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Tuesday July 2nd, 2002
Jerry Douglas leads Dobro® into new era
by Walter Carter for gibson.com
Jerry Douglas' fluid lead lines, along with his lightning fast pull-on, pull-off technique, have brought the Dobro® out of the limited confines of traditional bluegrass and into mainstream music of all styles. He's currently leading his own eclectic band, touring behind his new Lookout for Hope CD and appearing as a featured member of Alison Krauss' band on the Down from the Mountain tour.
In the same way Douglas has continually advanced Dobro® technique and Dobro music over the past quarter-century, he's also advancing Dobro® design with the Jerry Douglas Signature Dobro®, made by Gibson's Original Acoustic Instruments division.
The JD model, introduced in 1995, is a work in progress, Douglas says. To fully explain it requires a quick lesson in recent Gibson/Dobro® history, which includes some misconceptions about Dobro® production at OAI and a few hard truths about past Dobro® production.
In the 1990s, the previous owners of the Dobro brand had left the door open for individual luthiers. "There were so many luthiers who came in and took over and filled the position of what the Dobro® had been," he explains. "Tim Scheerhorn, Paul Beard and those guys, they're building good guitars because they had the old Dobros® to work from. When Gibson bought Dobro® (in 1993), they made the same Dobro® they had made for thirty years. It just doesn't compete.
"You don't just buy a company from somebody and then you know how everything works. Gibson has proved that with mandolins, too. Mandolins sucked; now they're good. Banjos were bad; now they're good. The guitars are really good now, made in Montana."
Gibson had two choices to make the Dobro® competitive again, Douglas says. "They had to make their guitar better or change the insides and bring it up to date - which is what my model does."
Traditionally, Dobro® design has had a bit of a mystical element. The Dopyera Brothers designed it with a "soundwell" - a circular frame of laminated wood that surrounds and supports the aluminum resonator cone. Most 1930s Dobros have circular holes in the soundwell, but some have diamond-shaped holes and some examples don't have a soundwell at all. Some sound better than others, and it's not always possible to figure out why.
Whatever the secret is in the old Dobros, the soundwell system works well in a bluegrass setting, but as Douglas found out, Nashville session work was a different matter. "I realized after doing sessions that were really overproduced, that had thick drum tracks and electric guitars and really big bass, just a regular Dobro wouldn't cut through that stuff," he said. "You couldn't hear it."
Douglas' design does away with the soundwell and utilizes sound posts to support the top. A system of baffles shapes the sound in the body. "The Dopyeras, the only part of the body they worried about was the round soundwell that held the cone, the spider and the coverplate," Douglas said. "It was like a little speaker throw. My guitar uses the whole body like a speaker cabinet throws. Instead of bass ports, it's got a high-end region that's divided up into sections of tone, and it really works. It pulls in everything, moves the sound around, uses the whole body of the guitar.
"And also it has lighter tuners on it now. Tuners suck up a lot of vibration. The more mass there is in the tuner, the more vibration it's going to absorb. So we put Waverly tuners on it.
"That guitar's a work in progress, and I'm the guinea pig for the prototypes."
The main obstacle to overcome now with the Gibson/OAI Dobro®, Douglas believes, is the stigma - or more accurately, the misperception - of mass production. "There's this thing about mass production. People think everything that Gibson does is mass produced. They don't think that about the mandolins or the banjos, but they seem to take it out on the Dobros.
"The Dobros® are not mass produced. Nothing over there is. There are people working on them every day, working on the same guitar until it's done. It's not like you hit it with your sandpaper once and it goes to the next guy."
OAI's Jerry Douglas model has a different sound than virtually any other resonator guitar, and Douglas is always in need of different sounds. "I've got a bunch of guitars I play on shows," he explained. "Just because I don't play the Dobro® all the way through doesn't mean I don't like the Dobro. It's just that I'm playing them all because they all work on different songs. They all have a different voice."
On his records, it's the same thing. In addition to the JD, he uses non-resonator, woodbodied Hawaiian guitars, electric lap steels and two different Scheerhorns. "It's a matter of casting roles," he said. "Which guitar speaks in this register, in this key. I just tried them all. The new Gibson model is definitely not just a bluegrass guitar. That's the thing about this new style with those baffles and posts. It gives you different voices, it gives you more voices than the original Dobros® had. You move your hands to different areas and get a completely different voice."
Douglas' new CD has some bluegrass-rooted tunes on it, but it ranges far and wide musically, from a multi-tracked Dobro® choir doing Duane Allman's "Little Martha" to a nine-minute jam with mandolinists Sam Bush and Chris Thile playing all the rhythm (no drums) to songs with vocals by Maura O'Connell and James Taylor. It's not such a surprising mix, considering that he grew up listening to the Beatles and Flatt & Scruggs at the same time, but it will no doubt draw criticism from the traditional bluegrass crowd. Douglas is used to that. Every band he's ever been associated with has defied bluegrass tradition, starting with the Country Gentlemen and J.D. Crowe and the New South, continuing in Nashville with the Whites and Strength in Numbers, and currently with Alison Krauss and Union Station.
"I get clobbered sometimes by the traditional bluegrass crowd because I play on a bunch of country records or I play on pop records or something like that," he said. "I leave the clan for a while, but I think I can leave and come back. It's my personality that I'm hiring out. It's not my soul. It's not like that."
In recent years, Douglas was in such high demand for session work that he began to worry about his personality, if not his soul. Earlier this year he turned down sessions with Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band. "It wasn't because of them," he explained. "It was because whatever I did went into someone else's column. I was just hired. I just got tired of that kind of stuff, and also wanted to do what was in my head, the kind of music that I wanted to play and all the influences that I have - just all these things that go through my head.
"It was hard to figure out what you are, what kind of music you play, because you don't have time to sit down and play what you want."
Douglas shut himself in his office in the basement of his house in Nashville and spent two or three days recording everything he could think on a mini-disk. When he emerged, he had the ideas for Lookout for Hope, although it took more than a year to do the actual recording. It was worth the wait.
"Finally," Douglas said, "I'm hearing my tunes the way I wanted to hear them - not the way I had to play them."
The Gibson Jerry Douglas Signature Dobro® is here. For more information call 1-800-4GIBSON anytime or send us an email.
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