CD Liner Notes: Rhythm and Joy – The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Live 1980

It was the last day of 1980 and in Kansas City, Missouri, one of the coolest bands of the previous decade was on stage. It was a memorable reunion of the group’s original lineup of mountain man songwriters, players, and friends. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils were still alive and well on the rock and roll road at the time, having just released a new studio album, but it had been five years since keyboard player Buddy Brayfield had performed with his friends. Same goes for Randle Chowning, whose warm melodies drove the group’s sweetest pop songs (“Country Girl,” “Leatherwood”).

The reunion show was simply something the band had wanted to do, to bring Buddy and Randle for one more night of inspired musical mayhem. So they made it happen in Springfield, Missouri, where the band members had first found one another a decade earlier.

But one more night just wasn’t enough. The second show three weeks later in Kansas City was an afterthought, a fun excuse to celebrate a new year in the city that had been their second home. Only recently did band manager Paul Peterson come across the tape, unearthed from the depths of a storage closet and miraculously intact. Almost every Daredevil had forgotten about the gig, and they had all forgotten that it had been committed to tape. When they listened to it, the memories came flooding back.

The Daredevils had first connected quite randomly in 1971, at a time when John Dillon was living in an Ozark Mountain cabin. “We all met at the cabin one day to play songs, and then we realized that everybody played different instruments. Then we discovered that our harmonies worked, and we became this sort of unit to showcase these songs. It all became a magical thing.”

The free-wheeling crew of rural bohemians drew their influence from each other and from their uniquely isolated mountainous terrain. Mountain music had been an authentic American craft for decades, but these guys lived at a time when The Beatles came through loud and clear on the radio, as did contemporary country music and classic jazz. They began mixing it all together without any conscious effort. They just liked to write and sing songs.

“From the first time we ever played together to the time we got on a jet to fly to London and record our first album was eighteen months,” remembers Larry Lee, the spooky falsetto behind “Jackie Blue,” the Daredevils’ biggest hit. “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”

Neither does having a Top Forty hit (“If You Wanna Get to Heaven”) and a Gold Record six months after a first album is released. “It just blew our minds,” says Dillon, “And we had yet to meet a record executive! Now, those were the good old days.” By year two, they had a second album and a second major chart hit (“Jackie Blue” went all the way to Number Two on Billboard charts, Number One on Record World charts). Of this accomplishment, Chowning says, “Things like that don’t happen anymore.” Those two hits featured different vocalists and somewhat different sounds, “Heaven” being a country-fueled, rousing sing-along, and “Jackie Blue” the haunting, swampy rocker. The common denominator in those songs, of course, was the great band playing them.

What set the Daredevils apart was their communal spirit that included five, count ‘em, five, songwriters and lead singers in the original lineup: Dillon, Lee, Chowning, harmonica player Steve Cash, and iconoclastic bass player, Michael “Supe” Granda. There were other later members, some of whom also played the New Year’s Eve gig: guitarist Terry Wilson, Bill Jones on sax and flute, the Darelicks on backup vocals. Most notable, though, was Steve Canaday, in whom they found a sixth creative force, a writer and singer who would spend many of the years to come as a latter-day Daredevil.

For the Daredevils, the careful development of each song was the driving force for becoming better players. The playing was, in fact, quite secondary to the craft of songwriting. And ultimately, it was all about the practical business of friendship: They learned to play each other’s songs because, well, the songs had to be played.

When big time producer Glyn Johns (already famous for his work with the Rolling Stones) was brought in to work on their first album and lend some cohesion to their mountain charm, he was struck by the quality of their songs but under-whelmed with their mastery of their instruments. “Glyn Johns said early on, ‘You guys aren’t a band, you haven’t even learned to play together yet,’” says Cash, laughing. “He said that like it was a revelation. Really, it’s true. We were just raw players. We did anything we wanted to. So basically we were a songwriter’s jam band, more than just playing big long solos, which we weren’t very good at. We wrote songs.”

By the end of 1980, they were plenty good. Their performance skill had become tight, polished, and experienced—but not at the expense of their gloriously ragged mountain grunge.

Cash’s harp-playing became an integral part of the trademark sound, but so extreme was his absence of training that he virtually invented his own sound by fortuitous default (being left handed and holding the harp backwards will do that). “I’m not a virtuoso. I’m just a country player. I don’t know what I’m doing. I play a lot of rhythm. Mine’s a unique mountain style; real harp players can’t do it.”

When the young Cash and his friends were inadvertently becoming the Daredevils, they crossed paths with the great blind harp player, Sonny Terry, whose recordings with Brownie McGhee became some of the most important tracks in blues history. Terry offered Cash the best advice one could get: “The best way to learn harmonica is just to buy one, put it in your pocket, play it when you feel good, play it when you feel bad.”

Terry’s straightforward mentality is equally applicable to the unadorned beauty that permeated the entire career of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. At the end of the day, they were guys who liked to make music when they felt good and when they felt bad. But mostly good.

That’s how the songs felt on New Year’s Eve for the performers and their energized audience. Dillon’s “Standing on the Rock” serves as the country rock greeting (“I’d rather be called hick rock,” says Cash). “Country Girl” owes as much to The Band as it does Nashville. “Look Away” gets room to breathe in this spirited live version. And both “Durty Gurl” (written and sung by Canaday) and Cash’s “One More Night” appear for the first time anywhere. “Arroyo” and “Noah” prove that “Jackie Blue” wasn’t the only funky groove that the guys were responsible for. “Walking Down the Road” offers imagery and feel straight out of Robert Johnson’s southern American experience (“Lord, I made it to the station with my suitcase in my hand / Walked up to the window like a nat’ral born man / Said I sure do hope that choo-choo train runs on time”). “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” closes out the set in hillbilly glory.

Chowning remembers the show and the organic meeting of musical minds that he and his friends enjoyed. “A phenomenon really does happen when we’re together. Individually, we’re us, but when we get together we become them. And it takes on kind of an energy thing of its own.”

After Kansas City, Chowning returned to the solo career for which he’d first left the band, also working in the music publishing world. Brayfield had left the band with medical aspirations, and was already a practicing osteopath by the time of the New Year’s Eve reunion, and that’s what he still does today.

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils would continue making music throughout the eighties and nineties, with various other talented musicians contributing in the same democratic fashion that the six originals had done when they accidentally came together in the beginning (Dillon, Cash, and Granda continued to serve as the band’s core of founding fathers). All the writers have continued to write, which has resulted in some big name artists covering their songs. Lee and Chowning have had great success as producers and recording artists, Granda has carved out a cult-status solo career (Supe and the Sandwiches among his many incarnations), Dillon has entered the advertising industry as his unique creative outlet, and Cash has become a respected science fiction novelist.

But on the last day of 1980, the band that had come together by chance revealed how much they’d grown over the previous decade. It was all just for fun, really, always had been, and it showed. A quarter century later, that special night can still be experienced. And nights like that don’t happen anymore.