Hartford has been delighting folks with his music all his life, but his first major recognition came in the mid 60s, when his mega-hit "Gentle on my Mind" earned him two Grammys.

It has become one of the most recorded tunes of all time, second only to the Beatles' "Yesterday," booting Hartford into the limelight and firmly establishing him as a major musical talent. He had regular television spots on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and "The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour," and in the early 70s he won another Grammy for his album, Mark Twang, featuring such river songs as "Skippin' in the Mississippi Dew," "The Julia Belle Swain," and others.

With all that success, Hartford could have become another rhinestone cowboy, but he remained true to his roots, sticking with acoustic instruments and the music he loved as a boy growing up in St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi. Like Mark Twain, the river is in his blood—it pervades Hartford's music and his writing.

"St. Louis is a pretty river-oriented place," Hartford explained in his soft Missouri drawl. "Captain Edgar Allen Poe (who pilots the "General Jackson") calls St. Louis the Nashville of the river industry because there's so much boat business there."

Hartford's fascination with the river and its riverboats began in childhood and never subsided. When he talks about it, his conversation is slow and rhythmical, like much of his music.

"I've always loved boats, and I've always loved the river," he said. "When I was in the fifth grade, I had a schoolteacher who was a fanatic about steamboats. In 1947 an old steamboat called "The Golden Eagle" struck a towhead in Grand City, Illinois. She managed to buy the pilothouse off the wreck and haul it here on a flatbed truck and put it in the schoolyard. Now, that made a great impression on me."

"In fact, my first choice of profession in life was not music—it was to be a steamboat pilot." He exercised that ambition early in life working as a deckhand. "There weren't many steamboats around, but I rode on a few," he said. "I wanted to go towboating. But the music just took over. The music was there and I just couldn't help myself...I remember I'd go out and work on the river in the summertime and I'd take a banjo with me and the music would distract me."

The Mississippi Valley Barge Line and the Midwest Towing Company both hired Hartford as a deckhand, and he worked the towboats hauling coal. "We shoved coal up and down the Illinois river between St. Louis and Lamont, and serviced all those coal loading docks all up and down the Illinois river," he recalled. We towed coal between Chester, Illinois and St. Paul, Minnesota on the upper Mississippi."

Hartford still loves the river, but the music won out. Now he can hardly remember how old he was or which instrument he played first in his long and versatile career.

"I guess it would be the mandolin and fiddle, maybe even the harmonica," he mused. " I was pretty young. My grandfather had an old fiddle he kept up under the coats in the house, and I used to get the bow out and saw around on it a little bit.

"Mom and Dad used to square dance, and I'd go along to hear the music and that'd set me off. I plunked around on an old mandolin that belonged to a great-uncle, and we had an old piano in the parlor I used to bang on," he said with a chuckle. "And we had a bunch of old song books."

Then, in the early 50s he heard Earl Scruggs picking the banjo.

"I had always loved the five-string banjo, and when I heard Earl Scruggs, it really set me on fire," he said. "So I got into the banjo, and things just kind of evolved from there."

Just as the rivers flowed around St. Louis county, the music flowed, too, and Hartford took advantage of it all, learning all the tunes he could on the fiddle and the banjo.

"There were fiddle players around home--Dr. Jimmy Gray, and Gene Goforth, and an old fiddle player named Jess Arthur. They were just people who played around the neighborhood. They didn't make records or anything."

Hartford was an avid listener, and he soon joined them, playing for dances and even getting paid. "I was pickin' the banjo before I was old enough to drive," he recalled. "They used to pick me up and take me to dances and stuff. I picked up the fiddle for square dances, and if another fiddle player there was better than me, I'd pick up the banjo. We used to play these little places all up along the north bank of the Missouri river between St. Louis and Washington, Missouri."

By the time he was 18, he was working almost constantly. "I worked a dance hall in south St. Louis Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights, and an after-hours club in Grand City, Illinois on Friday and Saturday nights after the dance hall closed. Then I was playing on the radio with Fiddlin' Willy, and on a radio show out of Wharton, Missouri, with Paul Turner and the Green Valley Ranch Hands. I mean, I was just jobbin' around about three, four, five different bands," Hartford said.

"I had a band with a boy named Paul Bridenbach--we called ourselves the Ozark Mountaineers," he chuckled. "We played on the Lighthouse Jamboree. The Missouri Valley Boys would come on after us and then an ol' boy who called himself Robby and his Ramblers. I'll never forget him--he had an ol' fiddle with his name on the side of it in aluminum letters. He had it plugged in and the letters would rattle every time he played. He had an old boy in his band he called Jumpin' Johnny McClaine. Johnny McClaine's big deal was he'd sing and then he'd jump up in the air, and then after that he'd get drunk and pass out, and so forth."

"We did the country music of the day, a lot of Webb Pierce and Carl Smith and Ray Price, stuff like that, and we did a lot of old-time stuff, a lot of old fiddle numbers, because Missouri's a real hot-bed of old-time fiddling. Everybody knew all the old fiddle numbers, so we did everything from "Leather Breeches" and "Wagoner" to "Walk Along John" and "Hamilton Iron Works" and "Wake Up Susan."

About that time the folk boom started to happen and lots of people began to look toward more traditional music. Hartford discovered a group of people in south St. Louis to jam with. Among the musicians was Doug Dillard, who later founded the popular bluegrass group, the Dillards.

Wherever Hartford played, they loved his music. "They would say, play some of that banjo band music like them there Flapps and Scrubbs guys play. Play some of that there Bill Monroe music...they called him Bill MUNroe."

Listening to Hartford recount his stories is like listening to his songs. He rambles along, with droll jokes interspersing the conversation. He began writing in high school when he discovered that poetry went better when he hummed a tune.

"They used to have these poetry things, and I found that if I sat down and just wrote to the melody of something, like writing a song, and then turned it in as a poem, it went pretty well with the English teacher," he said. "Later on—this was when folk singers were starting to happen, Bob Dylan and people like that—I started thinking to myself, why don't I just write stuff that just jazzes me, and not try to think about writing a song, necessarily, but just write? I started doing just that, sending stuff down to the Glaser Brothers in Nashville, and they liked it."

Hartford, his wife and his young son soon moved to Nashville, where Hartford got a job as a radio announcer, writing songs in his spare time at the station. "We decided we wanted to relocate to Nashville. Not being really successful in the music business where we were, we figured we could go to Nashville and not be successful and have more fun.

"There's a lot of people who would go to Nashville and if they couldn't be successful, they'd leave. And I thought, that's silly! There's so much good music there, why go back home and not be successful when you could stay there and have a much better time at not being successful."

That attitude pretty much sums up Hartford's philosophy of life, and that's what makes him such a favorite with audiences young and old. Indeed, a Hartford concert almost has the flavor of an old-time medicine show. On stage he takes turns singing, telling stories and dancing on the only electrified thing around—the small, amplified board he uses to tap out a rhythm, while never missing a beat on the fiddle. His original style, a mix of old-timey and bluegrass, is popular with purists, and his sometimes whacky lyrics get the attention of an even broader crowd. His wife Marie, usually accompanied by their young grandson, sells T-shirts and tapes at a table nearby. And they all travel around in a big, silver, converted Greyhound bus.

After 20 albums, most with major record labels, he's followed the path of many other musicians and started his own label, called Small Dog A-Barkin'. It came about because he wanted more control of his own music. A friend told him he could make more money, too.

"I had a record I wanted to put out and the label didn't think it was sales-worthy, but I did," he said. "So I thought, well, I'll just put it out on my own label. Sure enough, within six months I'd made more money off that one record on my own label than the whole time I was on Flying Fish, MCA, Warner Bros. and RCA. I said, oohh, wait a minute!

"Basically, what we're in now is like a truck garden," he says, enjoying his analogy. "I write the music, then I go in the studio and do a really good job of making an album with it. Actually, I now have more money to make the album. I take the music and manufacture it, then we load it in the truck and take it out to the highway and sell it. Right?"

He's released three albums on Small Dog A-Barkin', which are available through the mail and from a few distributors. Cadillac Rag, an album of fiddle tunes, was the first. Next came Goin' Back to Dixie, a blend of old time and original songs, and finally The Walls We Bounce Off Of, a solo album of off-the-wall songs with those wry lyrics that have become his trademark. Two new recordings are scheduled for release later this year, a fiddle album with Texas Shorty, called Old Sport, and one called John Hartford Live at College Station Pennsylvania.

The crowds at Hartford's concerts really respond to his witty, irreverent ditties, quirky tunes like "Boogie," perhaps his best known song. "Everybody wishes they could be up on that hill where you could boogie all the time," he explains, " but they don't realize that those folks stop once in a while."

Hartford's songs are sometimes topical, such as the cheeky "Sexual Harassment," which tackles the sticky question of just how friendly one can be, or "Going to Work in Tall Buildings," about entering the corporate world. But a more serious Hartford always remains the poet, penning truly memorable lyrics in songs like "I Love a Little Girl with her Hair All Down Behind," which evokes the gentle romance of a bygone era.

Yet Hartford hasn't confined his writing talents exclusively to music. His account of a riverboat wreck found its way into a children's book several years ago as a long poem called "Steamboat in a Cornfield," published by Crown, and Doubleday also published a book of his song lyrics. He also wrote and performed in "Banjos, Fiddles and Riverboats," a cable show for the Nashville Network.

A couple of years ago, Hartford even became a character in the long-running comic strip Gasoline Alley, by Jim Scancarelli. "I'd met Scancarelli out on the road and played some fiddle with him, and he just called me up one day and asked if he could put me in his comic strip. He came down to the house and took a whole lot of photographs and talked to me. He even let me help with the dialogue, so that I would actually be making an appearance.

"He'd call me and say, ‘Now, we've got such and such a situation here. What would you say and what would you do?' That way I was actually interacting with his characters. I enjoyed that."

And Hartford still works the river.

"I have a first class, unlimited tonnage pilot's license, and I work summers for Captain Dennis Trone. When I'm not working shows I go up there and work as a pilot and keep my hand in. I've done that since 1970. I play and pilot both."

There aren't many steamboats anymore, according to Hartford. Most of the excursion boats today are diesel, but there are still a few left. The "Julia Belle Swain," which he worked on for years, and wrote songs about, was recently sold. "I was on the ‘Julia Belle Swain' for 23 years," he said sadly, "and I miss her very much."

But that won't keep Hartford off the river. "Now I'm going to work on a boat called the "Twilight," a twin crew passenger boat that runs from Maclaine Island to Anyhow," he said. "And I'm heading down to New Orleans next week to put the "General Jackson," the Opry Land steamboat, in dry dock."

And we can soon look for another Hartford to join the musical ranks.

"Jamie (his son), who used to play with me, has got a record that's being produced by the same fellow who produces Dwight Yoakam. He's out in California and they're getting ready to put a lot of money behind him."

In the meantime, Hartford's happy in his Nashville home that overlooks the Cumberland River, where he can pick the banjo and watch the boats go by.

To order John Hartford albums,
write to Small Dog A-Barkin', PO Box 443,
Madison, TN 37716.