Interview with Dave Leonard – 22 September 2012

Dave is a well-known banjo picker, from Bargersville, IN

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TA:  Today is 9/22/2012.  I’m at Bean Blossom with Dave Leonard.

DL:  [Back in 1992, at the June festival] . . . .  Yeah, I was down here—Uh, I had underwent valve surgery, valve replacement surgery.  And Louis Snyder--  come up to the house--  I couldn’t drive yet.  Come up and got my camper and truck, brought me down.  And Danny Jones was down here, who was, of course in the early seventies was a Blue Grass Boy.  And we sat around and talked and picked, you know, like we do around here.   We were standing over at the Schmaltzes’ campsite, jamming.   And here come James and Bill back, on a cart.  And they stopped, and Bill recognized Danny Jones and got out, asked him what years he had played for him, and so on and so on, and through the conversation Danny said, “Bill, would you like to pick a number?”  And Bill said, “that’d be wonderful, what would you like to do?”  And he said, “Let’s do ‘Little Cabin Home on the Hill.’”   So I said, that was my big claim to fame: I picked one song with Bill Monroe down here.

...

DL: And that was the year that all of the guys had went around, and they had whitewashed about six to eight foot up on all the trees, so that when -- Bill’s eyesight had gotten really bad at that time – James had ‘em all paint them, so Bill could see them, wouldn’t run into them!

They made money for doin’ it, that’s how they made the money to come to the festival—and I don’t know who-all was doin’ it, Jim Schmaltz was one of ‘em. . .    Yeah, and so that’s the way that story went:  they had whitewashed the trees that year to keep Bill so he could see ‘em before he got up on ‘em.  

Well that was the story that the guys that whitewashed ‘em told us, was James had ‘em do it, so Bill could see ‘em and he wouldn’t walk into them.  ‘Cause he always walked around without his glasses on.

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