Flatpicking Professor Enjoys a Double Life : Bluegrass Guitarist Finally Found Room for His Music Amid an Academic Odyssey

Carrie Hellawell, a senior at Cal State Fullerton, wasn’t thinking about broadening her range of music appreciation when she signed up last semester for Speech Communication 101.

Associate Prof. Dan Crary certainly didn’t have anything of that sort in his lesson plan for the course, which presents an overview of how people communicate verbally, not musically.

For three hours each Wednesday afternoon, Hellawell and about 20 other students stepped into the world of Speech Comm 101, a windowless basement classroom where Crary, as he has for the past 15 years on the Fullerton campus, introduced students to the theory, ethics and philosophy of human communication.

Before the semester was out, though, Hellawell became one of the few students to step into Crary’s other world: the one where he leaves the lectern, takes off the conservative jacket and tie, and communicates with his fingers as one of the leading guitar players in bluegrass and traditional folk music.

Standing outside Crary’s classroom last month after a lecture on the barriers to communication posed by differences in culture and gender, Hellawell recalled how her boyfriend had come home one day with a guitar instruction book and tape that had her Speech Comm teacher’s picture on the cover. It was her first inkling that Crary had made a mark in ways that had nothing to do with blackboards and chalk.

When Crary played one of his rare Orange County concerts last month at the Shade Tree, a cozy stringed instrument shop in Laguna Niguel, Hellawell’s boyfriend invited her along--even though her taste in music runs to hard rock bands such as Bon Jovi and the Scorpions, not lone guitar pickers playing old-time tunes.

“My boyfriend really wanted to see it, and I thought it couldn’t hurt,” the business major said. “It was fabulous. I never heard anything like it. He had the 12-string guitar, which sounds so different, so beautiful. Even if it was folk music, it didn’t sound like folk music.”

In traditional folk circles, Crary, 49, is seen as an innovator who has taken basic bluegrass in unexpected directions by adding touches from such outside sources as Celtic and flamenco music. He first won recognition in 1969 as a member of a Kentucky band called the Bluegrass Alliance. Crary was hailed for helping to re-establish the flatpicked guitar as a prominent bluegrass solo instrument at a time when it had lapsed into a rhythm-keeping role.

“If you get well-known in this game, it’s being famous among a very few people,” says Crary. A tall, large-framed man with a balding, furrowed pate and full, graying beard, he looks like a cross between a mountain man and an ancient Greek philosopher. His voice is deep, resonant and smoothly modulated--amplifying his largeness and yet, in that careful modulation, conveying subtlety and restraint as well. It is a voice honed through years as a high school and college debater, a radio disc jockey, a seminarian and a classroom lecturer.

If fame in Crary’s folk “game” is limited to a small circle of admirers, at least they are far flung. He is a regular on the U.S. bluegrass festival circuit and he has toured in Europe, Australia and Japan. A few days ago, with the Cal State academic year over, Crary set out with his regular playing partners, fiddler Byron Berline and banjo player John Hickman, on a 2 1/2-week tour of Germany, Switzerland and Britain. Later this month, Berline, Crary, Hickman and their new bass player, Steve Spurgin, will take off again, this time for an extended tour of the South Pacific. The shows are part of a State Department program in which exponents of uniquely American music are sent overseas to act as cultural ambassadors.

Crary also has kept a steady profile as a recording artist. His fourth solo album, “Take a Step Over,” is about to be released on Sugar Hill Records, a North Carolina-based folk label. A fifth album, which Crary says takes more of a New Age instrumental slant, is already finished and ready to be released later this year. Crary also has recorded steadily with Berline and Hickman, prominent bluegrass musicians in their own right, with the partnership’s fourth album due for release this year.

Besides playing the folk guitar, for the past 10 years Crary has been expounding on it in a monthly instructional column for Frets magazine, which is read by about 30,000 aficionados of acoustic stringed instruments.

“Dan Crary is more than a musician,” said Phil Hood, editor of Frets. “The reason he’s a good columnist is he’s an aware person. He’s aware of the power of music on all levels. He tries to use his column to inspire and elevate his readers, to make them better players, and maybe make them see just how important music is and what a transforming experience music can be. Being aware of all the spiritual dimensions of music, more than just passing along technique, is what makes him special.”

For many years, Crary said, he was unable to justify music as anything other than a sideline.

“I bought into the ‘music is fun but it’s frivolous’ idea,” he said during an interview at his small home on a Fullerton street lined with jacaranda trees in full purple bloom. “It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I began to realize that what I had in my hand when I played the guitar was something important. Now I see what the traditional arts do for people, how it gentles them out and makes them nice to each other.”

Crary came from “a strong, evangelical Christian home” in a rural town in Kansas. “It was very good for me, and it was sort of a natural thing” to grow up interested in the ministry or some other work directed at helping others.

He was 12 when he was captured by the steely sound of a guitar twanging on a local country music radio program. At the time, Crary said, in 1952, the accordion was king among young Kansans, and he had never seen anybody play a guitar.

“It was a very esoteric instrument, and I’ll be damned if I know why my parents agreed to buy me one. I was into nothing. I was kind of a nerdish kid who didn’t have much going on. It may be that was the first thing I showed any initiative about.”

Crary played in local talent shows and joined a traveling troupe that played in orphanages and hospitals. From 1957 to 1960, he went off to study for the ministry at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. The folk boom was burgeoning at the time, and traditional folk music was having its moment as a trendy pop music form. The Gate of Horn, one of the seminal folk clubs in the country, was just down the street from Crary’s Bible school. But he kept his playing to himself.

“When you’re at Moody Bible College, you don’t go to nightclubs. I was still sitting around working out traditional arrangements to play for people if I ever got the chance.”

Crary spent the 1960s in an academic quest with no certain goal. From Chicago, where he decided that he was not cut out for the ministry, he went back home to major in philosophy and speech communication at Kansas University. Then he went after graduate degrees in theology at schools in Northern California and Louisville, Ky. It was in Louisville that he fell in with a band of bluegrass musicians, formed the Bluegrass Alliance, and began to make a reputation for himself as an innovative, hot-picking guitar player.

Crary recorded with the band, made a solo album, and appeared at folk festivals. Then he switched academic directions again, having decided that he would not fit in as a professor of theology.

“I’m very interested in ultimate questions, and I found my theological study to be fascinating and relevant,” Crary said. “But I also knew damn well that in conservative theological circles a guy like me who likes to play guitar, drink a little wine and read outrageous books didn’t fit in. I was disc-jockeying on a country radio station, and I was playing at the Red Dog Saloon. It was no (moral) problem for me--Jesus ate with publicans and sinners, and I played bluegrass for them. Nobody (at the seminary) gave me a hard time about it, but I knew that eyebrows were raised. Eventually I would have run into a conflict with it. So, at age 30 I started all over again, still resisting music.”

Crary spent the early ‘70s back in Kansas, earning his doctorate in speech communication but doing little to advance the initial musical reputation he had made for himself in Kentucky. “I figured that was it for any kind of professional playing, at least for a while. While I was at Kansas I did very little gigging except for very local stuff. For about 3 1/2 years, I was really out of the picture.”

During that time, Crary says, he finally realized that music was not just a diversion, but deserved a prominent spot in life’s big picture. The turnaround began when he visited friends in California.

“I was bitching and moaning about how hard graduate school was on me, and my friend, Luana, said, ‘Well, Dan, why don’t you just quit that and play the guitar?’ I gave my usual answer: ‘It’s not important, it’s not a helping profession, I have to do my bit for humanity.’ She shook her finger at me and said, ‘Dan Crary, don’t put down music. It makes people feel good.’ ”

Two months after the visit, Crary said, he got a letter from his friend’s husband, telling him that she had undergone surgery for cancer. “He wrote and told me that the first thing she asked for coming out of anesthesia was to hear my tape. That hit me profoundly. From that day forward, I changed my attitude about what place music plays in people’s lives. Every place I turned, there was evidence that art is important to people.”

With his Ph.D. completed, Crary began teaching at Cal State Fullerton in 1974. He also returned to high-level music-making, teaming with Berline, who had established his folk fiddle credentials playing with Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass. After relocating to Los Angeles, Berline also established some pop music credentials, playing with an influential country-rock band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and doing recording sessions for the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Rolling Stones. In 1976, Crary joined Berline’s Sundance band and went on his first solo tour outside the United States. He has continued to keep up a high musical profile ever since--as much as weekend gigs and summer tours can allow.

“My academic life still gets my greatest commitment in terms of time because it demands it,” Crary said. “I’m not going to do anything half-way. It’s just that I insist that I’ve also got a mission as a musician. Music comes out of my personal time, what other people spend as free time. Other people mow the grass or go to the ballgame. I pay someone else to mow the grass, and I never go to the ballgame.”

Crary’s schedule doesn’t allow him and his wife, a professor and consultant in the field of business communication, to take a typically casual approach to home life, either. “We have to be very careful about organizing our time,” said Crary, who has two daughters from a previous marriage. “We just negotiated which weekend in October we’ll shut down and have time for each other. It takes a good deal of care and negotiating with your partner for that to work.”

Crary’s life as a professor has cost him some opportunities as a musician. When Sundance landed a major-label record deal in 1976 and set out to tour to promote its album, Crary stayed behind because a new academic year was just starting. A few years ago, Crary had to pass up a State Department tour that took Berline, Hickman and a replacement guitarist on an intriguing itinerary that included dates in North Africa, Jerusalem and Katmandu.

Besides tearing at his time, Crary’s double life seemingly could leave him open to criticism from musical or academic quarters that he could achieve more by embracing one calling or the other instead of moving back and forth between the two.

“I used to worry about that issue,” Crary said. “But music does not know these distinctions. It selects lots of unlikely people. I’m an ambitious person, but if I never achieve more than the way my life is today, I have no cause for complaint.”

For the most part, he says, he keeps his two spheres separate.

In the world of bluegrass, where, Crary says, “there is an undercurrent that if you’re not a country boy, you can’t pick,” he tends not to dwell on theories that don’t have to do with playing the guitar.

Sometimes, though, Crary’s band mates will bring up his credentials for him. “Once in a while we’ll introduce him by saying, ‘Dan just got through writing another volume for the encyclopedia, so here he is,”’ Berline said. “Something corny like that.”’

In one sense, according to Berline, Crary can’t help fitting the image of an academic. “The old tale of the absent-minded professor, that’s sort of like Dan. He tends to leave a trail of his belongings wherever he goes. In Europe he lost his address book in a telephone booth. He left his briefcase lying in Alaska, right on a sidewalk in front of a hotel.” And one legendary night, when Berline, Crary and Hickman were playing at a club in Redondo Beach, “he comes in, opens his guitar case, and there’s no guitar in there. Luckily, Vince Gill (a noted country singer and guitarist) lived around the corner at the time, so we went and borrowed his.”

Said Crary: “I think my memory’s as good as anyone else’s, but I do have more things to remember than most people do, living two lives as I do. If I ever forget anything I get kidded about it.” To which, he said, his retorts are usually “unprintable.”

Aside from an occasional performance at college functions, Crary avoids introducing music into his scholarly life. But he does see ways in which being a traveling musician adds depth to his teaching.

“Music gets me places where I have communication experiences that are powerful and highly illustrative of some of the things I lecture about in class. To me, it makes perfect sense to be out there seeing how my in-class theories work in a different environment. These experiences let people know that I know what the hell I’m talking about--it’s not just book learning, but I’ve been out among live human beings in some far-flung places.”

Besides, Crary said, variety, rather than narrow specialization, is what colleges--and society as a whole--ought to emphasize.

“Maybe with a combination of influences--through education, some benign political influence that tries to free people instead of enslaving them, and the arts--maybe we can make some whole human beings. But a lot of people are so busy pursuing just one of these solutions.” In academics, he said, “our specialties have become so much more difficult and competitive, we don’t see the mission of a liberal education as we used to do. Our students still think of education as a union card instead of something that’s going to make them better human beings.”

Whether he is teaching guitar workshops or lecturing about the communication pitfalls that can disrupt a romance, the man who used to be known as Deacon Dan among his fellow faculty members keeps alive a zeal that makes him see a guitar as a spiritual tool, and a college lecture as a means to “make some whole human beings.”

Addressing his Speech Comm 101 class, Crary the professor was trying to hammer home some keys to happiness along with information of a more theoretical nature. “What happens when you have a partner who will not dance,” he asked during a discussion of communication barriers in romantic relationships. “I have a solution to that kind of relationship. Stop it. It pains me to say that. My game is teaching people how to dance. Our relationships are supposed to feel good and be fun. Human relationships are supposed to be productive and pleasant and nice, by God, and if they’re not, we have to do something about that.”

Teaching a guitar workshop recently at the Shade Tree, Crary also went beyond theory and technique. Running through his presentation was the idea that music is something to be shared with others, something that is properly enjoyed when it reflects the bonds between people.

“You can be a really terrific flatpicker and not get anywhere in music,” Crary told a semicircle of 11 students while sitting with a guitar cradled in his lap. “By and large, folks don’t want to listen to fast flatpicking. It bores ‘em. A 90-m.p.h. rendition of a fiddle tune, you can see them yawning, you can see them rolling their eyeballs at the ceiling. Once we learn to play some hot licks on the guitar, that’s just the beginning. Then you have to find a way to make some music that people will enjoy.”

And the place to learn, Crary said, is not huddled alone, but with other people. “We ought to learn the music the same way that all the pioneers and old-timers learned it,” he said. “Go to jam sessions. Watch people play. Be around players. Have your ears open. Have people show you things that are not written down, then go home and try them. Participate in music. It’s not learned out of books and tapes. It’s learned by being part of a community.”