Rodney Dillard and his brother, Douglas, grew up on a farm in Dent County, raised by parents who loved music and passed that love on to their sons.
Music eventually shaped the boys’ lives.
“Doug and I got into the music because my dad played the fiddle,” Rodney Dillard said in a telephone interview last week from his home at Branson, an interview mixed with memories, insights and a lot of humor. “Mom and Dad gave him a banjo, and I ended up with a guitar, and we just started playing different places and learning the music.”
The two loved bluegrass music and over the next few years they met other people with similar appreciation of that genre, people who would eventually join them and help them.
“In a nutshell, that’s how it all started,” Dillard said.
The Dillards will be at the Pickin’ on Picknic at St. Clair this weekend, scheduled to perform 6 p.m. Friday. Phelps and Dent countians interested in attending can find out more by going to pickinfestival.com.
He went on to Southern Illinois University on a couple of scholarships, and brother Doug worked as an accountant for a company.
“And one day I said, ‘Douglas, this college stuff is not for me. I’m not comfortable with it. I want to go do something about music Let’s go somewhere. And he said, ‘OK,’” Dillard said.
They knew a local school teacher named Mitch Jayne, who often played the bass with them.
They also had met, through the music, a mandolin player named Dean Webb, who was from the Kansas City area, but who played music with them frequently.
In fact, the Dillard brothers and Webb recorded music in hopes of making an album. When they played the recording for Jayne, “he said, dadgum, and sent it to his sister who worked for a big production company in Hollywood.”
That soon led to relationships with a couple of managers out there.
“So, we decided, well we’re done. Mitch quit his job; Doug quit his job. I sold everything we had, and we took off in Dean’s ’55 Cadillac with a trailer and headed for California.”
They took off right after Thanksgiving.
“It took us three months to get to LA,” he said. “We worked our way across. We did all kinds of odd jobs.”
They got to California in time for the folk-music explosion.
“It was nuts,” Dillard said. “We walked into a place that is called the Comedy Store now, but back then it was one of those big folk gatherings that drew all the intellectuals. When we first walked in there, somebody came up and asked, ‘What do you think about the existentialist movement?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I was raised Presbyterian.’”
That first night, he said, “We actually played that night in the lobby and the guy said, ‘you can’t do it there, do it on stage.’”
So, they did, and as it happened, there was a producer in the audience, a producer later responsible for The Eagles and The Byrds. With his direction, the four young men from Missouri were soon signed to record for Electra records.
“There was a blurb in Hollywood Variety about these weird-looking guys from the Ozarks who play this funny music signing with Electra,” Dillard said. “Well, Andy Griffith was looking at a script called ‘The Darlings Are Coming.’ He told someone, ‘Have them boys come over.’”
The boys went over to Desilu Studios to audition within weeks of their arrival in California.
“We got halfway through a number and they said ‘That’s it.’ We thought they were throwing us out,” Dillard said.
It turned out they got the job as The Darling Family. Denver Pyle played the father, Maggie Peterson played Charlene and the four Missouri boys played music they had written, such as “Dooley,” a catchy song about a real person the Dillards knew, a song that rhymes hollow, swallow and dollar.
“We did one episode, and they had so much response that we did one a year for six years,” Dillard said.
They did much recording, much television and much touring over the years.
“It’s been a very, very interesting career,” Dillard said.
In some ways, it’s an unexplainable career, for events seemed to have fallen into place quickly, but Dillard said, “a lot of things happen sometimes because of where you are, but also a lot of it is how you present yourself with people. Mitch and I did it with humor back them. I was the foil ,and he was the straight man. We had this comedy going on which helped to sell the music because a lot of people didn’t know what bluegrass was.”
They worked their way into big clubs and venues.
“Bill Cosby opened for us for two weeks in Cleveland, Ohio,” Dillard said.
The Dillards went on to record many albums, and Rodney Dillard led a broadening of the music with the release of a project called “Wheatstraw Suite.” Because of that and other work, The Dillards were credited by Rolling Stone magazine with helping to found country rock music.
The personnel have changed over the years, and Rodney Dillard is the last of the original four members. Mitch Jayne died in 2010, Doug Dillard in 2012 and Dean Webb in 2018. Rodney now performs and records with his wife, Beverly, and other musicians.
“I’ve been in Branson now 38 years. When I left LA, I left Hollywood, came back home, and then I went to Nashville,” he says. “Earl Scruggs and I toured together for a while. Well, then I came to Branson and I had a show at Silver Dollar City in the nighttime at Echo Hollow for seven years, I think. I worked with Jim Stafford up here at his show for a couple of years and then I did my own show up here for one summer.
“Then I sort of got the road itch again after I raised my two kids, I was ready to go back out and see people I hadn't seen in a while, some of my fans, so I work when I want to. I’ve been blessed enough to do that.”
Dillard, 79, said he has a great band, some musicians from Nashville and some from North Carolina.
“So, we all just meet up and do Dillard stuff off all the albums over the years, including the new one.”
That new one, “Old Road New Again,” came out just a few months ago, in 2020, and included guests from other genres, as well as bluegrass musicians such as Ricky Skaggs, Don Henley and Sam Bush.
“Bill Van Dirk produced this one; he’s got 13 Grammys. He’s produced a lot of stuff,” Dillard said of the album that is much in the vein of Wheatstraw Suite.
Asked if he ever tires of singing “Dooley,” Dillard said he does not.
“I’m very fortunate and blessed to be able to sing that song,” he said, as well as “There Is a Time,” both of them written by him and Jayne and performed on the Griffith show. “Both of those songs have been recorded by a lot of people, and I enjoy hearing how other people interpret the song. I love the way Alan Jackson did ‘There is a Time.’”
Dillard said he is fortunate now to be able to select dates and venues where he wants to perform.
Nowadays, also, Dillard said, much of his life is spent with his grandchildren. No doubt, he is shaping their lives; for Dillards, it seems, family has always been important.