Free Devil Sent the Rain by Tom Piazza

infection around a puncture wound. The main attraction is President Andrew Jackson’s house, the Hermitage, where historically minded Nashville tourists can go for a couple hours’ respite from the Eternal Twang.
    I have always wanted to meet Jimmy Martin. I’d heard that he was a difficult person, but I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for the past two days. But you may not even know who Jimmy Martin is, so first things first . . .
    One night in 1949, a completely unknown twenty-two-year-old singer-guitarist from Sneedville, Tennessee, walked up to Bill Monroe backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and asked if he could sing him a song. Monroe agreed, and before an hour had passed he invited the young man on the road with his band, the Blue Grass Boys. At that time, Monroe and his mandolin had already pioneered the sound that would become known as bluegrass, a form of country music reaching back to earlier mountain styles and adding an emphasis on instrumental precision and virtuosity. Monroe’s two most famous sidemen of the 1940s, the guitarist-singer Lester Flatt and the banjoist Earl Scruggs, were as important in many ways to the music’s development as Monroe; when they left the Blue Grass Boys in 1948, they were stars in their own right.
    Martin’s arrival brought another element into the group; his high, strong voice, stronger than Lester Flatt’s, gave a new edge to the vocal blend, and his aggressive guitar added a stronger push to the rhythm as well. His early-1950s recordings with Monroe, including “Uncle Pen,” “River of Death,” and “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” are classics. After five years with Monroe, Martin went on his own, first teaming up with the very young Osborne Brothers and then forming his own group. The 1957–61 incarnation of the Sunny Mountain Boys, as he called them, with the mandolinist Paul Williams and the banjo prodigy J. D. Crowe, is widely regarded as one of the greatest bands in bluegrass history.
    Martin had a string of hits in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including “Ocean of Diamonds,” “Sophronie,” the truck-driving anthem “Widow Maker,” “You Don’t Know My Mind,” and his signature tune, “Sunny Side of the Mountain.” Martin’s vocals—high, plaintive, and lonesome—wrung every bit of meaning and feeling out of the lyrics. Like many country performers, he was capable of astonishing sentimentality, musical crocodile tears, like his duet with his young daughter on “Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?” But at his best, his phrasing, the impact of the urgency behind his long, held notes, could be staggering.
    Although his early recordings are considered bluegrass classics, to my ears he seemed to take more chances and gain in expressiveness as he got older. In 1973 he received a gold record, along with Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, and Maybelle Carter, for his contribution to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s first Will the Circle Be Unbroken album; his performances are arguably the best thing about that record.
    Despite all this, Martin has remained a kind of shadowy figure, with much less of a public profile than some of his bluegrass peers, like Ralph Stanley or the Osborne Brothers. He is seen in Rachel Liebling’s excellent 1991 bluegrass documentary film High Lonesome , but the glimpses are only tantalizing. In some ways Martin doesn’t fit into the categories that have evolved in the country music world. He is too raw for the commercial and slick Nashville establishment, and in a way too unapologetically country in the old sense—mixing sentiment and showmanship with George Jones– and Hank Williams–style barroom heartbreak—for the folk-revival types to whom bluegrass was, and is, essentially folk music. On top of that, the King of Bluegrass, as he called himself, had a