Jerry Douglas

Jerry Douglas grew up in Warren, Ohio. He has been compared to such musical giants as Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker for his innovations on the Dobro, an acoustic resonator guitar played with a slide. His father, John, who had emigrated from West Virginia in search of work, was a steelworker who played bluegrass. As a boy, Jerry began performing on an acoustic guitar with his father’s band on weekends. When he was 11, Jerry Douglas fell in love with the Dobro when his father took him to a Flatt & Scruggs concert. Uncle Josh Graves’ Dobro playing inspired the boy to devote his life to the instrument. “It seemed to me that he was getting as much emotion into the voice of his guitar as the singers were getting into their vocals,” Douglas recalled. “I couldn’t go to sleep that night. That sound was echoing in my mind, possessing me. It was not a question of whether I would own one of those guitars. The question was how soon.”

As soon as he graduated from high school, Douglas became a touring professional musician. In 1973, the joined the bluegrass band The Country Gentlemen. The next year, he joined J.D. Crowe & the New South, which was taking the music in a new direction. Douglas won his first Grammy in 1983 and was the top Dobro player on Nashville recording sessions during the 1980s.

Douglas collaborated with producer T Bone Burnett on the soundtrack for the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and appeared in the movie, playing with the Soggy Bottom Boys on “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” He has played with everyone from jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli to Ray Charles to classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and has written an opera that has been performed in Italy. In 1998, he began performing with Alison Krauss & Union Station, which gave him time for other projects, including fronting his own band.

Asked about his expansion of his instrument’s role, Douglas said, “I didn’t know that it was a limited instrument. No one told me it was, so I assumed I could play whatever I wanted to play.” That ranges from nimble solos to unobtrusively accompanying a singer, as he told NEA interviewer Mary Eckstein, “I can play harmonies against a vocal to complement or supplement a singer. I try not to distract from the vocal but to add to it. I think that it’s an art form to stay out of the way, to be subliminal in a way and to enhance whatever the vocalist is saying and trying to put across.”

In response to a question from Eckstein, Douglas offered some advice to young musicians beginning their careers, “When you reach a plateau in your playing and you think you'll never learn anything else, that’s when it starts to get really hard. And that’s when you just have to keep playing a lot. You have to play through those plateaus, and eventually something will push you on to the next level. You need to really turn it on and play as much as you possibly can because something is going to jump out at you that's going to send you in another direction. Your development never ends.”