John “Curly” Seckler’s musical career spanned nearly eighty years. In the mid-1930s while still a teenager he formed a band with his brothers that played what was then referred to as “hillbilly” music; he was still going strong in the first decades of the twenty-first century and was “laying down tracks” in a recording studio as recently as 2013 at the age of ninety-four. He is best known as a long-term member of the iconic bluegrass band, Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, with whom he played on and off from 1949 to 1962; along the way he also played in bands with such “first-generation” bluegrass stars as Charlie Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and Mac Wiseman. An appendix that lists the recordings he appeared on fills five pages.

To make sense of the constantly shifting bands and band personnel mentioned in the book it is important to know several aspects of bluegrass history that read almost like a biblical narrative. “In the beginning” there was the Monroe Brothers, a hillbilly band featuring Bill and Charlie Monroe, that influenced nearly everybody. They split up in 1937 and went their separate ways. In 1946, Bill Monroe’s new band, the Bluegrass Boys, which by that time included guitarist/lead vocalist Lester Flatt and 3-finger banjoist Earl Scruggs, crystallized the sound that was eventually named for them and is now known as bluegrass music. In 1948, Flatt and Scruggs left the Bluegrass Boys and founded their own band, an act for which Monroe never forgave them. In 1969, Flatt and Scruggs themselves parted company, and not on the best of terms.

Seckler’s main talent was his ability to sing the “high-tenor” harmony part with power and great emotion, and to effortlessly match the lead singer’s note-rhythm, syntax, and phrasing. High-tenor harmony—taking a conventional tenor part and raising it up an octave so that it is positioned above the melody—was popularized by Bill Monroe while he was still in the Monroe Brothers band. Bill Monroe also created a distinctive approach to mandolin while in the band that would be widely emulated.

In 1939, Charlie Monroe invited Seckler to join his new band, eventually known as the Kentucky Partners, and fill the vocal void created by Bill’s departure. Seckler played with the Kentucky Partners and several other bands through the 1940s; then in 1949, Lester Flatt invited him to join the Foggy Mountain Boys in the role of high-tenor singer. Seckler’s vocal duets with Flatt during the dozen or so years that he worked with the band are considered some of the finest examples of bluegrass singing ever recorded.

Seckler was never considered a virtuoso instrumentalist but he always played well enough to get by in the highly competitive bluegrass music scene. He started out on tenor (4-string) banjo, abandoned it during the 1940s in favor of mandolin (probably with Bill Monroe in mind), and also taught himself to play rhythm guitar. He is credited for creating a highly rhythmic approach to mandolin—known as “the chop”—that helped to drive the sound of the Foggy Mountain Boys, and which in turn has been widely emulated since then by bluegrass mandolinists.

Seckler had quite a varied musical career after departing from the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1962. He played with various bluegrass luminaries and recorded several projects for which he was the featured vocalist. He also played for over twenty years with a band of all-stars called Nashville Grass, which was founded and originally led by Lester Flatt. After Flatt’s passing in 1979, Seckler took on the role of band leader.

Foggy Mountain Troubadour is above all a vivid portrait of the musical milieu in which Seckler and his musical colleagues operated. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, bands would get hired to do live weekly shows for local radio stations; this notoriety enabled then to pull in audiences for performances and dances within a radius of a few hundred miles. After a few months a band would saturate the market and have to move on to another city. By the mid-1950s better-known bands like Flatt and Scruggs were doing live television performances that would be broadcast in local markets; when performances could be taped for later broadcast, it freed bands to engage in extended concert tours. Finally, by the mid-1960s, as these kinds of venues were drying up, the modern bluegrass performance scene was developing, featuring weekend festivals and large concert venues sponsored by universities, private promoters, and arts councils.

There are many “juicy” tidbits in this book for the diehard bluegrass fan to feast on. For example, we find out that the Foggy Mountain Boys always kept their instruments tuned up half a step (relative to “concert pitch”) because Scruggs liked the way his banjo sounded in that register. We learn that they introduced the resonator guitar, or dobro, to bluegrass music—and de-emphasized mandolin—in an effort to further differentiate their band from Bill Monroe’s. It turns out that for many years Bill Monroe used his influence to keep the Foggy Mountain Boys from appearing on WSM’s prestigious Grand Ol’ Opry show. And when Flatt and Scruggs parted company, a musical dispute was at the root of it; apparently, Earl wanted to inject modern influences into the ensemble, but Lester wanted to keep the old sound.

Although Seckler seemed to give Bill Monroe a fairly wide berth throughout much of his career, the latter seems to have regarded him as somewhat of a rival. On at least two occasions at festivals held around 1970, the two of them were thrust on stage to sing a duet. Both times, Monroe directed the band to raise up the pitch of the song a couple of notches, hoping to force Curly to go beyond his comfortable vocal range (according to witnesses, Monroe was unable to throw Seckler off his stride).

Most of the focus in Parsons’s meticulously researched volume is on the musical activities of Seckler and his bands—where they played, how their fortunes fared, shifts in lineup, and so on. We don’t really get to hear this singer’s inner voice, however, or get much of a glimpse into his personality. We are told of his hardscrabble childhood in rural North Carolina and his struggles throughout much of his life to make ends meet; there is also brief mention of two difficult marriages (one contentious, the other marred by a spouse’s severe illness and subsequent mental deterioration). At the very end of the book, a friend of Seckler describes him as “warm, congenial, respectful, proud, compassionate, generous, and spiritual” (205). Although, we have no reason to doubt this assessment, I would have liked to see more of this person revealed in the narrative.

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[Review length: 1117 words • Review posted on November 14, 2017]