John Hartford Interview excerpt by Bob Carlin

It all started here - story by John Hotze

I was about 3 years behind John and pretty much followed in his footsteps of music discoveries. I remember before I could drive, I took streetcars and busses to get up to Roy Queens "Hillbilly Park" at the Chain of Rocks amusement park. That was a real accomplishment for a 14 year old kid when the park was over 20 miles across town. I spent many weekends up there watchin' Grand Ole Opry stars perform.  In the beginning I was alone and later on I went with Paul Briedenbach. After Paul & I met John at the Opry, John became close friends with us. For the next several years we all enjoyed sharing our passion for bluegrass music together through trips to the Opry, jammin', and sharing our records and in my case, tape recordings and records.

John speaks of Flatt & Scruggs beginning that 5:45 AM Martha White flour show. Sometime down the road I will transcribe some of my reel to reel recordings I made from those 5:45 shows. In order to be able to stand a chance of bringing in WSM here in St.Louis it had to be between the time the sun went down in the evening and the time the sun came up in the morning. I suspect most of my best recordings from the Opry or these early morning Flatt & Scruggs shows were done during the winter when the nights were long. John was always anxious to listen to my latest recordings I had of Flatt & Scruggs. So it was neat to hear him mention these shows in the Carlin interview.

Also as John mentioned and I'm sure a lot of you old timers will remember anxiously waiting for 8:30 in the evening to come on a Saturday night so you could listen to the Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry on your local radio station. I know I use to listen to the Prince Albert portion of the Opry long before I realized that I could bring in WSM on my big old floor model radio my folks gave me. When I learned I could bring in the Opry directly from WSM, I started listening to it from 6:00 in the evening (during the winter) all the way up till the Opry ended at midnight. At midnight the "Midnight Jamboree" came on with more live music from the Ernest Tubb record shop for another hour.

This era I have been writing about was between 1954 & 1960. I went into the Navy in the summer of 1960 and that was pretty much the end of an era of my life for me. I all but lost contact with John, Paul and bluegrass music for many years. A cheap old guitar went with me on several cruises to the Caribbean and the Med but I sort of lost site of bluegrass and the Opry. I don't think I got back into seriously listening to the Opry again until the 80's, and by than they pretty much "tore down the Grand Ole Opry" like John wrote in his song. Roy and Bill were about the only ones I could relate to by then.

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