Biography
A banjo player who shared stages with luminaries such as fiddler Vassar Clements and dobro specialist Jerry Douglas, Bill Runkle nonetheless remains a little-known presence from the bluegrass circuit of the seventies and eighties. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, he never performed with Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys. Enthusiasts tracking the formative Del McCoury groups known as the Dixie Pals account for most of the recognition he still receives. Broad attention reached McCoury by the mid-eighties, yet Runkle belongs to an earlier chapter, before the leader abandoned the Dixie Pals name and its associations in favor of the Del McCoury Band. At least three distinct editions of the Dixie Pals existed from 1967 onward, although McCoury has often remarked in interviews that the personnel onstage could differ from night to night. At the time he restricted himself to weekend engagements, earning his living as a logger on weekdays, while most of the sidemen navigated similar schedules, so assembling a working unit frequently meant relying on whoever was free. McCoury placed three albums with the Rebel label between 1974 and 1984; those sessions later appeared in the retrospective Classic Bluegrass. Runkle worked with mandolinist Donnie Eldreth, fiddler Bill Poffinberger, and bassist Dewey Renfro during the first incarnation. Bassist Jerry McCoury joined the subsequent lineup, turning the Dixie Pals into another bluegrass “brother” band. The notes accompanying the McCoury collection present this sequence, yet the actual discography reverses the order of the bassists, with Runkle appearing in both configurations. The informal character of the group, which McCoury later described as existing more “for fun” than anything in his later career, may explain such inconsistencies. Twenty-first-century bluegrass commentators now view the seventies and eighties as a golden era and regard early recordings by artists such as J.D. Crowe and McCoury’s Dixie Pals as prized documents, although contemporary audiences did not always greet the music warmly, a factor that added to the musicians’ hardships. Issued when Rounder had released fewer than twenty albums, the 1973 High on a Mountain—now regarded as McCoury’s Rubber Soul—was in fact the label’s nineteenth title. On that record Runkle, the McCoury brothers, fiddler Bill Sage, and mandolinist-vocalist Dick Stuber produced a sound that led Old Time Music critic Jack O’Ryan to apply the phrase “chamber bluegrass.” Magazines aligned with the most traditional Appalachian styles often voiced objections to the supposed alterations introduced by younger players, newgrassers, and chamber bluegrassers alike. Selections such as the striking “Big Rock in the Road” were said to possess “none of that precipitous, exhilarating flangdang quality of early bluegrass...” The follow-up, self-titled album brought back Poffinberger and Renfro, with Eldreth and Stuber sharing mandolin duties, and contains some of Runkle’s strongest recorded work, including sensitive duets with the leader that display considerable nuance without a heavy flangdang quotient. By contrast, the earlier album preserves one of the rare instances of Runkle’s songwriting: “I’m so Lonely Tonight,” which, while not signaling a prolific composer, demonstrates that he did not consider typical country & western themes beneath him.