ASHEBORO — Don’t let Larry Davis’ Southern charm fool you:He’s not just any good ol’ banjo-pickin’ country musician.
Davis could have followed the tradition of his father, Glenn, playing the banjo. He “dabbled in music a little bit,”first getting a four-string ukulele, then one his father bought from a catalog for $39.95.
“I didn’t want to be a banjo player,”Davis admits. “I love to play the guitar. It’s just the sound of it. I listened very intently when Iwas growing up.”
But instead of pursuing music, he pursued Major League Baseball right out of high school at 17.
He played infield/third base for the Washington Senators, and the only time he got to the pros was during spring training with the Chicago Cubs.
“I should have made the majors,” he says.
But he registered at Pfeiffer University. It was the only college at which he could register, because by the time baseball season was over, school had already started. He stayed there about a year.
“Then I found out that there were a lot of athletes at Elon,” he says. “I went a semester at a time, dropped out and came back.” Finally he stayed, having bought his first electric guitar. But instead of focusing his studies on music, he majored in history.
“I love history. I’ve studied everything from the War between the States to the Titanic to outlaws,”he explains.
It was at Elon that he “got really dead serious”about music.
Upon being graduated, he moved to Asheboro to stay with his father and started practicing the guitar “literally eight hours a day.”
He began playing in the area, working with later-Congressman Bill Hefner when he had his own “country show,” and around the Charlotte area.
But his talent wasn’t truly discovered until he moved to the Salem-Roanoke, Va. area where Don McGraw’s Salem Records is based.
“There was a hotbed of musicians,”Davis says.
He got plenty of experience there, doing backup during sessions for The Statler Brothers and a host of other country singers who just came into town to record and leave.
Then he tired of the area and decided to move to Nashville, where he recorded at Queen of Sound Studio on Pine Street.
But, once again, his environment disappointed him. Not because he lost faith in the music, but because he lost faith in people.
Early one morning, after rehearsal, he’d decided to leave his equipment in the car. When he got back to it, someone had stolen it all. “That took so much out of me,”Davis remembers.
So he came back home to Asheboro, playing anywhere he could, including with Greensboro’s Burt Massangale and his band, which performed Top 40/Big Band songs. In the meantime Massangale’s son, Rob, began booking him at different events as a solo act.
“That started the solo career,” Davis says. “He’d book me here and book me there. He booked me for TV Guide … and I played about every festival in the South.”
Then he realized that playing strictly country and bluegrass music was limiting, something his father, who died in 1986, always warned him against. He decided to learn a variety of musical styles to play on the guitar. This would help open doors of opportunity, including playing at Kyle Petty’s wedding reception.
Though he grew up listening to bluegrass, he said he “backed off” of it in the mid-’90s because he wanted to concentrate on jazz, mariachi, flamenco and Big Band, drawing inspiration from an impressive roll of guitarists, from Chet Atkins to Jimi Hendrix.
“I listened to all of them and got ideas. Iturned the corners, as they say in the business, and developed a style of my own and people know it’s me,”Davis explains.
His style is “working on harmonics on the electric” or, in layman’s terms, playing melody and chord at the same time. He will take a standard tune, learn the melody and see how many chords he can work around the notes.
“But what’s so encouraging on a guitar is you can go out and … make constant improvements all the time,” Davis says. “I remember (deceased Grateful Dead guitarist) Jerry Garcia saying when he was 50 he finally discovered the neck of the guitar, (which proves) it takes years to learn the thing inside and out.”
Davis has had seven of his songs recorded, including “Love is the Greatest Thing,”“Heaven Gets Closer Every Day,”“Time to Go Out and Get Tired Again” and “Bahama Blue.”
He has a publishing company through BMIRecords and is a writer for BMI, his way of trying to put more quality back into the music industry because, he says, “the industry needs more George Gershwins.”
“Quality is the big thing they need now,” Davis says. “All these record companies, and Iwon’t call names, have just run anybody and their brother like a cattle drive and they all sound and look alike. They think, ‘As long as we can get one good hit out of him, it’s all right.’ That’s why there are not a lot of young musicians who want to study and learn music, just hear a CDfor an hour and want to play it. I’m not putting down the alternative groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson, but you’ve got some great entertainers and singers who’ve been pushed out, like Tony Bennett and Chet Atkins.”
Though Davis won’t reveal his age — he says age isn’t an issue to him because he’s got so many goals to reach — he is determined to play as long as he is in good health. He’s been known to frequent Spencer’s Escape the Daily Grind, and will give concerts at Greensboro’s Friendly Avenue Baptist Church July 30, and at Stratford Place in Winston-Salem Aug. 18.
“People tell me Ishould start singing more,”Davis says. “I don’t consider myself a singer, but it would add something to (the playing).
“You try to play as well as you can, and that depends on how tired you are, who you’re playing with … . But the biggest thing you’re concerned with is bringing yourself out of that amplifier. You want to keep things simple and beautiful.”
Maybe it’s a good thing Major League Baseball didn’t pick him up.
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