but they don’t have to be stars and sing. Everybody in bluegrass, in my band, is a star, because I’m singing, and they come in there and sing and play too. They get well-known right real quick” — and then they leave, he implies. That they might leave because he’s hectored an errant member onstage, dressing him down in front of a festival audience, or because he’s been known to get mean when he has a drink too many, doesn’t seem to occur to him.
Or maybe it does. One former Sunny Mountain Boy I talked with recalls that “Jimmy really admired George Jones, and not just as a singer. I remember him telling me about a promoter who kept booking Jones even after a whole string of those no-shows he was famous for, and I think that the point he was driving at was that Jones was so good, his music was so great, the people loved him so much, that they would put up with anything he would do — and that was part of what Jimmy saw in Jones that he wanted for himself. He likes being hard to love, and being loved anyway.”
In the end, it all comes back to the music. Through all the turmoil, Jimmy Martin has made some of the most soul-stirring music in the history of bluegrass — indeed, in the history of 20th-century American music of any style — and he’s done it in a way that’s his and his alone, bringing to even the corniest novelty song a depth born of his passion to entertain, to connect with an audience.
“If I sing a sad song, I feel sadness in my mind, in my heart, and just like I could cry,” he tells me. “But I can’t cry and put on; it has to come out just right, you see. Like when I sing ‘Shake Hands With Mother Again’ or a good gospel song, I’m thinking of good things, thinking of Heaven, someday we’re all going to be there…and then if I’m singing a funny song, I want everyone to whoop and holler and dance, you see what I mean? Like ‘Skip, Hop And Wobble’, when I say, ‘skip, hop and wobble,’ I put a little skip in my action on the stage, you see. I just don’t stand there just like a stump, I make it wiggle right with it.”
In the twilight of his career — he’s playing no more than a couple dozen dates a year these days, and recent heart trouble may reduce even that small number — Martin is no less interested in music, or in the music business, than he’s ever been. During our conversation, he illustrated a point about the need for good songs by referring to David Ball’s 1994 hit “Thinking Problem” (he remembered exactly how high it went on the charts), and allowed as how he’d like to open for Marty Stuart or Travis Tritt. I was looking more for reflection on a brilliant but tragically flawed career, but it seemed typical of the man to be no less preoccupied with unlikely plans for the future.
So it may be that the best way to end this account is by letting Jimmy Martin, the King Of Bluegrass, have the last word. It’s as close as he came that day, or is likely to come anytime soon, to a summary of his career, and in his words, his way of putting things, you’ll likely get as good a sense of the man as from anything else that has been written or said about him:
“Well, I can say I’ve worked hard, but I can also say it’s paid off, and my advice to any musician or singer is kindly like the Good Book says: With faith as big as a mustard seed you can move a mountain. Well, I had faith, that so many people told me I was a good singer and a good entertainer, I said well, maybe it’ll break through somewhere. I guess it did, because I’ve had good musicians with me, and I’ve had some bad ones….You gotta take the bitter with the sweet and go on through.
“I’ve seen times that I didn’t think, Lord, that I could go no further, I went just as far as I could get, what am I going to do next? When I was playing in those old bars, beer joints, and blood a-flying and teeth getting knocked out, and the bar owner said, ‘If a fight starts, you just keep singing, don’t change the song, so nobody else can hear it.’ I’ve sung ‘Sunny Side Of The Mountain’, a bottle was flying right across in front of me. But that’s good experience. There are a lot of people that’s made good, it’s been through the same thing I’m talking about. It ain’t easy.
“I still believe with good songs, with good musicians, good singers, good quality all together, harmony in the music, and all blending together — not just the mandolin playing tinny, and the fiddle playing tinny, I’m talking about good tone out of every bit of it, where it works in together — I still believe bluegrass music would hit the charts. I do.”
ND contributing editor Jon Weisberger lives in and writes from the Cincinnati area. He once participated in a performance of Jimmy Martin’s “You Don’t Know My Mind” that was just exactly right, and hopes to do it again someday.