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Music to Fancy Gap

The cotton fields of Alabama sizzle like a steam iron during picking season in late August. The work is hard, back-breaking really, as the picker works his way down the line of cotton plants stooped over, pulling off the balls of raw cotton and stuffing them in a sack slung over his back that grows heavier with each row. Even for a grown man or woman, picking cotton all day in the sullen heat of a Dixie summer utterly exhausts the mind, body and spirit. For 11-year-old Herschel Sizemore, it must have been even harder. But he worked as hard as anyone every day because he was on a mission.

"A gentleman named Jody Rine had a Gibson A-50 on the wall. I always bought my strings at his store, and I asked one day if I could play it. He said I could and I sat there and played it. I loved how it sounded and it played real easy. I asked how much it cost and he said seventy-five dollars," Herschel Sizemore recalls today, still thinking of how much money that was to a poor Southern farm-boy.

"I sat there and played it for an hour or so. I told him I could pick cotton to pay for it and if he hadn't sold it by then I would come back to buy it from him. When I got up to leave, he put it in the case and said he was going to put a letter in it.

"He said if your Mom and Dad don't care, you can have the mandolin and pay what you want when you can, because you really need that mandolin. My Mom signed the letter and sent it back. And when I started picking cotton, I sent him money every week until I got it paid off."

Such determination and sense of fulfilling his obligations would mark Herschel Sizemore's entire musical career, a career that would have been even deeper and more influential had he felt able to accept any of the four offers Flatt & Scruggs made to him to join their band during its heyday.

But those offers, as well as other chances to play music fulltime, came and went as Sizemore concentrated on working his day job to support his family. For many years, music was a sideline professionally, something he pursued on weekends and at night; but it was always his passion.

Born in 1935 in Alabama, the youngest of ten children in a working class family, he grew up at a time when the nation, and the south in particular, still reeled from the Great Depression.

His first mandolin arrived as a present from an older brother serving overseas in World War Two. "I suspect it was probably a Stella or something in that class," he remembers. "It was just a little mandolin with stripes of wood down the back like a taterbug."

No one in his area knew much about mandolin. He tried to learn by listening to players like Mac Mcgar and Paul Buskirk on the radio. He saw Bill Monroe live on the Grand Ole Opry and the experience set him on fire. But he never tried to duplicate Monroe's forceful, percussive mandolin style.

"I was fortunate in an unfortunate way," he says today, smiling at the memory. "I didn't have a record player, only a radio."

Unable to listen to records and study mandolin solos and licks, he developed a remarkably keen ear and put his fertile musical imagination to work developing a unique style based partly on popular mandolinists. But, he equally was influenced by the soaring fiddle work and haunting double-stops of players like Benny Martin and Howdy Forrester.

Years later, after he and Monroe had become friends, Monroe would kid Herschel about "not playing it right" because he didn't play Monroe-style. But then, tellingly, he would confide in Sizemore how much he respected him. "You play what you hear in your head, just like I did," the father of bluegrass once said to Sizemore.

That sense of music identity and creativity helped Herschel Sizemore create a mandolin style bridging the gap between the rhythmically dominant approach favored by most early bluegrass mandolinists and the highly melodic approach developed by contemporary players like David Grisman and John Reischman.

Rather than take a linear, scale-driven approach to the instrument, Sizemore intuitively built solos that incorporated open strings -- especially on the A and D strings -- to establish interesting musical tension based on wide intervals.

Avoiding furious, typewriter-like staccato lines of repeated eighth and sixteenth notes, his solos favor groups of notes separated by well-conceived pauses. There's a bounce to his playing that's created by playing melodic structures over the ends of some measures.

"I liked the sound of the fiddle when it rolled on over the end of a line," he tells Mandolin Magazine." It seemed liked when I would come to the end of a line, there would be a little holdover -- maybe just a beat -- and I just never liked holding a note. So I kept working at getting it to roll over and keeping that note pattern going."

Even on a fast-paced breakdown like Roanoke, he never sounds rushed or like he's chasing the tune. Instead, his economical note selection allows him to concentrate on playing the melody instead of sounding overly chromatic.

"If you play the melody and play it well, with a minimum amount of notes, you're better off than if you play a hundred notes around the melody," he explains. "When I start playing a tune, I try to stay on top of the melody and the timing and ride them at the same time. If you have good rhythm you can ride that like a bicycle."

Part of that, surprisingly, comes from the influence of banjo great Earl Scruggs. "I went through a stage when I was a young man where I would play wild and far out to get people's attention," he admits.

"Then I watched Earl play Cripple Creek and he played it straight. And I learned that if you play the melody to where people can hum it and remember what you played, then you got through to them. I can play a lot of stuff that I don't play because I choose not to. You don't want to play a bunch of stuff the average person can't relate to."

Showing the determination that has carried him through his entire career, he built a remarkably fluid tremolo from scratch. "I can remember when my wrist was as stiff as a pump handle," he recalls now. "I religiously worked on it. I was dedicated to trying to get a smooth tremolo. It took a long time; it's not something for me that came overnight."

Those endless hours of sitting with his mandolin and concentrating on playing with a loose wrist paid huge dividends later in his career, and his free-flowing right hand gave him better tone and increased his speed, as well. Too many mandolinists, he believes, can't play a tremolo that's in time with the music.

"It's slow to the timing of the song," he points out. "To me, everything is based on your timing. You have to play the tremolo to the timing of what's going on."

He also credits his loose wrist for the snappy, precise chop he's perfected over the years. "A lot of it is in the wrist," he insists. "If you have a stiff wrist, you'll have a stiff chop.

"I use a very short chop, only about three to three and a half inches. That makes me quicker, because if you make a chop that winds up eight inches below the strings, you've got to come all that way back to chop again."

Sizemore also doesn't rely on any strict formula when playing backup, preferring to "go totally by feel. The drive of the tune dictates to me what you can do on it. There are places where I feel you can push it a little, in other words, chop just a wee bit harder to bring out the emphasis of what's going on," he relates.

A master at generating a clear, sweet-toned note, Sizemore credits his superb coordination between his pick and left hand with helping wring the most tone possible from his instrument. Sizemore has worked hard to make sure his pick hits the string at the exact moment he frets it. "I never liked hearing muffled notes," he confesses, "I like to hear the notes pop out."

Of course, producing a memorably musical sound from a mandolin is considerably easier if you have a memorably musical mandolin to begin with, and Herschel Sizemore has a collection of the best of the best. At one time, he owned four Lloyd Loar F5s, and currently keeps three of the legendary instruments in his stable, two of which have consecutive serial numbers.

He missed his first opportunity to buy a Loar from a man from Salt Lake City during the sixties when he balked at the asking price of 800 dollars. In 1982, he acquired his first 1923 model for ten times that amount.

"I still have that one, it has a special place in my heart," he says today. He keeps all of his mandolins strung with medium-gauge phosphor bronze strings and prefers a natural shell pick. "I used to use a real heavy one, but then I realized that a medium thickness pick would not work me as hard and I liked the tone better," he explains.

He keeps his action around three-sixteenths of an inch at the fifteenth fret, and has replaced the original issue narrow-gauge fret-wire with heavier wire because he wore through the original frets too quickly.

Herschel's musical career has included many stops and starts, however. In the late 1950s, he had begun playing with the Dixie Gentlemen with banjo player Rual Yarbrough when not busy with his day job. By 1958, he'd come to the attention of the top band in bluegrass, Flatt and Scruggs.

Lester Flatt asked Herschel to join the group to replace Curly Seckler. But with a sick child at home and other responsibilities, he had to say no, and stayed instead with the part-time Dixie Gentlemen. Eventually, that band got a record deal and began making regular television appearances, but Herschel still maintained his day job.

The exposure, however, was bringing his growing skill as a mandolinist and composer to the attention of more bluegrass stars, and in the late 1960s, he joined Jimmy Martin's band and worked as a full-time bluegrass musician for the first time in his life.

But soon, he was living in Roanoke, Virginia, where he formed another group, the Shenandoah Cutups, with several former sidemen from Red Smiley's band. Other groups included Country Grass and he also played many studio sessions for bluegrass players in Virginia. One session with former Bill Monroe guitarist and lead singer Del McCoury led to an invitation to join Del's band, the Dixie Pals.

In the 1990s, Herschel joined the Bluegrass Cardinals, recorded as a freelance mandolinist, and performed as a member of Rambler's Choice. He also put together two of the most memorable solo mandolin projects of the decade: 1993's Back In Business and My Style, both on Hay Holler Records.

Always a composer recognized for clever, memorable melodies, Sizemore emerged as the author of truly classic mandolin standards including the key of B mandolin anthem Rebecca, Uncle Charlie, Amandolina and the tune transcribed here, Fancy Gap.

"That's the way I wrote everything that I have to date,"

he answers when I asked him if his musical ideas come to him while noodling around on the mandolin. "I sit down with my mandolin and start doodling. I stare off into nowhere and clear my mind of everything and just sit there playing. I can hear a tune like it's always been there."

As an aid to his composing, he now uses a small tape recorder his wife Joyce bought for him as a present. "I used to let tunes slip away. I'd write something late at night and then forget it the next day," he cautions young songwriters. "Now if I come up with something I think is pretty good, I put it down on tape. And I always remember it when I put it down. I don't know why."

That's a mystery, one of many in his long career. What's no mystery is how he's influenced mandolinists the world over. "There can be no doubt that Herschel Sizemore is one of the greatest ever," says Alan Bibey in the liner notes to My Style, and that's a fact.

Now in his 60s, Herschel Sizemore is gaining even greater respect and influence, appearing at the annual Roanoke Bluegrass Weekend and appearing as a guest artist on many sessions and stage appearances by other musicians.

AcuTab Publications recently released a superb book about Herschel's playing that should be studied by any serious bluegrass mandolinists. He's also preparing the tunes for a new solo CD project to be recorded this spring.

Fortunately, there's no more cotton picking in Herschel Sizemore's future, but he's still at it, filling his bag with memorable mandolin playing for the rest of the world to enjoy.

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