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John Cowan Hartford (December 30, 1937 – June 4, 2001) was an American folk music, country music, and Bluegrass music composer and musician known for his mastery of the fiddle and banjo, as well as for his witty lyrics, unique vocal style, and extensive knowledge of Mississippi River lore. His most successful song is "Gentle on My Mind", which won three Grammy Awards and was listed in "BMI's Top 100 Songs of the Century". Hartford performed with a variety of ensembles throughout his career, and is perhaps best known for his solo performances where he would interchange the guitar, banjo, and fiddle from song to song. He also invented his own shuffle tap dance move, and clogging on an amplified piece of plywood while he played and sang.
He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2010.
His early musical influences came from the broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry and included Earl Scruggs, nominal inventor of the three-finger bluegrass style of banjo playing. Hartford said often that the first time he heard Earl Scruggs pick the banjo, it changed his life. By age 13, Hartford was an accomplished old-time and banjo player, and he soon learned to play guitar and mandolin as well. Hartford performed with his first bluegrass band while attending John Burroughs School, a local private high school.
After high school, he enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, completed four years of a commercial arts program and dropped out to focus on music; however, he did receive a degree in 1960. He immersed himself in the local music scene, working as a DJ, playing in bands, and occasionally recording singles for local labels.
In 1967, Hartford's second album Earthwords & Music spawned his first major songwriting hit, "Gentle on My Mind". His recording of the song was only a modest success, but it caught the notice of Glen Campbell, who recorded his own version, which gave the song much wider publication. At the 1968 Grammys, the song netted four awards, two of which went to Hartford. It became one of the most widely recorded country songs of all time, and the royalties it brought in allowed Hartford great financial independence; Hartford later said that the song bought his freedom.
As his popularity grew, he moved to the West Coast, where he became a regular on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; other television appearances followed, as did recording appearances with several major country artists. Hartford played banjo and sang the vocal harmonies on the Guthrie Thomas song "I'll be Lucky". He also played with The Byrds on their album Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
His success on the Smothers Brothers series was enough that Hartford was offered the lead role in a TV detective series, but he turned it down to move back to Nashville and concentrate on music. He also was a regular on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (as the banjo picker who would stand up from his seat in the audience to begin the theme music) and The Johnny Cash Show.
He played the Philadelphia Folk Festival 11 times between 1969 and 2011. In live performances, John Hartford was a true one-man band; he used several stringed instruments and a variety of props such as plywood squares and boards with sand and gravel for flatfoot dancing.
He switched to the Flying Fish label several years later and continued to experiment with nontraditional country and bluegrass styles. Among his recordings were two albums in 1977 and 1980 with Doug and Rodney Dillard from The Dillards, with Sam Bush as a backing musician and featuring a diversity of songs that included "Boogie On Reggae Woman" and "Yakety Yak". Dillard/Hartford/Dillard: Glitter Grass/Permanent Wave, Rounder Records. Hartford's Grammy-winning Mark Twang features Hartford playing solo, reminiscent of his live solo performances playing the fiddle, guitar, banjo, and amplified plywood for tapping his feet. At the same time, he developed a stage show, which toured in various forms from the mid 1970s until shortly before his death.
Hartford changed recording labels several more times during his career; in 1991, he inaugurated his own Small Dog a'Barkin' label. Later in the 1990s, he switched again to Rounder Records. He recorded a number of idiosyncratic records on Rounder, many of which recalled earlier forms of folk and country music. Among them was the 1999 album Retrograss recorded with Mike Seeger and David Grisman, with bluegrass versions of "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay", "Maybellene", "When I'm Sixty-Four", and "Maggie's Farm".
He recorded several songs for the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, winning another Grammy for his performance. He made his final tour in 2000 with the Down from the Mountain tour that grew out of that movie and its accompanying album. While performing in Texas in April, he found that he could no longer control his hands due to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which ended his life two months later.
Hartford is considered a co-founder of the newgrass movement, although he remained deeply attached to traditional music as well. His last band and last few albums reflect his love for pre-bluegrass old-time music.
During his later years, he came back to the river every summer. "Working as a pilot is a labor of love", he said. "After a while, it becomes a metaphor for a whole lot of things, and I find for some mysterious reason that if I stay in touch with it, things seem to work out all right". His home in Madison, Tennessee, was situated on a bend of the Cumberland River and built to simulate the view from a steamboat deck. He used to talk to the boat captains by radio as their barges crawled along the river. That bend of the Cumberland River, known as "Hartford's Bend" or "John Hartford Point", is denoted on official navigational charts with the "John Hartford Light".US Army Corps of Engineers. 2013. Cumberland River navigation charts: Smithland, Kentucky to Celina, Tennessee. Chart No. 27.
An accomplished fiddler and banjo player, Hartford was simultaneously an innovative voice on the country scene and a reminder of a vanished era. Along with his own compositions, such as "Long Hot Summer Days" and "Kentucky Pool", Hartford was a repository of old river songs, calls, and stories. His song "Let Him Go on Mama" from Mark Twang was inspired by retired Streckfus Steamers musician (and later chief engineer of the steamboat Delta Queen) Mike O'Leary. Hartford was also the author of Steamboat in a Cornfield, a children's book that recounts the true story of the Ohio River steamboat The Virginia and its beaching in a cornfield.
From the 1980s onwards, Hartford had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He died of the disease at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, on June 4, 2001, at age 63. He is interred at Spring Hill Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee. (2026). 9780786479924, McFarland & Company, Inc.. ISBN 9780786479924 Hartford was given a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in honor of his work. He also was given a posthumous president's award by the Americana Music Association in September 2005. The annual John Hartford Memorial Festival was held in southern Indiana from 2011 to 2019 and in 2022.
Hartford acknowledged that the royalties he earned from "Gentle" allowed him to live the life he wanted as a musician, author, folklorist and steamboat pilot. The Financial Times commented that "his song about freedom ensured his own freedom."
Aereo-Plain and Morning Bugle are often considered to be Hartford's most influential works, coming as they did at the beginning of a period in which artists such as Hartford and the New Grass Revival, led by Sam Bush, would create a new form of country music, blending their country backgrounds with influences from a number of other sources. His later years had a number of live albums, as well as recordings that explored the repertoire of old-time folk music. He sketched the cover art for some of his midcareer albums, drawing with both hands simultaneously.
Hartford is also a published author, including 1971's collection of poetry Word Movies and 1986's Steamboat in a Cornfield, a poetic retelling of a steamboat running aground along the Ohio River.
Cartoonist Jim Scancarelli was a fan, and mentioned Hartford several times in his strip Gasoline Alley. In 1991, a flood washes up a steamboat carrying Hartford; in 1998, he played at Rufus and Melba's wedding reception; and in 2002, when Skeezix and Slim are lost in a cemetery, Hartford's gravestone is seen.
The third track on the album A Tear in the Eye Is a Wound in the Heart by the band Black Prairie, of Portland, Oregon, is entitled "For the Love of John Hartford", an instrumental.
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