The Murphy Method Blog

Jim Fee died the evening of Thursday, September 18th, 2008. He was simply one of the best banjo players in the world.

I recall the first time I ever saw Jim: One afternoon in 1979, we arrived to play at a one-day bluegrass festival put on by the Women’s Club in Cocoa, Florida. I walked into the big pavilion and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There was Chubby Anthony on stage playing the fiddle with three musicians I didn’t know—and they were PLAYING BLUEGRASS. Now, starting in the 1960s, I had seen Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, J.D. Crowe, Jimmy Martin, and other bluegrass greats, but suddenly here was a band that (along with being able to play as well as anybody) had an incredible excitement in their music that I’d never heard before. At that moment they were playing and singing Chubby’s song “Dear One,” and I was speechless. The vocals were soaring and the instruments were fiery. This was simply the best band I had ever (and have ever) seen on stage.

I found out that the banjo player was named Jim Fee. Jim’s banjo playing and solid baritone singing were a critical part of the band. His amazingly strong style and originality were like nothing I’d ever heard on the banjo, and he could play the slower material beautifully and then launch into a banjo tune like no one I’d ever heard.

Later, when I got to know Jimmy, I found out that his personality matched his music. He was straight-shooting, perceptive, and intelligent. After Chubby died, Jim kept the band together and always played great music. He asked me to fill in on mandolin with him a few times, and those are some of my best musical memories. It was a special pleasure to have the group come into my studio and record an album, in 1985—for years, I’d wanted a chance to mix them the way I thought they ought to be heard.

Rest in peace, Jim. We’ll remember you for a long time.

Here are another couple of excerpts from Murphy’s Banjo Newsletter articles about Jimmy Fee.

BNL August 1999

[In June of 1999 my son Christopher enrolled in a recording school in Orlando, Florida, called Full Sail. Much of this column somehow manages to focus on that! Fortunately for BNL subscribers, Jimmy Fee lived nearby and I had a chance to visit him and write something about banjos! I’m including only the part of the article about Jimmy.]

…Then for one frantic week Casey and I were actually in Winter Park, installing Chris in his apartment, meeting his roommate, setting up a bank account, shopping for furniture, buying him groceries, attending orientation at Full Sail, and, best of all, visiting the great banjo player Jim Fee who lives down the road just mile or two from Full Sail. Unbelievable, but true. And at Jim Fee’s picking shack, finally, I got to play the banjo!

I’ve probably told you this before, but we worked a lot of shows with Jimmy when we lived in Florida. He played the banjo with Chubby Anthony and Big Timber and they were hotter than a two-dollar pistol. He’s one of the best banjo players I’ve ever heard, and he’s also one of the most driving bluegrass rhythm guitar players I’ve ever played with. When Jimmy is playing the guitar, you don’t have to work to make the music sound right, you just sit on top of his rhythm and play the banjo.

Back when I was pregnant with Chris (1980), I had somebody take a picture of Jimmy and me, belly to belly. I titled it “Guess which banjo player is pregnant?” I thought it would make a good cover for BNL, but Hub wisely thought not! I did, however, include the picture in my book of BNL columns. I think Jimmy gets a kick out of that picture. I know I do. So round, so firm, so fully packed…

Casey, Chris, and I got in some good picking with Jimmy. There were plenty of banjos there to choose from including our own 1937 Gibson style 11 with a Red Henry neck and a Huber tone ring; another style 11 that a friend of Jimmy’s had purchased through E-Bay; a beautiful new gold-plated Gibson; and a copy of a style 11 which Jimmy had put together with neck he made, a pot and tone ring from Bill Sullivan at First Quality, and a Kalamazoo resonator. Of all those great-sounding banjos, my favorite was the one Jimmy had concocted. It’s a dandy (as Jim would say). He just has a way with banjos. He also has a way with guitars. He was picking an old 12-string Hondo guitar that he had converted to a 6-string by adding a Martin top and neck. I thought it sounded wonderful, especially with Jimmy playing it, but he said “You ort to hear it when it’s got good strings on it.”

What did we pick? Well, we started off with “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” (in D), then we picked everything from “Foggy Mountain Special” to “Baby I’m Georgia Bound” (in F) and “Hold Back the Waters of Lake Okeechobee”. Jimmy also sang a song he wrote about his grandson, Brandon “Tater” Cranston, who’ll be 7 in October. Jim says the song makes Tater’s dad about half mad when he hears it, and when you read the words you’ll understand why. In three-quarter time, now, starting in a G chord with the
downbeat on “my”:

My baby Brandon don’t favor no Cranston
All he got from his Paw was his chin
He looks like a Fee
And that shore tickles me
That Cranston blood line was too thin.

And Jimmy can’t hold back a big grin when he sings that last line. As the evening wound down, Jimmy took back the banjo and picked Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” at my request and “Never On A Sunday” which I’d never “hyeered” on the banjer before. It was vintage Fee. He’s a dandy.

BNL December 1997

[Most of this column is about the IBMA World of Bluegrass in Louisville. Since Jim Fee showed up for it (a first), I included something about him.]

My old friend Jim Fee, from Orlando, Fla., one of the best “banjer” pickers in the world showed up, to my surprise. We picked a while in my booth, with me on banjo and Jimmy on guitar. Jimmy’s always been pretty tight with a compliment, so when he mentioned that I did a good job on “Foggy Mountain Special” I swelled up like a toad. I guess that gave me just enough moxie to show off my arrangement of “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.” When I finished, all he said was, “I like to play that in D chord.” So I said “have at ‘er,” we swapped instruments, and I watched HIM play it. After that, I felt like I could have stood on the head of a banjo and walked under the strings. Whatever made me think I could play the banjo? This guy can play rings around me.

[If you made it to the end, many thanks! Maybe one day we’ll be able to include some snippets of Jimmy’s music or some downloads.] {Or maybe today, my dear techno-phobic mother!} Here’s Jimmy picking “Give Me Roses While I Live”.

I wanted to honor the memory of my banjo-picking friend Jim Fee a little bit more so here are some columns I wrote for Banjo Newsletter that feature him. I’m pretty sure Jimmy saw these (at least I tell myself that he did), and I hope that he knew how much I admired him and what he meant to me.

BNL May 1984

[This long column is entirely about Jimmy. I hope it gives you some idea of the person he was.]

The Wit and Wisdom of Jim Fee

You don’t know Jim Fee, do you? That’s all right, he probably doesn’t know you either. He’s only one of the best banjo players in the world. I mean, he’s right up there with J.D. Crowe and Sonny Osborne. His Scruggs-style lead is powerful and clean—every note is in the right place. He plays as well at the twenty-second fret as most good banjo players play in first position. His back-up, especially on slower numbers, is rich and full. Remember Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date”? You ought to hear Jimmy play that on the banjo. It seems like he uses all the chord positions in the world and I’ll bet he doesn’t know the names of any of them. Jim is also a prime example of a “good old boy” in the best sense of the phrase. He is straight-talking, hard-drinking, and forever cussing. I have censored most of his quotations—you may odd your own expletives. If you’re talking with him, you’d better be prepared to hear the unvarnished truth, with no apologies.

“Y’all are really sounding good, Murph,” he told me  last year. “Best I’ve heard you sound. But why do you play that ‘Just Because’ capoed at the fifth fret?” “I thought it sounded good. I thought I could get more drive there—help support the rhythm more.” “You ought to play it in open C. That’s where the drive’s at.”

Jim was born in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1941, and was raised in a little coal mining camp called Yancey. His dad was a coal miner, and like everybody back then, the family also farmed to eat. Jim started playing at the age of ten, when his dad “came in and told me that I was either going to learn to play the banjo or he was going to whip the hell out of me.” So his dad, who played clawhammer banjo and guitar, taught him “Chickens Crowin’ on the Sourwood Mountain.”

Jim got out of the mountains “just as quick as I got old enough, which was about eighteen years old. I left Harlan and went to Cincinnati. I got up with a bunch called the Stoney Mountain Boys, which was Earl Taylor (mandolin), Jim McCall (guitar), Walter Hensley (banjo), and Vernon McIntyre, Sr., (bass) who was known as ‘Boatwhistle.’ ” Jim still remembers those boys as the best group he ever worked with. “Now, Hensley was the best banjo picker outside of Earl Scruggs that I ever listened to. I learned a lot from Walter Hensley, just from sitting and listening to him. All he ever sat down and showed me were two things: ‘Groundspeed’ and the kick-off to ‘I Know You’re Married but I Love You Still’.”

After a series of nefarious peregrinations and perilous misfortunes too numerous and sordid to recount here (that’s Red’s line), Jimmy wound up in Orlando, Florida, picking at Disney World with Nelson Young. They played six days a week for almost seven years. This included doing the famous (or infamous) “Bear Shows,” which required the boys to play music dressed  like bears, in huge, heavy bear costumes. When the Disney World job ended, Chubby Anthony asked Jim to come and work with him.

“I jumped at the opportunity, because I’d watched him on TV when I was a kid, back when he was working with Carter and Ralph on WCYB Farm And Fun Time. We watched them everyday at noon on Channel 5 out of Bristol. I’d get out of school every day at twelve for dinner; it was about a half mile up there to the house, and I’d make it in about five minutes, straight up the mountain.” Me: “Bet you couldn’t do that now!” Jim: “G-d–, I wouldn’t even get the theme song on the end of it now. But Chubby was playing fiddle with them. And that fiddle made an impression on me, even at that young age. I still remember how exciting it was. And it was the same when I started playing with him, too. Still the same style; same sound.”

“Big Timber,” as the band came to be called, was simply one of the best bands ever. With Chubby on fiddle, and sometimes lead guitar; Jim on banjo; Bill Pruitt on guitar; Bill Lamarche on bass, they played music that would make your hair stand up. It was hardcore bluegrass at its best. “Fee-Fee, La-La, and Bert,” as Chubby called them–what a band! They were just beginning to get some national exposure when Chubby, who had been in poor health for some time, died in February, 1980. Jim took over the leadership of Big Timber and is still at the helm. Jim is the only original “Big” from the Big Timber that is left. After Chubby died, Bill Pruitt stayed a while then moved away, and Bill LaMarche simply doesn’t qualify as “big.” John Maultby, now on fiddle, well-Jim says it best when he introduces John on stage: “We call him the ‘Sapling.’ ”

I collected some of Jim’s wit and wisdom at a festival we played together last weekend. Said festival shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty. All in all, it was a rather typical small bluegrass festival. The M.C. was up on stage announcing future festivals from flyers presented to him by promoters: “I don’t think I’m gonna read this one.” he drawled. “They didn’t put no date on it.” He chuckled a bit and turned the flyer over. “Oh, here it is. They stuck it on the back as an aftermath.”

(more…)

Jim Fee, a great banjo player and a good friend of mine, died this past Thursday, September 18. Jimmy, a Kentucky native transplanted to Orlando, Florida, had been fighting for his life for months, first in the hospital and then in rehab. He lost part of a leg to diabetes, was on dialysis many times, but finally succumbed to a staph infection. His devoted family—four children and his wife Loretta—was with him every step of the way. His daughter Becky (Becko) kept his many friends across the country apprised of what was happening with regular email posting to Care Pages. Thank you again for that, Becky.

Although Jimmy was not as well known to bluegrass fans as, say, Earl Scruggs, J.D. Crowe, and Sonny Osborne, he was certainly in their league as a picker. I got to know him when Red and I were living in Hawthorne, Florida, and Jimmy was playing with Chubby Anthony and Big Timber. I admired his playing immensely and tried to copy his banjo break on the song “Baby I’m Georgia Bound,” a song Jim recorded with Chubby. I devoted an entire Banjo Newsletter column to him in May 1984. It was called “The Wit and Wisdom of Jim Fee” and I included it in my book of collected BNL columns. (We plan to post the column in an upcoming blog.)

Jim was a down-to-earth fellow, a plain-spoken man, a guy who knew what he thought and would tell you flat out. But somehow he managed to do this with just the right touch so that it didn’t tick you off or make you fighting mad. Humor had a lot to do with it. He also cussed like a sailor, but somehow that too was never offensive. At least to me. It was just Jimmy.

I’ll never forget one thing Jim said to me about my banjo playing. Red and I had just played a set at the Otter Springs Bluegrass Festival in Florida. Jimmy was running the sound, so of course he had been listening to us. After we finished (and had done some selling at the record table) I went back to visit with him at the sound board. I don’t remember anymore how we got into talking about “Just Because,” one of the songs we had done. But I sure remember what Jimmy had to say about my banjo break. Red was singing the solo lead in the key of C. I, at the time much enamored of the capo, was playing the banjo capoed up at the fifth fret. (This was almost certainly because I didn’t know how to play very well in the key of C any other way, such as in the first position.) Jimmy called me on that with little preamble. “@#$%, Murph,” he said. “Why are you playing it capoed up so high? You’re losing all the sound. The sound is down there on the first frets.”

I can’t say I went right home and learned to play “Just Because” in the first position. But I do play it that way now. And Jimmy is right. That is where the sound is!

I am also proud to say that I string my banjo the same way Jim Fee strung his: with all the strings wrapped to the same side of the tuning peg. (To me it seems to be to the left side of the post.) That way, all the strings turn the same way. So when you play “Flint Hill Special” you don’t have to remember to turn the B string one way and the G string another way. Makes sense to me. Guess it made sense to Jimmy, too.

The Stanley Brothers recorded a great song that they probably learned from the Carter Family called “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone.” As the title indicates, it asks the question, “Will you miss me when I’m gone?” I’m sure Jimmy knew and loved that song. And the answer is a resounding and heartfelt YES! We will miss you, Jimmy. We do miss you. I miss you. And I’m so glad you were a part of my life.