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Compton Grammy Acknowledgement / Discography

Music to Hartford House

At first glance, Mike Compton seems like one of the last people anyone would ever expect to become a certified mandolin icon. Skinny as an unstuffed scarecrow and perpetually clad in bib overalls, for years he lacked the confidence in his own musicianship to believe he could even make it in music professionally. He even quit the business at the point where he'd achieved his greatest success, living in the mountains of upstate New York where he barely touched a mandolin and pondered what else he should do with his life.

Yet today he has earned a worldwide reputation as one of the modern masters of bluegrass mandolin, known especially for his personal take on the fiercely hard-driven, rhythmically intense style developed by the master of the genre, Bill Monroe.

Mike's apprenticeship in bluegrass mandolin has led him to a position where his command of the instrument allows him to go far beyond mere mimicry of Big Mon's licks to a unique ability to weave new phrases and solos that bear the mark of Monroe without sounding forced or copied. To most of us, it's a mystery; to Mike Compton, he just calls them "Billisms" and goes about his business making some of the finest traditionally oriented bluegrass mandolin music on the planet.

From his longtime associations with musical greats David Grier, John Hartford and the Nashville Bluegrass Band to his recent work on the pop breakout hit soundtrack O' Brother Where Art Thou (OBWAT) and the subsequent Down From The Mountain tour that brought live bluegrass to thousands of new fans, Compton has emerged as one of the most visible and influential mandolinists working today.

It's a long way from his birthplace in the home of the blues deep in the Mississippi farmland of Meridian, Mississippi, where he was born on that oddest of birthdays, February, 29. The year was 1956 and in that part of America paved roads didn't run everywhere at that time. A simple red dirt road divided the cornfields around the Compton household, where there was no air conditioning but music crackled like heat lightning across the Dixie horizon.

"Mom and Dad both liked music, but neither of them played anything," Mike says in a voice still colored by that Deep South dust. His great-grandfather on his mother's side had played fiddle and her dad played some guitar, and Compton figures that's where he got his musical inclinations.

He grew up hearing early country music, like Rosewood Casket, and tunes of that nature. But he also heard more contemporary music. "My Mom and Dad had Mitch Miller and Strauss waltzes and Herb Alpert and Ray Charles and Hank Williams, so I grew up with a potpourri of stuff," he explains.

The blues, which played such a prominent role in Monroe's musical development, wasn't part of the mix he absorbed as a child, he says today. He first heard bluegrass as a teenager. "I didn't know what it was about," he says of the blurry-paced, frenetic sound he heard on tunes like Rawhide.

During the summer, like most Mississippi farmboys, he worked picking peas and peaches and hauling hay and doing other chores. And, to this day, he vividly recalls hearing eight-track tapes of Monroe and the Stanleys, Flatt and Scruggs, Arthur Smith and other stars of the era blaring from the dashboard speakers of a hay truck he used to load for some local men who enjoyed that music.

A trombone player in school, Mike started on guitar as his first stringed instrument, then received a small roundback mandolin from Sears as a Christmas present. "The first thing I remember learning to play was Dixie, of all things," he says.

Even more surprising, it wasn't Monroe or any other bluegrass or country mandolinist he first distinctly remembers, but the mandolin player/singer in the duet Seales and Crofts, which produced several Top 40 Hits. But the Monroe sound is what grabbed him once he started playing the instrument seriously, and he never looked away.

Some local musicians helped him develop his ear and showed him some of the basics of tuning and chording and fretting the instrument. "Mainly I learned by hunt and peck. I just beat it into my hard head through trial and error and practice and repetition. Playing with records.

"At one point, I could tell by the color of the record jacket spine what was on both sides, what keys they were in and how much I would have to tune sharp or flat to be in tune with those Monroe records," he recalls.

"I liked the sound of it and was intrigued by it," he says of most of the early mandolin music he heard, "but I started on Monroe because it sounded easier than the other stuff I was hearing.

"It didn't take long to realize I had underestimated it. I didn't understand what was going on with it at all. I heard other players. I had records from John Hartford that had nice mandolin on it and I heard the early New Grass Revival albums; but that was so far above my head I couldn't make sense of it.

"So, I went back to Monroe. It struck a chord with the sound I like. I thought I would go ahead after I master it," he recalls, chuckling at the impetuous notion of relegating Monroe's mandolin music to a mere stepping-stone to greater things on the instrument.

Looking back, Mike says his fascination with Monroe's music grew at least in part from his own personal sense of introspection and "creating my own despair, so it was something that went hand-in-hand with the way I was living.

"Part of it is the way I was geared; the other part is just listening to it so damn much! It's almost become a second language. I'm not like Monroe; no one is. But a lot of the people I hung out with were Monroe's age. They were all old men; there was no one my age (to play bluegrass with). I learned what they were proud of and what their lives consisted of. So because I was real familiar with what they were about, it seemed to translate over to the music."

Mike's first exposure to playing music in public came in a little honky-tonk in Meridian, a country-style beer joint where he and friends would play for little money. In 1977, though, he moved to Nashville and soon thereafter met Pat Enright, the remarkable vocalist and guitarist who asked Mike to join a band he was forming.

Although that group never got off the ground, it did form a close relationship that one day would lead to bigger things. In the meantime, Mike started playing with Hubert Davis, a straight-from-the-still bluegrass banjo master who gave the young mandolinist an "old school" grounding in bluegrass and how to play behind the original Scruggs-inspired bluegrass banjo style.

"It was all I could do to hang in and keep up," he says of the three and a half-year stint with Davis. "Hubert was real patient. We played five nights a week, four or five sets a night, so it was hours and hours and hours of playing. I found things I still use."

After leaving that band in 1981, Mike spent time odd-jobbing around Nashville like nearly everyone who moves there with hopes of playing bluegrass for a living. He cooked up grits and country-fried steak at Cracker Barrel and did anything else he could to survive.

About then, he also hooked up with banjo master Butch Robbins for the last remaining bookings of the original The Bluegrass Band and began doing a few gigs when and where he could with Alan O'Bryant and Pat Enright. Before long that group evolved into the original Nashville Bluegrass Band with Enright, Mark Hembree on bass and Alan O'Bryant on banjo.

"It clicked right away because we all felt the same way about the music," Mike recalls. "Even though we were from Milwaukee, Indiana, Mississippi and California, we all had the same idea in mind about the music we liked. We were all fans of black music and we all liked Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs and that kind of stuff. We were playing the music, the material we liked and doing it as best we could."

Blending traditional bluegrass influences, black gospel harmonies, a modern approach to bluegrass material and a powerful stage presence that grabbed audiences from the first note, the NBB was an immediate hit, riveting festival and club audiences and earning rave reviews. The band's 1985 debut on Rounder Records, My Native Home, swept through the bluegrass world like a Tennessee tornado, and everyone knew this band was going to revolutionize contemporary bluegrass.

Mike Compton looked set to join the ranks of players like Sam Bush and David Grisman as one of the most popular and influential mandolinists of the day.

"It was like grabbing a rocket by the tail. We didn't have any idea it was going to be that big, it just took off," he says thinking back. Then disaster struck.

Rolling through a mountainous section in the rain, the band's bus crested a hilltop and found "nothing but brake lights," as Mike recalls the scene they encountered at high speed. The bus smashed into the cars in its way, causing serious injuries to bassist Mark Hembree who was driving.

"The rest of us had cuts and bruises. It broke my mandolin in half, but I had nothing to go to the hospital to get well from," Compton explains.

The experience, while not significantly injuring him physically, caused Compton to seriously rethink his life as a professional musician and the changes that had come about because of the band's sudden, overwhelming success.

"I was getting wound up as tight as an eight-day clock just wondering about the future. I decided I had done more than I ever wanted to do in a band and that part of me had been fulfilled. I thought I should go and get a real job; the bus accident was just icing on the cake. I didn't feel like I was serious enough about being a musician," he says simply.

The woman he'd been living with found an ad for a caretaker's job for an elderly couple living in the Catskill Mountains who needed, as Mike puts it, "the yard cut and firewood brought in. I thought, what the hell, and we moved to the Catskills and stayed there a year with absolutely nothing to do."

Mike cleaned houses, worked as a ski lift attendant and once again did what he had to do to survive. But in such a remote location, he had absolutely no one to play music with. For a while, it seemed that Mike Compton's mandolin career was over almost before it had begun.

But in his isolation, Compton began to realize how much music meant to him, not just as a means to make a living but as a source of expression and satisfaction as an artist.

"I was miserable. It dawned on me after I'd been there a few months and had no one to play with that it meant a lot more to me than I originally thought. Having denied my creativity and moved away, I decided to go back to Tennessee and take another stab at it. This was in 1991," he recalls.

Back in Nashville, he worked a day job at a local print shop, but was soon hanging out with players like David Grier, Roland White, Sam Bush, Ronnie McCoury and others. He met John Hartford, whose oddball sense of timing and idiosyncratic performing style seemed to be just what Compton needed to release his own emerging creativity.

"I got exposed to a lot of stuff through John's love of old-time fiddle music that I'm sure Monroe heard when he was a kid. These were older forms of what I had already learned and I could see the connections. It gave validity to the notion that we all influence each other."

While doing a session for producer T-Bone Burnett with Hartford, Compton struck up a relationship with the influential roots revival impresario and Nashville Bluegrass Band, Mike was asked to step back in to the role he originated with the band and he happily reunited with his old bandmates.

He appeared on some of the top bluegrass and country roots-oriented projects coming out of Music City, including the third installment of the legendary Will The Circle Be Unbroken series. He began appearing with the de facto house band at the world-famous Station Inn and appeared on the Little Grasscals: Nashville Superpickers CD, which bears his likeness on the cover. He appeared as a member of the OBWAT's Soggy Bottom Boys backing Alison Krauss on Late Night with David Letterman, Conan O'Brian, and appeared on the Tonight Show with Dr. Ralph Stanley. "The ball took off rolling and we went with it," he says simply of his rise to international renown.

Through it all, Mike's main axe has been a Gilchrist. He owned the first instrument sold in the U.S. by the Australian luthier. Mike had been playing a Randy Wood two-point when he got a call from a friend at George Gruhn's telling him to come check out two new F5 mandolins they'd just gotten in.

"Gruhn said if I wanted it, I could have it for $1,000; they were going up to $1,500 the next day," Mike says, amazed at what the same instruments would fetch today on eBay or Mandolin Cafe.

"I borrowed a thousand dollars and bought the red one with the flowerpot. Scared me to death." That instrument, which he acquired in 1979, has since been retopped with a new x-braced top, Mike confirms.

His main instrument now is an F5 Gilchrist built to emulate the sound of Monroe's personal F5. "It's the best one I've had, the most Monroe-sounding," he says. "It's parallel braced and has very heavy mid-range tones. It's made of 400-year-old sugar maple from New England, and I guess the top is red spruce."

Mike also just acquired a blond A model from up-and-coming builder Will Kimble and has a 1927 or '28 Gibson A Junior that he used a lot on OBWAT.

Unlike many players who depend exclusively on one type of pick for all of their playing, Compton uses a variety of picks depending on what instrument he's playing and the type of music he's performing. "I play a Fender heavy for some things that need to be more ringy," he explains, adding that he also uses tricorner Golden Gate picks and a triangular fake tortoiseshell D'Andrea ProPlec, which he calls a "slick, real fast pick."

He endorses D'Addario strings and uses the coated EXP strings on most of his instruments, preferring the J-75s on the Gilchrist, the J-74s on the Kimble and the company's polished Flattop strings on his A Jr., which he also will string with silk and bronze strings on occasion.

Mike keeps his action surprisingly low, about 5/64ths at the twelfth fret, explaining, "I'm not trying to be Superman anymore. That's high enough. Any higher and you start losing sustain. I like them just high enough so you have tone and sustain and plenty of whop."

Like most professional musicians, he's struggled with stage amplification, trying various combinations of external and internal mics and pickups. After years of frustration, he's given up. "At festivals and clubs, I just play into whatever mic is standing there. It's not worth carrying around a good mic because a lot of sound people can't make acoustic music sound good anyway," he says ruefully.

Today, Mike Compton lives a life he scarcely could have imagined as a boy, traveling the world playing music and conducting workshops for fans eager to hear his bluesy, rhythmically charged, downstroke-driven solos and backup licks.

He's been drawing rave reviews of his tours with young Monroe master David Long, who Mike says has "probably the best understanding of Monroe's right hand of any of the new guys. He understands the tone and attack, and it turns out he and I love the same stuff, like Yank Rachel, the Mississippi Sheiks and Lonnie Johnson's fiddle playing."

In his personal life, Mike's happily married to a fiddle-playing wife, Sadie Johnson, from Birmingham. The couple lives in a restored 1930s farmhouse in Dickson, Tennessee, 42 miles west of Nashville.

His redheaded daughter Hallie who just turned five loves to draw, while two-year-old son Eli "loves anything that makes a sound come out of it," proud papa Compton relates. "Eli broke the top in on the old Harmony mandolin I played when I was first starting out. I asked him why he did that. He told me he was trying to get the songs out."

Ask Mike about whether he has a solo project coming out and he replies slyly, "I keep running away from it. My excuse is that I don't know what I'd put on it. Until recently, I haven't felt like I had anything to contribute and felt intimidated by damn near everybody out there," reverting to his natural lack of an inflated ego.

But having worked through some of those personal demons and with a catalogue of intriguing original songs at his disposal, he now feels the urge to record under his own name. "Now I feel like I have something to say," he says. "It'll be predominantly original material with varying numbers of people. Some solo, some duo, some trio, maybe some mandola, some tenor guitar and some singing."

Today, few fans of bluegrass mandolin anywhere in the world are unfamiliar with the work of Mike Compton. He's taken a passel of influences -- old-time fiddle tunes, rock salt and nails bluegrass, the aching allure of the true Delta blues and even a whiff of Seales and Crofts -- to create one of the most recognizable and respected mandolin voices anywhere.

Sometimes, it would seem, you just have to look a little deeper to see the icon within.

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