''Speedy'' Krise's Dobro changed the sound of country music

George "Speedy" Krise, who introduced the Dobro to bluegrass music, is shown playing at his home in Portsmouth with his wife of 62 years, Freda. (Photo by John H. Sheally II / The Virginian-Pilot)

By Phyllis Speidell
The Virginian-Pilot

PORTSMOUTH — George E. “Speedy” Krise plucks a melody with his right hand as his left guides a steel bar along the guitar’s strings.

The guitar is a Dobro, and it resonates with the sliding twang that has become a hallmark of traditional country music -– largely because of Krise.

Think of the ear-catching soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or the hit songs of Alison Krauss & Union Station.

Krise’s contribution to early country music has been acknowledged by the Library of Congress. The songs he wrote were recorded by some of the greats, among them Roy Acuff and Mac Wiseman.

The West Virginia picker came a far piece from playing a borrowed Dobro in his youth, but Krise isn’t resting on his musical laurels in a Nashville mansion. He lives with Freda, his wife of 62 years, in a small cottage in the Cradock section of Portsmouth.

Never a megastar, Krise, 84, walked away from the music business 50 years ago -– and didn’t look back.

“I’d liked to have stayed with it, but it was hard to travel that much with four little ones at home and barely making a living.”

Those were the days of playing Grange halls and schools, when admission was a quarter and the bands played more for the music than the money. Musicians were lucky to make $40 a week, and most kept a day job.

Before the days of luxury buses, Krise and his band traveled to barn dances, theaters, music contests and other gigs in a DeSoto.

“There was a snowstorm one night when we were crossing the Smoky Mountains. I had to walk in front of the car with a flashlight.”

But the late 1930s to the early 1950s were also the golden age of traditional country music on radio. That’s when Tennessee Ernie Ford was a radio announcer and the early morning shows advertised chicken feed and farm products.

Families across the Southeast gathered around their Zeniths to listen to Nashville broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry or, from Knoxville, the WNOX “Tennessee Barn Dance” and the “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round.” Although Krise never performed on the Opry, he was a regular on the other two shows.

The stage roster read like a country music hall of fame: Carl Smith, Archie Campbell, The Carter Family, Molly O’Day, Acuff and Wiseman.

Krise is generally recognized as the first musician/songwriter to play a Dobro on a commercial, bluegrass recording. More than 55 years ago, he backed singer Carl Butler in a recording session for Capitol Records.

Some of Krise’s own compositions -– “Heartbreak Express,” “You Plus Me,” “Our Last Rendezvous,” “Plastic Heart” -– were in the session, all released on 78 rpm records.The recordings helped make Butler a country music standout.

And the Dobro in the background changed the sound of mountain music, roots music, bluegrass, hillbilly or traditional country music -– whatever you choose to call it.

“Back then, there were only about eight Dobro players recording anywhere,” Krise said. “Now there’s one behind every tree -– and they’re all good.”

Dobro, Krise explained, isn’t a type of guitar but a brand name dating to the 1920s Hawaiian music craze.

The Dopyera brothers, a family of immigrant Czech instrument builders, fitted a six-string guitar with a round aluminum resonator plate and a diaphragm to amplify the sound. Held horizontally and played with a steel bar on the strings, the “Dobro” produced the popular, lilting island sound.

Krise was 15 when his sister’s boyfriend came to court her , carrying a Dobro to their home in West Virginia.

While the beau wooed his sister, Krise played the Dobro, blending it to the mountain music he’d loved all his life.

“Country music is good for the soul, heart and mind.”

Nearly 60 years later, two folk-life historians spent days capturing Krise’s memories, music and achievements for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In November 1995, their 24-minute documentary debuted at the library’s Mary Pickford Theater to a crowd of bluegrass fans vying for Krise’s autograph.

“We were very pleased to accept for our collection a copy of the documentary,” said Jennifer Cutting, ethnomusicologist with the folk-life center. “Future researchers will be interested in the valuable contributions 'Speedy’ made to early country music.”

Charles Bean, one of the historians, said finding Krise was a highlight of his research, the reason he helped produce the documentary.

But he had one question after learning that Krise was the first to play a Dobro on a commercial bluegrass recording.

“Why haven’t we heard of him?”

Krise wrote a cache of songs, more than he can remember now.

They’re about life, love and loss, mothers and friendship, the West Virginia mountains and the New River that runs through them.

At least 15 have been published and recorded.Wiseman was a regular on the Old Dominion Barn Dance radio show in Richmond when he recorded Krise’s “Goin’ Like Wildfire.”

“One of my biggest records,” Wiseman said.

In the next few years, Acuff recorded Krise’s “Plastic Heart.” Bluegrass artist James King sang his “Heartbreak Express.” Frankie Laine and Jo Stafford turned “Goin’ Like Wildfire” into a duet. Carl Smith made his recording debut singing Krise’s “No Trespassing.”

Another Krise number, “Georgia Waltz,” was nominated to be the state song but lost out to “Georgia on My Mind.”

But Krise will never be wealthy from the royalties, which were minimal.

“My songs are all 50 years old, and you can’t make much on that.”

In the early 1950s, guitarist Jack Shelton recruited Krise for his band, The Green County Boys.

“Speed was unique because he could play almost anything on the Dobro – took the lead with the fiddle and could sing, too,” said Shelton, who lives in Asheville, N.C., and is now 85. Krise’s voice is reminiscent of Ralph Stanley’s high, lonesome sound.

“We worked for three or four years together at WNOX,” Shelton said. “He was a prince of a fella.”In 1954, as radio’s popularity waned in the excitement of television, Shelton left the business for a 9-to-5 office job.

“Radio was the thing that made mountain music popular,” Krise said. “TV never did what radio could.”

Two years later, Krise found a sales job with the Cook Coffee Co.

He packed up his family and his Dobro to move to Akron, Ohio, and capped a part of his life that reads like one of his own lyrics.

Hinton, in the middle of West Virginia, had a population of about 3,000 when Krise was born.

His family lived on Sunset Hill , near enough to the New River to fish all night and have fresh catfish for breakfast.

His father was a brakeman/conductor on the C&O Railroad, his mother a homemaker who played a guitar and taught Krise to play mountain ballads.He went to a two-room elementary school and was 12 when he earned his first guitar, a $14 Sears, Roebuck Spanish model, by sweeping out the schoolhouse for a dollar a month.

When he graduated from high school in 1940, country music was graduating from the mountains into the mainstream.

He signed on with WJLS radio in Beckley, W.Va., and formed his own band, the Blue Ribbon Boys. At WJLS, he met some of the bigger names in the business -– O’Day, Acuff and Little Jimmy Dickens, then called “Jimmy the Kid.”

Dickens was enjoying a chicken dinner at the Krise house on Dec. 7, 1941, when the radio crackled with the announcement: Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

That was about the time Krise met Freda. She was 13 and living in nearby Beaver, W.Va. He was 19 and already a radio personality in cowboy boots and a Truman-style hat – tall crown and narrow brim.

They married when Freda was 15, and he was drafted into the Air Force.

He was assigned to control tower operations in Colorado Springs, Colo., where pilots would answer his thick mountain drawl with “Thank y’all.”

After his discharge, Krise came home to work as a railroad telegraph operator, until O’Day invited him to come to WNOX.

He happily gave up the telegraph key for a guitar pick. From then on, country music and musicians were a constant part of the family’s everyday life.

The three Krise daughters –- Sue, an editor at The Virginian-Pilot, Georgia and Carolyn -– and their brother, Ed, were backstage as much as they were in the audience.

Eventually the financial struggle took its toll. Krise left the stage – but the music never left his heart.

He played an occasional bluegrass festival, and when his son started a rock band, Bluestone, Krise joined them.

“We played 'Rocky Top’ and all the Eagles’ songs , but the audience wondered, 'Who is the old guy in the back?’ ”

Perhaps the quickest thing about Krise is his smile – and it flashes when he talks about Acuff, Dickens, Bill Monroe and the others who sang what he calls “real” country music. Even Patsy Cline sang “so-called country.”

Krise doesn’t listen much to contemporary country music . He likes Krauss but thinks she sings “uptown bluegrass” and says the group Nickel Creek is “too hip-hop” for him. EmmyLou Harris “has the voice of an angel.” Dolly Parton “hums better than most people sing.”

In 1996, Krise was featured in a tribute concert in Moorefield, W.Va. One of his old cronies, guitar player Glenn Lehman, traveled from Ohio to play with him and Mike Seeger, musician, folk historian and Pete Seeger’s brother.

Today, a variety of health problems plague Krise, and arthritis cramps his hands. His hearing is going bad and he can’t feel the strings too well . Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the steel bar.

But his hands, only a little less dexterous than they were half a century ago, can still tease out the melodies of his beloved mountains, the blue violets that grow there or “Herman the bulldog, the meanest mutt in town.”

“I’m ready to form another band,” guitarist Shelton said. “Whenever Speedy is ready.”

Reach Phyllis Speidell at (757) 222-5556 or phyllis.speidell@pilotonline.com