Song of the Day 8/9: The Dillards, “Dooley”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

The first time most people saw the Dillards, they were playing idiot hillbillies on “The Andy Griffith Show” who drifted lazily into town from their home in a mountain holler that made Mayberry look like the big city. When they weren’t being nuisances to Sheriff Andy they sang bluegrass tunes with stupid looks on their faces. In the show they were called the Darlings.

The Dillards were actually such sophisticated musicians that soon after they left Missouri for Southern California in 1962 they became important influences on the nascent country-rock scene there. They later toured with the Byrds. The band also got the attention of the television industry and was soon hired for a recurring role as the Darlings. Bluegrass had recently proved a winner on TV with Flatt and Scruggs’ ’”The Ballad of Jed Clampett” on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The Dillards were told to play up their rural image.

That had been the lot of country performers since they first became widely known through the new record industry. Yes, they were rural folk, but apparently not always rural enough. Skilled banjo players and fiddlers were dressed in straw hats and faded overalls for publicity photos and often had some of their teeth blacked out to indicate that dentistry had yet to reach the mountains. Shoes were optional. They were given names like Stringbean.

Here are the Dillards being Darlings in Mayberry, some sitcom hijinx included. Andy plays a little guitar. They wrote the song, which is about a moonshiner. The title calls to mind the murder ballad “Tom Dooley,” made famous by the Kingston Trio. The similarity is mainly in the name, which often shows up in folk music in some version. Both were scofflaws, but moonshine is just moonshine and murder is murder.

Many current performers grew up seeing the Dillards on reruns of “Andy Griffith” and took note. Molly Tuttle cited the Dillards’ influence on a song she wrote called “Dooley’s Farm.” “It just felt fun to write a story song and update the old song “Dooley” that I grew up listening to by the Dillards,” she said. Instead of illegal booze her Dooley grows illegal marijuana.

Here’s Molly singing the Dillards’ “Dooley” with progressive bluegrass stars Tony Trischka and Sam Bush.

The Dillards had already incorporated some modern elements when they first hit L.A. and kept developing a more progressive bluegrass style, as heard on the 1970 album “Copperfields.” “We put strings on it, we went electric, we used drums and we put layered vocals on it,” said Rodney Dillard.