The Murphy Method Blog

Folks, here’s a 1980 video of a Red and Murphy band performance that was posted on YouTube recently:

This is our Red and Murphy band with Nancy Pate, one of Murphy’s sisters, singing her song “Mountain Laurel Man”. The whole scene brings up a lot of nostalgia. The band included Murphy (banjo), myself (mandolin), Murphy’s sisters Nancy (guitar) and Laurie (bass), and excellent musician Tuck Tucker (dobro). We were performing outdoors to a packed crowd at Bullwinkle’s in Tallahassee, Florida, on a Sunday afternoon in August, and the local university station, WFSU-TV, was taping our show. Nice opportunity, right? Right. Except for the details:

We were playing three sets not only outdoors, but facing the sun, in the late afternoon. In August. In Florida. The temperature was about 103 degrees, and in that direct sunlight, the heat was hard to describe. Tuck burned his hand on his metal dobro resonator. I changed into a clean shirt at each set break, and was still soaked to the skin by the second number when we started playing again.

Sometimes you wonder about the final product, too. WFSU made a 30-minute bluegrass show from all that tape, and sometimes I couldn’t tell how they’d selected and edited the material. For example, at one point in the second set, Murphy played Foggy Mountain Breakdown. Trouble was, she broke a string partway through, so Tuck and I had to finish out the tune trading breaks on mandolin and dobro while Murphy was at the back of the stage changing the string. So we were lacking part of the band—the most important part, on Foggy Mountain Breakdown—and Murphy was visible on screen changing the banjo string—but out of the 40 or more numbers we played that day, FMB was one of the 8 or 9 numbers which WFSU included in the televised show!

Seeing the clip also reminds me also that this was one of the first jobs Tuck played with us. His first two or three gigs with us were in REALLY hot situations—he may have wondered just what he was getting into—but Tuck was a trooper, and he just played on through the heat. Stayed with us for the next six years, too. Can’t ask for more than that.

By 1980 we’d developed a habit when we went out to play, of being ready for any weather from 20 degrees to 100 degrees, and wet weather as well. In Florida, as in other places, it went with the territory.