Thursday, October 22, 2009 9:56 AM CDT

Farmington Press columnist Mitch Jayne, a longtime member of The Dillards, was recently inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall Of Fame.

The presentation came Oct. 1 at the historic Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Old Opry, in Nashville, Tenn. The IBMA Hall of Fame is housed in the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Ky.

Joining Jayne in Nashville to receive the honor was Dillard’s members Doug Dillard, Rodney Dillard and Dean Webb. The night also saw legendary bluegrass group The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers also inducted into the hall of fame.

As for the Dillards, the four piece band were a driving force in modernizing and popularizing the sound of bluegrass in the 1960s and '70s.

Rodney Dillard, on guitar, and Doug Dillard, on banjo, grew up playing music with their family and friends — including a teenaged John Hartford — near Salem, Mo. They performed on a St. Louis radio station as The Dillard Brothers in 1958, recording for a local label. After meeting Dean Webb they recruited him to play mandolin and bass for another self-produced recording which ended up in the hands of Mitch Jayne, a former one-room school teacher who hosted a radio show called “Hickory Hollow,” in Salem.

Ironically, it was Jayne who attracted the attention of a promotion manager when he was visiting his sister in California in 1961, and then returned to Missouri to tell the Dillards he wanted to learn to play the bass fiddle and join the band as their emcee, utilizing his talent as a storyteller.

The Dillards, this time with Jayne on the bass, played their first show at Washington University in St. Louis and hit the road for Los Angeles in 1962 with $300 in their pockets, stopping to work in Oklahoma. Their first night in Los Angeles they went to see the Greenbriar Boys at a club called The Ash Grove. They were invited onstage to jam and impressed an Elektra Records representative in the crowd.

By the next evening they had a record deal. A DesiLu Studios representative saw an ad in Variety magazine about Elektra signing the Dillards, and within days they were called in to audition for the role of the “Darlings” on The Andy Griffith Show. The Dillards played the part of “the boys”, four quiet and shy brothers who were proficient with their instruments but had little to say otherwise. They played alongside their television sister, Charlene, and father, Briscoe Darling, played by Denver Pyle.

Despite the fact that The Dillards recorded only six episodes for the program, they continue to be the most often seen bluegrass artists on television, thanks to reruns of the popular show.

Their first three albums included original songs written by the band members that have become bluegrass standards like “The Old Home Place,” “Dooley,” “Doug's Tune,” “Banjo in the Holler” and “There is a Time.” The Dillards incorporated stand-up comedy into their stage show, usually instrumented by Jayne, and their talents as entertainers brought bluegrass to new audiences in urban clubs from L.A. to New York City, on college campuses, in movie scores, at folk festivals and on tour with mainstream rock bands and comedians.

By the late '60s The Dillards had become a driving force in creating new sounds in the West Coast music environment, sometimes upsetting bluegrass purists as they amplified their instruments and added drums and steel guitar. The band's unique flair for songwriting and arrangement affected a broad range of important future musicians in the bluegrass and pop music world alike, and they are credited with helping set the stage for the “country rock” movement and the burgeoning progressive sounds of bluegrass.

The band went through personnel changes in 1967 but has reunited periodically in concert and television appearances.

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