The Melodic Common Denominator

At first glance, you may not be familiar with the name Jim Rooney. By all accounts, though, you’re probably well-aware of the people, places and things he not only was part of, but also created, championed, and chased after.

Within his memoir, In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey, Rooney meanders down the rabbit hole of his wild and wondrous melodic past. It includes his time running around the bluegrass/folk scene in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s. Those connections parlayed into a position as the director and talent coordinator for the Newport Folk Festival at a time when the event forever changed the music industry during the folk explosion on the 1960s.

In It for the Long Run tells the story of man behind the scenes who truly made big things happen—from managing the legendary Bearsville Sound Studio, in Woodstock, New York, to a Grammy Award for producing Nanci Griffith’s album “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” working with Townes Van Zandt and Bonnie Raitt, to receiving the lifetime achievement award from the Americana Music Association in 2009. It also dives deep into his extensive time spent with Bill Monroe, the “Godfather of Bluegrass,” and Muddy Waters, the “Father of Modern Chicago Blues,” which resulted in Rooney’s landmark 1971 book Bossman: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters.

During the recent Southeast Regional Folk Alliance conference, held at the Montreat Conference Center near Black Mountain, North Carolina, Rooney, now 80, was the keynote speaker. I was part of an intimate panel with Rooney, touching on our experiences interviewing and writing about musical icons. Below is an excerpt of that conversation.

How did you get into the writing business?

“I like history. And I’ve always liked books about music. I’ve always been interested in the story, and it can be kind of encouraging to you that they had their days when nothing was right, nothing was going to get done—they just had to eat it and do it. The first book I wrote was Bossman. I had written some press stuff, too, when I managed the Club 47 in Cambridge, (Massachusetts), and I developed a relationship with a writer for the Boston Globe, (music critic) Ernie Santosuosso. And then when I worked for Newport I also started writing press releases. And I discovered that newspapers want to fill space, and I’ve seen my own words in the New York Times. No by-line, but they used every bit of it,” he says with a laugh.

“And I had this idea for Bossman in the middle of the night, literally. I just woke up. I had gotten to know both Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters. It just dawned on me how similar they were as people, as men. And then I started thinking about how they were as bandleaders. Both this book, Bossman, and Baby Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years; the real value of these books is that it’s largely in the words of the people themselves, and that’s a really good way to go, if you can do that. I think it has an immediacy to it, especially now that this is history. As far as Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters … (it) gives you a picture of these people as they were, out of their own mouths—I just don’t think there’s any substitute for that. 

“My own memoir is another matter. That was hard work. But, I did that partly for the same reasons, for people to have some idea how the music world works. So much of (other books are) focused on celebrity. But, they don’t have much of an understanding of the nuts and bolts of it, the shoveling (manure) after the elephant part of show business. I’m happy I wrote it. I’m glad I’m done with it. And I don’t think I’ll be writing anymore books,” he said, laughing again.

What was the most challenging aspect of putting together Bossman?

“I had gotten to know Bill and Muddy,” describing Monroe as “a very shy man. He was an interviewer’s nightmare. You’d ask some question and he’d say, ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’ There was a time when I just didn’t know how this was going to work. I was lucky with Muddy because he had been in a pretty bad car wreck and he was in a hospital in Champaign-Urbana. I went to visit him, and he was happy to have a visitor. You don’t get your recorder out and just start asking questions. That’s not the way to go. You have to just talk and I was using a handheld cassette recorder just as unobtrusively as I could. 

“And with Monroe, I lucked out. One night we were broken down, as many times this happened with his bus. We were staying all night in a garage outside of Roanoke, and he and (fiddler) Kenny Baker were sitting up front. Monroe was aware, he knew what I wanted; he just couldn’t give it to me. They knew I was there, and they were just talking.”

Rooney turned his recorder on, “and that was absolute gold. Bill talked about all kinds of stuff, Kenny talking about the first time he heard Bill’s music. 

“It is your approach, and for good reason—this is their life, and they don’t want to give it away to some idiot from somewhere else. They’re too proud to let it go. You have to spend some time, make them aware that you’re actually okay, and can talk with them like a normal person—maybe become a friend.”

He said the Bossman book “was an idea based on what knowledge I had at that point on both of them. But, in the course of interviewing all the people who had worked with them, it became much clearer to me, how similar they were, how they approached their music, and took their music from these rural backgrounds and made it a commercially viable music.”