Eddie Pennington: part-time thumbpicker is a full-time legend
What makes Eddie Pennington so good? What made him the man often recognized for helping to keep the unique sound of thumbpicking alive?
He laughs at these questions.
“I don’t even know if I’m the best in my family,” he says, noting his son, Alonzo Pennington, a multi-talented “can play anything” guitarist, has won more thumbpicking national championships than anyone and that his grandson, 21-year-old Caleb Coots, might be the best traditional thumbstyle guitarist out there.
Thumbpicking is a unique style of guitar playing where the thumb makes the rhythm while the fingers pick the melody. It was first popularized by Merle Travis in the 1940s and later by Chet Atkins. Guitarists like Pennington and his family have been carrying on the tradition.
Pennington’s resume as a musician and entertainer is impressive. He has won the National Thumpicking Contest in Mountain View, Arkansas, retiring from it in the 1980s after winning twice in a row. He has received the National Heritage Award and the Kentucky Governor’s Award in the Arts. He was inducted into the National Thumbpickers Hall of Fame in 2003, the Old Time Country Music Hall of Fame in 2011 and has an honorary doctorate from Western Kentucky University.
Pennington has played at the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the Kentucky Derby Day Breakfast. He played at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. His music was even featured on the Kentucky Educational Television show Kentucky Afield. He has played in France and across America, but he was never a full-time musician—instead, he had a day job as a funeral director and eventually was elected Caldwell County Coroner for five terms.
“I left the funeral home because of my health; I was sick of it,” Pennington says with a laugh. “That’s sort of where my music career started. I met these people from Washington, D.C., and they had me up to play at a big festival or two. I was fortunate enough to get out and play some big places.”
Now 70, he has retired from the coroner’s office. While he says he received some “nice” awards over the years, he felt he had to stay grounded back in Princeton, where he lives with his wife, Penny.
“You know, I toured a whole lot of this country. I never did completely trust music with my living,” he says. “As coroner, when I would be off, most of my stuff that I played was, you know, three- or four-day stuff, maybe two days’ travel, and then I’d get back to being the coroner.”
Pennington also did commercial sharpening—saws, band saws and carbide tools—to make ends meet when he came off the road, a curious choice for a person who has, arguably, priceless digits at the end of his hands.
“I get it, but sharpening (a saw) is a whole lot different than running one of them,” he says, chuckling. “I had respect for those saws, and I was very cautious.”
The influence of Mose Rager and an unintended contest
“I was 18 before I knew what Merle Travis was, or anything,” Pennington says.
A fiddler since he was young and having recently acquired a secondhand guitar, he was listening to a recording of an interview of Travis and heard Travis say he was influenced by Mose Rager, who only lived about 20 miles away from where Pennington was living at the time in Nortonville.
He says he drove to Drakesboro in Muhlenberg County, found Rager’s home, knocked on his door—and everything changed.
“I was over his house, just me and him there, and he showed me some chords in two or three different songs that I’ve always really appreciated,” Pennington says. “I appreciate everything he did … he was the one, really, that I think put it all together, that made it count. That didn’t mean greater ones came after him, but Mose was the foundation of it.”
Pennington says he was walking on air after that. And a whole lot of the thumbpicker he became can be traced back to Rager.
“You know, it hit me heavy the first time I saw Mose Rager play,” he says. “I knew I had met the master. I was so excited, I went home, I couldn’t even sleep thinking about him. And then I got to studying about Merle Travis.”
Years later, Pennington had gone from being a student of thumbpicking to something more, again, through a Rager connection. At Rager’s funeral, he says he heard some men talking about judging a national thumbpicking contest in Arkansas. Thom Bresh, Merle Travis’ son, was doing a workshop there. Eddie was interested and a little confused about what was going on, but it really worked out.
“Well, I thought you had to enter the contest to go to the workshop,” he says. “So, anyway, I entered the contest and believe it or not, I was lucky enough that I won it.”
After the national title, Pennington’s name was out there. He says the people he met, the contacts he made, were life changing.
“(Thumbpickers) weren’t organized when Mose died, you know? It really wasn’t organized when Merle Travis died,” he says. “Merle and Mose, they don’t have any idea the impact they’ve had on thousands of players around the world, not just over here in the United States or Kentucky or Tennessee, but around the world. Since the internet’s come to be, I get inquiries from people all the time, all over the world, about Mose Rager.”
Other influences
Pennington says he owes a debt to all kinds of people over the years for showing him something on the guitar, for being a friend or for just sitting down with him and playing. He names Gene Francis, who let him play at his square dances when he was young. Pennington first met Francis on a jaunt through north Todd County, when he ended up at a house playing with Rager, Francis, the late Odell Martin—“a once-in-a-thousand years guitar player,” Eddie declares—and a couple of country music star Donna Fargo’s band members.
There was musician Freddie Russell, a great friend Pennington loved to play with; there were the people who helped run the Merle Travis Appreciation Society and those who volunteered and donated to get the Merle Travis Music Center constructed in Powderly in Muhlenberg County.
“There was always somebody better, when you’ve been around some of the best, like Odell Martin and Paul Yandell and Charlie Murphy,” he says. “I, after Merle died, really applied myself to that type of music. That is what I was best at doing.”
A fall and the future
Late last year, Pennington “took a little fall,” as he put it, but got a massive hematoma on his leg that required surgery. “Well, right now they say I’m sort of with a standstill with it,” he says. He wears a drainage pump on his leg and eventually may require more skin grafts.
But the old master says he still enjoys picking, though he doesn’t get to do it as much as he would like. This summer, he was getting ready to play at a jamboree in Cadiz with his son, his grandson and his friends and was looking forward to it.
He says he enjoys being onstage, just focusing on hearing the tune in his head.
“What goes through my mind mostly is … my fingers sort of can find (the tune) and it comes more automatic than it does if I’m thinking it out,” Pennington says, then chuckles. “When I’m playing, I just try not to think too much.”
