By Jim Carrier | Posted on February 1, 2025|The Tradition|
Long after Jim Rooney is gone, the sounds of bluegrass that he recorded will remind us of the beauty of acoustic stringed instruments played with taste and subtlety. Not famous as a performer — although he was one, certainly — Rooney’s lasting contribution to bluegrass music is embedded in a thousand songs that he helped produce. Like a painter with a fine brush, Rooney added small strokes to soundscapes not easily categorized. Often, one has to search to hear them.
His instrument was his ear, tuned by years of listening to folk, hillbilly, country, blues, and bluegrass music, and playing and singing in several bands. His talent lay in hearing in his head what a mandolin or banjo, Dobro or fiddle, could add to a song. Asked about his practice of infusing bluegrass into other strains of music, he interrupted: “I don’t think of it that way. Those instruments are colors…especially mandolin. I think mandolin is a terrifically versatile instrument to have in a recording track. It just gives you different flavors and sounds. It can be used just as a rhythm instrument, or it can be used behind a vocal. It just gives you a different texture.”
Rooney, 86, (born January 28, 1938) semi-retired in Vermont, may be best known as a Nashville producer and publisher. He worked with John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Hal Ketchum and Garth Brooks, among others. But his discography lists an astounding musical array: 87 produced albums, nine engineered records, 23 albums on which he performed, and 18 composed songs, not to mention five album liner notes and three books, including Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters, and his 2014 autobiography, In It For The Long Run — A Musical Odyssey. By the time he moved to Nashville, in 1976, Rooney was a seasoned folk and bluegrass singer and manager of music venues and festivals. The skills he learned in that half of his life would serve his studio work.
Born in Boston, raised in suburban Dedham, Massachusetts, James K. Rooney seemed destined to a scholarly career while enrolled in the prestigious, private Roxbury Latin School. At age 14, a classmate told him about a live “hillbilly” music show on WCOP radio in Boston. The show, starring “The Confederate Mountaineers,” was the funniest thing his friend had ever heard. When Rooney tuned in, he didn’t laugh. “I’m convinced that my Irish genes were jangling when I heard that fiddle and banjo stuff.”
As he listened to Boston’s country music shows and searched for albums, “Hank Williams was the first person that really got to me as a teenager. There was some sadness in his voice, and emotion in his singing. That was what was appealing to me. It was a very buttoned up time, the 1950s.”
One evening, Rooney and his pal walked into WCOP to see the show and ran into the Mountaineers, dressed in their Confederate hats and jodhpurs, who were just leaving to play a gig at the Plaza Bar, one of several country music clubs popular with Navy sailors based in Boston. “Why don’t you come with us?” a band member said, so across Boston Commons they trouped, Rooney, his pal, and the Mountaineers — Bea and Everett Lilly, Tex Logan, and Don Stover — a band that would play at the Hillbilly Ranch bar for 18 years. “This is why this bluegrass scene started in Boston — exactly from them,” Rooney said.
Rooney saved up to buy a plywood guitar in a cardboard case, and began learning songs, many from Carl Sandburg’s collection, The American Songbag, a gift from his mother. With an ear for chord changes, he subscribed to Country Song Roundup, published in Connecticut, which printed lyrics of hits and stories of performers.
At 16, with maybe four months of self-taught practice — he played his guitar backward, strumming with his left hand — and the chutzpah he showed all his life, he took a trolley downtown, walked into the radio studio of the Saturday Hayloft Jamboree and auditioned for the booker, Aubrey Mayhew, playing and singing, “Music Making Mama from Memphis,” a Hank Snow tune, and “Honky Tonk Blues” by Hank Williams. “Okay,” said Mayhew. “You’ll be on the radio this afternoon.” Rooney bought a checkered shirt, a clip-on red string tie, and played the show for three months.
In 1956 Rooney entered Amherst College as a classics major. In his junior year someone introduced him to another student, a beginning banjo player named Bill Keith. Folk music was taking off and the pair began performing at hootenannies. “I could be a pretty emotional singer, and I had some humor in the patter and people liked that. And then Keith was just advancing by leaps and bounds, so it was a very good combination.”
After graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1960, Rooney began a master’s degree at Harvard, where he found himself in the middle of the folk music scene. “It didn’t take long for the music to take over.” A teacher, however, suggested he first apply for a Fulbright Fellowship, which took him to Greece for a year. Keith, meanwhile, had joined Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys.
Exploring Greece deepened Rooney’s interest in ancient stories that were sung, and he soon realized that bluegrass standards like “Pretty Polly” had roots 300-to-400 years deep. “I liked being part of a tradition. I am a singer. I sing songs that I learned 60 years ago and I am still singing them because I can re-imagine them and make them fresh. One thing I like about the bluegrass community is that sense of tradition.”
Pulled by music, unable to meet a PhD expectation that he write papers in Greek and Latin, Jim ended his academic pursuit, and was offered the job managing Club 47, a famous coffee house in Harvard Square in Cambridge. He and Keith had performed there in 1962. “He was good at that work. He was always thought of as a straight shooter, and a nice guy,” recalled Betsy Siggins, who kept the calendar while Jim hired the artists.
Club 47 welcomed Black musicians at a time when they weren’t totally accepted in Cambridge, Siggins said. “Elizabeth Cotton was playing at the club, and she could not go into a store to buy a new blouse. Somebody had to go in and get that for her,” she said. Siggins and others often hosted musicians in their homes when they were refused hotel rooms. “Jim was a very gentle person who was very accepting of all kinds of music.”
“I was raised that way,” Rooney said. His parents purposely moved away from Roxbury’s heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood to Dedham’s mixed community. After moving to Tennessee, someone from New England asked him, “How could you possibly live there? I said, ‘Have you ever been to South Boston? South Boston will take a back seat to no one in their racist attitudes. So don’t talk to me about that.’”
Tall and lanky, ginger-haired, with an easy grin framed at times by a major moustache, Rooney parlayed his experience at Club 47 into a series of jobs helping to manage festivals — New Orleans Jazz, Newport Folk, American Folklife in Washington — and the Bearsville Sound Studios in Woodstock, New York, where he helped construct the studios and make several records, including Mud Acres — Music Among Friends (1974) for Rounder.
In 1973 Rooney began hanging out in Nashville, meeting and jamming with musicians, partying, and occasionally traveling, back to Woodstock, and playing gigs with Bill Keith in Europe. He settled in Nashville in 1976 after meeting Jack Clement, owner of the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa. Clement had apprenticed for Sam Phillips at Sun Records and Chet Atkins. He also wrote hit country songs.
“In addition to Bill Monroe, maybe the biggest other influence on me as a person was Jack Clement. He was a very, very generous person. Talented. Interesting. He was also extremely tolerant and welcoming. He liked me right off the bat because I was from Boston, I had gone to Harvard, and I played left-handed, and I was an odd person. He liked odd people because he was himself — in spades. And he gave you opportunities. He was only disappointed if you didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. And some people didn’t.”
Clement urged a reluctant Rooney to engineer. “I didn’t have any engineering skills and thought it was too complicated. But Jack forced me into it. He said ‘You have good ears. You know what things are supposed to sound like.’ As simple as that. I became his engineer, almost overnight. And I did it for several years, every day, all day every day. And that’s the kind of work you have to do — journeyman work. I had the opportunity. I ran with it and that opened everything up for me. Then I had the confidence. Sitting next to an engineer now I know what I’m talking about.” It was there, in the Cowboy studios, where the many lines of Rooney’s CV converged. “I ran a club, I’ve stage managed, I’ve built studios, produced records, engineered — all these different things. But the focus for me is always making the conditions of performance right for the artists so they can get their music out into the world. Whatever I’m doing has to serve that purpose. And that’s not about me, that’s about them.”
As a producer, “It’s my job to find the musicians that would serve that purpose. And that takes time — you have to learn who the musicians are.” Rooney hired bluegrass musicians when they fit the purpose. “The bluegrass world just produces great musicians. They know how to play by ear and they know about harmonies. They know all kinds of things. I think bluegrass is a great way to learn about music. You learn a lot of stuff by being in a bluegrass band.”
One of Jim’s earliest productions was Nanci Griffith’s third album, Once in a Very Blue Moon, recorded June 26-July 2, 1984 at Jack Clement’s studio. He hired Bela Fleck and Mark O’Connor, at the time both relatively new in Nashville. “I put Mark O’Connor and Bela over sitting next to each other. And between them, they just came up with little things to put behind her songs, and they didn’t play on every song, but they played on the ones that seemed to work for them, like “Spin on a Red Brick Floor,” or “Roseville Fair.” I’m not big on telling musicians what to play. I think they should know what to play and what not to play. And the good ones are like that.” He later hired them for her album, The Last of the True Believers, recorded Oct. 7-9, 1985 at Cowboy Arms.
O’Connor remembers both records — “in particular, because that is what I found most compelling about my own session work with Rooney. It was key in my recording session career, as I found an approach I took on those dates that distinguished me from the fiddlers before on the Nashville scene such as the session greats, Johnny Gimble and Buddy Spicher. In 1984 Rooney engineered a Clement production of John Hartford’s Gum Tree Canoe, where my unbelievable assignment was to replace all of my fiddle hero Vassar Clement’s tracks on Hartford’s album. After recording on songs like “Lorena” for Hartford at the Ol’ Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa on Belmont Blvd, Rooney gave me the canvas to fully introduce my recording approach throughout with a new fiddle sound on those great and timeless Nanci Griffith albums, Once In A Very Blue Moon and The Last of the True Believers.”
For Fleck, “The Nanci sessions were always an exercise in calling fantastic musicians with the right esthetic and letting them have their head. I learned a lot from seeing how he directed them with as little input as possible — all the while getting a very natural sound — and enabling everyone to use their own common sense. He’s just very open and natural — often kind of funny — and trusts the people he works with. His esthetic seems to be built on finding the musical truth in the situation.”
Rooney produced three of Griffith’s albums, including Other Voices, Other Rooms, which won the 1993 Grammy for best contemporary folk album, and best production. “Who’s better than Jim Rooney?” Nanci Griffith told Seven Days, a Vermont newspaper in a 2013 Rooney profile. “He’s magical. I wouldn’t have a career without Jim Rooney.”
Rooney said he has used banjoist Richard Bailey “on a lot of records, and I’ve used Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin on a lot of records. I think I was one of the first people to use Stuart on records because Mark had moved on, moved up to another level and I couldn’t pay as much as the major country artists would pay.
“The best thing about those musicians, I think, is that they’re not playing licks. They actually play music. There’s a difference. When you’re learning you usually learn licks and there are some players that never get far beyond that. My bluegrass background has definitely helped me in my work as a producer. No question about it.”
Sam Bush quoted Chet Atkins, who once said, “A good producer hires musicians he trusts and stays out of the way.” “Jim doesn’t tell you what to do. For me, it wasn’t so much him telling me what to do, is that he guides me into making the correct decision, really. If that makes any sense.”
When Rooney casts a band, “He’s choosing players that are sensitive to this before they walk in,” said Duncan. “And so if, if one of them — me included — steps over whatever line that is in his mind, be it, you know, just being a little bit too aggressive with the part, or whatever, that player probably knows he’s going to get asked to do it again. As soon as it happens in that situation, it’s like, I know this is coming, and then sure enough, he’s on the talk back. ‘Let’s try it again.’” Tim O’Brien says Rooney “doesn’t waste a lot of time in the studio. He pushes it along gently. He steers it. When it’s going in the wrong direction, he steers it quickly. I was singing a thing with Chris Brashear. He wanted me to sing harmony. And it was way up. I tried it a couple times. I said, ‘Jim, I could try this. We could work on this for a while, but it’s kind of rough.’ He pushed the talk back button immediately, and said, ‘I’m not really interested in that kind of sound.’ Cut it right away, you know. And I sang a lower part that did it in about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then we went on. That’s kind of how he works. Good producers are like people who have a good party, they invite nice people, and then they make sure their drinks are filled. He kind of does that with the music.”
Rooney produced three records for Peter Rowan, who recalls: “There’s an expression in Nashville: you have to let the song tell the story. Don’t try and manipulate it too much. And that has always been one of Jim’s great talents is, downplaying the overthinking, because when you start to overthink things, it just gets a little funky, not in a good way. He allowed spontaneity. He just made it easy for the song to emerge.”
Jim’s autobiography, In It For The Long Run — a Musical Odyssey (University of Illinois Press 2014) is an honest look at a peripatetic life, his relationships, and highs and lows of his career. When he first moved to Nashville, “there was a period there, probably two or three years, when I was going pretty much off the rails (with pot and alcohol). And I could have done some serious damage to myself and maybe some other people as well. And I’m not particularly proud of that. But it was something I needed to do in a certain way. I needed to just break it all down. And basically when I got to Jack Clement’s, I was ready to start building up again.”
In 2000 Rooney convinced his partners in Forerunner Music, that online music downloads had no future for them. After 15 years of song publishing, in which they rode the wave of 100 million Garth Brooks records, they sold out, providing him with the only equity he had ever earned. “I’m not rich but I can live my life,” he said. In 2009 Rooney received a lifetime achievement award from the Americana Music Association.
Back in New England, Rooney married Carol Langstaff, a dancer and arts promoter, and settled into her 1805 country home. He recorded a series of radio shows, “In It For The Long Run” for WFVR-FM, a community radio station in South Royalton, Vermont. He also helped find a home for the archives of the Boston Area Friends of Bluegrass, now called the Boston Bluegrass Union, at U-Mass Amherst. Curated by his former coworker Betsy Siggins, the collection will include digitized recordings of the organization’s concerts. For awhile he returned to Nashville to lead gigs of Rooney’s Irregulars, a bushel basket of musical talent that he had worked with. In Vermont, he said, “I do physical work around the place — stack wood and whatnot. And I feel good about it. I’ve always grown up around people that worked. The approach to professional music is just the same. You could call it good work. It’s work that is worth doing and doing well. And it affects people in a good way.
“Do you think Hank Williams had any clue that a kid in Dedham, Massachusetts would have his life changed by his singing? That’s one of the real beauties of what we do. You shoot arrows off in the air, and you do not know whose heart they’re going into. A lot of them land on the ground. But a lot of them get through and give somebody something they didn’t have before and that they wanted. And so you can look back at things you do — my dad built buildings and I made music. And it’s added up. A lot of people have gotten a lot out of the music that I’ve been involved in one way or another. And I think that’s about all I can ask.”