John Dilleshaw

Calling John Dilleshaw a bandleader or guitarist doesn't seem quite enough, as fronting groups named Seven Foot Dilly & the Hot Pickles or Dilly & His Dill Pickles seems more like a sheer act of courage, unless one is playing table to table in a deli. Bear in mind, however, that this was the '20s and '30s, the eras of commercially recorded string band music, and even a group that didn't have a corn pone name would wind up acquiring one by the time the instruments were back in the cases at the end of a recording session. In this case, the group's name was based on long John's height, as he measured six-foot seven inches in his socks. As for the pickles, they were a bunch of hot hired fiddlers and a father and son playing tenor banjo and bowed bass. Combined with the leader's rocking, bluesy guitar style, it was a remarkable variation on the basic string band sound that left fans of this genre wanting to know more about this man. It is fortunate that listeners had Dilleshaw around at all, considering that he, his mother, and sister were the only survivors of a typhoid epidemic that totally decimated the population of one section of north Florida in 1912. They moved south to Hiram, where his mother taught school and Dilleshaw used what would be skilled musical hands for hunting and farming. In the span of a couple of years, trouble struck again with first the typhoid coming back to claim his sister and then Dilleshaw shooting himself in the foot in a hunting accident. This seems like a major tragedy, but it is actually on the minor scale in terms of injuries for members of string bands of this era. (For further information on this fascinating, slightly gory subject, see the entry on fiddler Lowe Stokes). In this case, it led to Dilleshaw becoming a guitarist, as a fellow...