Patuxent Records keeps barroom bluegrass alive in Maryland

By Geoffrey Himes

Posted 7/14/2010

Both Patuxent Music, the record label, and Patuxent Studios, the studio, are housed in a long, two-story, white-stucco storage area. Up in the attic are cardboard boxes full of CDs that demonstrate the label's breadth. The roster is dominated by bluegrass artists--both legendary old-timers such as Frank Wakefield and the Stonemans and up-and-comers such as Darren Beachley and Tatiana Hargreaves. Also represented are the blues, jazz, and roots rock.
Downstairs in the dim light of the control room, leaning back in his padded, black producer's chair before the big digital board is Tom Mindte, the founder/owner of both the studio and label. The 53-year-old musician is a big, round man in a black polo shirt, amber-frame glasses, graying red hair, and a soft voice. His enthusiasm for American roots music can be seen in the photos of Duke Ellington, Bill Monroe, Louis Armstrong, and the Stanley Brothers hanging on the walls. The most significant picture, just above his left shoulder, is a black-velvet painting of Buzz Busby.
In the '60s and '70s, when Mindte was growing up in Rockville, the Baltimore-Washington area was the center of the bluegrass world, and Busby was one of its leading lights. The pudgy mandolinist played fast and hard in the style of the new urban bluegrass that the Appalachian immigrants had brought to the two cities. Busby specialized in applying the fast tremolos and double stops of fiddling to his mandolin playing. Mindte still remembers the first time he heard Busby leading his band at a Greek restaurant in Rockville.
"'That's it,' I told myself. 'That's the kind of mandolin I want to play,'" Mindte recalls. "I started to learn his style, first from his records, then from jamming in the parking lot with him after his shows and eventually by joining his band. Buzz was the best at that barroom bluegrass that grew up around Baltimore and Washington--and in Dayton and Detroit too. You see, down South the musicians played in church halls and school auditoriums, but up here they played in bars and the songs changed accordingly. Instead of just playing those nostalgic songs about the cabin on the hill and mother's grave, they started adapting drinking and cheating songs from mainstream country and arranging them for bluegrass bands.

"Then they started writing their own songs like that. How could they not? These were tough places full of tough people. I remember going to those bluegrass bars in East Baltimore--the Sandpiper Inn, Club Ranchero, Cub Hill Inn, the 79 Club. When you walked in the door, you walked onto a floor of sticky beer and into a cloud of cigarette smoke. I thought it was great--this was how it was supposed to be. Bluegrass wasn't meant to be sterile and healthy. It was meant for working-class, beer-and-shot joints."  More.