The Bigger Picture

Long Journey Home: The White Brothers and the Birth of Country Rock

by Bob Moses

The journey of Clarence White and his brothers offers a useful corrective for those inclined to consider bluegrass, if they consider it at all, as the province of rustics on an Appalachian porch, fiddling next to a jar of flammable liquid. Clarence and Roland White, singly and together, pulled the guitar forward in bluegrass ensemble playing, and hotwired the connections between fiddle tunes, bluegrass, western swing, folk, and country, setting the stage for a hardy hybrid: country-rock. They anchored a constellation of performers who expanded audiences from country radio shows and dance bars, to folk coffeehouses, recording studios, and then concert stages around the world. The White brothers’ story reveals the period from the late 1950s to mid-60s when country and bluegrass found its way to folk audiences craving authenticity, and from there to rock audiences in the form of the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, Poco, Eagles and countless others. A new publication and newly restored recordings now offer the chance to appreciate how profoundly Clarence White influenced both bluegrass and rock guitar, and hear the first expressions of his immense talent and its later fruition.

Bluegrass shares speed, volume, hard-driving rhythms and a decidedly dark view of humanity with rock music. And bluegrass, like the blues that ventured north to be electrified and urbanized into R&B and soul, is migrant’s music. From the 1930s Dust Bowl refugees to the postwar factory boom, California provided new soil for rural families looking for a new start — and they brought their music with them. The burnt-brown factory boomtowns in the valleys around 1950s Los Angeles drew one French-Canadian family, originally LeBlanc, from Down East Maine. The Whites settled in Burbank and soon found kindred musical spirits. Speaking from his home in Nashville, Roland White remembered that, “When we went to California, that’s the first time we had heard so much country music. On the radio and at the shows. We realized that no one was from California. They had come there to work. They were all from somewhere else.”
The Country Boys
Though barely big enough to hold the guitar in his lap, Clarence White asked big brother Roland to show him some chords. In a house vibrating to father Eric Sr.’s fiddle, guitar, banjo, and harmonica, it was an astonishingly short path (with brother Eric, Jr., on bass) from the living room to country dance halls, radio, and tv shows as The Country Boys. The youngsters — Roland was in mid-teens and Clarence was only 10 when they first appeared — played mostly traditional country tunes for the dancers and the variety shows — until their Uncle Armand introduced Bill Monroe to the family record player. The boys dug into Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and Jimmy Martin. In The Essential Clarence White: Bluegrass Guitar Leads (available
here), Roland identifies Earl Scruggs’s banjo playing, Josh Graves’s dobro and Jesse McReynolds’s mandolin as particular early influences on Clarence, as well as the varied styles of guitar players such as Don Reno, Joe Maphis, George Shuffler and, later, Doc Watson and Django Reinhardt. The spiral-bound volume with two discs, Roland’s tribute to his brother, presents the homemade tapes a self-assured 18-year-old Clarence made for his students to learn the bluegrass repertoire, just as he had learned from listening to those Monroe 45s. The package includes tab and musical notation for the songs on the disc, helpful instruction from Roland and his partner Diane Bouska, images, video, and a second disc of rhythm guitar tracks to help aspiring guitarists learn the solos Clarence laid down.

Clarence playing Shady Grove for his students:

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