Five Minutes Alone: Jerry Douglas
The Dobro legend talks first-guitar disasters, deceased gear and why listening is key to a happy collaboration
“my first guitar was a silvertone. It was like playing a cheese grater...”
The first cut is the deepest “My father had a really nice guitar when I was young but mine was not so good. My father had a 1963 Gibson Hummingbird then right after that he got a nice, old Martin D-28. But my guitar was a Silvertone. It was like playing a cheese grater, the strings were high and it hurt my fingers. I was about six or seven.” Dream on “I wanted my father’s guitar when I was a kid. I loved it, I loved the old brown Gibson case with the pink lining. I loved the smell of the polish, I still remember all of that. My father took me to see Flatt & Scruggs play in my hometown. I saw Josh Graves playing Dobro then that was what I really wanted. It looked so cool. It was an Art Deco instrument, which I didn’t know anything about at the time, I was maybe 10 years old. I loved the sound of it and the way it looked. I asked my father to raise the strings on my Silvertone and I would learn how to play like that. He did that for me. The nut was made out of an old toothbrush, the family toothbrush [laughs]. We left our guitars stacked on a chest and the sun came in through the window and my guitar wasn’t used to having that much tension on it. I remember opening up my guitar case and my guitar just folded up, all the glue joints were softened. That was the end of that one. Then my father was forced to find me a real Dobro.”
One in a million
“I got my first Dobro and thought I would never need another guitar again. I now have 70 of them! The one I play most of the time is made by Paul Beard and it’s called a Blackbeard. It’s a guitar I asked him to design. It’s mahogany, and it has a Hipshot on it so I can go between a G tuning and an open D tuning. I think that guitar will carry me to the end of my life, but who knows?”
Baby, come back
“I had a wonderful Ibanez Analog Delay that I would love to have back. I used that until it wore out; it just came to the end of its life and died. I know I could go out and buy another, but when I lost that I felt like I had really lost a friend. It just broke. I used it until it just wouldn’t work anymore.”
Whoa, listen to the music
“When working with an artist it is important to listen to each other. If you’re not listening to each other you may as well be in another room or in the studio on a different day. That is the key to collaboration, listening to the other players. Most of the artists I have worked with have listened and we’ve worked together in the same vein. I can adapt to situations.”
Let it grow, let it grow
“On this new record [ WhatIf] there’s a couple of songs that I am re-recording because I hear them a different way now. The instrumentation that I have gives me a different viewpoint of how to move on through these songs. The first song on the record is Cavebop and I hear that song now completely differently to how I originally recorded it [on 2002 album Lookout
ForHope]. Songs are like children, they grow up and you find out what they really are.” The Jerry Douglas Band’s latest album WhatIf is out now on Decca