Published in Bluegrass Unlimited (October 2023), pp. 14-16.

Music in American Life: The Johnson Mountain Boys

by Thomas Adler

All who love to explore bluegrass music’s history in depth are aware (or arguably should be!) of the longstanding and ever-growing series of books devoted to “Music in American Life,” published by the University of Illinois Press since 1972. As a whole, the catalog of books explores all forms of American vernacular music, documenting not only historic details, but also the place of music in American culture and the cultural life that gives rise to particular musical styles. 

Alongside genres like country music, blues, Dixieland, gospel, Tin Pan Alley, minstrelsy, western swing, and jazz, bluegrass music has been especially well-represented in the Music in American Life catalog over the past half-century. Books in the series have focused on a broad range of the most significant bluegrass people, places, and sounds, also chronicling the stylistic evolutions and revolutionary changes that have characterized bluegrass since its earliest origins. 

Readers of Bluegrass Unlimited will therefore surely be delighted to learn that a book is now in development about a powerful, historic, and incredibly influential band: The Johnson Mountain Boys. 

The author is Ira Gitlin, originally from New York. Ira has become well-known across the greater Washington, D.C. area since 1986 as a talented multi-instrumentalist and thoughtful scholarly commentator on bluegrass. While Gitlin considers himself principally to be a banjo player and teacher, he has also supported many Washington-area bands with his sensitive work on 5-string, guitar and bass. 

Ira Gitlin conceived a need for this project over the past half-dozen years, not only because of his personal admiration as a fan of the Johnson Mountain Boys, but also because he views that great band, which performed nationally and internationally from about 1975 until 1988, as a significant bluegrass exemplar of a “back-to-basics” impulse which, Gitlin asserts, shows up in the evolutionary history of many musical styles, once the styles have been established long enough. 

The back-to-basics revitalization that Ira Gitlin attributes to the Johnson Mountain Boys was also noticed by many other perceptive commentators on their music. Neil V. Rosenberg noted in Bluegrass: A History that “…in the Washington area the most talked-about band of the early eighties was not in the progressive mold but was neo-traditional in repertoire and performance style—the Johnson Mountain Boys….They both believed in and kidded about the lonesome and sentimental side of the old-style bluegrass songs that made up the bulk of their repertoire.”  

Similarly, the discerning and influential radio personality Bill Vernon put it this way: “At a time when the force of tradition was ebbing in bluegrass music, The Johnson Mountain Boys took that tradition, ameliorated it, revitalized it, and made it their own. They brought to their music unique creativity, dynamism, and dedication….”  

Numerous similar quotations might well be offered here. For instance, David Morris—longtime writer for the online news and media website Bluegrass Today—noted in 2020 that the two Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductees that year stood as stylistic opposites: “The Johnson Mountain Boys, with soulful lead singer Dudley Connell… was traditional with a capital T…. New Grass Revival was at the opposite end of the spectrum.” 

Gitlin’s book, based on his own meticulous research and many personal interviews, will fully detail the complete history of the group along with thorough identification of the principal Johnson Mountain Boys and numerous temporary “fill-ins.” Ira Gitlin himself filled in on bass five times in 1994. There will surely be stories from and about all the band’s regular members; and Ira hopes that all those with pertinent reminiscences will reach out to him via ira@iragitlin.com. 

But since the band’s heyday ended nearly three decades ago, present-day bluegrass devotees may benefit from my own short review of the group’s history that follows here. This key bluegrass group performed together in various configurations for only twenty-one years, from 1975 until 1996. (That period of influential recordings and live shows coincidentally echoed the twenty-one year career of Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, who were together from 1948 till 1969.) But the Johnson Mountain Boys’ most active and significant period filled just ten years, from 1978 until 1988. Nevertheless, there were as many as twenty reunion shows or more each year from 1989 through 1996, and many of the individual members pursued spectacularly noteworthy bluegrass music or related careers after the band’s end. 

In their prime, the group initially released one 45-rpm single record in 1979, and one 7” 45-rpm Extended Play (EP) record on the Copper Creek label; the 7” EP was re-released in 1984 as a 12” EP.  Copper Creek was founded by Gary Reid, who played bass with the band in a brief early incarnation. Later on came eight LP albums and one double LP on Rounder Records, most of which were also released as CDs, audiocassettes, or 8-track tapes. Rounder also highlighted four songs from the LPs on two 45-rpm releases. Happily, contemporary fans can fortunately find a good many of the band’s fine performances preserved as videos—both single clips and full show performances—on the internet’s video-sharing platforms, YouTube and Vimeo. 

The website of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum lists thirteen key members of the Johnson Mountain Boys, and categorizes them by their “primary instruments”: over time there were two guitarists: Dudley Connell and Ron Welch; three banjo players: Frannie Davidson, Richard Underwood, and Tom Adams; two mandolinists: Eddie D’Zmura and David McLaughlin; five bassists: Gary Reid, Mark Prindle, Earl Yager, Larry Robbins, and Marshall Wilborn; and one fiddler: Eddie Stubbs. Of course, many—perhaps most—of these band members were actually excellent players of multiple instruments. Dudley Connell, for instance, began as a banjo player, and David McLaughlin was also a fine fiddler, who played twin fiddles with Eddie Stubbs on several outstanding songs. Tom Adams excelled on guitar and mandolin as well. 

The band also relied on its members’ powerful vocal talents, presented in solos, duets, trios, and quartets. In the first semi-permanent incarnation of the group, Dudley Connell sang impressive solo leads, as well as offering soaring tenor parts which smoothly combined with Richard Underwood’s leads and David McLaughlin’s baritone lines. Eddie Stubbs’ rich bass-baritone voice supported his own country-style solos, like “Waltz Across Texas,” as well as the group’s gospel quartets. The band also varied their vocal parts with Dudley Connell sometimes covering a high baritone line. Such flexibility in both instrumental and vocal presentations was always a hallmark of the Johnson Mountain Boys. 

A striking fact is that the first professional incarnation of this group, with the same personnel, emerged as a local “bar band” and quickly rose to the top of their profession, playing hundreds of festival and concert shows across the USA at high-end venues like the Grand Ole Opry, Lincoln Center, the White House, and Madison Square Garden. They traveled abroad to Canada, Africa, England, Japan, India, China, and more, carrying their special blend of bluegrass to huge audiences. 

Several striking aspects of the group delighted fans in the group’s live performances. They always looked sharp in a traditional and professional way, wearing matching two-or three-piece suits, shirts, western hats, and neckerchief ties. They opened most of their shows by running onto the stage and exploding into high-energy performance, typically beginning with a short up-tempo fiddle tune that was followed in less than one second by a banjo or mandolin introduction to the next song.

In his forthcoming book, Ira Gitlin will undoubtedly discuss the sources for the Johnson Mountain Boys’ astonishingly diverse repertoire and wide-ranging stylistic approaches. The band’s recorded tracks on all ten of their albums comprised more than 150 songs and tunes. More than twenty of those were composed and usually led by Dudley Connell, emphasizing his striking knack for creating powerful and memorable songs like “Weathered Grey Stone” and “Now Just Suppose.”  Other regular band members contributed heavily to their recorded legacy as well: Richard Underwood created fiery banjo instrumentals like “Five Speed” and “Newton Grove”; David McLaughlin generated mandolin-centric numbers like “Georgia Stomp”; and Eddie Stubbs authored fiddle tunes like “Sugarloaf Mountain Special” and “Montgomery County Breakdown.” Stubbs also covered fiddle showpieces like “Orange Blossom Special.” Bassist Marshall Wilborn composed and helped in singing a fine trio number: “Goodbye to the Blues.”  

The Johnson Mountain Boys recordings show how they revitalized the decades-long development of the “traditional” bluegrass music genre by juxtaposing items from many different composers. They recorded fourteen venerable items labeled “traditional” or “public domain,” like “John Henry,” “Black Eyed Susie,” and “Duncan and Brady.” They also covered great bluegrass songs by Bill Monroe, the Louvin Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley, Earl Taylor, and Jim & Jesse McReynolds. Country music songsters, old and new, were well represented in the band’s recordings as well, for instance: A.P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, Harlan Howard, and Don Gibson. There were also numerous gospel songs originally composed by Albert E. Brumley, or published in the Stamps-Baxter collections of hymns. The Johnson Mountain Boys even covered a Bob Dylan composition, “Only A Hobo,” and the title song of their final album, Blue Diamond, was written by Jean Ritchie. 

When Ira Gitlin’s upcoming book on the Johnson Mountain Boys is published in the “Music in American Life” series, it will unquestionably find a place in the library of all dedicated fans—not only longtime fans who thrilled to their music and who lament this particular band’s ultimate demise, but also those who seek to deeply understand their stories, which are key to the history and development of bluegrass music in America.