But these days, he’s added visual arts into the mix, painting boldly colored scenes of country life, as well as crafting a variety of homemade instruments that qualify as their own genre of folk art.
He has painted cast-off guitars and turned them into clocks.
He has made banjos and painted them in the colors of the American flag.
He has turned old metal tins into “can-jos” and old drums into “bass-jos,” one of which wound up in a Zac Brown Band video.
“It’s fun to make something out of nothing,” Marsh said. And that’s the essence of folk art.
Fueling banjos
Marsh had done some drawing in high school, back in Birmingham in the 1970s. He drew some for the school newspaper, until he got kicked off the staff over a drawing with some double entendres.
But he hadn’t drawn much since, until a year or so ago, when he found himself with more time on his hands.
He’s always wielded a paintbrush, but never in the service of art. Marsh’s day job is pinstriping cars, primarily for the Sunny King dealership. All his equipment fits in a tacklebox.
Now, he buys old prints in nice frames and then paints over them, turning them into colorful portraits of musicians and dogs, trucks and tractors.
A couple of years ago, he started making can-jos, a type of homemade instrument that’s popular because it’s really easy to make. Basically, a can-jo is a fret stick stuck to a can. Pluck the strings, and the can serves as the resonator. It can be a soda can, a Miller Lite can, a tin can. Marsh made his using old cookie tins.
Then he moved into bass-jos. “Basically, it’s just a giant banjo,” he said, crafted from a bass drum, a fret board and strung with Weed Eater line. The thing can really play, big ol’ vibrating bass notes.
One of Marsh’s bass-jos made it into a video for the Zac Brown Band song “Toes.” A friend of Marsh’s, a session bass player in Atlanta, borrowed it to take to the studio and show around. The Zac Brown Band happened to be recording there, and asked to use it in the video.
Just the other day, Marsh made a washtub bass, “just to see if it worked.” He went to Lowes and spent $17 on a tub, a wooden handle and some more Weed Eater line. He built it in less than an hour.
And, yeah, it worked.
None of these instruments are for laughs. They’re playable, traditional instruments, prized by folk music fans and musicians who like doing things a little differently.
There are versions of the washtub bass in Australia, South Africa, Cuba and Italy. In Britain, they play the tea chest bass.
Les Claypool of the band Primus has played both a bass-jo and a washtub bass.
Marsh sells his paintings and instruments from a booth at Apple Barrel Antiques in Oxford, along with a collection of sundry other objects that have caught his eye: 1960s chairs, Rock’em Sock’em Robots, “the ugliest Elvis bust in the world.”
The bass-jo is on display there, too.
Natalie is there a lot, as well. Natalie is a Jack Russell terrier and Marsh’s near-constant companion for three years now. She goes everywhere with him: to work (“all the car dealers know her”), to bluegrass festivals, to the antiques mall.
Cheaha Mountain breakdown
Marsh’s instrument of choice is the banjo, although he also plays mandolin, guitar, bass, squeezebox, harmonica and fiddle. Born in West Virginia, Marsh grew up in Birmingham, one of four children (one of his brothers is state Sen. Del Marsh).
He started playing music around age 13. He was introduced to the banjo when the rock radio stations he listened to started playing “Dueling Banjos” in 1972. Marsh liked what he heard. “I mowed some grass and got me a banjo.”
After high school graduation, in 1976, Marsh and a couple of buddies went on a cross-country bicycle tour. There was an organized tour that year, called the Bikecentennial, which covered 4,250 miles between Oregon and Virginia.
Marsh and his buddies didn’t do that one. No, these guys struck out on their own, flying to Oregon, biking up into Canada, to the Great Lakes and back down to Virginia. They dipped their bike tires in the Pacific and the Atlantic. Their route was longer than the Bikecentennial.
They took $450, and came home with change. “We spent $1.11 a meal each,” Marsh said. “We never paid to camp. We never got a room. We ate macaroni-and-cheese, tuna and milk.”
Marsh emphasizes that they did this on 10-speeds. ITAL 10-speeds. UNITAL “We only had one flat in the group,” he said.
“And I’ve hardly ever gotten on a bicycle since.”
After that adventure, Marsh settled into pinstriping cars, moving around the country, playing in bluegrass bands. In 1981, he followed his brother, Del, to Anniston and put an ad in the paper looking for other bluegrass musicians.
In 1982, the band Distant Cousins was formed.
“Bluegrass is jazz – country jazz,” Marsh said. “Everybody gets a break; they improvise.” Marsh doesn’t play straight-up bluegrass. “I didn’t grow up taking water to the well,” he said. “I grew up on Steve Miller.” So his style of bluegrass includes Bob Dylan and Guns ‘N Roses along with Bill Monroe.
He opened a store called Mountain Music. He was on the radio and TV with Distant Cousins.
He bought an old farmhouse on 80 acres that back up on the Talladega National Forest. In 2001, he built an amphitheater on one end – the now-defunct Cheaha Mountain Amphitheatre, with seats for 2,000 – and he put on bluegrass festivals and staged the play “Smoke on the Mountain.”
But it rained a lot. He could never draw the crowds he needed. “I never could get it going,” he said.
He sold the amphitheater to some folks who have since turned the stage into a house.
Will the circle be unbroken?
Distant Cousins is still around, 28 years, some 30 musicians and a few name changes later.
But it’s not enough.
“It’s slow here,” Marsh said. Really not much of a music scene, or an art scene. “It’s a down market here, too, now.”
And so this week, Marsh is planning to move to Colorado. He plans to come back to Alabama for the winters, but will spend the warmer months in Colorado Springs, where the humidity is lower and the arts scene is livelier.
“This past year, I got bored. I’m getting older. I don’t want to stay up late to play clubs,” Marsh said.
He’s 52. His kids are grown. (His son, Skyler, 21, plays bass with Distant Cousins.) “If I don’t get out and play now …” Marsh said. “I need to do it while I can.”
In Colorado Springs, he’ll play with Grass It Up, a self-styled “hippie-grass” band led by Shannon Carr, a Distant Cousins alum. “I can play two to three times a week in Colorado Springs,” Marsh said. “The art market is better. It’s a tourist town, a college town.”
He’s found a co-op art gallery to check out. The college actually has a course in bluegrass. He’ll hit up the car dealerships, his pinstriping tackle box in hand. And if all else fails, well, he’s had practice at living on $1.11 a meal.
He’s already given a farewell show with Distant Cousins at The Rabbittown Café in Piedmont.
His son will keep Distant Cousins going, as well as the pinstriping business and the antiques booth, selling paintings and handmade instruments.
And Jim Marsh will load Natalie in the car and head north. “Livin’ the dream,” as his voice mail message says.
It’s been more than 30 years since that cross-country bike ride. It’s time for another adventure.
Contact Lisa Davis at 256-235-3555, ldavis@annistonstar.com.
