Can you play about half as much and play it on single strings?” The guitarist did just that, and continued to record with Cash for the next 40 years. Blake borrowed a dobro from Josh Graves (of Flatt & Scruggs) and recorded with Cash the next day for the song “Bad News.” He recounts that after the first take, Cash told him, “Well that’s real good, but that’s too good for one of my records. During one of these sessions, June Carter introduced him to Johnny Cash, who was in search of a dobro player and hired him on the spot. Session Work and Solo Careerīlake started picking up session work in Nashville around 1963.

Blake first heard Doc Watson’s music through one of his students he was amazed by Watson’s approach, and at that time began developing his own flatpicking skills by transferring them from mandolin to guitar. He was drafted in 1961 and served for two years in Panama, returning home in 1963 to resume his work as a performing musician and guitar instructor. His first guitar was an inexpensive Stella he got around age 12 that he played fingerstyle, and soon after that he learned mandolin and dobro.Īt 16, Blake dropped out of school to play mandolin professionally, and by 19 he was working with the bluegrass and country musician Hylo Brown, touring as part of June Carter’s band, and doing session work. Growing up, his family listened to the Grand Ole Opry and other programs on a battery-powered radio, and it was there that he heard the musicians that would influence him throughout his entire career: Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, and Riley Puckett.

Norman Blake was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1938, shortly before his family relocated to Sulphur Springs, Georgia. And though Blake stopped touring in 2007 to enter retirement, at the age of 83 he continues to play and record, with his most recent album, Day By Day, released last October by Smithsonian Folkways. But his accolades are dizzying: He has worked as a studio musician and sideman for some of Nashville’s greatest stars his songs have been covered by the likes of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Tony Rice, and the Punch Brothers he has received a multitude of Grammy awards and nominations and he is considered one of the finest and most influential flatpickers ever. Blake has kept a low profile, living the majority of his life in the quiet northwestern corner of Georgia. Often described as one of the great unsung heroes of 20th-century folk music, it’s hard to imagine that Norman Blake, never one for the spotlight, would want it any other way. From the March/April 2022 issue of Acoustic Guitar | By Alan Barnosky

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