Early in March of 2009 I joined my first bluegrass band. I have always enjoyed playing bluegrass, but it was always sporadic and sometimes part of what Bois d'Arc Bottom was doing. In my earliest years of banjo playing, I traveled most of northeast Texas with Joe Julian, J.T.Bryan, Ross Whit and sometimes Stuart Anderson, mostly attending Texas Fiddle contests and playing Texas fiddle music. I always felt that I lacked true experience in playing REAL bluegrass banjo. Now that I'm in a real bluegrass band, I'm playing dobro all the time! Here's how that came about...

I have known most of the members of "Hard 2 Git" for a pretty long time. I can remember me and Gary Moreland playing at PJC in the mid 70's and Sam Bolton was on the same program. I usually ran into Sam at one of his convenient stores in Paris (BoMart). And, over the years I have shopped at Village Jewelers, owned and operated by James and Anna Martin. James used to have the band, "Simply Gospel." I remember several years ago hearing that Stuart Anderson had joined the Hard 2 Git band as their banjo player. I was surprised that he had joined a Paris bluegrass band.

About a year ago, Hard 2 Git's regular dobro player, Jonathan Perry, moved out of town and left the band dobro-less! Jonathan also maintained the website for H2G. Since I had run into H2G several times at the Lake Bonham Hoedown as I played with Joan Kelton, James happen to ask me if I knew anyone that could build a website. I told him that I had designed a few and might could help out. From that conversation, I became the webmaster for H2G.
One evening James asked me to come over to his home so he could settle up with me on the cost of the website work. When I got there, Debbie and I sat down in their living room and visited for quite a while. All of a sudden James said, "Now, here's what I really wanted to talk to you about." He told me that the whole band had agreed on asking me to join Hard 2 Git as their new dobro player. They also wanted Debbie to be a big part of the band. (Maybe she will blog about the "fun" she's had with H2G!)

Since joining H2G in March, we have played in Lone Star, Pickton, Bonham, Tom Bean, Paris (FBC and Cowboy Church), Sulphur Springs and Mountain View, AR. We usually practice once a week at the Martin's in Paris or Stuart's home in Commerce. Our schedule of shows can be seen at http://www.hard2git.com/ .