AREA CODE 615'S FIRST ALBUM ON POLYDOR IS OUT OF PRINT. TOO BAD. BOBBY THOMPSON played exquisite banjo in that studio-only band back in the early '70s. I bought the record when it first came out and I still, literally, get chills every time I listen to his solo on Hey Jude. It's that powerful.

Bobby Thompson: I was born on July 5th 1937, in Converse, South Carolina. My father worked in a cotton mill, and my mother was a housewife. Neither of them played music. I had a grandpa on my mother's side that played banjo, but I never got to hear him.

BNL: Was there music in the house growing up? Records or radio or anything?

BT: Just a radio, that's all. We used to listen to the Grand Old Opry on Saturday night.

BNL: So you would maybe hear Bill Monroe. So what was your first instrument?

BT: Banjo. I heard Foggy Mountain Breakdown -- it was a theme song on a disk jockey show. I had just started to want to play then and I had a friend who'd bought a guitar, and I heard that record and told my folks that I wanted a banjo.

BNL: What was it about the song?

BT: It just knocked me out. And I tried to play it, but when I listened to it on a record player slowed down to 45, I found out I'd been playing it backwards for six months. That was the early 50's. I was fourteen.

BNL: That's exactly when I started. A good head-start. So you just taught yourself? You didn't have anyone to teach you?

BT: No, no. There was some guy in Converse that was going to teach me to play, but he played clawhammer. I never learned clawhammer.

BNL: I'm finally learning it now, 35 years after I started. It's great, but it's taking a long time. What was your first professional experience? How old were you when you started playing out?

BT: Well, I played a high school contest and won that, and then me and the guitar player Leland Hodge got on a radio show in Spartanburg. We played there, and another band hired me to go to Augusta, Georgia.

BNL: Were you still in high school at this point?

BT: Yeah, I guess. Let me see...I graduated in ‘55 and then we moved down to Augusta -- me, James Davis and Bill Cooker, and the Pritchard brothers from North Carolina.

BNL: So you moved down to Augusta to become a full-time musician?

BT: Yeah. While we were playing down there, some guy says, "We have a girl singer we want you to listen to," and he came to the house with his wife, and we thought she was going to sing. Anyhow, he also had a little kid about waist-high to me, and he said "Get up and sing, Honey," and it was Brenda Lee.

BNL: Brenda Lee? How old was she?

BT: I don't know. It was before Decca records signed her. We backed her up for about six months, I guess, in ‘56.

BNL: Doing country music or bluegrass?

BT: Trying to play bluegrass. (laughs)

BNL: So she started off with a bluegrass band. Her career might have gone differently if she'd stayed with a bluegrass band!

BT: Yeah. She sung the same way that she did in later years. Just knocked us out.

BNL: So you were doing Bill Monroe tunes, and Flatt & Scruggs.

BT: Yeah. One night we were playing a job and we were on the roof of a juke joint with Brenda Lee singing, and some guy comes out and just knocks the hell out of another guy from the audience, so we quit playing. And the head man said "Keep playing! Sing the song, Brenda!" and she sang (singing) "There She Goes..." and we packed up, man! (laughs) Then I went back home to Converse and I met the Lewis Family and played a lot of dates with them.

BNL: You mean your band and their band?

BT: Yeah. Then I moved to Spartanburg, and then to Greenville, and played with Curley Mulligan.

BNL: So you'd move from town to town just playing with different people.

BT: Done that for about six months, and painted cars during the day. Then I moved to Asheville, North Carolina with Carl Storey. Probably '56 or '57 -- I can't get it all straight now.

BNL: So you did your first recording with him? Is that correct?

BT: Yeah. I done Fire on the Banjo and Banjolina [both cuts on Starday].

BNL: So that was a 45; those two songs. Now, were you doing fiddle-tune style at that point?

BT: No, with Carl Storey we used to play a lot of double-bass with Bonnie Lou and Buster. Benny Sims played the fiddle.

BNL: Benny Sims -- sure. He used to play with Flatt and Scruggs.

BT: He made a comment to me one night -- he said "It's a shame a banjo player don't sit down and try to figure out these fiddle tunes note-for-note like we play." That got me started. Then I moved down with Jim & Jesse in Valdosta, Georgia. That's when I started playing in that style.

BNL: Do you remember the process you went through when you were coming up with that style of playing?

BT: Not really.

BNL: Did you sit down with Benny Sims?

BT: No. I wish. He stayed with Carl Storey and I moved to play with Jim & Jesse right after that. Me and Jesse and Vassar Clements, we would travel the road a lot, and every day we were at a town Jesse would get up and write a tune. Every damn day! Me and Vassar would get up and work it out with Jesse. We had a bunch of stuff, man.

BNL: It's too bad you wouldn't do it on stage -- just playing on the bus.

BT: Yeah. On-the-bus tunes.

BNL: So that's how you started in this style.

BT: Yeah, but nobody would listen to it. Goddamn. Everybody just wanted to hear Scruggs style, and when I played that fiddle-tune style they'd look at me like I was crazy. I played it for myself and my friends all the time, but we didn't play it on stage. Just a few tunes.

BNL: This would have been 1958 or so. I have this tape of you, I can't even remember where I got it from -- I guess Neil Rosenberg. You're playing with Jim & Jesse on some Florida TV station, and it's mostly instrumental -- a lot of banjo tunes. You play almost no melodic sorts of things. I think you did Rainbow, and Katie Hill, and Crazy Fingers, things like that. I had a chance to interview Carroll Best before he died, and he said that he had met you and had gotten you into playing in different keys, like the key of D without a capo -- playing fiddle tunes. Do you remember that?

BT: I used to play Arkansas Traveler and a bunch of tunes like that in D. I forget what-all else I used to play. I can't place Carroll Best. Where's he from?

BNL: He was from western North Carolina. I can't remember the exact town. He was a farmer out there, and he was playing in that style in 1945. He started playing for square dances, and the fiddler would get sick -- but anyway, he said he ran into you sometime in the fifties and showed you something's in D that he was doing. He didn't say where, but he didn't tour a lot, so I imagine it was when you were in western North Carolina.

BT: Yeah. I used to play some contest somewhere up in North Carolina. Hubert Davis used to win it every year. Every year!

BNL: Couldn't get in there, huh?

BT: I played it a lot, but I never won.

BNL: Would you play the fiddle-tune style?

BT: No, I wasn't playing that yet.

BNL: So Jim & Jesse was your second recording experience -- you did what, six sides for Star Day or something like that?

BT: I did Border Rider. I used the chromatic style on that record.

BNL: '58 or something. At that point you were the only person you knew playing in that style.

BT: I had, I think, went into the Army. I stayed in six months, and got out and joined the Guards Unit for five years -- stayed four of the five. I went back with Jim & Jesse. I told the Guard people "You can try to get me, but I don't think you can catch me, by God!" And they didn't! I stayed out.

BNL: So you left a year early to go back and play with Jim & Jesse -- I think you needed your banjo playing more than your service at that point.

BT: So when I first met Bill Keith was...I heard him play something on the Opry.

BNL: Right. With Monroe.

BT: Right. First time I met him was when he came down to the house in Converse.

BNL: You'd moved back to Converse at that point. Now, how did you feel that he was doing that fiddle-tune style and getting all that fame?

BT: I don't know -- I thought we both started it at the same time. I didn't have no hard feelings for it.

BNL: I guess he'd heard Border Rider. Don Stover was doing a tiny bit of that too, but mostly he did it on his own, he said. So you were with Jim & Jesse for 2-3 years in the late fifties, and Vassar was with them the whole time?

BT: Yeah. Me and Vassar. (laughs) We had a good time, man!

BNL: I bet. Are there any good stories from back then?

BT: I can tell you a damn million!

BNL: I bet! Those years on the road -- there must be some amazing stuff that went down.

BT: We used to play a square dance in Valdosta on Saturday night, and every Saturday night Vassar and Chick Stribling would get drunk, and I can tell you some stories about Vassar and Chick. One Sunday morning some guy called me and said I had a friend that drove off a bridge down in the Okefenokee Swamp, and his name was Vassar Clements -- come down and get him. I went down to get him -- turned on the road he'd told me to -- went down this dirt road ‘til I seen the back end of Vassar's car standing straight up. He'd drove off an old bridge and fallen in. I stopped the car and all of a sudden Vassar stood up and said "Well damn, Thompson! You got your banjo? Let's pick one!"

BNL: Oh man! Vassar was living rough back then, but he loved to play music. Still does. So he was probably still a little bit drunk at that point. Did you play?

BT: No, no.

BNL: Probably not the time.

BT: We used to work a lot with the Louvin Brothers. We used to have a good time, man. (Laughs)

BNL: I bet. So you were in the army for six months, went into the National Guard for four years, went back to Jim and Jesse -- you were down in Nashville at that point?

BT: Yeah. I played with them for about a year and a half, then I quit and went to work in a machine shop for a couple of years. My shop made a lot of the parts for the space shot that went to the moon -- we made the bushings that turned the engines.

BNL: So your fingerprints went up in space. That would have been mid-sixties?

BT: I'd worked in a machine shop in Spartanburg for about three years while I was still in the Guards.

BNL: I saw you with Jim and Jesse at the Roanoke Bluegrass Festival in Fincastle Virginia in 1966.

BT: Yeah. We played the Newport Folk Festival.

BNL: That's right, that CD just came out. So that was around '66 or '68. When you worked in the machine shop, were you still playing music on the side?

BT: I used to pick on the Opry once in a while. I was at the Opry one night and somebody called from Nashville. They just wanted a banjo player to come down for a session. I went, and that's when I met Brady Martin, Jerry Reed and Llyod Green.

BNL: Is that how you got started with studio work?

BT: Yeah, Brady Martin got me started doing sessions.

BNL: So soon after that you got into Area Code 615. Do you say "Six Fifteen," or "Six-One-Five?"

BT: Both.

BNL: So what year was Area Code 615?

BT: I forget. I know I done some sessions with the Monkees.

BNL: Really?!

BT: Before Area Code.

BNL: There's a song they did called Good Clean Fun. Was that you on there?

BT: Yeah.

BNL: Get outta here!

BT: No kidding.

BNL: I was never really a Monkees fan, but then they did that song, and I thought "Whoa now, that's a good song, who's playing banjo on that?"

BT: Yeah, that's me.

[Editor's note: Buddy Blackmon adds that in 1968 Mike Nesmith recorded at RCA studios in Nashville, but the sides were released as The Monkees. The pickers on those sessions say that this was the genesis of the group Area Code 615 -- Bobby Thompson, Buddy Spicher, Charlie McCoy, et al. This bunch was later nominated for a Grammy and did some revolutionary tunes and arrangements.]

BNL: Wow! That's something I've wondered about for thirty years or something. Now, listening to this tape of your playing, when you met Bill Keith for the first time. You're playing some amazing jazz kinds of things on there, not even necessarily the chromatic style, but you did something from My Fair Lady, On The Street Where You Live, I think it was, and then some bebop sort of things that nobody else was playing at that time. How did you come up with that stuff?

BT: I don't know. Tunes that I'd heard and liked, like Little Rock Getaway, Ain't Misbehaving. I just heard that tape last night. Béla Fleck brought it by.

BNL: Right! I gave that copy to Béla. How did you feel, listening to that?

BT: Okay by me.

BNL: Do you remember playing all that stuff?

BT: Not really.

BNL: But it didn't surprise you?

BT: Not really. I had a bunch of stuff like that that I'd worked up, but I quit playing it when I came to Nashville. Nobody would play with me, so I just finally stopped.


Continued in Banjo Newsletter Vol. XXV-7, May 1998