RIP Al Murphy

At a tiny, noisy tavern in Galena, summer of 1989, the band had a little downtime after teardown. I asked the fiddler, Al, if he knew a notorious-among-hipsters country song written by Leon Payne and originally recorded by Jack Kittel in 1974. He didn’t, so I played it for him, with vertiginous feeling. The song hits a high bar in country creep, and has yet to be beaten. (I had yet to be beaten as well, by the crush of years; I was bursting with the desire to spread songs, absorb experience, and drink others under the table, but that’s another story. Sort of.) 

In Payne’s “Psycho,” a first-person narrator broods about his various killings, distributed with dramatic flair across three long verses — his ex, her bf, a puppy, a “neighbor girl” slain Clue-like with a wrench, and, in a clever last-line denouement (spoiler alert), the person he’s been singing to. The song opens with his asking meekly for some fried fish.

Al listened to me raptly. When I’d finished, he exclaimed, “Good God!” and released some staccato bursts of bottled-up laughter. His head and shoulders were still shaking five, ten, twenty minutes later. It was just the reaction you’d have hoped for and then some. The reason I remember it after some decades of trying to elicit shaking and exclamation points with song performances isn’t that the song is so wonderful, though it is. 26-year-old me, in league with ten flavors of in-your-face-motherfucker music and in love with of-the-moment emanations like rap, punk, R&B, and power pop, loved, above all, country and bluegrass. That was where I perceived my skill and knowledge base to lie; with youthful arrogance, I enjoyed teaching the world to sing these kinds of songs, in guitar classes at Old Town School, to friends, at shows with Special Consensus. That was the band Al and I were working with in Galena that night; he served in it for a short season and I for a couple longer ones. 

I knew Al knew the score more than I did, partly because he was a generation older. Still, I was that guy who “thought he knew the lot” (Michael Flanders, “The Gnu”), and might helpfully hip a 49-year-old who had played with Kenny Frickin’ Baker and was utterly steeped in folklore to a grisly 1960s ballad. Thinking now about Al Murphy, who died the other day, his intense reaction to “Psycho” stays with me. The way he listened was the way to listen: with your ears and heart, with buy-in, letting story and feel and tone suck you under the tide. In the case of a really hard-hitting song, coming up after gasping and grateful, wow-ing and still taking in what happened. That was what I got from him — how to hear music. 

If you think that’s frightfully basic, maybe you don’t recall your own young naïveté, or maybe you missed the chance to run it into a shaman, to have it helpfully righted. When he was young and before he joined David Grisman’s band, my friend Todd Phillips signed up for a class with Charlie Haden. Haden walked into the room with a pile of LPs and a turntable, and played songs from them for an hour, without speaking. He was demonstrating the comparative value of talking about music and listening to it, and he was showing how to listen. Todd watched the emotions on Haden’s face as he opened his mind and got lost.

A short time after that Galena gig, Al and I had a four-hour midnight drive in his Dodge Ram, the same one he rode around in documenting midwestern fiddle tunes, or to festivals, often with his beloved wife Aleta, with whom he played and sang, riding shotgun. He’d packed some road-mix cassettes that he’d made, and that night I silently shook hands with Clay Blaker, the Mosbys, Tibby Edwards, Leon McAuliffe, and Frankie Miller. I heard some folks, like Ira Louvin and Faron Young, that I knew 4 or 5 songs by but not the 40 or 50 that Al would have known. As the headlights swam across empty stretches of I-80 ahead of us, I listened on and on. I was mimicking his way of listening, but also genuinely agog at the wellsprings being opened before me. What did I think I knew about country music? I was up on a few dozen acts, knew a couple hundred songs and twenty or thirty fiddle tunes, all of it paltry stuff, as I realized upon meeting a real scholar, a guy who centered his life and mind on the stuff, who would later sign his holiday cards to me “Country musically, Al.”

As we approached Davenport, Charley Pride was singing about paintings in “Crystal Chandeliers.” Al said, “I always understood him as saying light up the panties on your wall,” and he laughed at himself with that same staccato shoulder-shaking burst. He had a real, unaffected taste for creepy funny shit, like the series of slayings in “Psycho,” or his own lascivious “panties” mondegreen. He relished any insider dirt on the stars, including filthy blue material too good to repeat here, in print and under these solemn circumstances. So we were both of like mind, easily attracted to the music descended of Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, funny and borderline-crazy as a lot of it was. But Al was also under its skin. He took my hand, there and through the ensuing months and years, and led me down toward the heart.

I wasn’t so close to him for long. One reason among others that Charles Dickens’s books, for all their caricature and contrivance, hit home is that strong, unforgettable characters come and go. Miss Havisham, Herbert Pocket, Mrs. Gummidge, Wackford Squeers (!), and Joe Gargery don’t show up in most of the chapters of the tales in which they early on play a role. But their role, for the hero, is life-changing. The stories are as they are because of the length and segmentation requirements of the 19th-century serial; yet our real lives are chaptered and episodic, as David Copperfield’s or Pip’s were. Al’s life intersected with mine on maybe 15 more brief-ish occasions after our main chapter. 

He kept educating me, mailing me cassettes with music tailored to fill my gaps. There were full albums by McAuliffe, Hank Thompson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmie Arnold, Gary Stewart, and others. Thus began my lifelong love of Hank and the Brazos Valley Boys; it was their first LP, with great songs like “Yesterday’s Girl,” “Green Light,” and “Wild Side of Life.” The amazing “Country Love Ballads” LP by the Louvins inspired the title of my first record, which was dedicated to Al.

Of course he had an amazing LP collection, there at his house in Iowa City. I traveled a few times from Chicago to scavenge, record, and hang. The first 90-minute Maxell mix I made is crammed with songs I’ve carried ever since: “Where Are All The Girls I Used To Cheat With?” by Keith Whitley, “Juke Joint Johnny” by Jimmy Atkins And His Pinetoppers, “Whiskey” by The Stanley Brothers, “See The Big Man Cry” by Charlie Louvin, “The Snakes Crawl At Night” in Porter Wagoner’s version, “The Second Mrs. Jones” also by Porter, “Drink Up And Be Somebody” by Haggard, “Died A Rounder At 21” by the Nashville Bluegrass Band (didn’t they do it? I recall Alan O’Bryant’s voice, but don’t find it on the Internet, just other versions)…and on and on, one grisly goddamned topic after another. I plumbed his brain about acts and songs. A thought, about adultery or alcoholism or homicide or unquenchable sorrow, would lead to another and thence to a recording. “What’s this?” I said once, pulling from the shelf a garishly colorful record called “The Judy Lynn Show.” It wasn’t much, Al reckoned. But it did remind him of Bobby Hicks, or Jean Shepard, and down the path we went to another great piece of music I’d never heard. The scholarly, specialist mind retains a million little-understood connections.

In 1999 I plotted out a record, “13 Hillbilly Giants,” that I hoped would recapitulate and redistribute the joy I took in these mixtapes, and I asked Al in as one of a sextet of players. In his fiddling on Jimmie Logsdon’s “I Wanna Be Mama’d” you can hear his ID in his bowing, which I connect with his particular physicality. His touch was on the light side, a little liquid (the staccato of his laugh didn’t show up in his playing), and his thirds and fifths had that country thing that puts a special feel into their intonation and impact. His playing weaved and leaned and tottered a little, and it didn’t have much of the macho exclamatory dynamism like you hear in the Ray Price kick-offs or in contest fiddling. He was steeped equally in old-time, bluegrass, and commercial Fifties-to-Seventies country, and his fiddling was a level blend of them. He had the grace and glide of a wise elder for as long as I knew him and up to when he was actually old.

There were 8 or 9 times that I got to play on stage with him post-Consensus. I asked him, only hours beforehand, to drive to Champaign to play a little bar with my group in 1997. There was a wedding show in some western suburb of Chicago ten years later. He sat in with my act a couple times passing through Iowa City, bringing a pick-up so he could compete with the drum-fueled hubbub. He was one of the tribe, you know? Driving for many hours or putting up with loud crappy barroom monitors was part of the deal, a show of love, for both people and music. He and Aleta kept light on their feet as a team, through the years. They lived pretty frugally (largely, I might imagine, on Aleta’s income as a nurse), jumping into the van to go hear or play music as called to, in tune with its ever-agile spirit.

The more I write the more I remember. One time, in 2003, I coerced Al into Chicago for a Jean Shepard show at Old Town School, where I put together a group to back her. Jean and her music were very dear to me — the chops, the material, the attitude — and so I wanted to make the night more than another one-off road trip for her, something that wasn’t down the memory-hole the next week. I showed some mid-1950s sixteen-millimeter footage of her on a pull-down screen right before her set. (I’m not sure whether Jean was more struck by the gesture or annoyed that 70-year-old her had to follow 22-year-old her!) Mostly I wanted to make sure the music was right and tight, behind her. Of all of us, Joe Terry banging the house piano, Robbie Gjersoe Tele-twanging, me eight feet tall in an ill-fitting powder-blue Alcala suit — Al was the player Jean fixed on, twinkling at him, throwing him solos, calling him “old-timer.” She was 12 years older than he, but he did have that 2000-year-old-man vibe about him. 

Those guys that snap gum, flash rolls, and talk fast and cheap. Al wasn’t one of them. If you said something to him you had to wait for a reply; often you could count to 11, 12, or higher. This could get excruciating on the phone; bearing up through the silence, you could never be altogether sure about having been disconnected. After, say, 40 seconds, the ringtone might erupt, risking cardiac arrest. Maybe this slow-talking is a musician thing. I know three others who float serenely outside protocols of conversational pace, and all three are musicians, and men. Well, I can appreciate it as a rebuke to modernity and superficiality. Slow down, chew on it, let a little air hang, untainted by your top-of-mind two cents. Stop acting like Richard Widmark for a second. Taking your time is country, it’s musical. It’s wise, not wiseguy.

I don’t think it will cause anyone undue upset when I mention Al’s alcoholism, because overcoming it was a major and public factor in his life. He talked often about the excesses he committed while in its grip. There were stories about ripping through couch cushions to find a little flask, a rainy-day surprise he might’ve hidden away for when he’d run out of pocket change or the liquor store was closed. Some of these stories have bled in my mind into Old Bela Lugosi tales and I’m not sure which is which but I think raccooning the couch is Al’s. His drinking days seemed like some awfully long horror movie he’d been forced to sit through and now would never walk within ten blocks of the theater just to be sure an especially neat monster poster didn’t tempt him inside. One time Dallas Wayne was with him at a gig when a bartender gave Al a glass of orange juice, in which Al instantly detected a trace of something else. Dallas had never witnessed such an explosion from the quiet fiddler. “You sonofabitch!” Al spat at the barkeep. “I haven’t had a drink in fifteen years, and if I did it sure as hell wouldn’t be with you!” I could only imagine, with labor, the younger Al who’d been in Vietnam and had been a drunk. I had to think it was a warm-up act to the real thing, the completed person. He was meant to be a monotheist, loyalties undivided — music was it.

The last time I saw my friend I walked away thinking “That’s the last time.” Al was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis many years ago, and it was a long twilight. At a little bar (it’s always a little bar!) in Des Moines ten years back, I was doing a show with Redd Volkaert, and Al showed up, leaning on a cane and moving slowly. But he always moved and spoke slowly, and meanwhile his mind was fine as ever. I’m not sure I saw him at all between then and June of last year, when I played in Iowa City with my fiddler friend Christian Sedelmyer. That was the night I thought, Last time. I knelt at his wheelchair after we played and said a couple sappy things, to little visible response. He sat there quite a while, saying nothing, like always. Finally, to Aleta: “Let’s get out of here.” Agreed, Mr. Eastwood!

But there was a sort of epilogue, when in March of this year, I bumped into Aleta’s sister and her husband at a little — aah, scratch that, a medium-sized listening venue (eat my dust, little bars!) back east. It brought to mind that I might check in with Al, give a call. I wasn’t sure he was up to it, cognitively or otherwise, so I emailed Aleta to ask. She said that he had just bounced back from sepsis and was “less voluble than usual.” These guys are something with the ironic understatements. Anyway, I decided to let go, and here we are.

There are a couple people who I think about more or less all the time now that they’ve died, without trying or even wanting to, and I imagine Al will join my dad, Steve Albini, and a few others in that select memorial mindscape. And I’m sure that space will enlarge year by year as I approach 70 and, fingers crossed, yet-grimmer milestones. “Ghosts,” as Jesse Winchester not-overcreatively called them. “No regrets,” I say. It’s a mantra but an unforced habit as well. As long as someone is living there’s the possibility something will change. But that seldom happens, and the honest look back has to disclose an iridium-dense inflexibility in our assessments of others, in our relationships with them, and in some ways at the core of their natures. Miss Havisham stays a nutty old lady in a cobwebbed wedding dress. But once the book closes and further change is impossible, you can let your mind roam across the chapter. As the character was being sketched in, no tiny stroke seemed to add much surprise, but you never knew, with things in motion. Well before my dad died, I often found myself thinking: He will die before me, and none of this will be resolved meanwhile, because it can’t be, because nothing can really change with us. I began referring to the serenity prayer retrospectively — don’t regret what couldn’t have been changed. Regret — if only they knew, if only I had said — is a deluded move, a self-centered shutting-out of the natural world, where people are exactly as sketched (Jean Shepard scoffing at her mussed-up pre-show hair, “Looks like it smelled a wolf!” while Al reacts with a staccato laugh and a mental note never to forget that), where their freedom of will is so marginal that they can scarcely behave otherwise.

So I don’t wish I had said this-or-that before Al died. When I had the chance to, I rejected it in full knowledge of what we were both like and what the parameters were. Not that there was much to say: he knew I loved him, and I know he loved me. He said so a long time back, in an article in the local paper! So it’s a fact, and you can look it up.

I was surprised to learn the news not from a friend but from Bluegrass Today’s website. The obituary, written in part by Aleta, noted Al’s highest professional achievements. There were his records, including the one he made with Art Rosenbaum. There was his playing with Bob Black, John Hartford, and Kenny Baker (Al played guitar behind Kenny, and by the way was also a good singer and not shabby at mandolin as I recall). And there was his preservation of the music of Lyman Enloe and other great, undersung midwestern fiddlers. Among the fiddle tunes I learned from Al in person were “Through The Fields,” the title track from his 1987 record which he taught me one slow note at a time at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem; “Hamilton County Breakdown,” which I included on my Very Best record (it might have been from that same night in Galena, come to think of it), and which we played again during that Jean Shepard show, learning afterward from her husband, Benny Birchfield, that Benny had authored the tune (!); “Old Countryman’s Reel,” which Al gave me a cassette of at the Chicago wedding gig; “Jack Danielson’s Reel,” which I use frequently to warm up my left hand and also to reveal my deficiencies; and “Pacific Slope,” a crazily rangy tune that Al recorded and so did I (and so, I think, did “Lou Martin”).

The last line in the obit was: “In lieu of flowers or cards, Al would like everyone to support live, local music by going out to see local artists and buying their records.” A perfect exit line. Al modeled — for me, and for every aspirational and actual musician in his midst, many if not most of them not just “local” but very close by him there in Iowa — a way of being with music that was religious, all-angled, total, something like Marabel Morgan, famed Total Woman, modeled for married women. Meaning the model was idealistic, like Marabel, but not as silly. Al revealed every angle but, if you met him after about 40, the pharmacopeia/drinking-to-oblivion one. (It is an angle, let’s face it.) Listen to music silently. See it done. Learn it note by note, changing it to suit you but taking care not to ruin it. Play and sing it, anywhere you can, at home, on stage, while traveling, in your sleep. Think it over. Take in the gossip, savor the ironies and absurdities, all the creepy details that attach both to the lyrics and the life. Direct any leftover money after food and lodging toward it. Know the names and histories. Sit open-mindedly before the masters. Be careful what you say, and how much — spewing know-it-all nonsense and gum-snapping jive talk is the behavior of numskulls in bars not serious music folk. In all these ways, I thank my friend for nudging me toward becoming a better person and musician, and I hope to pass it on to others.

And if I could speak to the numskull in that long-ago Galena tavern: it was Eddie Noack in 1968, not Jack Kittel in ‘74, who first recorded “Psycho.” Learn humility!