It felt like a pilgrimage to a covert, Prohibition-era speakeasy. Should we dim our lights as we approached down dark, winding country roads, searching for the elusive banjo player at the provided address?
Upon pulling up behind other vehicles, the high lonesome sound of a string band provided the necessary breadcrumb trail to a large workshop behind the main house. We approached tentatively, peering surreptitiously in the window. But we’d been invited — this wasn’t the trespassing it felt like.
The walls were lined with all manner of signage and paraphernalia: NASCAR, county commissioner campaign signs, and sundry southern sports posters.
Musicians were situated in the corner in a loosely organized circle of chairs and stools. An upright bass, two guitars, mandolin and the pièce de résistance: a banjo.
He assumed the trademark stoic stance of a banjo player. Expressionless, except a slight smile when another musician played an especially good break. He could have been posing for an old-timey court house drawing, Bereft of photography equipment, I tried to capture the image through mental sketching for posterity.
Even for a casual picking session with friends in the back of a barn with no expected audience, he was dressed with dignity. An ivory fedora with a thin black band encircling it. A shirt the color of the Carolina blue sky and khaki pants, long, unlike the short pants the other men wore.
“It’s an eastern North Carolina thing,” my host had hypothesized about the banjo player’s reticence to be interviewed. “People don’t want to talk about themselves because it seems like they’re seeking glory and attention. But at least I thought it would help you to have seen him play.”
The group played and sang for an hour and a half while I was there, pausing briefly to suggest songs to one another. They played without written music or chord sheets, effortlessly, ending each song with a flourish simultaneously. No ragged edges. It was as if they played together all the time. But I knew differently. One of the guitar players was currently in a professional bluegrass band. It had been eight months since he’d been here.
The banjo player took some baby powder out of his pocket, put it on his hands, and spread a little on the banjo’s neck.
“Rock of Ages,” I heard the upright bass player suggest. When they launched into the song I thought, “That’s not the song they sing in church.” Turns out it was a Stanley Brothers tune.
”I’ve just seen the rock of ages
Jacob’s ladder hanging down
I’ve just crossed the river of Jordan
Now, my son, I’m homeward bound.”
A couple of weeks later, I got word that Tim Myatt would indeed talk to me, and he was as gracious as could be when I asked about his first interest in banjo playing.
“I started about 1953. I was 12 or 13. I was interested in the banjo. My daddy went out and bought me a mandolin because he loved the mandolin. I tried it a while and layed that aside and he bought me a $38 banjo. I heard Earl Scruggs on the radio — that’s where I got my interest in it. That banjo sound just did it for me. I’ve always been crazy about that instrument,” Myatt said.
Born in 1940 in Snow Hill, Myatt said his family listened to the radio every chance they got — in the evening, when taking a break at lunch from working in the fields. WCKY in Cincinnati, WSM in Nashville. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Don Reno and Red Smiley.
“There weren’t but about three bands popular back then,” Myatt said. “The Stanley Brothers came in there pretty soon after that. But Lester and Earl and Bill Monroe were the first ones, you know.”
His daddy loved music and played the guitar. Myatt taught himself how to play the banjo just by listening to Earl Scruggs.
“I started off with two fingers ‘cause I couldn’t tell what he was doing. A man came by about six months after I’d been trying for a while and told me I was supposed to play with three. So I got me another pick.”
Myatt’s family didn’t even own a record player in those early years. He said he was “so poor I couldn’t pay attention.”
“It took me maybe 3 or 4 years I guess. Then I started playing on Channel 7 on the Smiley O’Brien Show in the mid ‘50s with two boys from LaGrange, Wayne and Robie Killette. The first time I was about 15 or somewhere along there.”
The Carolina Partners was an established band in the region. When the banjo player, Jerry Jenkins, had a heart attack, they asked Myatt to step in. When Jenkins got better and came back, he played the dobro and Myatt stayed on banjo. The band started playing on WNCT-TV in 1954 and Myatt stayed with them, playing on television until 1969.
“We played every Saturday night. We’d go out and play once or twice a week at the school house or something and we’d draw a big crowd because, until 1965, I don’t remember seeing much on television from Nashville. So we were just about the only thing on TV, I reckon, for some people. We were very popular. I remember one night we put on two shows because the school house would only hold so many,” Myatt said.
Every Saturday night The Carolina Partners played live, they advertised Allis-Chalmers Tractors.
In addition to playing locally on channel 7 and channel 9, Little Roy Lewis got The Carolina Partners on a show in Georgia several times that went out to 30-some stations. It’s rumored that The Carolina Partners had a chance to go on the Ed Sullivan show. They didn’t go, but were invited.
“We started traveling and playing shows but three of us had regular jobs and we couldn’t leave our jobs like that and didn’t want to take up music full time. So we quit after a few months of that.”
Speaking of Little Roy Lewis, Myatt said “he plays too fast for me. If he slowed his music down a little bit it would suit me better. But he’s a good friend of mine. He came to my house one time and we played until 4 in the morning. He used to call me on the telephone and say, “Earl’s coming!” (talking about Earl Scruggs) except he’d say “Uhll” — he’s got that southern drawl. He’d say, ‘He’ll be with me about three days and we want you to come down.’ And I said, ‘Little Roy, I’m running the store and I can’t go.’”
Myatt was in the host band that anchored the Winter Bluegrass Fest in Kinston for many years. He also played at festivals with many household names such as Al Batten, Dave “Stringbean” Acken and Grandpa Jones.
“The best person I ever played with was Benny Martin, who played fiddle with Flat and Scruggs in the early 1950s. I played a bunch of bluegrass festivals with him. He liked my banjo picking. He gave me the best compliment I ever had. He said he’d rather play with me than anyone he ever played with except for Earl Scruggs.”
If you ask his opinion about a certain famous contemporary banjo player, he’ll give it to you straight: “I tell everybody that Béla Fleck was a real good banjo picker — until he learned how.”
As an octogenarian, Myatt says he’s convinced that playing music “keeps your mind sharp.”
Even though Myatt was busy running stores for 30 years, he said of the banjo, “I really loved it and still do, and that’s been my hobby my whole life. I don’t hunt or fish. When I had a few minutes to spare, I was with the banjo.”
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