When Byron Berline was recording with the Rolling Stones for their album Let It Bleed, Mick Jagger called him over and told him it wasn’t sounding right.
Berline feared the fiddle parts he had just recorded in the Los Angeles studio where the Stones were working had not impressed and he was about to be fired, but Jagger had something else in mind.
“We think it’d be good if you went out on the street and recorded your part on the sidewalk. We’ll get a nice ambience,” he told Berline. The fiddler laughed nervously. “Well, whatever you want,” he replied with more than a little apprehension.
A microphone and a speaker were placed on the street and Berline stood on Sunset Boulevard to record a country version of Honky Tonk Women that became one of the highlights on the Stones’ classic 1969 album. Some of the street sounds had to be silenced for the recording. “There was a bulldozer out there moving dirt and Mick Jagger went out himself and stopped the guy,” Berline recalled. Fans have long wondered why a car horn can be heard on the song, which the Stones retitled Country Honk. The answer was simply that Jagger thought the honking horn reflected the spirit of the song and so it was left on the record.
At the time Berline had just left the US army and recording with the Stones elevated him to the A-list of session musicians. He became the man rock stars turned to whenever they wanted to add a little back-porch country flavour to their recordings. He played on Bob Dylan’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack and on records by the Byrds, the Band, Rod Stewart, Stephen Stills and the Eagles.
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When he played on Elton John’s song Take Me Back he asked the singer, “How country do you want this? Do you wanna be able to smell the manure on your shoes?”
“That’s exactly what I want,” John told him.
A three-time national fiddle champion, Berline was to country fiddling what Yehudi Menuhin was to classical violin. He appeared at Nashville’s premier country venue, the Grand Ole Opry, and his fiddle was heard on numerous traditional country recordings, including those by the Dillards, Emmylou Harris, Earl Scruggs and Tammy Wynette.
On screen he had cameos playing his violin in Bette Midler’s 1979 feature film The Rose and in Star Trek: The Next Generation, dressed in full Starfleet uniform. As a band leader he gave a start to several future country superstars including Vince Gill and released more than a dozen albums. His final release, Flying Fingers, appeared in 2016.
Almost as renowned as his playing was the Double Stop Fiddle Shop that he opened in 1995 in Guthrie, a quiet town in Oklahoma, with a population of barely 10,000. Despite its location, the Double Stop became one of America’s best-known music stores, where fiddlers from all over the world would drop by not only to purchase instruments but to jam in the back room.
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To Berline’s distress the store burnt down in 2019, destroying hundreds of irreplaceable instruments. “They all had souls and personalities,” he lamented. With financial help from the local community he was able to open a new venue across the street. The Double Stop Fiddle Shop and Music Hall survives him, along with his wife Bette (née Ringrose), whom he married in the 1960s, and their daughter, Becca O’Connor.
Byron Douglas Berline was born in 1944, in Caldwell, Kansas, and brought up in Grant County, Oklahoma, where his parents Elizabeth (née Jackson) and Lue Berline were farmers. His father, an amateur fiddler of some repute, taught him to play at the age of five. He won his first competition at ten, outplaying his father.
He made his recording debut playing old-time fiddle tunes on the Dillards’ 1965 album Pickin’ and Fiddlin’, but it was an invitation to play at the Newport Folk Festival that year that thrust him into the limelight. Bill Monroe, the godfather of bluegrass and its biggest star, was also on the bill and was sufficiently impressed with Berline’s playing to ask him to join his band, Blue Grass Boys.
Berline initially declined in favour of finishing his teaching degree in PE at the University of Oklahoma, but joined the band in 1967. He spent only six months with Monroe before he was drafted in to the US army, but it was long enough to record several songs that are regarded as bluegrass classics, including Gold Rush and Sally Goodin. On his discharge in 1969 he moved to Los Angeles and as a country boy in the big city, found that his rustic fiddle playing was in demand. He continued to live in California until 1995, when he returned to Oklahoma.
Looking back on his years as rock music’s go-to country fiddler, he remarked simply, “It’s worked out pretty well.”
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Byron Berline, fiddler, was born on July 6, 1944. He died of complications after a stroke on July 10, 2021, aged 77