Perhaps it is fitting that one of the last recordings made by John Hartford, who died on June 5th aged 63, was of the fiddle tune Indian War Whoop. It was heard on the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers's film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as a darkly Bacchanalian accompaniment to a torchlit procession of lurching and capering hillbillies. But he may also be remembered as the composer of the 1960s love song, Gentle On My Mind, which was turned into a top-40 hit by Glen Campbell.
John Hartford spent most of his life making music with sinew and wit. In the rule-bound worlds of bluegrass and American old-time music, he cut an anarchic figure, yoking the ageless sounds of banjo and fiddle to genial songs about getting high and the decline of that country music institution, the Grand Ole Opry.
Growing up in St Louis, in the 1940s and 1950s, he was drawn to local bluegrass musicians, and began playing fiddle with them. But, after hearing Earl Scruggs, the virtuoso banjoist in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, he switched to banjo, and played with bands like the Ozark Mountain Trio and the Dixie Ramblers. His first jobs were as a commercial artist - he could write and draw with either hand, or indeed, both at once - and a disc jockey, the trade that led him, in 1965, to a songwriting contract in Nashville.
"I played a little bit," he said, "but I mostly just sat on a stool and sang my weird songs." He was signed to RCA by guitarist and producer Chet Atkins - "They thought I would be their Bob Dylan" - and, in five years, recorded six albums. One of them included Gentle On My Mind, subsequently recorded by several hundred artists and performed more than three million times.
Between 1967 and 1971, John Hartford worked as a musician and writer in Los Angeles, on TV shows fronted by the Smothers Brothers and Glen Campbell. He also played banjo on the Byrds' epochal 1968 album, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
In 1971, his face, wreathed by long hair and beard, and enigmatic behind aviator goggles, appeared on the cover of Aereo-Plain. This collection of his songs included Tear Down The Grand Ole Opry and Up On The Hill Where They Do The Boogie, on which he was joined by the fiddler Vassar Clements, guitarist Norman Blake and dobro player Tut Taylor. Unclassifiable then, the album has become a classic of what the music business now calls Americana; for the singularity of its maker's vision, it should really be filed as Hartfordiana.
Soon afterwards, he returned to Nashville and a quieter life in bluegrass - what he called "my success through smallness approach". He worked as a maverick soloist, playing banjo, fiddle or guitar, and clog-dancing on a sheet of plywood. He also pursued anew a boyhood passion for old riverboats, and spent several weeks a year piloting the Julia Belle Swain out of Peoria, Illinois. River craft, and their lore, inspired several songs, a book, and, in 1976, his Grammy award-winning album Mark Twang, which was adorned, like many of his records, with his gracefully handwritten sleeve-notes.
Over the next two decades, he continued to make quirky music. His collaboration with David Grisman and Mike Seeger on Retrograss, an album of pop songs rearranged for old-time or bluegrass band, produced characteristic jeux d'esprit, like Otis Redding's Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay, refashioned as a Jimmie Rodgers-style blue yodel. He also became immersed in the repertoire and styles of Kentucky and West Virginia fiddling, and made a couple of albums playing this sober, elegant music.
His cancer was diagnosed in 1980, but he was able to continue playing until this spring. For years, he had hosted "picking parties" at his house, and, in his last weeks, many friends continued the tradition by gathering to play for him in hospital or at home.
John Hartford: born 1937; died, June 2001