Yesterday marked the 83rd anniversary of the death of Arnold Schultz-a mentor and influence to Bill Monroe. Its a bit of a lengthy read, but filled with great insights. Enjoy! Bluegrass music, thanks in part to the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years. It is widely accepted that Merle Travis perfect the method sometimes known as Travis picking, a thumb picking style originating in Muhlenberg County that has been popular for years. But most people have never heard of a wandering musician named Arnold Shultz, whose style of playing influenced the musicians who are credited for creating both bluegrass music and the thumb picking style. Music historians are aware of the fiddler and guitarist Shultz and his influence. Shultz was a mentor to Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, and according to Brenda Bogart of WKUs Kentucky FolkWeb, was described as the man who put the blue in bluegrass. Rich Kienzle wrote in Guitar Player magazine of Shultz influence on the four legendary Muhlenberg County thumb pickers Kennedy Jones, Ike Everly, Mose Rager, and Merle Travis. Richard D. Smith echoed that influence in his book on Bill Monroe titled Cant You Hear Me Callin and further stated that had he been recorded by field folk recorders or race record labels, Arnold Shultz would today share the pantheon of African-American country blues greats with Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and even Robert Johnson. Shultz worked the coal mines of western Kentucky but mostly roamed all over the countryside with his guitar, playing for anyone who would listen. Shultz roamed an area referred to by scholars as the Shultz-travis region, an area that included most of Ohio and Muhlenberg counties and part of Butler and McLean counties. Shultz, son of David and Elizabeth, was borsht in February 1886 to a highly musical family in the heart of a musically active community. It is not known for sure where he was born, with some accounts saying Cromwell, while others say Taylor Mines, a defunct mining camp two miles southwest of Beaver Dam. He played many instruments, including fiddle, banjo, mandolin , and pain, but his favorite was the guitar. His half-brother worked the riverboats and when Arnold was about fourteen, he headed out on a trip and asked what he could bring back and Arnold asked for a guitar. It didnt take him long to master it, he had a natural gift for music. According to Mose Rager, Arnold was working as a porter in a Beaver Dam hotel and a man named Paul Landrum showed him some chords and said that Arnold caught on faster than anyone he had ever met. Thanks to the erratic schedules of the coal miners, black-white relations were much better than many other areas at the turn of the century, and so there was quite a bit of cross over in black and white music, which lead to the creation of bluegrass music. Arnold walked the railroads from Morgantown to Rochester to Browder, playing music all along the way and picking up styles and incorporating them into his own style. He played with many of the greats at the time, Clarence Wilson, Uncle Pen Vandiver, Kennedy Jones, and Bill Monroe, playing what was known as hillbilly music, but he also absorbed black folk music traditions: blues, rags, breakdown, gospel tunes, and anything suited to open guitar tunings. He used a style known as pulling strings, where he twisted his strings to make different sounds and he fretted with a knife or bottleneck. He frequently laid his guitar in his lap and played it with a steel bar, a method that calls for finger picking, with the thumb striking alternating bass notes. Thumbpicking guitar style has been credited to the Muhlenberg County legends Kennedy Jones, Mose Rager, Ike Everly (the father of Don and Phil Everly a/d/a the Everyly Brothers), and Merle Travis. Jones, Rager, and Everly influenced Travis, who took the style to the rest of the world along with Chet Atkins. But Shultz influenced this group of Muhlenberg County pickers, particularly Jones who pioneered the use of a thumb pick to enhance the bass notes. Shultz was a fiddle player as well as a guitarist, and with this combination of talents he became a mentor and influence on a young Bill Monroe. In his keynote address to the 2004 IBMA World of Bluegrass Convention in Louisville, Ron Block quoted Bill Monroe on Shultzs influence: The first time...I ever seen Arnold Shultz...this square dance was at Rosine, Kentucky, and Arnold and two more colored fellows come up there and played for the dance. He was powerful with it. Richard D. Smith wrote, He was a short, somewhat chubby fellow who usually wore a big black hat. He was quiet but personable when spoken to. He was African-American, a local laborer and a truly exceptional musician. Indeed, the consensus of those who heard him is that Arnold Shultz was on elf the greatest blues guitarists who ever lived. Monroe also said, Theres things in my music, you know, that come from Arnold Shultz-runs that I use in a lot of my music. I dont say that I make them the same way that he could make them, cause he was powerful with it. In following a fiddle piece or a breakdown, he used a pick and could just run from one chord to another the prettiest youve ever heard. Theres no guitar picker today that could do that. Shultz traveled the riverboats up and down the Green River, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi, playing with both jazz and blues bands, which influenced his playing style. He would winter in New Orleans, soaking up the rich musical diversity of that city. But during the last thirteen years of his life, he more or less settled down in the region, with oral history placing him in Rosine in the mid-1920s and from the late 1920s until death in early 1931 he lived in Morgantown in Butler County, boarding with a local family. He continued to play music during those years and became something of a folk hero in the area. Shultz died on April 14, 1931, officially of heart disease, but in the regional lore he either died of bad whiskey or poison administered by jealous white musicians. He is buried in Morgantown in a historically black cemetery at the end of Bell Street. A number of the graves there are marked simply with field rocks, but Arnold Shultzs grave has a large headstone erected by the city of Morgantown in recognition of his musicianship. This article was written by Kathy Thomason and Don Thomason.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 20:02:54 +0000
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