In the inaugural OKMA Spotlight, we visit with Hal Clifford, one of the founders of the legendary bluegrass band Mountain Smoke. With a career spanning nearly five decades, it is incomprehensible that they wouldn't have a story or two to tell.
Mountain Smoke (from left to right): Gary Howe, Roger Mashore, Kenny Davis, Tom Bergman, Rich Dimonico, Hal Clifford, Billy Perry
He said, “They’re gonna boo.” And I said, “I don’t care if they’re gonna boo or not.”
Founded in 1973, Mountain Smoke was (and is) one of the premier bluegrass bands; not just in Oklahoma, but in the world. They are comprised of Hal Clifford on guitar and vocals, internationally acclaimed banjoist Billy Perry, Tom Bergman on guitar and vocals, Kenny Davis on resonator and pedal steel, Roger Mashore on bass and vocals, Gary Howe on fiddle and mandolin, and rounded out by Rich Dimonico on drums and percussion. The band sometimes includes Hal's daughter on vocals, K.C. Clifford, an artist in her own right. Don't let the instrument designations fool you — put an instrument in these guys' hands and they will play it. And leave you in awe.
Hal Clifford discusses his beginnings with music and ties to The Grateful Dead, the horrors of the Vietnam War, sets the record straight on opening for KISS with Vince Gill as front man, performing for Oklahoma governors and US Presidents, future tours and albums, current philanthropic ventures, and more.
Interviews conducted by Matthew Wallace of the Oklahoma Music Archives. (Feb. 12-14, 2019)
Spotlight
OKMA: So tell me a little bit about yourself and your music. How did you get started playing?
Hal: You mean playing with Mountain Smoke or playing myself?
OKMA: Playing music yourself.
Hal: Well, I’d been a singer for a long time. I sang in high school in a glee club. I went to boarding school in Colorado. In wanting to do that, and also enamored with folk music, I got a guitar, which wasn’t much of a guitar, and took it to boarding school to teach myself to play the guitar. I got an early Kingston Trio book with easy songs in it, with no bar chords, learned how to play “500 Miles” and slowly, but surely, learned a bunch of chords and started playing folk music. I was in a folk music group in high school with a very, very talented banjo player and singer, a classmate, and another very good singer. The three of us had a group.
So anyway, we did that and I went to the 1963 and 1964 Newport Folk Festivals. Stayed there for the duration and got to sit around in little camping areas with people like The Weavers (Pete Seeger, Erik Darling), Peggy Seeger, and all sorts of old players back in that day. Joan Baez was there. And I was into that music, playing music with all of them. I took the magazine that used to come out from Pete Seeger called Sing Out, which was thought to be a pretty socialist or communistic magazine later on (laughs). Mainly what I think it was is they had new songs; every single issue had new songs with chords. That’s where'I learned a lot of the folk music that I learned.
Bob Dylan at the '64 Newport Folk Festival
I saw Joan Baez introduce Robert Zimmerman, 1963, said you guys will know him as Bob Dylan and have him sing some songs for you. That changed music from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan right about there. In ’64, he was a headliner. He had a place on the show in ’63, but Joan Baez kinda brought him out. And back then the stage was only about, oh maybe a foot, maybe 18 inches off the ground. You could walk right up and stand on it. Chairs were sitting right there in front of it. A lot of musicians would just sit on stage when somebody else was playing. Very casual. There was no worry, no lines.
I’ve seen pictures and movies of it, but I can’t find myself in the crowd. I know kinda generally where I was, but I’ve yet to see myself out there. And I keep thinking I’m gonna see myself, but I haven’t found it yet.
So I came back from that really liking that music. I was in Colorado and I went to Red Rocks in August of 1964 and I saw The Beatles play there. I thought their harmony was incredible. I mean, for somebody who likes to sing, if you listen to how close their harmony was. And the whole difference to that music was pretty amazing. It didn’t bother me that it was cheesy music from what everybody was doing at that point in the folk music part of it.
One of our classmates in school with me there at Fountain Valley School was Bob Wier, who along with Jerry Garcia, started The Grateful Dead. I’ve stayed in touch with Bob over the years. He came back for our 50th reunion and we played some music together. He told me the stories about how The Beatles had screwed up their whole deal. He had left school and met Jerry Garcia and they played as Bob and Jerry Folk Music. Jerry Garcia was a very talented banjo player and very average pedal steel player and he actually played the pedal steel on Teach Your Children, on that record. Which most pedal steel players go “oh my god, we can do better than that!” Garcia had put a group together, and he was playing a lot of bluegrass, called Old & In the Way. Are you familiar with that group?
OKMA: I’m not.
Hal: Well, if you look them up, you’ll find some of the really fine players of bluegrass music were together and made up that band of Old & In the Way, which I thought was one of the classic names for a band. Especially a bunch of old guys (laughs).
Anyway, that’s kinda where I got started with playing folk music. I really didn’t start playing bluegrass, per se, until later on. I played music in Vietnam, when I was over there, when somebody wasn’t shooting at you. I did work in some of the areas where people were coming down off of the heroin that was so easily obtainable in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese were given very, very intense doses. Little vials of almost pure heroin. The North Vietnamese gave it to them for free to hand out to American soldiers. Sell it to them for 2 bucks a vial. They’d come down off of that and I’d play in the hospitals over there at our particular base, where I was, which was way north. Helping these guys come down off of it. It was a bad time. Those guys would come back home, paid 2 bucks for a vial of heroin over there that would cost them 200 bucks a vial, and you wonder why there was a bunch of problems with theft and every kind of disorder you can think of when they come back trying to figure out how to maintain their habit.
But that’s kinda my background with folk music. When I came back from Vietnam, I played at a Steak and Ale a night or two a week and played folk music and a little bit of banjo there, since [the movie] “Deliverence” had just come out and everybody had just rediscovered that there was an instrument called a “banjo” (laughs). Even though the Mumford & Sons thinks they invented it.
The Original Mountain Smoke: Russ Christopher, Hal Clifford, George Crenshaw, Jim Wagoner
Anyway, I played there and I met some of the guys playing. Some of the guys would come in. A guy who plays with us now, Billy Perry, who’s a world class banjo player – one of the finest there is. There was no reason to play banjo when he was around. And some other guys would come in and we started playing about 11 o’clock. The late, late deal in there. We’d start playing some music in Steak and Ale on my single gig nights and that’s kinda where we got started. Then we kinda pulled our little group together in a guy's, George Crenshaw’s, house one Sunday afternoon and that became Mountain Smoke.
OKMA: So it started from you playing at the Steak and Ale, then you just met up at his house, and…
Hal: Yeah, I mean I was playing out there. Most of these guys had been playing music independently or some of them, like Billy and some of the other guys who were bluegrass guys, had been playing bluegrass still since they were kids. They all grew up playing every instrument. That’s where Vince Gill and Billy Perry and Bobby Clark and all these guys, all their families went to bluegrass festivals. When I was playing little league baseball or playing something else, they were going to festivals all summer and they could play every instrument better than anybody else.
Billy reached over with his left hand and grabbed the guitar strings and stopped him. He’s still playing some, though, with his right hand and he goes, “Stop.” And he went back to playing.
Bobby Clark and Billy, Vince, and Jimmy Giles... those guys all ended up winning every kind of contest. Bobby Clark’s a world mandolin champion. Jimmy Giles, world mandolin champion. Fiddle champions, flat pick guitar champions. And they finally wouldn’t let them enter the contests anymore because they would win first, second, and third in every instrument.
OKMA: (laughs)
Hal: I’m serious. And they talk about sometimes they have these little groups that are pretty good, but they were nothing like The Bluegrass ReVue. They were incredibly, incredibly good. And they all ended up doing music at one time or another. Vince Gill, especially. Bobby Clark, especially. And Billy Perry.
"On Blue Ridge" album cover
Anyway, that’s kinda where we started with it. We started playing, not bluegrass, country, rock, but we kinda did it our own way. It wasn’t just purely bluegrass. We played at a Wednesday night place in Oklahoma City and it got so they were making more money on Wednesday nights than they were on Friday and Saturday nights from the bar. And we started playing opening act for a lot of people. You can look on our website and see the names of people we played with. I think there’s some people that we played with that aren’t on there, but most of them are. And we opened for all sorts of people that became major. Alabama, you name them, we’ve played with them. Actually, we got more encores than Alabama when we played with them. Same thing with Pure Prairie League. We did stuff with The Dirtbag Lot. Did stuff with Jimmy Buffett.
I met Jimmy Buffett, and he actually played right before us. He was a single act, played right before us at a festival (laughs). I told him all along that he opened for us and he thought that was pretty funny.
OKMA: About the KISS concert, how did that all play out?
Hal: Well, the KISS concert… everybody wants to know about the KISS concert. The KISS concert was this. Ron Nance at Satellite Ticket Agency called me about 6:30 in the evening and said, “Hey, I’m in a real bind. I’ve got an act down here at the Civic Center and it’s festival seating. I booked these guys almost a year ago and now they’re big time. They just came from playing a huge concert.” I can’t remember if he said it was Detroit, where they were getting $20 a ticket or something and had like 25,000 people. “So I’ve got them down here with 5,000 people, seats, and the Civic Center. And there’s no reserve seats and they’ve been in here since the doors opened. We had trouble with people trying to get in without tickets.” That’s because of KISS, their first album had gone crazy after Ron had booked them. They had an opening act on there, that I can’t remember who the name was. Somebody told me it was Blue Oyster Cult, but I don’t think that’s the truth. They had another rock band that was traveling that was going to do the opening act for them here in Oklahoma City. And that band got out and tried to do their sound check and there were people in there yelling at them. You know, booing them. Telling them to get off the stage. They wanted KISS. They got mad and picked their equipment up and left. And that was at 6:30.
Ron called me and said, “Hey, my contract says KISS doesn’t start until 9:00. And it says they can walk if they don’t have an opening act.” He didn’t tell me who the band was. He just said “I’ve got an act down here and I need somebody down here to do an opening act. Will you come down? I’ll pay you anything!”
I said, “Everybody’s not here!” We weren’t booked that night, so there were guys every place.
He said, “If you’ll put anything together and come down here, I’ll owe you forever.”
So I said, “Okay. I’ll be down there as soon as I get some guys.”
I got Vince Gill and I got Bobby Clark. I don’t remember who played fiddle that night, it might’ve been David Coe. Russ Christopher and myself. There were like five of us playing all acoustic plugged in through mics primarily. We got down there and we found out the band was KISS. And I’d never even heard of KISS (laughs).
I said, “Why us?”
Mountain Smoke, 1975 David Coe, Russ Christopher, Hal Clifford, Bob Cuadrado, Vince Gill, and Jim Wagoner
He said, “Man, you’re my only chance. Can you stay out there for like 30 minutes or something? Can you just stay out there?”
And I said, “Yeah, we can stay out there.”
He said, “They’re gonna boo.”
And I said, “I don’t care if they’re gonna boo or not.” He’d offered to pay us like three times - we were getting like $2,500–3,000 a night. He was going to pay us $6,000 or $7,500. When we opened for him, that’s what we usually got was like $2,000 or $2,500. I said, “Man, just pay us what you normally do.”
Well we did it and they booed from the moment they opened the curtains. I mean booed and booed and booed. My answer for them was “Hey, you guys are fantastic! We’ve absolutely never had this kind of ovation from you guys. You’re super! Louder, I can’t hear you! Louder!” And they’d boo and whatever… you know, get out of here. They didn’t want a country band up there playing for them. So anyway, we played for about 40 minutes. And that guy that wrote an article here in Oklahoma City did not know a thing of what he was talking about.
OKMA: Oh really?
Hal: He said we played two songs. That’s totally wrong. He didn’t call me or ask me. The guy that did the KISS big magazine deal, when KISS did their 40th anniversary, we had a long talk. He got the whole story. And Vince told the story a number of times on television. On Johnny Carson and Letterman and all sorts of places. They’d ask him, “What’s the craziest thing you ever did?” and he’d say “I opened for KISS.” And he says that he mooned them, but he didn’t. He bent over backwards and pretended to drop his pants to moon them. But he didn’t moon them. He just pretended he did. But he did flip them the bird when he left the stage. But he was also in high school. Just out of high school, ’75. So anyway, he was a kid.
OKMA: So there’s a little bit of an urban legend there.
Hal: Yeah, you know, he had a bad temper for a long time. The other things that happened that night, when I left the stage, I said, “Hey, you guys have been fantastic! I know you’re going to enjoy the band coming up behind us. And you all be sure to get Mommy and Daddy’s car home by 10!” All these kids all made up in makeup. There were a whole bunch of young kids out there, so that’s what I left them with.
Then we went back and talked to KISS. They were pretty nice guys. In fact, after the whole show was over, we sat and talked to them at length. In that show that night, “Firehouse,” I mean that was their big song. And Ace Frehley, the guitar player for KISS, there were boots about maybe 12–14” high heels. Gigantic. I mean, real high boots they were wearing as part of their costumes. This was long before they had wireless mics, so they had cords hooked up on their guitars and they had a wall of Marshall amps back in the back. And their drummer was up on a stand at the back of the stage and the other guys were up there at front. Ace was moving back and they had roadies back there pulling the cords back and feeding him cord out when they walked around. But they caught his heel and fell backwards. I mean, fell straight over backwards. He was playing a Les Paul, turned to the left, that Les Paul hit the floor and snapped the head. Broke the guitar, snapped it right off at the top. And I thought he was gonna cry. He was looking at this thing and couldn’t believe it. Looking at the guitar all folded up. The roadies back in the back ran up, grabbed him by his arms. He couldn’t get up off the floor in those shoes. They stood him back up on his shoes and got him up standing. Took the guitar off and put another guitar on him and they went on playing. Afterwards, he was really upset he broke this old Les Paul. It was one of his favorite guitars. Anyway, that happened, which was unique. Which their magazine didn’t know about and I told them.
Firehouse!
The other deal was, when Gene Simmons did the “Firehouse” deal right at the end, they had a big fire deal and they had to clear it with the uh… fire department was there and everything. And he would come out, the lights would go down, they were across the stage from him and they’d hand him a cup. In that cup was diesel fuel. And he’d put that in his mouth and they had a big torch and when they’d say “Firehouse,” he’d blow that out and a huge flame would come out, blow out across there. And then the lights would go out and he was over on the side of the stage, I was about maybe about 6 feet from him. He was spitting trying to get that diesel fuel out of his mouth (laughs). They’d hand him water. He was drinking and spitting that on the floor (laughs). And he looked over at me and I said, “Tough gig.” He laughed and said, “I’ve gotta quit this shit. I’ve gotta quit this.” That was his big ending, that was their big deal. And then they did an encore a couple times. That was the KISS concert and that’s exactly what happened.
OKMA: I know you’ve performed for some other people, namely Presidents Ford, Bush, and Carter. What were those experiences like?
Hal: Yeah, they were great. We’ve played for five Presidents. We’ve played for every governor now. We’re getting ready to play for Kevin Stitt. We were supposed to play for Trump, but Toby Keith came back into town and he did the deal. We got cut. Toby played it. We’ve done a bunch of fundraising deals with Toby. He came back and they just had him come over to this big deal in Norman when Trump was there.
Mountain Smoke performing for Jimmy Carter at the White House
Anyway, playing for Carter, we played a big deal out on the lawn of the White House. They had all the people from the executive office building in there for a big cook-out out on the big lawn. Set us up out there. We played. They came up, Rosalin and Jimmy came up, and took pictures with us up on the stage and they thanked us.
We played for him when they came through Oklahoma. Generally, we played for every Presidential candidate when they came through. We’d play for them here or played for them… eventually got invited to other things to play for them. That’s the only one we really played really at the White House. We played some other things, at parties and other things for them. And rallies and that sort of stuff.
OKMA: What were the other two Presidents you played for? Clinton and…?
Hal: We played for Clinton, Ford. Let’s see. Bush, first Bush. I’d have to look up. I know we played for two others, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. And we played for some guys who didn’t get to the President – that were running for President and didn’t get there. Cause usually, when they wanted somebody to draw a crowd in Oklahoma, they got us to come play it. That’s kinda where that was.
Our music, if we’re covering something, we generally try to change it so it sounds like us.
The other stuff, I mean, we did opening acts for all kinds of people. Both travelling and staying. Played a lot of stuff with The Dirt Band [aka Nitty Gritty Dirt Band] and Asleep at the Wheel. Hank Williams. All kinds of people, you can look at the listing on there. We did a bunch of stuff. Willie Nelson was one of our only guest partners. We played a number of shows with him. And we were kind of in demand back then to play because we were well known. We’d done the White House gig and that got a lot of press. We’d had a couple albums out by that time, so it was fun. We weren’t writing as much of our music as we are now. We write probably half of what we play now, so that keeps everybody interested.
OKMA: We’ve talked quite a bit about the history of Mountain Smoke: the former members and shows.
Hal: Right.
OKMA: I know the lineup has changed over the years, so how did the current lineup come together?
Hal: Well, the current lineup has Kenny Davis, who’s our steel and resonator guitar player. He played with us back in the ‘70s. Billy Perry played with us starting back in the early ‘70s. He’s back playing with us. He’s our banjo player. Roger Mashore, who writes part of the music and plays bass and guitar, played with us some in the early days. Kinda as a fill-in. He’s been a friend from way back in the beginning. Started playing in 2001 or so when we started putting this back together. Tom Bergman, who’s played consistently with the band since 1979 or 1980, plays guitar – lead guitar. Also plays excellent banjo. He plays with us. Our drummer is a jazz drummer, Rich Dimonico. He started playing with us about 5 years ago or so. Gary Howe is our fiddle and mandolin player. Gary started playing with us about 4 years ago.
We had a core group with Billy and Kenny, myself and Roger and Tom. And we looked for a fiddle and mandolin player and a drummer. We’ve had a couple different guys who played drums. We’ve had a couple different guys, like Randy Sanders who played with us back in the 70s. He played off and on with us on the fiddle. Jimmy Giles, who’s a world mandolin champion and two or three time national fiddle champion, played with us for a while in 2010-2012 or 2013. But he had a serious drug and alcohol problem and he wouldn’t go to treatment. So we had to cut our losses with that, even though he was an incredible player. He just couldn’t handle the other stuff. Anyway, that’s the group now.
K.C. Clifford
And then my daughter, K.C. Clifford, is a three time Woody Guthrie Songwriter Award winner. She started singing with us this last year. She’s got her own new album coming out, which is a fairly amazing new album. It’s coming out this year. She’s got 6 albums/CDs out. She came to sing with us because we wanted some more high harmonies. Roger and I are getting so old, we can’t sign the high harmonies (laughs). We enlisted K.C. to come sing with us part time. She’s not full time playing. Depends on what her schedule is, traveling and playing. So that’s the group, 7 or 8 of us, depending on what K.C.’s schedule is.
OKMA: I saw that she had won the Woody Guthrie Award three times. How has her success made you feel as a mentor and a father?
Hal: Well, I feel great about it! She’s loved to sing ever since she was a baby. We were singing all the time. She grew up in my music, which was folk music and people like Paul Simon. She emulated Paul Simon in writing. She was an award-winning… won virtually every opera contest around. She went to the number one opera school in the country, which is Indiana University. She got put with a full doctor professor as a freshman because of her talent. Which normally you get that when you’re a junior. She was accepted at virtually every place she tried out, which was like Juliard Northeastern Convervatory of Music, and all of the music deals she tried out for. And had offers for full scholarships at a number of places and automatically won some around in this region, in Texas and Oklahoma, when she was winning the opera contests.
She did not want to sing opera, she just wanted to have the training. The vocal training and the music theory training, which is highly specialized. Which she got. She graduated after she finished three years of music theory at Indiana and singing in all sorts of things there. She went to Bellmont in Nashville and added music business to her degree. Took the music business courses there. Vince Gill was there and Bellmont was one of the schools that he kinda backed. And so she was there and she knew him when she was living in Nashville.
And then a guy named Don Schlitz, who is a very talented songwriter (wrote “When You Say Nothing at All,” he wrote “The Gambler,” I know he’s got a number of Grammys), she nannied for him and his wife and sang a bunch of his demos and stuff when she was in Nashville. He tutored her on songwriting and on “don’t get hung up about you having to be the person that sings your songs; sell them to whoever pays the most money” (laughs). So anyway, Don was a good friend.
Mountain Smoke performing at the 35th Walnut Valley Festival
I knew his wife. That’s how they got together. The boarding school I went to in Colorado, his wife was the daughter of one of the masters there at that school. And so I met Don Schlitz when he came back with Paulie, his wife, for one of the reunions. I told him my daughter was heading to Nashville and he said, “You sure have her call me when she gets there.” And they did and she ended up being their nanny.
But that’s the group. And there were evolutions of it. There were a number of people who played with us for different periods of time. And the group went from bluegrass to contemporary country to country bluegrass to all country to all sorts of different... The group's has been continuous since 1973. We were just contacted last year by Ken Burns. Do you know who Ken Burns is?
OKMA: Yeah.
Hal: Documentaries. We’re gonna be in his new documentary on country music. Our song, “July, You’re a Woman,” back in the early-mid 70s, is gonna be one of the songs they use there. And they got our pictures and stuff. Tied it in with the stuff that they’ve got on Vince Gill. So we made that deal, which is coming out. Which is a very big honor for us. And they’ll actually play the song and show a bunch of our pictures. We had a bunch of early pictures of Vince, which they wanted.
We’re in the process of cutting a new CD. We’re putting the songs together for it now.
OKMA: You’ve mentioned the sound has kind of changed over the years. What’s the new CD going to sound like?
Hal: Oh, it’ll be, you know, most of it is going to be songs that we wrote. And those are still very high bluegrass. The songs we play, we play with bluegrass instruments. We’re not going to electric guitars and stuff, like we did somewhat in the late 70s and 80s when we were more country. It’ll be bluegrass instruments. It’ll be up-tempo, hot picking type songs. There’ll be some ballads and things that we write. So it’s gonna be kinda what we’ve been doing the past years.
The fans that have been with us for years and years and the new fans that are just starting, if we can bring a smile to their face and give them some time of enjoyment listening to our music, then we’re fulfilled.
Our music, if we’re covering something, we generally try to change it so it sounds like us. You know, if we’re gonna do something, because of the instrumentation that we have, we can take some songs and pick the tempo up substantially. You know, play the song differently than what it’s been played by somebody. We try most of the times for our record to change something around, make it our own, or it’s something we wrote in most of the cases. We put some things on the record that people wanna hear. We put “Rocky Top” on it at one point. We put “Orange Blossom Special” on there. There have been a couple different times, depending on who the fiddle player was. We have some cover songs that are on there, but done kind of our way.
OKMA: So true to the form you’ve been in?
Hal: Yeah, we’re not changing much of what we’re doing. People like what we’re doing. So we’re not really trying to change it. We’re not a cover band, where we go in some place and play that. And we’re not a dance band. Although, I mean, they can dance to us, you know. If we’re going to go someplace and we think they’re going to be dancing, we’ll do some songs that, you know, they can two-step to or whatever. Some country dance if they want it. We can play any of those songs, we just don’t in a normal concert environment. We’re playing our music. We’re not playing a concert environment so somebody can come hear our version of some old Bob Wills tune, you know.
OKMA: Talking about your live shows, I know you’re a mainstay on the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival. What's that experience like?
Hal: Oh we’ve done that. Byron Berline’s a friend of ours. Billy, our banjo player, subs in and plays banjo with him too. He lost his old time banjo player. Billy’s substantially better than the guy he used to have playing for him, so Byron’s loving having him. We kinda get into conflict with Byron sometimes on our shows versus his shows with Billy. We actually have a backup banjo player. Tom can play banjo really well, so if we have to do without Billy sometimes we do. So we play that show just to stay in it with Byron. They don’t pay anything. The only people they pay are Byron (laughs) and a couple of big acts.
Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival
I mean, it used to be a much bigger festival – a lot of venues. They were doing it inside the town. Now they’re doing it out in the flats, Cottonwood Flats, out to the west of town. It’s a small festival, you know. A big crowd’s 4,000 people, 3,000 people. That’s a huge crowd for them. You go up and play Winfield, like we play quite often. Winfield’s 25,000 people. So it’s a whole different world and 6 stages. So we do this, it’s close, and we like playing up there. Our fans can go out there. It’s a closed in festival they can go to. And we usually play only on Thursday night, cause they’re not going to pay much on Friday or Saturday.
Same time, while that’s going on, there’s a – Steve Brainard, who is a long-time friend of mine, who is one of the early, really great influences of country and folk music – his father, Pop Brainard, owned The Boodhi, which was a coffeehouse on the major coffeehouse series that ran from California to there into New York. It was a stopover place for great artists to play in. I mean there were all sorts of very well named people who played in The Boodhi back in the day. That’s where I started playing in as a sit-in folk music guy. Steve Brainard lives in Guthrie and he has, at the same time the bluegrass festival’s going on, he has a bunch of folk music friends of his come in who also like to go hear some of the bluegrass stuff. People like Mason Williams and people like that, who are big time players. People like Mike Settle, who was in [Kenny Rogers and] the First Edition, and all kind of stuff. They come in and we get some great folk music getting played up there during that time. Some of the old time stuff. And we all play stuff that we wrote and have a good time. Usually I go there Thursday night, at least Thursday and Saturday night, and play ‘til 1 or 2 in the morning. Really have a great time. Anyway, that goes on at the same time, so that’s what we do. Unless we get booked. We may be booked on Friday and Saturday and we play without Billy, cause he’s gotta play up there with Byron.
High Country Cowboys
Anyway, we’re going to do kinda a mini tour with some friends of ours from Red Lodge, Montana next September. If they can get booked at Winfield or someplace on a festival booking. Which I’m trying to help them get booked to. They’re called The High Country Cowboys and they are the modern day Sons of the Pioneers. They are three brothers and they can sing. You put their sound side-by-side with the Sons of the Pioneers and you’d think you’re hearing the Pioneers (laughs). They’ve won the Western Music Association Band of the Year the last couple years, song of the year, album of the year. One of the kids, Barney, has won the 2016, '17, ’18 yodeler of the year. You probably didn’t know there was such thing as the yodeler of the year, but there is. Doing the old-time western country yodeling. They’re a lot of fun.
We’re gonna go play six or seven cities in Oklahoma and Texas that are cowboy towns. And probably play a deal with Red Steagall, while we’re doing it. Red, he’s an old friend, and I introduced these guys to him and he absolutely loves them (laughs). So we’re probably going to go down to Breckenridge, Texas and play a deal down there with him when they come in to town. They’ll come in to town for two weeks and we’ll play places, like a lot of the old time venues around the state. You know, that are old time auditoriums. And places where they’ll like this kind of music, like Woodard, Oklahoma, McAlester, and Ada. And like the old Ken Lance Arena down there – the indian tribes, the Chickashas, have down there now. Those kind of places with these guys. They’re not known so they’ll enjoy coming and we’ll do a twin billing with them, have a lot of fun, travel around with them. Sit in a place and add some extra instruments to them when they want us to. So anyway, we try to play maybe once a month and keep our hands in it while we’re writing.
We’ve got a deal coming out of OETA, where they filmed a deal we did at OCCC (Oklahoma City Community College) where they recorded us. Recorded my daughter doing a show there. And I think they’re going to do two 30 minute segments on OETA of both of us live.
OKMA: Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on in the near future!
Hal: Oh, you know. We try not to stay too busy (laughs). We’re old, fairly old, but we just absolutely love to sing and we have fun just getting together and playing somebody’s house. You know, go play for four hours and go play what you want to play. Introduce something that you just wrote they’ve never heard of. That sort of stuff. It’s for us. If we weren’t doing what we’re doing, you know, we wouldn’t have a way to get our new music we write out in front of people. That’s what you write it for. You want people to hear it. You want to play it. That’s what it’s all about for us.
And we all, Tom and… Roger, not so [much] right now, used to be on the worship here at St. Lawrence. Tom and Gary lead worship at a church in Norman and I lead worship here in Oklahoma City. And Billy is part of a music worship team at a place in Yukon. So on Sundays, we all play Christian music at one place or another. And sometimes we’ll put on a little gospel show while touring around to some of these deals. Where we’ll play some of the old-time gospel anthems. That they want to hear the old gospel, we’ll throw in “I’ll Fly Away, you know that kind of stuff. And just do a little thing as part of their music at their normal church service. So that’s kinda what we do.
We’re going to keep playing until nobody shows up, I guess.
The glue that holds this whole thing together is that we all like each other. And we all like playing music. When we get together, we laugh as much as anything else. And we play and somebody will start playing something and we’ll say, you know, get off of the tangent here. Just try to stay on track and finish the song off. Anyway, it becomes a lot of fun.
When we take our train trips… I think I mentioned that we do a train trip. Did I mention that to you?
OKMA: No.
Hal: We annually do one or two train trips. We book a Heartland Flyer and we take a whole Heartland Flyer car full of people. Which normally you can get 82 people on there, but we can only get 50 seats up above. So we have 50 people who pay to go on the trip. And we give them dinner on the way back and we play music going down and music coming back. Maybe four hours in Fort Worth. They have a big time.
Usually coming back, they have a billion songs they want to request and we can play about half a billion of them. And we get to laughing, you know, they really think they can throw out something like “Free Bird” or something and expect us not to be able to play it. And we will play it (laughs). We can play (laughs). We can play “Stairway to Heaven”, we can play a lot of stuff that they won’t expect us to play.
We said now if we’re going to play this seriously and you think you’re going to throw something out that we can’t play, then here’s the deal: You put in a buck. If we can’t play it, you can take two bucks out of the jar. It’s not a tip jar, it’s just a jar they can make requests in and stump the band. We can usually fulfill their deal. We’ll tell them up front if we have no clue. Or never heard of the song that they’re talking about. You’ve gotta be able to hum it or give it some idea what it sounds like or we think you’re making it up (laughs). So that kind of thing is fun. That’s what music ought to be. It ought to be a good time. If the audience doesn’t think you’re having a good time, you’re going to have a very difficult time entertaining them.
OKMA: That makes sense.
Hal: If you look embarrassed about something… if you look embarrassed, if you blew something or you forgot the words or something else, if you make them uneasy then you’ve lost it. You know, they might as well know it happens to the best of them. And we’re not the best of them. So we have fun with it. We’re as professional as we need to be. We’ve got great equipment, great sound, and great people to play.
We’re always looking for new venues and places to go play. We get calls from casinos all the time to go play there and we won’t play there if they allow smoking where we’re going to play. We don’t do the bar scene anymore unless it’s a very large place like Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill or some of the Hard Rock spots and some of the other places. But not if it’s a deal where you’re going to be choking down cigarette smoke all night. Don’t need it!
So what do you do that makes you like music so much?
OKMA: I grew up with music. My mom would play old records, Moody Blues and Kansas. I’d really get into those albums and then as I got older, I kinda just branched out and found some of the newer music I was into. Then I had a lot of friends that were in the local music scene and I’d go out and support their shows.
Hal: And you’re local to where, Tulsa?
OKMA: Yeah.
Hal: Yeah, okay. We used to play Cain’s all the time. We used to play Cain’s 2-3 times a year. The place was jammed packed, but the old Cain’s was much more fun than it is now. Nobody who wants to come hear us probably wants to stand up all night. They’re not gonna do that. I don’t know if you know what the old Cain’s was like, whether you went there when it was at its heyday.
OKMA: Probably not its heyday. Earliest was in the 90’s.
Hal: Okay, well (laughs). We were playing it in the 70’s. That’s not the heyday. The heyday was with Bob Wills. But it didn’t change much through up until it changed owners back in the early ‘80s. When we were playing it, there’d be lines of people outside waiting to come in. There’d be no tables, no chairs set up. All the tables would be leaning up against the wall, you’d roll the table out, put the table where you wanted it, brought your chairs out, and sat down. They’d be piling those things up right up to the edge of the stage and back from there to wherever the tables quit and the dance floor was back behind there. So that’s how it worked at the Cain’s and it was a great way to do it.
There was no reservations. You just came with a number of people and you went over to grab the table. Most of them were big round tables. You rolled 'em out, sat' em up (laughs), and put your chairs around it. And then you had the people who wanted to listen were up there in front. And then the people who wanted to dance, they could still dance or do whatever they wanted to do. But they were back in the back and it wasn’t blocking the people that was trying to watch what was happening. It was more fun that way if you were trying to entertain. Not just a dance band. You know, we were never just a dance band. We were always putting on a show of some sort.
OKMA: How would you say the music scene has changed since the ‘70s?
Hal: I think there are a lot more people writing their own music. It always has been something that we like to do. But I think that [if] you’re just going to be a cover band, there are a million cover bands, you know. For us, if you really want to have fun, you write stuff that you want to play. And you play stuff that you want to write. You want to play the kind of music that you… you’re either telling a story or shows great musical acumen to play it.
When you’ve got a banjo player like Billy, who is off the wall... I mean he is as good as anybody you’re going to find playing a banjo. He is also a sensational dobro player, reasonably good mandolin player, and a very good guitar player. Same with Gary, our fiddle and mandolin player. Plays great piano, plays great lead electric guitar. Tom plays electric guitar, plays banjo. Kenny plays dobro and pedal steel. You know. Roger plays a couple different things. I used to play some mandolin, used to play some banjo, but I just play rhythm guitar now. But I mean we can change some things around with us. We’ve got a friend of ours named David Thomas. David played with Mountain Smoke in mid-80s, most of the 90s, and up into the early 2000’s. He comes in and plays with us, usually when K.C. cannot be there, and he’s a great singing talent, great bass player, great lead player. So Roger can hand the bass off to him and play guitar when he doesn’t want to play bass all night. You know, guys can switch around. It can be a lot of fun. That’s what makes it, you know.
We showed up one time with five banjos (laughs). Cause Gary could play banjo, Tom could play banjo, Roger could play banjo, I can still play a little. But I’ve got arthritis in my hand, so it doesn’t make playing the banjo really good anymore (laughs). And of course, Billy plays great banjo. So we walked out with five banjos, a drummer, and a pedal steel player (laughs) and they were going “what is this?!” (laughs) and so we said “We must be in the wrong place. We thought this was a Dixieland deal. It’s not a Dixieland deal?” And they’re going “What are you guys doing?!” We said, “Well, watch this!” and so we played, I dunno, we played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and a couple different things with all sorts of banjos going off. The only things we had playing, that was a bass, drums, and a pedal steel. No guitars. All banjos (laughs).
"I can’t imagine my life without music in it one way or another. It would not have been very fulfilling for me if I hadn’t found some way to play something." - Hal Clifford
OKMA: So you really never know what to expect at one of your shows, do you?
Hal: Well, the real one not to expect is maybe Vince might show up or somebody (laughs). No, we try not to be ordinary. And we’ve become a little less crazy in our days. We’re probably a little more laid back. Our audience is a little more laid back. But we introduce new people to the music all the time and what’s going on. I made a comment [about] Mumford & Sons… young people think they invented the banjo.
OKMA: Yeah.
Hal: Well the Mumford & Sons played up in Guthrie. They came into Byron’s about midnight and we knew they were going to come over there. Two or three of them came over. When they got up there, Byron got them up and they’re playing like this and Billy picked up the dobro and set his banjo down. The kid [Winston Marshall] was up there that plays banjo for them was playing banjo. And he’s adequate. You know, that’s about all I can say for him. He’s adequate.
Byron would say “Let’s play this.”
And he goes “I don’t know that.” (laughs)
“Do you know this?”
“No.”
“Okay what banjo tune do you know? What do you play? Tell us and we can play with you.” And he played something… I don’t remember what he played. He played a little bit along like this and they were clapping for him. There were a bunch of people that came in that heard they were coming over there. A bunch of his… kinda the Mumford folks were up there in Byron’s music hall while he was playing.
So after they went through two or three songs, Byron said “Let’s do this” and they picked… I can’t remember what song they picked up and played. It was a real hot banjo tune. And he said, “I know you don’t know this, but here’s the key it’s in. So just kinda play along with us.” And he told Billy to pick the banjo up. Billy picked his banjo up, kicked this thing off at the speed of light, and this kid’s looking at him going “My God almighty.” He couldn’t comprehend how fast Billy was playing this song. The runs and the chromatics up and down the neck that he was playing. The crazy things he was playing on this. Byron, of course, these guys could play right along with him and it was fine. But it was kind of, you know, if you’re gonna think that you’re a banjo player, you kinda need to know where you are in the hierarchy of banjo players (laughs). Don’t make people think that you’re the answer – the second coming of banjo players.
Billy’s got a bunch of funny stories, cause he’s won virtually every banjo contest he wanted to play in the world. One time, he went to the World Banjo Championships and the guy he was playing with got so lost. I mean totally lost. It was off the beat. And Billy is playing along correctly and the guy is just lost. Billy reached over with his left hand and grabbed the guitar strings and stopped him. He’s still playing some, though, with his right hand and he goes, “Stop.” And he went back to playing, but he played the whole thing through without any rhythm with it. He played the rest of the song all the way through and they gave him third place in the deal even though this guy totally wrecked it. There’s nobody else that could have played the thing he was playing without some kind of beat going on with him besides his own and he did.
Bill Perry Sr.
His dad was Bill Perry Sr.. [He] was kinda the guy that started the Oklahoma Bluegrass Club and was an old fixture in the bluegrass deal. He and Charlie Clark and two or three others, Bobby Clark’s dad, those guys were the ones that really were the bluegrass scene when it was going on. Do you know the name Jerry Douglas? Do you know that name?
OKMA: I’m not familiar with it.
Hal: Okay, Jerry Douglas is a dobro player. He’s been with Allison Kraus since 1980.
OKMA: Okay!
Hal: He’s won instrumentalist of the year two or three times in Nashville. He was Billy’s brother-in-law for a while. And he played dobro a while with us. He was incredibly good. But you look back at those, the kind of players that came out of this. And one day they were in Nashville, coming back from Bill Monroe’s festival or some festival in Tennessee. And Billy said he’d really like to meet Earl Scruggs when they were coming through Nashville. And they got there later than what they thought. It was about 9:30 at night. And Bill Perry, he’s never met somebody that he couldn’t… (laughs) he just got the address for Earl’s house. And they drove over to Earl’s house and Billy went up on the door, rang the doorbell about 9:30 at night.
And Earl opens the door and says, “Can I help ya?” (laughs)
He said, “Yes sir, Mr. Scruggs, my name is Billy Perry. I’m from Oklahoma and I started playing the banjo listening to your banjo. I just wanted to meet you at some point and tell you how much I appreciate what you do on the banjo.”
And Earl said, “Well, come on in here, Billy!” (laughs)
He came in and sat down and started talking to him about it, picked up two banjos, handed one to Billy, and said, “You got your picks?”
He said, “Yes, sir, I do,” pulled his picks out of his pocket and he played banjo with Earl.
Earl goes, “Young man, you are something else, are you not?” This was when Billy was like 14 or 15 and they were winning everything you can win at banjo contests like the Boston festival and Bill Monroe’s festival.
"Billy Perry's Bluegrass Jam" album cover
All those guys I just mentioned that have all won national championships on an instrument and they were all kids. Vince Gill, Billy Perry, Bobby Clark, Jimmy Giles, Mike Perry, they all won everything. And they’ve got an album with Jerry Douglas on there. They’ve got an album on there with Ricky Skaggs. Ricky was the same age as all these guys growing up. We played a lot of shows with Ricky.
We would sit around the festival, and there were all these guys: Sam Bush (New Grass Revival). We were the guys playing with Sam Bush and those guys when everybody hated the music that New Grass Revival were playing. And they didn’t like what we were playing, which is new grass. We both got kicked out of festivals because we wouldn’t play old time Bill Monroe music. And finally it caught on. Sam Bush is one of the best players ever.
It’s been a lot of fun and it’s not over. I plan on playing until I’m 80 at least, another 7 years. We want to have a band that played 50 years. We’re being considered for the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame and some other stuff. So we’d like to hang around long enough to get in that.
We’re in the process, in fact I, along with Max Boydston and a couple other guys, we just finished visiting with our Lieutenant Governor and Kevin Stitt. We got it accepted by the Lieutenant Governor and funded by the Lieutenant Governor and we’re going to have the Oklahoma Music Trail. And it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna start being put together this year. Probably 125 or 150 spots in Oklahoma where music, not just one [genre] of music, but all kinds of music. Not just country music, but places like the Cain’s Ballroom, places like Leon Russell’s studio, and David, oh what’s his name. The drummer.
OKMA: David Teegarden?
Mountain Smoke performing at The Blue Door, 2006
Hal: Teegarden. David Teegarden. You know, places like that in Tulsa. And, of course, the blues museum over there. Woody Guthrie’s place, the stuff in Okemah and the Woody Guthrie place in Tulsa. Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, which is in Muskogee. Diamond Ballroom in Oklahoma City. These old places. Blue Door in Oklahoma City. Old roadhouses, homes of people. I mean, it’s all going to be across and you’ll get places where music is spread out. Where places... the old places came from. A trail kinda like the Mississippi Blues Trails, that’s what this is going to be. And it’s about to begin. We’ve been pushing it for twelve years.
OKMA: That’ll definitely be interesting.
Hal: Well, Governor Henry killed it (laughs). We had the thing ready to go and he fired the person that was heading up the tourism thing. And brought this person in and they wouldn’t hear about it. They decided they would do it on a website where you could just look at the website and you could see all the pictures of these things.
And we said, “Pardon me, but how stupid is that? Don’t you want people to come to Oklahoma to see it or do you want them to stay in Biloxi and watch it online? I mean, you’re Department of Tourism. That means people touring Oklahoma, not watching it on the internet.”
“Well this is a lot more economical.” That’s stupid.
So anyway, Matt Pennell didn’t think so. He loved it. The Lieutenant Governor, he thought it was sensational. He said, “You guys are the first people that have come in and can give me something that is almost going to fund itself. Every one of these towns is going to keep their little exhibitions up themselves. They want the people to come to their towns!” So anyway, that’s happening. It is finally happening.
OKMA: That’s really cool.
Hal: Yeah, it is going to be really cool. And I’ve been on the Mississippi Blues Trail. My son and I did that while we were also playing the Alabama Golf Trail. We’d go back and forth over to Mississippi and do some of the roadhouses at night while we played golf during the day.
OKMA: Your mission with the Oklahoma Music Trail aligns very closely with that of the Oklahoma Music Archive. But you’ve also assisted in helping usher in a new generation of new musicians through the 2017 concert series “A Chance to Play” to help raise funds for instruments in schools, right?
Hal: Right, we’re highly involved in that.
OKMA: Is that an ongoing series?
A Chance to Play concert at Putnam High School
Hal: Yeah, it is. Our goal is to get 1,000 instruments. We’ve been accumulating them and we’ve got Larsen Music here in Oklahoma City that rehabs the instruments and then we give them to the schools. One of the things that we’re going to do, not just this series we’re going to do next September, but every time we play in a city outside of Oklahoma City we advertise the concert. Part of that is if you would like to pass along an instrument that you have hanging on the wall, or in the closet in a case, or someplace, bring it with you. We’ll have it rehabbed. We’ll give it to a public high school youth person who wants to learn how to play an instrument. And you can come to our concert for free and bring somebody with you.
We are doing that in conjunction with BancFirst and BancFirst will let them drop an instrument off at any one of their offices. In case somebody calls us and we’re out somewhere, we tell them, “You can just go to BancFirst and tell them Mountain Smoke said to bring an instrument there and drop it off." And we’ll have somebody pick it up and bring it in here in Oklahoma City and have it rehabbed. And we generally try to leave it… if it comes from McAlester, well we put it to the McAlester band. Or whatever high school is in the area.
OKMA: Well, your life’s definitely changed with your first guitar that you got. What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t gotten an instrument?
Hal: I was still singing no matter what. So I’d probably, I don’t know. I was driven to learn how to play something. You know, to be able to sing along and play something that was playing. So I would have probably found something I could play, if it wasn’t a guitar. It probably wouldn’t have been a piano but something that was portable. I can’t imagine my life without music in it one way or another. It would not have been very fulfilling for me if I hadn’t found some way to play something.
OKMA: So outside of music, what other interests do you have?
Hal: Oh, I do lots of things. I’m an avid sportsman. I played all sorts of kinds of sports in high school and up into college. And I like all forms of athletics. Now I’m playing a sport called pickleball, which is kinda a reduced sized court… kinda like tennis except on a reduced court. I was a nationally ranked racketball player and won the state here three times in Oklahoma. And won a lot of national tournaments and things. So it’s kinda a follow-up for that — the racketball. And I’m playing that now real competitively and going to the nationals. I qualified for the nationals in June in pickleball in the age group of 70-75. So I do that and I hunt and fish a lot. And I’ve got two grandsons in Texas and I go to ball games down there at least twice a month. And I’ve got a granddaughter and a grandson here in Oklahoma City. So that’s kinda what I do. I like all things outdoors. And we try to go to festivals, music festivals, and other things like that. I like to go see people. Probably the next band I’m going to see besides my daughter is Zac Brown in Tulsa.
OKMA: Are there any aspiring Oklahoman artists that you’ve come across that we should be looking out for?
Hal: Most of the ones that I know about, probably other people are going to know about them. They come to The Blue Door. I’m not nearly as connected to that as my daughter is. So she knows all of those kind of folks that are songwriters and players. Off the top of my head, I don’t really know any that have not been heard of quite a bit. Just not been around them. I guess I’m not much of a source for that. I usually defer that to my daughter who already knows the people when I mention them to her (laughs). So probably not a good source for that anyway.
OKMA: I’ve just got one more question. Before we finish, what is one message that you would like to give to your fans?
Mountain Smoke, 1973
Hal: The music is a way of life for us. Music is fine singing by yourself, but it’s a lot more entertaining if you have somebody to listen. The fans that have been with us for years and years and the new fans that are just starting, if we can bring a smile to their face and give them some time of enjoyment listening to our music, then we’re fulfilled. And they will be lucky if they come to the concert if they have more fun than we do. We play and we’re having a great time. We hope that feeling is emanated to the people who are out there. We hope they receive the fact that music is meant to be entertaining, not anything else. We just simply want them to enjoy it. And if they’re not enjoying it, then we’re probably not doing our part to make it something that should be received. We hope they keep coming back. We’re going to keep playing until nobody shows up, I guess.
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Brand New Man - Mountain Smoke
Mountain Smoke performing "Brand New Man", originally by Brooks & Dunn, 2012.
