Rob Pearcy

Written by Dan Miller

The name Rob Pearcy might not be one that you recognize right away, until you see his face. If you've ever attended Steve Kaufman's flatpick camp, or witnessed any of the flatpicking guitar competitions anywhere from Merlefest all the way west to Winfield, you'll undoubtedly say, "I remember that guy!" Rob is the kind of guy that you'll tend to remember if you have ever seen him. His tall, lanky build, long goatee, lightning-bolt guitar strap, Dan Crary Model Taylor guitar and characteristic hat, complete with its long turkey feather, make him one of the most recognizable players on the flatpicking guitar competition circuit. And although he has removed his hat and dressed up a bit for the cover of his debut solo CD, Hats Off, looking at that long goatee and Taylor Dan Crary model guitar will probably still bring back memories of Rob blazing through "Lime Rock" or sweetly gliding through his fine arrangement of "Kentucky Waltz" on a competition stage somewhere.

Rob Pearcy is a bluegrass music teacher by profession (teaching guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro, fiddle, and mountain dulcimer). That statement, in and of itself, is not one to raise eyebrows. Many bluegrass musicians teach students how to play bluegrass instruments to supplement their income. The unique thing about Rob is that he teaches bluegrass music as a full-time member of the faculty at Hunters Lane High School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Rob teaches about 70 students a semester at Hunters Lane. He runs three double length (an hour and forty minutes) classes a day, five days a week. The classes are divided into three blocks--one for beginners, one for intermediate level players, and an ensemble class. There are about 25 kids per class ranging from the ninth through the twelfth grade. The majority of the students enter the program with little or no experience. Rob starts all beginners playing the guitar. By the time the students reach the ensemble class, many have gone on to learn other instruments and have become quite skilled.

Regarding the beginning of his interest in flatpicking, Rob says, "I would read Guitar Player magazine a lot and I keep seeing this name pop up--Doc Watson--and his acoustic flatpicking. I had really never heard it. One of the local music stores that I did business with owed me some money in trade for something so I asked them to get me the Doc Watson albums so that I could see what this guy was all about. I got all of the old Vanguard Doc Watson albums and it really changed my life. I thought, 'This is really something else!' I thought it was the greatest guitar playing I had ever heard."

While Rob continued to play some electric guitar to make money, his attention and interest began to move more towards acoustic flatpicking. He says, "Frets magazine started that same year and I got the first issue. I read Dan Crary's column and learned how to play 'Salt Creek.' When I had first listened to Doc play, I thought no one else could learn to play like that. After I learned to play 'Salt Creek' reasonably well, I was excited."

Rob's first contest experience was at the Smithville Fiddler's Jamboree. Of his first trip to the Smithville event, Rob said, "They had been having the festival all through the seventies. I had heard about it but never had much interest in it. After I won an acoustic guitar and began flatpicking, I thought, 'Well I'll go to that.' I took my Alvarez and it was an amazing event. I was really impressed that the people that played there kind of took me in even though I was this strange hippy guitar player. I wound up jamming with the guys who were the top three guitar players at the contest that year. I was hooked from then on out."

After that first experience at Smithville, Rob spent the next several years entering as many contests as he could find, including the Tennessee State Championship sponsored by Gallagher Guitars. He says, "It was at Gallagher's flatpicking championship that I started meeting the heavy duty flatpickers. Iran into Steve Kaufman, Roy Curry, Danny Roberts, Fred Dugin, and Mike Whitehead. They were all real nice guys and would jam with you--I thought it was the greatest thing."

In addition to playing contests, Rob had also started teaching students at local music stores. One of Rob's friends, formerly a bandmate in a few of the country bands Rob had worked with over the years and at that time was a teacher at Hunter's Lane High School, brought Rob in on a new program the school was developing to teach kids bluegrass and acoustic music. Rob was first asked to serve on the advisory committee to help choose teaching materials. A year later, when one of the teachers left the program, he was hired as a teaching assistant. He now has been working as a full-time member of the faculty for the past ten years.

Having had ten years of experience teaching many students how to flatpick, Rob had the following to offer when asked to talk about what he has learned about teaching the art of flatpicking the acoustic guitar: "I see my main task as trying to teach them how to learn. As Dan Crary says in some of his instructional stuff, 'Everyone teaches themselves.' Someone else can show you how to do it, but you still have to get down to the task of doing it. I look at my job as like being a coach, and I show them the right things to do in order to learn. In flatpicking, I think it is important to team the alternating pick technique. If I can teach them to get the alternating pick direction correct, they seem to really smooth out. It is such a simple thing that students tend to think that it is not that important."

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