Tim Graves, of Lebanon, TN, is a highly revered bluegrass bandleader and dobroist. His career has stretched over four decades, and he currently leads the band “Tim Graves and the Farm Hands.” He previously served long stints playing with top bluegrass performers such as Wilma Lee Cooper and the Osborne Brothers. He has been awarded Dobro Player of the Year in Bluegrass 16 times. In 2015, he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. Such excellence is a family tradition, as Tim is the nephew of pioneering bluegrass musician Josh Graves, the longtime dobro player for the legendary Flatt and Scruggs band. Tim considers the style he plays today to follow a direct line to this family technique. “I am the nephew of Uncle Josh Graves,” Tim explains. “He gave me a dobro when I was 14 and a stack of LP records. He would come to my home to see his brother which was my father. He taught me the correct way to hold the dobro and correct hand position and correct forward and backwards rolls. He also taught me the slants that are imperative to his style of dobro. I learned the techniques and have been playing Dobro for 47 years now.”
As part of the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program this year, Tim will teach his distinctive dobro style to young musician Amelia Brown. After several years of training on other instruments, Amelia discovered a new interest during the pandemic. “For the past six years, I have taken music lessons for guitar and competed in bluegrass competitions. At several of the competitions, there is a dobro category. During Covid, my parents purchased me a dobro, and I picked up taking lessons on the dobro because I was interested in the sound.” As her knowledge of the dobro developed, she become particularly interested in this older bluegrass playing style. “It will be an honor to work with Mr. Graves because he can teach me much like Josh Graves. As a musician, I aspire to learn how to play a song from just chords and become a better player of a variety of styles. In addition, I truly want to learn how to play like Tim Graves and Josh Graves. Tim Graves learned directly from Josh Graves.”
Both Tim and Amelia realize that maintaining this particular style as part of the active bluegrass community is important. “At many of the bluegrass competitions I attend, less than 3 or 4 people compete in the dobro category, and rarely anyone under 30,” Amelia describes. Tim, especially, has strong opinions about the contemporary teaching of the dobro. “This style of traditional dobro is definitely endangered. No new dobro player is taught slants, or the rolls, it all just notes, hammer on’s and pull offs. I can play that style, but I feel that the soul and heart of real dobro playing is in the rolls and slants and fills behind the singer of a song. The soul of dobro is going to go by the wayside unless we get young players to realize that it’s not how many notes you play that makes the difference, it’s how you place the notes in the song that does.”
