“He had a way of being different with things,” says Norman Blake, one of the finest acoustic guitarists of the past century.

Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Patti Page have also taken turns with the song. Testament to the song’s enduring appeal and stylistic malleability, is the shortlist of artists who have covered it: country artists including old guard (Hank Snow), countrypolitan (Campbell, Tammy Wynette), outlaw country (Waylon Jennings) and bluegrass (Earl Scruggs). Glen Campbell covered the beautiful yet melancholy song a year later and scored a crossover hit, cracking Billboard’s Top Forty in November 1968. It didn’t have a chorus, it had a banjo on it, and it was four minutes long.” He said it went against every rule that could be a rule in music. “And he said, ‘I wanted to drink Julie Christie’s bathwater.’ He sat down at a picnic table and wrote the song in twenty minutes. Zhivago,” says Ronnie McCoury, a first-rate mandolin picker, songwriter and singer who swapped appearances with Hartford on their recent recordings. He told me he wrote ‘Gentle on My Mind’ after he had watched Dr. “He could really paint a picture with words. A parallel interest in acoustic, old-time music was also piqued during his youth, as he learned to play banjo and fiddle as a teen, and his dual pursuits fed each other throughout his lifetime.Įven Trump Says Kanye West Is Acting Too 'Crazy' and Needs 'Help' The locale placed an indelible mark on Hartford’s future, as his fascination with the Mississippi River ultimately led to his work as a riverboat deckhand and many years later a riverboat pilot. Hartford was born on Decemin New York City, though his family relocated to St. Hartford died on June 4th in Nashville after a lengthy battle with cancer he was sixty-three. Moments like that showed John as the brilliant entertainer that he was.”Īs a songwriter, dancer, top-notch string-musician, and - most of all - as an entertainer, John Hartford was one of acoustic music’s most versatile, talented and engaging iconoclasts. If John was playing from nine to ten, you could forget about playing after that because the crowd was his. Crowe, Boone Creek, before I went to work with Emmylou, I’d go to these festivals and see John show up with just a Barkus berry, a board, his fiddle and his banjo and he’d do his one-man show and it was awesome,” says Ricky Skaggs of John Hartford.

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