Check Out Jed Clark’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jed Clark.

Hi Jed, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I always remember wanting to be a drummer. I never set out to be a guitarist. My dad wouldn’t have it – drums were too loud. In his defense, we lived in a subdivision when I was a kid and I feel confident it would have driven the neighbors to call the cops having to endure me beating a drum kit to no end. My mother randomly announced that she had signed me up for guitar lessons one day when I was like 8 or 9. At least, that is the way I remember it going down? Maybe Mom will scold me and tell me it was different when she reads this.  I learned how to strum a few chords from a youth minister in the small town in southwest Arkansas that I grew up in (Magnolia). After a few months of lessons, he told my mom that there wasn’t anything else he felt like he could teach me. I didn’t pursue the guitar much more after those lessons ended. We moved to central Arkansas when I was about 12 and within the year, Mom came home and announced that she had signed me up for guitar lessons again.

This new teacher introduced me to the concept of “fingerstyle” guitar; playing the guitar with all of the fingers on my right hand as opposed to gripping a pick. With this teacher, I was able to advance much further and faster than I had with my previous teacher. I continued to study fingerstyle guitar for a few years before I became more interested in bluegrass music. My brother, Harry, was learning mandolin at the same time that I was taking fingerstyle lessons. He initially had an interest in Irish music and Bluegrass music, but a dramatic shift in our musical interests happened when my Dad surprised us with tickets to a Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder show. This was in 2004 when Skaggs played at the Reynolds Performance Hall at the University Of Central Arkansas. I was 13. Andy Leftwich & Cody Kilby were in Skaggs’ band at the time and I remember being awestruck at how fast they could play. I remember watching that show and thinking, “how on earth does someone play that fast?” It was incredibly motivating and inspiring.

After that show, I remember wanting to pursue flatpicking more. The term “flatpicking” is usually used to imply soloing on an acoustic guitar with a flatpick (guitar pick) as the primary means of plucking the strings. As time went on, I became more drawn to the social aspect of bluegrass music; I could jam with people I’d never met before as long as I knew the chord changes and key of a “standard” tune. Similar to jazz, bluegrass has a repertoire of traditional tunes that become commonly played and shared among local scenes. This more socially interactive music continued to draw me away from fingerstyle guitar and more towards playing bluegrass music.

Mountain View, Arkansas was only about 70 miles from the town I grew up in. For those that aren’t aware of Mountain View, it’s considered the “Folk Music Capital Of The World.” I don’t really know why it has earned that title, but when I was in my teens, it had a thriving community of young roots-music musicians. This provided my brother and I many fun weekend trips to play music and jam with friends. Mountain View is also home to the Ozark Folk Center. The OFC is an “Arkansas living history state park” which has a 1,050 seat theater that regularly employs local roots musicians as well as nationally touring American, bluegrass, and folk music acts. My mother, brother, and I played there for a few years during my teens with some other local musicians. I remember going up there as a teenager and seeing bands like Jerry Douglas, The Del McCoury Band, and Sam Bush.

As I neared my 20s, I kept trying to convince myself that I should do something other than pursue a music career. I really didn’t want to do anything other than play music, but there didn’t seem to be any way to make a livable income off of playing music. While performing at a festival in Waldron Arkansas (one of the few remaining bluegrass festivals in Arkansas) in 2011, I was offered a guitar position with a touring bluegrass group. I moved to Nashville in the late summer of 2011 to pursue playing music professionally.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I officially moved to Nashville in September of 2011 to play with a bluegrass band that was touring nationally at the time. I worked for the band for about five months before deciding to pursue other music opportunities. I ended up having two car wrecks during the fall of 2011. One was scraping a parked car with my truck in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrell – that one wasn’t too bad. The other was a pretty intense wreck that spun my truck 180 degrees, took out a fire hydrant, and pinned me against a telephone pole on 16th street. Thankfully nobody was injured. The wreck ran up an expensive bill to my insurance company. They paid the bill but dropped my insurance coverage because I had failed to tell them I had moved to Nashville. My truck would drive, kinda, but it was beaten to pieces.

I moved to Murfreesboro in late 2011. After about five months there, I moved to Spring Hill and got a job working for a lawn service company. After a little less than two months in Spring Hill, I got a call from an Oil Field Security company in Arkansas. They paid well and wanted me to start work as soon as I could. I took the job and moved home to Arkansas 9 months after I’d moved to Nashville.

I moved to Nashville with $6k in my savings account and no debt. I moved home nine months later with a truck that could barely hold 65 mph and $40.

It was late May of 2012 when I moved back to Arkansas. I found an affordable apartment that I split with my buddy Paul who was also working an oilfield-related job at the time. My title was technically “gate guard.” I’d sit in a “guard shack” (a 6×6 air-conditioned enclosed trailer) and when someone arrived at the well site, I’d go outside and briefly orient them to the site. This job was probably 90% downtime. Since I had tons of downtime and internet access while I was at work, I decided to take online classes through a local community college and work towards finishing my associate’s degree.

Towards the end of my tenure at the oilfield company, I met a local musician named Keith at a coffee shop I frequented. We became friends and started playing some music together. I found out that he lived in a house that was walking distance from the coffee shop and that he had a room available to rent. The house was really old and in serious need of renovating, but the rent was an unbeatable $250/person (utilities included). I moved in. It was known as “The Subway House” because it was literally directly behind a Subway restaurant. I ate Subway 9 times within the first two weeks of living there. I don’t eat Subway anymore for obvious reasons.

Shortly after I moved in, my younger brother Harry also moved in. He and I formed a trio with Keith that we called Keef & Co. My mother didn’t find the band name funny. We did. We performed anything that Keith wanted to sing. I played upright bass, my brother played mandolin, and Keith oscillated between uke and guitar. I’ve described it as an “acoustic funk trio.” Thankfully, Keith insisted that we document some of our arrangements and put them on YouTube and I’m forever thankful that he had the foresight to capture some of what we did. There are some videos from that era on my Instagram page for those interested. We played around town and opened for a band called “The Lone Bellow” at Harding University (the college in the town we all lived in).

While I lived at The Subway House, the oilfield security job ended and I worked as a crew lead for a very large lawn service outfit for about a year. After I quit the lawn service job, I left the subway house, moved home with my folks and decided to buckle down and finish my associate’s degree. I also started working part-time delivering pizzas for Papa Johns. At one point, while I was working at Papa Johns, the truck I had started having transmission issues. I was on a pretty low limb – Harry had just moved to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to pursue a full-time music job, everyone that had lived at the subway house had moved out of town, I was making a fraction of the money I’d been making before, and my only means of transportation and income had gone out on me. My grandmother bought me an old Ford Escape that enabled me to keep working. I put 100k miles on that car. Thank you Jimmie (my grandma). Somewhere in the midst of all this transition, I ended up getting a really random voicemail from a guy I’d met briefly at a music conference while living in Nashville.

His name was Stephen Mougin. He was the director of a bluegrass music program at a college in West Tennessee called Bethel University. For some reason, he was under the impression that I was the contact for a theater in Alabama and he had reached out to try to book Bethel’s bluegrass band at that theater. I returned his call to let him know that I didn’t know what on earth he was talking about (I didn’t manage anything in Alabama and to this day, I still don’t know who told him I did?) and to ask him if he thought the college he worked for would offer me a transfer scholarship. I was in a really unique situation; I had no minority status, I came from a middle-income family, I wasn’t military, I wasn’t disabled, I didn’t have children, and was trying to transfer into another school in a different state at 24 with an associates degree – there weren’t many transfer scholarship opportunities for people in that position. Bethel was able to offer me an excellent scholarship despite my lack of scholarship-eligible criteria simply for playing in the school bluegrass band. A few months after my audition to the program, I started attending Bethel in McKenzie, Tennessee. Since I already had an associate’s degree, I only stayed there for three semesters and a summer. I had worked many different jobs, lived in many different places, and hadn’t fully invested into the idea of college straight out of high school. Thus, I was 25 when I started my junior year of college. I was ready to get in, get out, and get on with my life – and I did. There is a concrete bench in a small courtyard on the Bethel campus. It sits in front of a brick wall. On the back of the bench, facing the brick wall, out of sight, engraved in the concrete, it reads “I will never know how I ended up at Bethel.” I can relate.

I’ve lived in Nashville ever since late December of 2016. I moved to East Nashville and sold Kubota tractors right out of college for about 15 months. It was a great job and taught me a lot. I worked hard and made great money. The job was very stressful though. So much so that in March of 2018, I had a panic attack and went to the ER because I thought I was dying. I gave my notice the following week. Over the past five and a half years of living here I’ve been privileged to work for many different musical groups. My first gig after moving back to Nashville in 2017 was playing upright bass for songwriter Donna Ulisse. Shortly after my tenure with Donna, that same year I got the guitar gig with a progressive bluegrass group called Circus Number 9.

In 2018 and 2019, I played guitar for Alecia Nugent. We ended up going to Ireland for about three weeks in 2019 and playing 11 or 12 shows. It was a blast. In late 2019 I played upright bass for Sierra Ferrell. If you haven’t heard of Sierra, you will before too long. I ended up recording a music video with her for her song “At The End Of The Rainbow” at a taxidermist’s shop in Indiana. I remember being exhausted because we’d played 2 (or maybe 3?) gigs in one day on 4 hours of sleep and were filming this music video at 1 in the morning next to stuffed deer and foxes. It was as weird as it sounds, but it was also a blast. The video is on YouTube.

In early 2020, after playing with many different bands and coming to the realization that I was going to have to head up my own group, I focused a lot of my musical efforts on booking my own shows. When I realized the world was going to shut down, I immediately changed all my efforts to focus on mowing grass. I’d done this all through highschool and knew how to make it work, so I ditched my music pursuits and focused on mowing. I’m very thankful to the clients I had and the opportunities that I was given to make money during that time.

The Station Inn provided me many opportunities to play during 2020. I will never forget the kindness that JT Gray, Jeff Brown, Jeff Burke, and Aubrey Shamel showed to me during a time when there was no music work to be had.

In 2021 I worked for 6 months as an operations manager for a lawn service company in South Nashville. In mid-2021, live music gigs came back with a vengeance. Once I quit the lawn service company, I started gigging as much as I could. I ended up playing 85 gigs in 2021 between filling in for artists like The Wooks, Aubrey Shamel, Josh Rilko, Theo & Brenna, The Golden Age, Shannon Slaughter and playing gigs under my own name. I am really thankful that I was able to stay busy playing so much last year.

This year’s gigging calendar hasn’t been as busy, but I have shifted my focus more towards releasing original music. I’ve released 4 singles this year and intend to release more soon.

I tell all of this story to say – I’ve had innumerable twists and turns on my journey to being able to play music as a career. And though the struggle has been an intense roller coaster ride at times, I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I guess you could say I’m a bluegrass guitarist by trade. But I rarely listen to bluegrass. Very little bluegrass holds appeal to me. Bluegrass music isn’t part of my family lineage – neither of my parents grew up listening to or performing bluegrass music. In my childhood, I listened to bands like Toby Mac, POD, Linkin Park, Creed, Pearl Jam, The Cranberries, and Tom Petty. I think these early influences contribute to a notable distinction in the way I approach music, and my guitar playing, as opposed to the way someone who grew up in a “bluegrass family” would. I also think learning fingerstyle guitar before learning about the guitar’s role in bluegrass music has significantly influenced the way I approach the guitar. Bluegrass guitarists seem to approach the guitar with a “what does this instrument traditionally do within the confines of how this music is ‘supposed to sound.’”

Fingerstyle guitarists seem to approach the guitar with a “how interesting or cool can I make this guitar sound” mentality. Fingerstyle guitarists seem to have a more inventive and creative mindset when approaching the guitar. I’ve tried to adopt this line of thinking into the way I approach bluegrass music. For example, it’s a pretty common practice in bluegrass music that when you’re playing in the key of E, you’ll use a capo on the 2nd fret and play D position chords. I try to use open E position chords. This tends to provide a really unique voicing to the rhythm section especially if I’m playing with a dobro player. Over time I feel like I’ve become known, for better or for worse, for my non-traditional chord choices when playing bluegrass (or any other genre for that matter).

Currently, I’m shifting my focus more towards releasing my own songs that I’ve written. I’ll let my audience be the judge of what genre they fit into, but I definitely wouldn’t consider my original material “bluegrass” music. I’d consider it maybe the love child of Tony Rice, Tom Petty, and maybe a redneck John Mayer? My Bandcamp link is in this interview. Check out my material and message me how you’d describe it.

I would say the thing I’m most proud of right now is the songs that I am writing and releasing. Playing as a hired gun for other artists is very flattering and uniquely challenging, but playing my own music is the most musically satisfying thing I’ve ever done. I hope to do it for the rest of my life.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I’ll feel like I’ve really “made it” when I can go play somewhere I’ve never been to and see people in the audience singing along with the lyrics to my songs. When that happens, I’ve “made it.”

And maybe when Weird Al parodies something I’ve written 😀

In another sense, “success” to me is getting to play music instead of clock into a regular job. Providing for myself with my creative endeavors is one of the most fulfilling and satisfying successes that I can envision in this life.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jedclarkguitar
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jedclarkmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/jedclark
• SoundCloud: https://jedclark.bandcamp.com/
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4gCycVpD9VYN1S2KjM7qhR?si=LXeSchSNSoK7u_Sez7KXbg

Image Credits
Daniel Kelley