“We liked folk music; we just liked every kind of acoustic music we could find... we discovered they were going to have this bluegrass festival in Roanoke, Va.... We pulled up at the festival and we realized it’s 9 a.m. and there’s tons of jamming going on. Boy that was all we could do was just to get parked...find somebody to pick with. What I liked most about those festivals was I met a whole bunch of people that were like me.”-Sam Bush in High Lonesome-The Story Of Bluegrass over footage of the New Deal String Band jamming, immediately followed by a segment of them on stage at Camp Springs, N.C., performing “Love Potion No. 9.”

        From about 1967-1972 the New Deal String Band, from Raleigh, N.C., was one of the first of the young southern bands who were pushing the edges of traditional bluegrass music outward lo encompass repertoire rarely if ever heard before in bluegrass music - songs like “No Expectations,” and “Friend Of The Devil.” Although the Charles River Valley Boys had recorded “Beatle Country,” no bands were actively playing the bluegrass festival circuit in the South, featuring material that hadn’t been “blessed by Monroe or done by Flatt & Scruggs,” as New Deal bass player Bob White put it. The New Deal boys were middle class, longhaired (for the times) college students from the South, whose “hippie” looks often got them into trouble with audiences. “If you had a chance to play before you got hit upside the head, you’d be okay,” said Leroy Savage. “Back in those days,” Buck Peacock added, “people would just hate you for the way you looked, if you had longhair, I mean—I’ve been threatened so many times. But if you played bluegrass it was like all of a sudden you were their buddy.”

      Bill Malone in Country Music USA said “Many people who heard the New Deal String Band (one of the first ‘hippie’ bluegrass bands, from Chapel Hill, N.C.), the Earl Scruggs Revue, or the New Grass Revival, could scarcely listen to their music without thinking ‘Why doesn’t somebody cut their hair?’” Neil Rosenberg in Bluegrass, A History, said “The New Deal String Band at Berryville...were...able to excite the admiration of a wide swath of the audience while at the same time incurring the displeasure of some of the conservatives, if not just by their looks...by songs like the Bob Dylan tune...that brought some boos from the audience.”

       Many fine musicians came in and out of the New Deal String Band over the course of the band’s tenure: fiddler Kenny Kosek (shown in the film segments, first with Al McCanless during the jam session and then on stage as the New Deal fiddler); guitarist Jack Lawrence (now playing with Doc Watson); Jim Field, guitarist and singer with the Charles River Valley Boys; fiddler and pianist Bob Hoban (who went on to play piano with Tom T. Hall); banjoist Rick Rirnan; banjoist and harmonica player Derwood Edwards (who later joined Loretta Lynn’s road band); Jim Watson, bassist with Robin and Linda Williams; bass player Mike Boykin; guitarist Ben Runkle; and banjoist Bob Isenhour.

There were predecessors to the New Deal String Band—bands like the 6 and 7/8 String Band with Al McCanless, Derwood Edwards, Snuffy Smith, and Ray Blackwell, and a band that competed under the name New Deal String Band at Union Grove in 1963 or ‘64 that included Jim Field, Al, Ray, Snuffy, Derwood, and Buck Peacock. This may have been the first time the name New Deal String Band was used.

The band that finally jelled somewhere between 1967 and 1968, and recorded as the New Deal String Band included William Emerson “Buck” Peacock on guitar; Leroy Savage, guitar and vocals; Gene Knight, banjo; Frank Greathouse, mandolin; “Fiddlin’ Al” McCanless, fiddle; and Bob White “Quail” on bass.

       All were from middle class backgrounds, influenced as much by the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, as by Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe; they were educated, and college bound. “We were all kind of folkies in part,” said Leroy. “I think all of us with the exception of maybe Al came into bluegrass music via folk music. I was listening to the Greenbrier Boys and the Dillards before I actually started listening to Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe...[and] as soon as Bob Dylan’s first album came out, it was hard-core from then on out. No New Christy Minstrels, Kingston Trio, no Brothers Four; it was Dylan, Mark Spoelstra, Dave Van Ronk, John Hammond...”

Born and raised in Rocky Mount, N.C., Leroy sang in several choirs during high school. He went to Louisburg College in 1963 and met Tommy Edwards who played guitar and banjo, and sparked Leroy’s interest in playing. “We had a little folk trio, matching shirts and little suede vests,” Leroy remembered. “I played the autoharp, and Tommy played guitar. We were all reading Sing Out magazine at the time. 1963 was my age of awakening—Union Grove, Galax, Newport Folk Festival. It was bluegrass from there on out.”

      Frank Greathouse, mandolin player with New Deal, and a high school friend of Leroy, was also from Rocky Mount. Jim Watson described Frank’s appearance in the New Deal band as “the one that always looked great with a cowboy hat because his hair was so frizzy, his hair stood straight out, so the hat would come down and then this hair would stick out under it—kind of like Bozo the clown.”

Like the others, Frank listened to the Kingston Trio; he played the piano accordion, then started learning guitar and listening to Flatt & Scruggs. “I remember watching them every Saturday afternoon right after Porter and Dolly,” he said. “Leroy, who was a bad influence—as my mama would attest to her dying day—sort of turned me on to other bluegrass people like the Stanley Brothers, who are still my favorites, and Bob Dylan, and songwriters.

      “In 1964 I went to the Union Grove [N.C.] Fiddlers Convention with Leroy. That was my first big rebellion—I was supposed to stay home and go to church on Easter Sunday, and I said ‘I’m not doing that, I’m going to Union Grove with Leroy.’ He walked into my house and my mama came up and said, ‘Leroy Savage you are the worst lookin’ thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ and Leroy said, ‘Thank you Mrs. Greathouse.’ And we walked out and got into Chancey Hill’s green and white ‘56 Plymouth and off we went...It was probably the first serious event that predisposed me to becoming a bluegrass musician.”

“Fiddlin’ Al” McCanless grew up in Salisbury, N.C., on an 1,800-acre cattle farm. His first instrument was a harmonica which he bought for 50 cents. He and his high school friends, Buck Peacock and Bob Isenhour, who had just started learning guitar and banjo, formed a group called the Muddy Creek Ramblers.

“This was during the hootenanny craze, and we’d go to the radio station on Saturday afternoons. They had open mike [and] there was a woman who came in and played a Peter, Paul and Mary record real slow and she’d sing along with it. Garland Shuping, the banjo player, was a little kid, and he’d come out and play, and me and Bob and Buck, and Bob’s little brother, Tommy Isenhour.”

      Al went off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in about 1964 and in his sophomore year took up the fiddle. “I just started sawing away. Bob had lent me some recordings of Gaither Carlton, so I really started playing old-time music before I played bluegrass.” Al was attracted to bluegrass music by the instrumental sound, especially that of Bill Monroe. He listened to the fiddling of Kenny Baker, Benny Martin, Chubby Wise, Buddy Pendleton, Joe Greene, Howdy Forrester, and had only been playing fiddle for about two years when the New Deal String Band formed.

“Tommy Thompson [founding member of the Red Clay Ramblers] was the first person I ever heard play old-time music in person, and that was a couple of years after we’d been playing bluegrass,” Al said. “I really like that kind of music. I never liked bluegrass more than old-time or vice versa. I got a Hollow Rock String Band record and I learned every tune on that thing—I loved it.”

       In 1969-70 Al, Tommy Thompson, and Jim Watson formed an old-time band, the New Academic String Band which existed simultaneously with the New Deal String Band. Later, in 1973, Al played on the Red Clay Ramblers’ first record, “The Red Clay Ramblers With Fiddlin’ Al McCanless.”

Buck (William Emerson) Peacock, also from around Salisbury, played rhythm guitar with die New Deal String Band, and was introduced to bluegrass music in high school by banjoist Bob Isenhour. He was about 17 when he first started playing guitar, and credits Charlie Waller and Gene Meade as being his guitar heroes.

“I can remember the first time I ever heard anybody play the guitar live, it was like a pure moving experience. The whole idea of somebody being able to make music come out of this instrument really touched me.

“What got me interested [in playing] was the folk music thing— Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Kingston Trio. ...But the fact that Bob Isenhour played so much bluegrass, that was the direction I ended up going. I was exposed more to rural bluegrass music than anything—Salisbury’s just up the road from Union Grove and some other little fiddlers’ conventions, and we used to go to all those fiddlers’ conventions—Union Grove and Cooleemee, Elkin, and Cool Springs and Mocksville, all during the summer....”

Bob White (“Quail”), bass player with the New Deal, was originally from Staunton, Va. “I played piano and clarinet in a band when I was a kid. Reno and Smiley were playing every other Saturday night at the Verona [Va.] Rollerland Skating Rink. And I was there a couple of times when they played, but at the time people [from my background] were going off to the Shenandoah Conservatory...I was [also] real tuned in to jazz, and when I heard bluegrass for the first time I realized that it had to be connected. I started playing the bass pretty early on.. ..went to Fincastle [and heard] George Shuffler and John Palmer, and I was just transfixed...

       Gene Knight played banjo with the New Deal. He was raised in Raleigh, and in high school played trumpet and French horn, and worked on learning the banjo by listening to Don Reno and Red Smiley recordings. When he was a freshman at NC State, he took some banjo lessons from Derwood Edwards who was living at Ashe Ave along with some other musicians. “It’s always amazed me that there were that many people with that much talent in one house at the same time...I was hanging out there at parties, trying to learn. At that time of my life that’s all I cared about.”

The mid to late ’60s was a period, in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area (as in other areas), when the folk boom, connecting with the burgeoning interest in old-time and bluegrass music, was creating a musical renaissance. In the same way that the Hollow Rock house near Durham was central to the area’s old-time music renaissance, a big, two-story white house at 106 Ashe Ave in Raleigh was central to the bluegrass renaissance. Mainly used by students at NC State, all the members of the New Deal String Band (and others) lived there. At one time, Gene Knight remembered, as many as eight or nine students living there were musicians. “It was like the [NC State] Design School-Ashe Ave.-bluegrass sort of thing going on,” said Buck.

“I came to [NC] State in ’64,” Quail said—a chino-wearing Bass Weejun- wearing, short haircut, gonna be an engineer-so strange. I remember standing in the chancellor’s yard telling him I was gonna go to the moon. I went to the moon alright... At midterms I went over to the cafeteria to get some coffee and Buck and Rodney Hutchins, Dale Lee (“Newt”)...were sitting in the basement playing the fool out of some bluegrass music. And I went the next day to a pawn shop and bought a guitar.”

“Newt was the bass player for the 6 and 7/8 String Band,” he explained. “He was in the Stoney Fork Valley Boys with Vic and Rodney... Do you remember him preaching upstairs at Ashe Ave? [imitates a revival preacher:] “And I was walkin’ down the road—

And I heard the thunder come and saw the lightnin’ strike—

And it struck one of Earl Johnson’s fattenin’ shoats—

And I said, you friends—

If it can happen to Earl Johnson— it can happen to you!...’ ”

“All these hippies that played bluegrass lived there,” said Al. “Derwood, Vic, Newt, and Rodney had a group called the Wautauga County Squirrel Shooters. I went to Carolina, and we started going over [to Ashe Ave.] on weekends; they had these big parties that just went on all night long—it got to be the happening place ’cause there was music and good times, and you could meet people there. So that’s where we learned to play, basically, every weekend. Another person who was living in Raleigh at the time,” he added, “was Buddy Pendleton. He was in truck driving school and he’d come over on weekends and play music with us. He was my inspiration when I started playing.”

“It was like party central in Raleigh for years,” added Frank. “It was a big crossroads...on Saturday night the doors would just open up and everybody’d come out on the porch and play, and people would wander in from State, Meredith, the Pancake House, you name it.”

“I lived in the dorm the first year,” said Quail, “and in my sophomore year moved down to Ashe Ave to be with the gang. “When we weren’t playing we’d go over to Durham and play at Tommy Thompson’s house, and to Chapel Hill and play at the Quadrangle and pass the hat. The Triangle area was so hot—it was just one of those magic times,” he continued. “In one loom at Hollow Rock, Barry [Poss], Sharon [Sandomirsky], and Eric Olson would be playing, and Alan [Jabbour] and Tommy [Thompson] and Bert Levy... and we’d walk in—we’d just disperse and play music.”

“One room’d be in the key of D and one would be in the key of B,” said Leroy.

The Sidetrack, a coffeehouse owned and operated by John Peden, opened in Raleigh in about 1963, and it became the musicians’ hangout of choice—the place to see John Hammond, Doc Watson, Len Chandler, Pat Sky, Buffy Sainte Marie, and others. After the Sidetrack closed for the night they’d go to Ashe Avenue and play bluegrass music ’til the wee hours of the morning.”

“[About 1965] bluegrass was happening,” said Quail. “Doc Watson was happening, Jim Kweskin was swingin’ through doing ‘I Dreamed About A Reefer Five Foot Long’ from 1927, and Bill Keith was doing his banjo thing...it comes up to Ashe Ave...and all the Hollow Rock phenomenon—there was an amazing mix of string music going on, pushing all of us toward getting into a band.” As the New Deal String Band gradually coalesced into the core band in about 1968, there were plenty of local venues where they became known, and where they developed large local followings. They played at fraternity parties, hootenannies, on radio and local TV, at the Lamplighter, the Keg, the Frog and Nightgown. They were the first band to open the famed Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill when it was behind Breadman’s, according to Leroy. “And all during this time, said Buck, “we were playing fiddlers’ conventions — Union           Grove, Galax...that’s all we did was play music. The closest we came to a home venue, was the Pickwick in Chapel Hill—we played there one night a week.”

“The place was packed every week,” said Jim. “The [band] was really cooking; they were playing regularly, they were doing old-time bluegrass but also mixing in Rolling Stones and Beatles stuff done bluegrass style. That was one of the things the New Deal String Band did, was songs like “Don’t Pass Me By,” and “Expectations...” “We came together at a time when there were only 12 or 14 groups making a living [at bluegrass music]” said Quail. “We came out of Chapel Hill bustin’ at the seams, ready to travel, and hit the festival circuit.”

Jim felt that the New Deal String Band, being from the South, had a stamp of authenticity, especially to those up north, that nobody else had, “whether or not it was true,” as he put it. “You all were learning it off records just like [the Red Clay Ramblers] were, [but] the whole perception of being from the South made it seem more authentic.”

“It’s not that someone is more authentic,” added Quail, “but the end result is a connection with the crowd and die people that are listening that takes on a life of its own."

      Jim described the New Deal sound. “They might take material from other places but it was definitely done in pretty much a straightforward bluegrass style. Frank was ahead of his time. He played really weird stuff, and he could really play straight ahead stuff. His playing was much further out than anybody else playing bluegrass in those days, and more in a blues kind of way. Quail was way ahead of his time as a bass player, and Peacock played [guitar] out of A shape a lot to get the open strings. He was a fine rhythm guitar player. Between him and Quail [the band] had a great rhythm section.”

Frank agreed. “I think what made die band continue and grow,” he said, “was it had a hell of a rhythm section— it was like an airplane taking off...and everything we did, weird and unweird sounded like bluegrass.”

“At the time we were really probably the first truly hippie bluegrass band,” said Leroy. “You did have the New York Ramblers, but they didn’t really have long hair or outrage anybody...and we were doing Grateful Dead songs, Paul Siebel, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan...”