Remembering Roy Clark: 1933-2018

Editor’s Note: Over the years, we’ve attempted to interview some rather reclusive music legends but, without a doubt, the hardest interview we’ve ever landed was Roy Clark for the Fretboard Journal #19.

When we typically reach out to musicians, we approach managers or publicists who already know about the Journal or at least understand the guitar universe. At the time we interviewed him, Clark occupied a whole ‘nother space: The world of television legends-turned-Branson entertainers. His manager also looked after the career of aging advice columnist Dr. Joyce Brothers along with a host of other Parade magazine favorites and clearly had no time to know about a reader-supported guitar magazine.

Nevertheless, we persisted and, eventually, we landed our Clark interview. We put legendary music historian Rich Kienzle on the job and he, as always, delivered a knockout story. With Clark’s passing at the age of 85 on November 15, 2018, I figured it would be fitting to look back on this piece… we hope you enjoy it.  -JV 

The Front Porch: Unearthing Roy Clark’s deep musical roots

By Rich Kienzle

When Roy Clark, a 2009 inductee to the Country Music Hall of Fame, showed up at the announcement ceremony, he didn’t know who his fellow inductees were. He soon found out they were singer Barbara Mandrell, who started out playing pedal steel, and Charlie McCoy, the veteran Nashville studio musician and Hee Haw bandleader. Mandrell, Clark recalls, caught the underlying significance when she commented, “Three musicians!”

“I never thought of it,” he says.

In four decades since Hee Haw made Roy Clark an American institution, Clark has been riding the crest, playing concerts around the world built around his crowd-pleasing vocal and instrumental skills. It’s no surprise that published profiles zero in on his TV stardom and showmanship, but there’s another, deeper narrative: The product of Washington, D.C.’s fertile country-music scene and a witness to a huge chunk of country history, Clark possesses greater musical depth and insight than many realize. As we discuss his wide-ranging career during the course of a nearly five-hour interview, that knowledge of music--and his place in its history--becomes abundantly clear.

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The village of Meherrin sits along a county line and a railroad in south central Virginia. Roy Linwood Clark was born there in 1933, one of five children born to tobacco farmer Hester Clark and wife, Lillian, who lived out in the country and had no electricity. In his spare time, Hester Clark played music, strumming tenor banjo with his brothers. Dudley played mandolin; Paul was a fiddler. There were no guitars.

Of Hester, Roy says, “He was a natural. He had very little influences down there, so he took what he heard and played it his way. Every time there was any kind of a gathering in Meherrin at the old home place, they’d be playin’ on the front porch while all the other kids were out runnin’ around. . . . When I was, like, 4 and 5 years old, I was mesmerized. I’d be just as close [to the music] as I could get.” Only later did he find out his mother played piano.

The Clarks eventually moved into the town of Meherrin itself. Hester worked in a sawmill, and the family had electricity and a radio, which exposed Roy to other string bands. “I was blown away,” he recalls. “I thought, prior to that, my dad and uncles were the only ones that played music. That enlightened me: This music thing is a lot bigger than I thought.” The family briefly moved to Grafton, West Virginia, where Hester worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Back in Meherrin, 8-year-old Roy tried strumming Uncle Dudley’s mandolin. At that point, he stresses, “I had never been close to a guitar.”  

Pearl Harbor turned everything around, and in January of 1942, Hester joined millions of city-bound rural Southerners in search of high-paying defense work; he lucked out, landing a job grinding precision lenses at the Washington Navy Yard. Moving his family into government-worker housing, Hester took two more jobs: stocking groceries (in return for a food discount) and playing square dances. For 9-year-old Roy, Washington produced serious culture shock. Its noisy urban streets reduced him to tears at night. He’d spend parts of the summer at Uncle Dudley’s in Meherrin, he and his cousin still fooling with the mandolin. At home in D.C., he’d play around with his dad’s banjo.

The Clarks’ next-door neighbor, Johnny Schwartz, noted Roy’s interest in music and, around 1943 or ‘44, showed him his own guitar: a Harmony-manufactured Weymann. “I strummed down across the strings, and it was just like the proverbial light bulb that went off. It just blew me away!” Decades later, at a South Carolina concert, Schwartz’s widow and son presented Clark with the Weymann. “The first guitar I ever touched. I couldn’t believe it--could not believe it.”

At Christmas, he got the Silvertone acoustic he’d asked for, complete with chord books. Hester tuned it, and Roy was on his way, practicing ‘til his fingers bled, with ice cubes in a glass to numb the pain. Two weeks later, he played with Hester at a square dance, standing in back until his playing improved. “One night, I found myself right up on the front line with the rest of them. I had made it.”

In 1945, Earl Scruggs was redefining the five-string banjo’s popularity with Bill Monroe’s “classic” Blue Grass Boys on the Opry, and it turned Clark’s head. Later, Clark took banjo lessons from the innovative Smitty Irvin, who would go on to become a member of Bill Harrell’s Virginians, an influential D.C.-area bluegrass ensemble in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

“I’ve always been intrigued by sound,” he explains. “I never picked up an instrument or thought about playing an instrument because I thought it would help my career or make me more versatile. I only learned to play different instruments because they intrigued me.”

He also developed a method to acquiring them. “When I got enough [money] to get two guitars, both flattops, I’d take one to a pawnshop and swap that guitar for a mandolin. I’d take the mandolin home and I’d learn as much as I could. I’d swap it at the pawnshop for a fiddle and take the fiddle home and take it back and swap it for a banjo. So if it weren’t for pawnshops,” he laughs, “I’d still be hung on that first guitar.”

Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith was an early guitar hero; so was Joe Maphis, a star at WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, who pioneered the idea of flatpicking fiddle tunes on guitar in the late ‘30s. “He played so clean . . . every note was so precise, so fast. I used to and still do try to get my chops workin’ by playin’ fiddle tunes, because there’s so many notes involved.”

Clark heard Jimmy Bryant, who was based in Washington before relocating to California, as well as future Opry star Billy Grammer. In 1948, Roy Clark made his local TV debut on WTTG’s country program, The Hayloft Conservatory of Musical Interpretation. Accompanied by Hester, he sang Eddie Dean’s hit ballad “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart).”

“Billed us as ‘Roy Clark and Dad,’” he recalls. “It should have been ‘Hester Clark and His Son.’”

Hester backed his son’s musical ambitions, swapping instruments (including his tenor banjo) and other items to get him a used Martin D-18. When Roy’s second guitar, an S.S. Stewart archtop with a DeArmond pickup, was stolen, he slapped a DeArmond on the Martin for lead guitar work.

After finishing his education at a Washington vocational school, in 1949, he landed a work permit allowing him to play venues serving liquor and signed on with local promoter Ralph Case, who booked square-dance bands into area clubs and military bases. That relationship brought Clark to Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre in December of ’49 to play a weeklong Grand Ole Opry stage show headlined by Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys.

Though Clark’s music career was beginning to thrive, baseball and boxing remained other career options. A tryout for the St. Louis Browns fizzled when he couldn’t afford railroad fare to training camp. As a light heavyweight in a local police-sponsored boxing league, he won 15 straight matches and could have turned pro. But when a more formidable opponent drew blood, he says, “I looked at my guitar with a little more seriousness.”

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Washington in the 1950s was the right place to pursue his guitar work, and Clark still marvels at its vibrant postwar country scene. 

“I cannot comprehend any city anywhere that had the action and opportunity for musicians to play,” he says, “where musicians from North, out West and the South would go to work, a lot [of them] for the government. On top of that, you had the military bases, the young men, all the girls out of high school workin’ as secretaries. There was a club on every block, and every night was a Saturday night.”

He not only played clubs with colorful names like Chubby’s and Joe Del’s, he used them as classrooms. “I could go and just sit there and listen to the musicians as I learned about what one particular player had to offer, and I stole him blind,” he laughs. “Then I’d move on up to one that was a little better.”

It was a local ordinance that sparked Roy Clark’s famous showmanship.

“You could not have dancing unless you had a permit that was very expensive,” he remembers. “That’s where I learned to do all the clowning and joke telling, because every show we played was a show--not a dance. The stage would be a couple milk cartons with a slab of plywood on top and a light bulb to give you a little bit of light.”

When the clubs closed at 1:30 a.m., he wasn’t finished. “I would go to after-hours clubs and play with these black groups, playin’ blues and stuff behind strippers. I learned firsthand--it wasn’t something I was learning off of a record; I was in the middle of it! Blues is a feel. You don’t write it down on sheet music. These places were illegal, and every two or three weeks, the police would do a token raid, [the clubs] would pay a small fine. Police would say, ‘We hate to do it,’ [then] shut [it] down for a week.”

One night in 1951, a recently discharged Marine brought along his new Fender Broadcaster and sat in with Clark and the band at Joe Del’s. Clark couldn’t afford one--until he won first prize that year in the banjo category at the National Country Music Contest in Warrenton, Virginia. The accolade earned him a plaque, a trip to the Opry and the $500 that funded his Broadcaster. “I always felt guilty I took money that I won with the banjo to buy a guitar,” he laughs. He placed second in 1952, and that year he bought a new Les Paul Goldtop--not too long after Gibson had introduced the model.

Washington’s country performers were close-knit. Clark’s friends included veteran singer Doyle Smith, Marvin Rainwater and singer-accordionist Jimmy Dean. When Dean’s 1953 single “Bummin’ Around” hit the national charts, he expanded his Texas Wildcats, originally a duo, and asked Roy to join. Dean’s manager, impresario and WARL disc jockey Connie B. Gay, made them a top local attraction on stages, radio and TV. (A frequent guest: an obscure Winchester, Virginia, singer named Patsy Cline.)

In clubs, the band ran all their amplified instruments ran through Dean’s single Gibson amp. “All through that one 12-inch speaker! I often thought about that and wondered, How did we sound? Our [stage] lighting was out of TheBeverly Hillbillies: a single light bulb from the ceiling that’s also where we got the power to the amplifier. Why it didn’t start a fire . . .”

The Texas Wildcats and other local musicians also hung out and recorded at Ben Adelman’s ramshackle studio in northwest Washington. Wildcats steel guitarist Marvin Carroll, “probably the most knowledgeable musician in Washington at the time,” became a new mentor, introducing Clark to Western swing and a new guitar idol: George Barnes.

“Marvin found this 78 record of George with some big jazz band, and they were honkin’ on something, and all of a sudden, here comes this guitar like he’s parting the waves! His tone is incredible. We all tried to figure out how he was playin’ with all this drive. If I had the ability, he’d be the one that I would want the most to play like.”

Clark’s habitual lateness collided with Dean’s strict no-tardiness policy once too often in 1955. “If we had a 12 o’clock show and it was a 15-minute trip, I’d leave 15 minutes before show time, and if I got a red light, that’d put me late. It was never intentional. I knew I was totally wrong. But I didn’t think it was all that important.” Dean fired him (and replaced him with Billy Grammer), yet they remained friends. “He gave me every chance,” Clark admits. Later on, he would give a more mature Clark a far bigger opportunity.

Clark continued in the clubs, performing solo and playing guitar behind Marvin Rainwater, who in 1955 won first place on the popular CBS program Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, the American Idol of its day. As Elvis swept America in 1956, Clark began rocking, and Rainwater’s brother-manager touted him to Talent Scouts. He took a D.C. band to New York and auditioned for talent coordinator Janette Davis, “doin’ Little Richard, Fats Domino, B.B. King--everything was pretty raunchy. She said I would fit, but the tunes--she said, ‘There’s no way the censors are gonna let you do that!’ Finally, we settled on ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ I didn’t want to do that.” He placed second.

Meanwhile, Washington’s storied bluegrass scene was blossoming before his eyes. “The Country Gentlemen, Red Allen, all of ‘em started playing a club in Georgetown, the Shamrock, Tuesday night,” he recalls, “and I actually was able to sit and watch ‘em grow and get to know ‘em. I met Charlie Waller when he was a parking-lot attendant with his guitar in the booth. He’d sit and sing Hank Snow songs--sound just like Hank--turn around, start [playing] bluegrass and was one of the leaders in the bluegrass movement in D.C.”

Bluegrass wasn’t on Clark’s plate; he hosted local TV shows and rocked out in clubs like the Rendezvous and Strick’s, where a performance in the spring of 1960 changed everything.

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In the audience that night at Strick’s, Wanda Jackson, rockabilly pioneer and Capitol recording artist, faced a dilemma. The Golden Nugget in Las Vegas had offered her a regular spot, but she needed a new band and a bandleader able to open and emcee her shows. Clark, she felt, could be that leader, and her dad offered him the job. Realizing he’d reached his limit in Washington, Clark accepted.

Impressed by his stage skills, Jackson’s innovative manager, Jim Halsey, made Roy his third client, after Hank Thompson and Jackson. “[Halsey] was the first that said, ‘I think you have a career and I would like to be part of it,’ and actually went and did something. I’d had that before. Several others said, ‘You really got something.’ That’d be the last I’d hear, and that gave me a complex.”

The Nugget’s entertainment, running 21 hours daily, dazzled him. “Headliners in the evening would either be Hank Penny and Sue Thompson, the Wade Ray Five, Bob Wills, the 101 Ranch Hands, you name it.”

At that time, Clark used a Gibson Byrdland, his preferred guitar, or a Les Paul Goldtop. In October of ‘60, when Jackson and the band recorded in Nashville, producer Ken Nelson took notice. “Ken came out and put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘How would you like to record for Capitol?’ I said, ‘I’d give anything!’ He said, ‘I’ll have to sign you as an instrumentalist, because we have so many singers . . .’ I said, ‘It doesn’t bother me a bit.’ He even said, ‘We’ll work [vocals] in.’”

The next year brought a move to Hank Penny’s band. The veteran Western swing bandleader and comic fronted a jazzy lounge outfit with singer-wife Sue Thompson. “Hank hired me--didn’t need me, but he wanted me to be part of his show,” Clark says, calling him “the funniest man I’ve ever seen onstage.” His time with Penny vastly improved his own comedic skills. “If he believed in someone’s talent, he would work until he got some results.” Clark also connected with Penny’s jazz-minded pedal-steel player, Curly Chalker, who “sounded like a whole horn section.”

In November of 1961, he and his Penny bandmates traveled to Hollywood to record his Capitol debut LP, The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark, a lounge-toned set showcasing his high-velocity picking. Things didn’t go smoothly. Thieves cleaned out Clark’s station wagon, taking his Les Paul and amp. Penny had his longtime pal Leo Fender ship a Jazzmaster and Vibrasonic amp to the Capitol Tower, but Clark had already borrowed a blonde Gibson ES-335 from Smitty Irvin, who’d relocated to L.A.

“It was a bottom-line Gibson, but very good, all I could come up with at the time.” He used the Gibson on the session, explaining, “I was not familiar with the Jazzmaster. . . . I just did not feel comfortable at all tryin’ to play it.” He did, however, feel comfortable posing with it for the album’s cover photo.

One of Clark’s old pals decided to kick-start his rising star. The Jimmy Dean of 1962 had become a seasoned network TV host, now world-famous for his 1961 country-pop hit “Big Bad John.” Guest hosting The Tonight Show (based in New York) for a week, Dean tracked Clark to the Safford, Arizona, club he was playing. “He got me on Wednesday night and said he wanted me on TheTonight Show. It had to be Friday, his last night.”

Roy hired a plane and flew cross-country Thursday, got into Manhattan Friday morning and didn’t see Dean until half an hour before the show’s 5 p.m. taping. “He said, ‘How many tunes they got you down for?’ I said, ‘Well, they said two, maybe somethin’ with you.’ He said, ‘Well, tell you what. We’ll do two. If that don’t get ‘em, we’ll do two more. We’re gonna do whatever it takes. When you leave here, you’re gonna be tall hog in the trough!’”

It worked. “There was a demand for my album, the only thing I had out,” he says, still marveling at what Dean “went through to get me on there.” Clark’s first vocal hit came in 1963 with “The Tip of My Fingers.” He recorded his signature version of “Malagueña” in 1965. His final Capitol album, in 1966, was the instrumental Stringin’ Along with the Blues, backed by Howard Roberts, Barney Kessel, pianist Gene Garf, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Earl Palmer. “I wound up in the studio that day and wondered, What am I doin’ here? I didn’t want to take my guitar out of the case. Talk about heavyweights!”

Byrdlands remained his preferred instrument. (The cover of Stringin’shows him with a Byrdland sporting a Charlie Christian pickup.) Unfortunately, his heavy tour schedule took a toll on them. “The airlines would just break ‘em up,” he complains. “Every time I called Gibson, they’d send me a replacement, and I’d send the Byrdland in, and they’d repair it.” He later used Byrdlands with Florentine cutaways, but asserts, “I didn’t care for that. Visually, I thought the rounded cutaway had prettier lines. The one that has the Christian pickup, I took all over the Far East.” It suffered from the cold of cargo holds and tropical Asian heat. “The neck warped. [Someone] made it playable. The fact it held up at all was amazing to me.”

Jim Halsey made TV a major platform for Clark. “I’ve had more success in television than in any other medium,” he admits. He was a regular guest on The Beverly Hillbillies, co-starred on the short-lived 1966 NBC daytime show Swingin’ Country and was taping Jonathan Winters’ short-lived NBC variety show in the fall of ‘68 when writers John Aylesworth and Frank Peppiatt approached him about co-hosting “a country show similar to Laugh-In.” Clark would be the television star; the other host, Buck Owens, would be the steady country-music chart-topper.

The show, with the working title Hee Haw, was originally supposed to be a one-shot; it premiered in June of 1969. Around that same time, Clark’s recording of French pop singer Charles Aznavour’s original ballad “Yesterday, When I Was Young” reached the country Top 10. Various pop singers, he says, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin among them, were approached to cover his single.

“This is the greatest compliment in the world: Sinatra said, ‘I’d love to record it, but I can’t afford to have a cover record to Roy Clark.’”

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While Buck Owens and Roy Clark were amiable co-hosts, Clark felt early on that the Bakersfield twang of Owens’ famous Buckaroos, the show’s house band, didn’t mesh with his vocals, and he spoke to the production team. They insisted the group was “the best band in country music”; Clark countered by declaring them “a great band for Buck,” but stressing that Nashville had an abundance of far-more-versatile players.

“I didn’t mean that derogatorily,” he emphasizes. “I was doing songs that [Buckaroo] sound don’t fit.” The new house band, led by Charlie McCoy, included A-Teamers: banjoist Bobby Thompson, guitarist Leon Rhodes, who’d played dazzling country jazz as a member of Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours, bassist Henry Strzelecki and, later, Curly Chalker.

During his Hee Haw days, Clark used a Gibson Mastertone banjo (he still owns six or seven) and the Ovation acoustic and electric guitars he endorsed. When Gretsch bought Sho-Bud and Sho-Bud co-founder Shot Jackson designed guitars for Gretsch, he briefly used their modified Super Axe solid-body.

On one show, Clark recalls, a last-minute guest appeared, and the producers asked Clark, who didn’t have his guitar, to back him. “I asked Leon if he had a guitar I could borrow. He said, ‘Anything I got.’ It was a Telecaster, plugged into a Peavey amp--Peavey gave Hee Haw all the amps we needed--and I hit down on his Telecaster, and three strings come off the bridge. I hit it the way that I normally play, and I think he used an eight [gauge], smaller than a nine. . . . I had to have a heavy gauge to match the gauge of the pick against the string. That way, when I played fast and I’d hit the string with the pick, it would actually bounce the pick up, and I was ready to go again.”

At first, producers were clueless about country-music customs. “Buck, myself, Grandpa Jones and Archie Campbell really had to educate ‘em,” he says. “They got to where they were a lot more knowledgeable.” That’s how the Hee Haw Gospel Quartet came to be. Grandpa Jones, who’d recorded gospel in the ‘40s with Merle Travis and the Delmore Brothers as the Brown’s Ferry Four, suggested the idea. Producer Sam Lovullo was reluctant, until Jones and Clark teamed up. “Thank god I’d got enough clout they would listen to me,” he says.

Taping those segments with Buck, Grandpa and Kenny Price, Clark often borrowed Washington friend Doyle Smith’s 1939 Martin D-45. Smith died in 1976; years later, his nephew, guitar virtuoso Doyle Dykes, presented Roy with the treasured instrument. “Only 11 in existence,” he adds.

During the show’s twice-a-year tapings in Nashville, Clark sometimes jammed in his off hours with banjoist Buck Trent, Dobroist Shot Jackson and fiddler Roy Acuff, the Grand Ole Opry patriarch. During one jam, someone suggested that Clark appear on the Opry, but that gave him an even better idea: re-creating his Meherrin front porch on the Opry stage, with Hester, uncles Paul and Dudley, cousin Kenneth on electric bass and family friend Bob Schott on banjo along with him.

Within a week, an Opry spot, Hee Haw appearance and album for ABC/Dot were arranged. Roy Clark’s Family Album, a set of traditional standards, became his best-selling album. “It took my family to come down and record my first Number One album,” he laughs. The 1975 album A Pair of Fives (Banjos, That Is), with Buck Trent, hit the Top 10 and led to the Country Music Association’s Instrumental Group of the Year award. His 1979 album with friend and R&B great Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Makin’ Music, was “as ad lib as you can get,” Clark remembers.

As Branson, Missouri’s stature as an entertainment center rose in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Clark took notice. In 1983, he opened the Roy Clark Celebrity Theatre, the first Branson facility owned by a country act (although he later sold his shares). He joined the Oprycast in 1987, and although Owens left Hee Haw in 1986, Roy Clark remained on the show until the end, in 1992.

In 1993, Clark united with jazz giant Joe Pass for an album of Hank Williams songs; the idea came from West Coast jazz producer Ralph Jungheim, who captured the sessions in both audio and video. Clark used the Heritage Roy Clark model for the sessions--similar to an L-5, with a thinner body, shorter Byrdland-style scale and a Bigsby-style armrest. “I don’t know how I got the nerve to do it,” he reflects. “I’d just sit there and marvel at the fact I could actually make sounds on the guitar in front of Joe Pass.”

The two began their work unaccompanied, but Clark soon realized his own limitations.

“Eventually, I said I’m not being fair to Joe; I cannot give him the support I’d like for him to have when he’s playin’,” Clark explains. “He backs me up incredible. But I’m not capable of doin’ what he deserves.”

Guitarist John Pisano, Pass’ frequent collaborator, and a rhythm section joined them. Pass never mentioned his terminal liver cancer. “We went to get something to eat, and when he would sit and would move, he would flinch. You could tell he was really in pain. [Pisano] told me Joe was a lot sicker and in a lot more pain than anyone knew. It was only two or three months--that’s the last thing Joe ever did.”

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Fame has brought rare opportunities to Roy Clark, including a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with a bit of guitar history, thanks to his friend in Oklahoma City, guitarist Benny Garcia. A veteran ‘40s and ‘50s Western swing sideman who played with Hank Penny, Tex Williams and Bob Wills, Garcia knew the surviving family of jazz fountainhead Charlie Christian, and they still owned the guitarist’s iconic blonde Gibson ES-250 and amp.

After Garcia adjusted the guitar for them, they trusted him enough to lend him the hallowed gear, and he brought it by when Clark was in town. Examining it, Clark saw where Christian himself had filed the bar pickup under the B string. “I held it; I could not bring myself to try to play it. It was just hallowed ground. Benny played it a little bit, and I finally very carefully stroked a couple of chords on it.”

Clark, who’s lived in Tulsa for years, still tours with a regular band. His guitar choices remain fluid. A couple of years ago, he switched from the Heritage H-535, based on Gibson’s 335, to their customized Golden Eagle, “like a Super 400, but thinner.” It has the elbow rest and shorter scale he prefers. He also uses a 12-string solid-body Ovation Preacher for certain songs. “I do things like ‘Moscow Nights’ and get different balalaika-type sounds.” He rarely plays acoustic, he says, except when “we do a Hee Haw Gospel Quartet-type tune, but I’ll use ‘em to strengthen my chops.”

Age has required concessions. “I’ve slowed up,” he admits. “I have a taste of arthritis.” It affects his right thumb. “I’ve been working to try to get it back, so my banjo playing kind of took a back seat. I’m in therapy.” His guitar approach has also changed. “Most of my guitar playing was done for show, to be entertaining. What I need to do is play more. The worst thing I can do is not play. I carry three guitars on the bus, so the more I play, the better I can do.

“I have nights that surprise me [that] I play as well--by my standards--as I do. I’m more creative now. I think it’s because I know I can’t get away just blazin’ through something.”

He keeps a Peavey amp but avoids stomp boxes. Effects, he insists, “really wouldn’t work for the way I present myself. I move around too much.” He uses “a touch of reverb, just to brighten, and on occasion, ever-so-little slap, just to fill it.”

Bluegrass remains on his mind; he is surprised by its wider popularity and changing sound. “Before bluegrass started getting solidified, mandolin was a backup instrument. Now it has taken over from five-string banjo or the fiddle. They’ve got some incredible mandolin players that just blow me away.”

He wants to record a new, unique bluegrass album of his own. “I better get down and do it,” he says. “Work at not sounding like anyone else--try to be original and not go back and do the standards, but consciously work on trying to be original. I listen to XM Satellite Radio bluegrass programs and I notice too many bands are dangerously soundin’ alike.”

Now a Country Music Hall of Famer at age 77, Clark reflects on a long musical career. “Lookin’ back on it, I should have [taken] a little more time, especially in records,” he notes. “I used to go into Nashville on Sunday night. My producers would have, from song publishers, a stack of records. I’d go through ‘em, make two cuts, then pick out the ones for a 12-song album, record it in four days and be back on tour that weekend. . . .

“If you want an exceptional product, you have to put the time in. I have to be satisfied. Because you can’t look back and say, ‘Well, if I’d have known that, I would have did this differently.’ But you don’t know. You have to be open. And I have been blessed with that. If I’m pushed, I’ll try anything."

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SIDEBAR

Indescribable: Roy Clark encounters Hank Williams

“To this day, what he had is just indescribable,” Roy Clark says, in awe of Hank Williams. “All he did was just stand and sing, but there was something that emanated from him . . .”

Once, during his weeklong tenure in Baltimore opening for Williams in late 1949, Clark was jamming with Drifting Cowboys fiddler Jerry Rivers in an upstairs dressing room between shows. When Hank suddenly came in, sat down and listened, Clark tried to maintain his cool.

“He got up and said, ‘Well, you guys don’t care if ol’ Hank’s here or not. I think I’ll just leave.’ I wanted to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Sit down! What do you want to hear?’ Jerry said, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid. That’s just Hank. If you don’t talk to him, he doesn’t think you want to talk to him. And if you talk to him, then he don’t want-a talk to you. It’s a no-win thing!” While Clark says he didn’t notice it, Hank Williams chroniclers indicate that his drinking marred the Baltimore engagement.

Clark later opened for Hank at an indoor show at Maryland’s Marshall Hall Amusement Park. The star, who’d broken a guitar string, sat and replaced it while the Cowboys played an instrumental. “I’m watchin’ him, and I’m three feet away. He looked at me and says, ‘What in the hell’s wrong with you? Ain’t you ever seen anybody change a guitar string before?’”

Later in the show, Clark recalls, shouted requests from the audience darkened his mood further.

“Hank said, ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ He said, ‘Now, if you want me to sing those songs, you shut up! But if you keep hollerin’, I ain’t singin’ a damn thing!’ To this day, I’ve often thought, How far would I have gotten if I had told an audience to shut up?”