The Story of Byron Berline, Ted Silar's Last Rose album, and "Country Honk"


Not too long ago, I made an album with Byron Berline, the fiddler who played on the Stones' recording, "Country Honk," from the Let It Bleed album.

I think this album that we made, Last Rose, deserves a wider audience.

And not just for me. For Byron. It's almost the last thing that Byron Berline recorded before he died. And he did an incredible job on it.

Here, by the way, is the album on Spotify and Amazon:
Last Rose - Album by Ted Silar | Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/6gcgZc33zNvrz0zEtXnzPj?si=J6kMv3oNRW-iVdsxH4yE8A&...

Last Rose by Ted Silar on Amazon Music - Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0BML4QDJQ?*entries*=0&*Version*=1

And here's some more information about the album:
Last Rose - New Honky-Tonk Country Music by Ted Silar
https://tedsilar.com/new-honky-tonk-country-music-album-last-rose/
New Honky-Tonk Album, Last Rose: The Story of the Songs (tedsilar.com)
https://tedsilar.com/new-honky-tonk-country-music-album-last-rose-the-story-of-t...

And here's some information on Byron Berline:
Byron Berline - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Berline
Byron Berline, Master of the Bluegrass Fiddle, Dies at 77 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/arts/music/byron-berline-dead.html

Here's the story of recording the Last Rose album:

Six or seven years ago, I realized that technology had advanced far enough that I could make a real album all by myself, without having to go to a studio.

I'd been playing in a honky-tonk country band up in the Poconos. We'd been playing songs by Ray Price, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart, George Jones. (Music, by the way, that influenced Gram Parsons, which influence Gram Parsons then passed on to the Rolling Stones.)

I was inspired then to make a honky-tonk country album.

I downloaded Reaper and got me an out-of-date interface off of Ebay, and I was in business—after a long learning curve teaching myself how to work all the software and equipment, that is.

I laid down the rhythm tracks and vocals myself. Only to realize something was lacking—pedal steel and fiddle. All those old Ray Price records had pedal steel and fiddle.

Without a clue what I was doing, I typed "pedal steel players" into Wikipedia. Scrolling around, I decided on Dan Dugmore. One of those great LA studio musicians, he'd played in James Taylor's and Linda Ronstadt's bands for nearly 20 years (that's his solo on "Blue Bayou"), among many others.

And, more to the point, he had an e-mail address!

So I sent him a rough mix of my songs. And he got back to me right away: he liked the songs and would do it. In a couple of days, he e-mailed me his pedal steel tracks, I plugged them into the mix, and, wow, did they add that sound I was looking for.

Then I started looking for fiddlers the same way. Several didn't work out. But then I noticed, miracle of miracles!

Byron Berline had an e-mail!

I didn't hear from him for a long time and didn't expect ever to. I mean, this was Byron Berline, for mercy's sake.

Suddenly, I got an email from Byron, apologizing that it had taken him so long, but they'd had power outages because of tornadoes in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the town where Byron lived, and where he had his store, The Double-Stop Fiddle Shop.

He said he liked my songs and would be happy to play on them.

In one of our e-mails, then, I idly remarked, "You know how Ray Price always had two fiddles?"

"Alright," he writes back, "I'll overdub a second fiddle part."

So now I have, not three tracks of Byron's fiddling, but six, two harmonizing tracks on each song.

What a great guy. No other fiddler would have done that for me. I don't know, but I think maybe he was looking to his legacy. He wanted to make something really good, and he did.

(It's funny, but Byron Berline and Dan Dugmore, both being LA studio musicians, had played together on many sessions before they played together on mine. The second version of James Taylor's "Carolina on My Mind" for instance.)

I was working on another song for the album when I heard that Byron had died.

A real hard time in my life. Around the same time, my parents had died. A real hard time.

Eventually, I got myself together enough to finish that other song. I got 3-time Grammy winner, 5-time Fiddle Player of the Year, Jason Carter, of the Del McCoury Bluegrass Band, to fill in for Byron, and I got 5-time Banjo Player of the Year, Kristin Scott Benson, to play the banjo part.

They both had e-mails.

At a certain point in post-production, my engineer, Andrejs Sadkovoys, and I realized that we had a lot of extra fiddling of Byron's that we weren’t using in our first masters of the songs he had played on. Because Byron had played all the way through the songs—just like he did on "Country Honk"—rather than just playing on the intros and in the solo verses. And so we decided we just had to make every note we had of Byron Berline available to the world by remixing to include it all. Hence, the “Mix 2” versions of the songs, mixes that we put at the end of the album.

And here's a little background on Byron Berline:

Byron Berline played with everybody. The Stones, Dylan, Elton John, The Byrds, The Flying Burritos, Rod Stewart, The Eagles, The Band, Joe Cocker, The Doobie Brothers, Stephen Stills, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Vince Gill.

And that's just for starters. He was on Star Trek. He not only played "Country Honk" on Let It Bleed, but on Bill Wyman's album Monkey Grip, on "Pussy"—he really kicks the bluegrass on that one—and "What a Blow."

Byron Berline was a great storyteller. There are lots of interviews with him online telling the story of his "Country Honk" recording session.

Here's my version of the "Country Honk" story:

Gram Parsons had been urging the Stones to do more country. And he told them to get Byron for "Country Honk."

Keith called Byron in Oklahoma one night. Byron thought it was a prank call because, apparently, Keith was three sheets to the wind. Eventually he realized it was for real. Keith asked him when he could be in LA. "In about a week," he said. Nope, Keith answered. They'd be needing him tomorrow.  So they flew Byron out the next day.

Mick and Glyn Johns decided to put Byron on the sidewalk outside Elektra Studios on Sunset Strip, without earphones, just speakers, for playback, with a friend of theirs driving up and down beeping his horn in the street. The Stones, the Doors, Leon Russell, Bonnie Bramlett, and other rock musicians were all partying there in the parking lot while Byron recorded. Talk about pressure. He recorded five takes. When Mick and Keith chose the keeper take, Byron said "Did you hear the mistake I made?" But they said to just let it stand as was, they liked the sound.

Robert Altman from Rolling Stone was photographing the session. But only one photograph has ever surfaced, one of Bonnie Bramlett watching Byron play through the window of the studio. (Actually, I recently found some more photos from the session at the Berkeley Robert Altman archive. In case anyone is interested, they can find them there.)


This session apparently jump-started Byron's career in LA. Soon, everybody wanted to play with him, and nearly everybody did. (Including me!)

Very cool . Thanks for sharing