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Bluegrass Man |
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 Trey Dixon
When I drove out to meet with Larry Gillis, I expected to find one of the most talented Bluegrass performers I've ever had the pleasure of hearing. What I found just might be the missing piece of America. I followed my hand scrawled map which took me off the main roads outside of Soperton to a half completed log cabin in the woods. Larry and I sat and talked in the cabin's one completed room.
He's building this cabin by hand, and not with a kit. That would go against the way he lives. Along the walls are impressive deer heads, all mounted by Larry himself. The same is true for everything around him from his fishing boat to his custom rattlesnake banjo strap. He appreciates being around things he crafted himself, things that stand more on substance and quality than empty flash. That's the mark of an artist, and that shines through in his music as well.
 Larry is just back from Yeehaw Junction, Florida where he and others performed to a crowd of thousands at the Yeehaw Junction Bluegrass Festival and Fiddle Championship. Now back home he has the chance to relax and spend a little time with family before hitting the road again. He's extremely close to his children (two sons and a daughter), a trait not common enough among professional musicians. I asked him how he managed to balance time on the road and time with family. He explained "The average father might be home every day, but only get thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon. I'm gone for days at the time, but when I'm home I'm totally here. I get the time to work on things with them and really know what's going on in their lives."
Closeness of family has always been a part of Larry's life and is a major reason for his love of music. He remembers "All of my daddy's people played music. If you didn't play you didn't really fit in." So playing and logging became Larry's way of life until his late teens when he and his brother checked the mail one day and found a letter from a promoter. The Gillis Brothers were then legitimate professional musicians and spent the next seven years traveling and playing together. Life on the road suited Larry more than it did his brother, and the duo eventually stopped touring.
While that may have changed the way things were done, it didn't dent Larry's love of music, travelling, and performing. He loves it at least as much today as he did then. He smiles and his gravelly voice perks up when he say's "I'm so happy with life that I have to pinch myself when I wake up each morning." Why not? He's living exactly the life he wants to live surrounded by the things and people he loves. He continues "Life to me is like an art. It's the same with music, kids, or anything else. The time, love, and attention you give it will decide what you have."
Larry's attitude toward life is likely what makes his music so good, or maybe his love of Bluegrass gave him his attitude. He say's "Bluegrass holds on to the truth. A music show to us is like a family reunion. The music is a tradition.
It's a reminder of so much of what made America great, and what so many have forgotten." That's the philosophy he and the band take on the road, and part of the reason so many drive for miles to see him and share in it.
Gillis has 17 albums to his credit so far as well as one he just recorded this past June. He and the band have a new album in the works now. We'll let you know when it's released. |
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