If you find yourself in Avery County on a Sunday afternoon, stop on by the Pineola Inn and watch Alan Johnson sawing away on the fiddle. He may be the busiest musician in the High Country. Ask him how many bands he plays in, and he might say, "I don't know."
When Jason and I sat down with him, it turned out this local fiddle player has a Nashville connection.
"I had a brother ten years older who wanted to play rock and roll, and a daddy who played the fiddle," said Alan. "So growing up there was every kind of music in the house. I picked up the fiddle around age nine and have never really put it down." Today he plays with the David Wiseman Band, the Johnson Brothers and a group known as Woody and the String Band.
But for many years, Alan lived and played in Nashville. "I moved there at age twenty-nine chasing a dream." Grinning, he says, "I handed out my card left and right; they called it the Nashville handshake. That's when you shake a person's hand and palm them your card. It took six months to get my first call, and I promise you, I was about ready to pack it in and come home.
But, for some reason, John Hartford, writer of Gentle on My Mind, was in Alan's corner. "He befriended me when I first arrived in Nashville," said Alan. "Almost exactly six months to the day I arrived in Nashville, the phone rang, and it was Hartford." He had called to make sure Alan hadn't given up. Within a week of that call, Alan had three gigs, and the rest is history. Alan smiled when reminiscing about how he and Hartford would often sit in Hartford's house playing their fiddles just for the pleasure of it.
"I am not the greatest fiddle player in the world," said Alan. "Those guys sit and practice all day long, the way a golfer hits a thousand practice balls a day. That's just not me." But Alan had a gift. When growing up, he heard something one of his heroes, like Doyle Lawson, played. He could instantly play it back note for note.
So why does a working Nashville fiddler end up back in Avery County playing at the Pineola Inn on Sunday afternoons? The best reason I can think of. A little boy missing his daddy. "When it came down to the music or the boy, there was really no contest," said Alan. It's been forty-six years since he picked up that first fiddle, and he's still playing. That sounds like a man at peace with the trade he made.
Watch the video to hear Alan tell the Hartford story himself, to catch a rare old clip of Alan and his family picking at the Hampton store years ago, and to hear what Avery County's fiddle player sounds like on a Sunday afternoon.
Watch our ride-about to meet Alan Johnson, Avery County's fiddle player.
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