Remembering an old friend

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August 10, 2010

By RONNIE ELLIS CNHI The Glasgow Daily Times Tue Aug 10, 2010, 09:07 AM CDT

FRANKFORT — Since this is written prior to Fancy Farm but won’t be published until it’s over, I’m stepping away from politics with a personal column.

My friend Mitch Jayne died last week. He was 82 years old and he lived all of them looking at the world through the eyes of an awestruck 15-year-old. Along the way, he taught in a one-room school in the Ozarks, worked as a DJ for a small Ozark radio station, wrote several bluegrass music classics, published three novels, helped start the career of The Byrds and always lived by his own rules.

Perhaps you knew Mitch just a little without realizing it. He was the pipe-smoking bass player for The Dillards, the ground-breaking bluegrass and later folk-rock group who also appeared as the Darling Boys on the Andy Griffith Show. Among his songs are Dooley, The Whole World Round, There Is A Time, and Old Home Place. He regaled big city and college audiences with stories from back home in Salem, Mo. He would introduce the band this way: “We’re The Dillards (pause) – and we’re hillbillies. I thought I’d better tell you that in case you thought we were the Budapest String Quartet.” He’d then describe Salem, including the “bunch of old men on the corner, chewin’ tobacco and spittin’ in the street to make a slick spot, tryin’ to get some ol’ lady down.”

Mitch collected antiquated and odd expressions. He collected characters like Dooley, who had “two daughters and a 40-gallon still.” The daughters were “big old mammoth girls,” one of which Mitch swore dated The Dillards’ mandolin player, Dean Webb. Each time she lifted an arm, “two bats and a whippoorwill flew out – she was the pretty one!” Ebo Walker, another of his musical creations, would get so drunk he’d lie down “to hold onto the grass to keep his balance.” Mitch wrote for Dick Clark and The Smothers Brothers – and just as proudly for the Current Wave, a weekly newspaper in the Shannon County, Mo., town of Eminence where he lived after his second retirement from The Dillards. I asked him why.

“In 1953 a girl from Eminence took me to visit. As we drove into town there were hogs rootin’ in the courthouse yard. I met a dog that belonged to the whole damn town. And the newspaper said at the top of the front page, ‘Shannon County first – the rest of the world later.’ It was my kind of place and I always wanted to live there.” (He neglected to mention his daughter now lived there.) One of Mitch’s novels, “Old Fish Hawk,” was made into a movie starring Will Sampson. His most recent novel, “The Fiddler’s Ghost,” was selected one of the best fictional works of 2008 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Mitch was never on time. I swear he once misplaced his six-foot upright bass while walking from my van to the stage 200 yards away. It had been my assignment to get him to the stage on time – presumably with the bass. I got him there on time but somehow the bass didn’t. I raced back the way we’d come, found it and got it to Mitch just as The Dillards went on. By the time I got back, Mitch had made a couple of new friends backstage.

Here’s the problem writing about Mitch. No matter what I write and no matter what you imagine, Mitch was more. One of his songs has this line: “Promises are words they use for things they never do. Mountains are promises come true.” Mitchell F. Jayne was a promise come true.

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.

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