Swingin' with a Western Fiddle
by Karen Boehler
It’s pretty clear country western singer-songwriter Charlie Daniels doesn’t know Junior Daugherty.
If Daniels had known Daugherty, the devil would have “went down” to New Mexico rather than Georgia and the fiddler who accepted the devil’s challenge would have been named Junior rather than Johnny.
While Daugherty doesn’t have a golden fiddle — not, at least, that he’ll admit to — he’s certainly in the running to be called “the best that’s ever been.”
The Otero County native, who now lives in Piñon, has a resume longer than his fiddling arm. It includes hundreds of fiddling championships, performances on four continents, seven solo CDs and collaborations with everyone from big name country western stars to classical violinists.
Daugherty was ranked as a top five fiddler nationally for 15 years. He was the New Mexico State Fiddle champion for eight years, the Southwest Regional Champion and is in the New Mexico Fiddler’s Hall of Fame.
He’s performed at everything from cowboy poetry festivals to Carnegie Hall and with people as diverse as Sir Yehudi Menuhin at the First American Violin Congress and Hawaiian fiddler Eddie Kamae.
While he admits to slowing down a bit these days — “I’m a little more particular about it than I used to be,” Daugherty says. “Somebody used to ask me if I wanted to go play, I didn’t ask where or how much, I just says, ‘Yeah. Let’s do it’.” — he’s still going strong at age 76.
He doesn’t play the honkytonks of his youth anymore but still competes as often as he can. He also teaches, judges, and performs.
My dad must have been very patient because I squeaked and squawked on that thing for years. And I had the fingering down because I’d played it like a mandolin. And finally one day he says, ’Dang, son, if you’d drag that bow across there straight it won’t squeak.’
Daugherty — his given name is Forrest but no one, even his family, knows him by that — was born in Alamogordo. He spent his youth in the Space City, growing up in a musical family.
Both parents played instruments and his grandfather and great uncle were fiddlers. Granddad Jasper, a blacksmith, also made fiddles and gave Daugherty his first one at age one. Of course, at that age, his arms were too short to play the full-size instrument correctly, so he eventually learned to play mandolin-style, picking out notes with a pick.
At age seven, Daugherty started playing the guitar. Right around the time he became a teenager, he began to think being a musician might not be such a bad profession.
He accompanied his grandfather and uncle Jason to a dance at the Women’s Club in Alamogordo, where they played for three hours.
“They asked him how much he wanted and he says three dollars,” Daugherty recalled. “And he just stuck it in his pocket and I was kind of irritated because he got paid and I didn’t. I only had two pair of nice Levis and when I got home I was getting ready to get back in the scrungies and I reached in my pocket and there was that $3. He’d stuck it in there. And I was hooked. I thought, ‘Hey! I could make money at this.’”
But it wasn’t until after a stint in the Navy and some time working at White Sands Missile Range as an electronic technician that fiddling became a full time job. He was working, going to college part time and playing music on weekends when a car accident made it impossible to work and he turned to music full time.
He never looked back.
By then, of course, the fiddle was his main instrument. He began playing seriously, he says, around age 16.
“I finally got where my arms were long enough to reach it,” Daugherty says. “I’ve got short arms.”
Apparently, having short arms was the only thing that didn’t come easy musically for Daugherty, although he says his parents did have to put up with a learning curve.
“My dad must have been very patient, because I squeaked and squawked on that thing for years,” he says. “And I had the fingering down because I’d played it like a mandolin. And finally one day he says, ‘Dang, son, if you’d drag that bow across there straight it won’t squeak.’”
With that bit of information on how to handle the bow, the toughest thing to learn on a fiddle, Daugherty was set. “After that, it was nothing but up,” he says.
Daugherty spent 35 years on the road. “I traveled all over the country,” he says. “Two weeks here and two weeks there.”
For most of that time, he played with the Mavericks, a group that included Tularosa cousins Elvin “Elbow” Jones, guitar; Bobby Jones, drums; Elmo Davis, a pedal steel guitar player from Alamogordo; and sister Ruby Daugherty on bass. The group also backed up what Daugherty called “a bunch of stars” before they were stars: names that might not mean much to today’s generation of country music fans but who were well known in their time.
Daugherty even turned down a chance to back up Faron Young once, noting “he only paid $75 a night and I could make more money than that on my own.”
Between road trips, he found time to marry and raise his family of three daughters, Penny, Voni and Tammi. While his home base was always southern New Mexico — Alamogordo, Cloudcroft, Mayhill, Mesilla Park — he lived in Hawaii for four years while working on a film about a famed Hawaiian fiddler. And, he’s performed in Scotland, Southeast Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.
He also spent time in the studio, recording on everything from vinyl records to eight-tracks to cassettes to CDs. Today, he’s got six CDs available. Most were recorded in Las Cruces at Gold Dust Records. His latest, though, Lights of Piñon, was recorded at Quad Studios in New York City, thanks to folks from the Ashokan Fiddle Workshop, where Daugherty has been teaching for 29 years.
Junior Daugherty has a trophy case filled with awards and honors from his 35 years of performances on four continents. A member of the New Mexico Fiddler’s Hall of Fame and eight-time New Mexico State Fair champion, Daugherty can still be found playing his fiddle on a Saturday evening at the Weed Cafe off Highway 24 on the southern Sacramento Mountains. Photos by Karen Boehler.
“This thing didn’t cost me a cent, to do that one,” Daugherty says. Organizers from Ashokan flew him to New York, where he cut 24 songs in 24 hours, after telling him, “We feel like we owe you.”
Teaching is something Daugherty is doing more of these days. Besides his summer stint at Ashokan, he teaches individuals and he’s proud of Daybreak Express, a Hobbs-based bluegrass group that’s winning awards on its own.
Cheyenne Hoyt and Clint Essary are Alamogordo cousins who perform in the band, both on vocals, guitar and fiddle. They were students of Daugherty’s and are showing they learned well. Hoyt won the bluegrass vocal championship at the 32nd Annual Santa Fe Old Time and Bluegrass Music Festival and placed second in the fiddle competition. She also recently competed at the Wickenburg, Arizona State Fiddle Championships, where she placed second in her category.
The group won the the Bluegrass Band championship at the Santa Fe festival and was selected by audition to be one of five entries to compete at the New Mexico State Fair Talent Showcase in Albuquerque.
Daugherty is currently teaching fiddle and guitar to three members of the Rabon family from La Luz and he sees promise there as well. Daugherty, who doesn’t read music, has several bits of advice for his students. “If you like a song, learn it. It may not be a good contest tune but don’t just learn contest tunes,” he says. And, he wants his students to find their own style.
“I try to tell them, don’t copy me. You don’t want somebody saying, ‘Hey, you sound just like Junior Daugherty.’ You want them to say, ‘Oh, I know who that is,’ from your style. I say, get your own style. Listen to me. Listen to whoever you like, then put it all together and you’ll have your own style.”
Daughtery’s style is what he calls ‘southwestern,’ which he says is a lot fancier than traditional fiddle music. “You add a bunch of notes and it’s the same tune,” he says. But while his music adds notes to the traditional songs, he says today’s youngsters are even fancier, playing what he terms ‘progressive’ fiddling.
“Some of these kids are adding so much to these breakdowns, these old breakdowns, that you don’t even recognize it any more,” he says. And while he’s impressed with many of the younger generation, he says maybe they’re going too far.
“I’m going to play as long as I can,” he says. “Somebody asked me a while back, ‘When are you going to quit traveling and playing?’ And I says, ‘I’ll probably die that day’.”
“I believe when you get to the point where you don’t recognize the tune, you’re changing the tune itself. I think that’s too much,” he says.
Daugherty will keep playing his style and that’s fine for his legion of fans. Playing one October Saturday night at the Weed Cafe, Daugherty drew rave reviews. “He has a tone to his fiddling that was touching my heart,” says Judy Wagner, a waitress and cook at the cafe. “He has the most pure tone. I think he’s fabulous. And he’s a gentleman. I can see why he’s so well known.”
“I think he’s incredible,” agrees Sheila Fry of Sacramento. “Really incredible.”
“I love fiddling and he’s fantastic,” agrees Karen Grindstaff, of Lapierre, Michigan. “I really enjoy listening to him play.”
Daugherty’s second wife Judy — both were widowed and have been together for several years — has seen the reaction to his music.
“When I go anywhere with him, I can see how much people admire him,” she says. “And I’ve heard stories of the things he’s done and the places he’s been. All over the world.”
While Daugherty undoubtedly has his critics, they’re few and far between. Until someone tells him he can no longer play, Daugherty is going to keep drawing his bow across the strings.
“I’m going to play as long as I can,” he says. “Somebody asked me a while back, ‘When are you going to quit traveling and playing?’ And I says, ‘I’ll probably die that day’.”
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