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Mac Martin interview from CBA Bluegrass Breakdown 2005

Mac Martin came to California in 2005 and played several concerts with a pretty classy pickup band he called the California Travelers that included mandolinist Butch Waller, fiddler Paul Shelasky, and Kathy Kallick on bass. Kathy said she hadn't played bass in some years but polished up her chops and suffered blisters for the honor of playing with Mac. There was a Dobro player in the band, too. I think it was Lisa Berman (who was in the Crooked Jades at the time) but my memory is not certain of that. I interviewed Mac concurrently with Peter Thompson, who used much of the same material on his radio show, "Bluegrass Signal," on San Francisco public radio station KALW.

I really enjoyed talking with Mac. He had been something of a personal hero for years, since I bought a vinyl album of his probably 20 years ago. This story was posted on Mac's web site for a while, but eventually was taken down. I'm glad the Hangout offers a place for it to get a wider readership. -- George Martin

By George Martin

There aren’t that many musicians who get to be “legends in their own time,” but one certainly would have to be Mac Martin.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1925 (he turns 80 years old April 26), Martin never dug for coal or picked cotton. But he started playing acoustic country music well before bluegrass existed, and was instrumental in kick-starting and maintaining a bluegrass “scene” in Pittsburgh and its environs. He saw the pioneer bluegrass acts (and the pre-bluegrass acts from whom they drew much material). He hung out with the Lilly Brothers, Bea and Everett, and learned much of their repertoire. He watched the Louvin Brothers, Doc Watson in the early years when he was playing with Clarence Ashley, and saw the early Country Gentlemen as well as Red Allen and Frank Wakefield.

Martin has an amazing memory. Learning music in a time when there weren’t all that many recordings available, he found if he heard a song once or twice he could usually remember it. He still talks about songs that were on the A or B sides of 78 rpm records he owned more than 50 years ago.

For many years, his band, the Dixie Travelers, played every Saturday night at Walsh’s Bar in Pittsburgh, followed by long stints at Gustine’s and the Elizabeth Moose Lodge, and was a magnet for bluegrass fans in the Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia areas. And last month, for the first time as a performer, Martin came to California for gigs at the Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley and Redwood Bluegrass Associates in Mountain View.

Martin’s tour was arranged by Peter Thompson, whose show, Bluegrass Signal, is on San Francisco’s public radio station KALW Saturdays at 6:30. Thompson also is on the board of Redwood Bluegrass Associates, which promoted the Mountain View concert. Bay Area songstress Kathy Kallick put together a “California Travelers” band to take the place of Martin’s “Dixie Travelers” band back home.
Kallick hadn’t played bass in many years (since the Good Ol’ Persons) but borrowed one and worked up some painful blisters getting her chops back in order to play and sing with Martin.

Others in the band were Keith Little on banjo, Paul Shelasky on fiddle, Butch Waller on mandolin and Lisa Berman on resophonic guitar. Martin was nothing if not a generous headliner, giving each member of the band solo turns and using the harmony singing talents of Kallick, Waller and Little throughout the evening.

Waller, who took a night off from his usual gig as leader of High Country, described playing with Martin as “a ton of fun.”

“He saw the original bluegrass band,” Waller said. “He saw Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs and Chubby Wise. And he knows everything; he’s a fount of information. He’s a wonderful guitar player and singer. I would have liked to have heard him with Monroe. He comes from the Lester Flatt school of playing and singing, you know, kind of a crooner. And a real, real solid guitar player; he’s just a wonderful guitar player.”

“It was really fun, exhilarating as all get-out,” reported Kallick. “And it was a throwback to when I was first learning to play and sing bluegrass, because his singing and playing is at that level of experience and expertise that I hardly ever have the opportunity to play with these days. When I was starting out and playing with really experienced players and singers, the phrasing and everything seemed so elusive. And I had that feeling all over again with him; I felt all clunky and square at first.”

“I never did this to this extent before,” Martin said of his trip west. “We went up to New York a time or two, and to New Jersey in a big old station wagon, that sort of thing. We went over to Delaware a couple of times but that was the extent of it.”

Martin could be the poster boy for that bumper sticker you occasionally see: “Real Musicians Have Day Jobs.” His band was regionally famous, his recordings gained him a reputation across the country, but the Dixie Travelers kept their Saturday night gig from 1956 well into the ’80s. Recently the band has been playing concerts and festivals and various venues in Western Pennsylvania and neighboring states.

When asked why he never toured, Martin replies, “Well, for one, there was enough activity there (in Pittsburgh). And the fellows I played with weren’t too enthusiastic about it. They weren’t the traveling type. They were really good pickers, but they were like good ol’ boys, you know. I notice here, people take their instruments out, then get the tuner out; these guys would get their instruments out, then get the six-pack out -- not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they didn’t have that last degree of professionalism.”

Martin was trained as an accountant, and worked for many years in the office of the A&P Stores chain and later was a financial officer for a chain of bookstores. “When I changed jobs in 1969, I worked Saturdays,” he recalled. “That was really an end-to-end; finish your work at 5:30, come home and try to get it together to go out to the bar. We used to play from 10 until 2 a.m. in those days -- late hours. I guess that answers the touring question. I didn’t have the flexibility, the band didn’t have the desire. But we were big enough, and we made a lot of music.”

The Dixie Travelers did get recorded fairly frequently, beginning in 1962 and ’63 when they made two vinyl albums for Gateway Records. They recorded several albums between 1968 and ’71 for Rural Rhythm, and 24 tracks from those sessions have been reissued on a CD. In 1974 the band recorded “Dixie Bound: Mac Martin and the Dixie Travelers,” for County Records.

Many of the recordings done during this time have been reissued on two CD compilations, “A Dark and Starless Night” (White Oak) and “24 Bluegrass Favorites” (Rural Rhythm). In 1977 the band recorded “Traveling On” for Paul Gerry’s Revonah Records. Copper Creek recently reissued this album, and released a new collection by the current Dixie Travelers, “Venango,” recorded in 2004. In between, Martin recorded an album of duets with Buzz Matheson, which White Oak issued as “Echoes of the Past” in 1988.

The “Dixie Bound” album contained several of the trademark songs for which he become known: “Frances Lee” and “Southern Moon,” both Martin originals, and “Alcatraz Blues,” which Martin brought in to bluegrass from the singing of the Delmore Brothers. Another Martin classic, “Does It Have to End This Way,” is on this album. Never reissued on CD, it nevertheless made it onto recordings by Bob Paisley and the supergroup Longview.

Another high point on that album is “A Faded Rose and a Broken Heart,” a song penned by Buddy Starcher and associated with Hank Snow, an example of Martin’s ability to find good bluegrass material in other areas of country music.

Despite growing up in a city, the child of Irish immigrant parents, Martin as a youth was exposed to plenty of rural music. “There was always, in those days, someone would come through town. Maybe you’d have a little movie house and they would show cowboy movies, western movies, and I remember North Carolina people coming up there to put on their show between movies,” he said.

“But primarily it was radio, even more than recordings, because you had what they called ‘sustained time,’ you could play on the radio for nothing, and you could advertise your personal appearances.”

Pittsburgh is only 50 miles from Wheeling, W.Va., where radio station WWVA was a major player of traditional music, including the late-night Wheeling Jamboree, which began broadcasting in 1933. The Jamboree was held in the Capitol Theater, a large movie house, and began at 11 p.m. after the movies were over.

“WWVA was 50,000 watts,” Martin remembers. “So you had, not necessarily bluegrass stations, but earlier bands, hillbilly bands. And you could pick up the Grand Old Opry, you could pick up WKJD and WLS from Chicago, you could pick up Cincinnati. My parents got a real good radio about 1939. You could pick up the Opry real well, you could listen to it all night long. Bill Monroe would come on, and maybe he’d come on later in the evening.”

Martin remembers listening to WWVA every morning. “They’d have Slim the Lone Cowboy, the Chuck Wagon Gang, a different Chuck wagon Gang than was nationally known. In 15-minute or half-hour segments they had Red Belcher and the Kentucky Ridge Runners. Then later we’d go down the Jamboree. You could go up to the studio in the Holly Building. They had the Bailey Brothers. I was there when Bobby and Sonny Observe came and joined Charley Bailey. Danny Bailey had gone back to Knoxville. I was there when Reno and Smiley came and joined Toby Stroud. The Stanley Brothers would come there. Jimmy Martin was there for a long time. This is like 50 miles from my house.”

Martin served in a Navy Seabees construction unit during World War II. “I had a nice little Gibson guitar,” he said. “I was still in the states, probably down in Virginia, and my mother sent me the guitar. She filled it full of cookies. Then the case broke. But I had my guitar right away, and when we’d go somewhere they’d put it in the ship’s hold for me. I always had the guitar -- a lot of cookie crumbs, too.”

Martin’s final Navy service was on Okinawa, and his ship arrived there after most of the Japanese had been defeated, but the island was still not secure. While he was on shore with trucks full of supplies a Kamikaze suicide bomber hit the ship. He spent most of his time trucking coral to be crushed and rolled out as “paving” for airstrips on the island.

Up until the end of the war, Martin had gone by his birth name, William Colleran. But when he was mustered out of the service he began playing in a band with banjo player Billy Bryant (who would be Mac’s banjo player for 50 years until his death in 1994) and bass player Billy Wagner. Martin thought three Bills in the band would be at least one too many, so he adopted the stage name he has used ever since. In the service, “Mac” often served as a salutation for people whose names one didn’t know. Martin said he was used to being called “Mac.”

“I thought Martin would go with it,” he said. “It was on my guitar already, I guess. I don’t know if that was secondary, but it’s become part of the legend. But that’s how I got ‘Mac.’ I could identify with that. 

Martin and his wife, Jean, have been married almost 53 years. “We worked in the same office for A&P Stores, that’s where we met,” he remembered. “We’d go to these office Christmas parties and we always seemed to be off somewhere together. So on May 3, 1952 we got married. We had five children. We lost a son in November of 2001.”

Two of Martin’s children play music. He said his daughter “has a real nice voice” and plays guitar. His son Bob plays guitar in the current edition of the Dixie Travelers. “He likes Tony Rice type of music, so we’ve got a little more lead guitar on our recordings than we’ve had in the past. He does it well, and that’s why he’s here. It’s wonderful . . . (to play with his son). And the current band still features fiddler Mike Carson, who joined Martin back in 1954.

“Sometimes your children appreciate your repertoire more than you did yourself,” he said. “Believe it or not, there are quite a few songs I’ve recorded that I didn’t do much after that, but my son being in the band, he encourages me to do those.”