Obit: Clarence 'Daddy Dick' Richards

Subject: Daddy Dick
From: kendall
Date: 02 Oct 00 - 02:05 PM

I got a piece of bad news on Saturday. A man called "Daddy Dick" Richards was killed in a car crash. He was 80. I first met him about 20 years ago, and, I could hardly believe what he was doing with a fiddle, guitar and stand up bass. This man had no left hand! His guitar was tuned to an open key, of course, but the fiddle and guitar were standard tuned. Now, when I hear someone say "I cant play mandolin because my fingers are to big." I tell them about Daddy Dick.

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: katlaughing
Date: 02 Oct 00 - 03:05 PM

Kendal, sorry to hear of the loss of another musician. Not meaning to be disrespectful, but may I ask how he played fiddle and guitar with no left hand? How did he get the notes right?

Thanks,

kat

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: kendall
Date: 02 Oct 00 - 06:59 PM

He had a callous on his wrist near the end. As impressive as it was, it didnt come up to the man I saw in Florida at the Spirit of the Suwannee. HE had no right arm! None.. he played an electric/ acoustic using hammer on and pull off. Furthermore, he really played complex tunes. I remember one of them was "Red Sails in the sunset. Beautifully done.

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: bigchuck
Date: 02 Oct 00 - 07:02 PM

I too was saddened to hear of Daddy Dick's passing. I have played in a number of jam sessions with him over the last 8 or 9 years, and always found him to be an entertainer and a true gentleman. His presence will be deeply missed.
Sandy

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: georgeward
Date: 03 Oct 00 - 03:41 AM

Clarence "Daddy Dick" Richards had done it all, from the hard-drinking life of a professional country musician to the sober and indefatigable Mason, Shriner, networker and master Adirondack Liar who died a couple of weeks ago. He had an endless repertoire of songs - stock country, cowboy, old vaudeville, older traditional songs - that he sang in a bass voice to rival Johnny Cash.

When television was in its infancy, really live and really local, he did that, as he'd done radio before it.

He spent years playing the dude ranches of upstate New York (yes world, we got cowboys...sorta), playing the role of Davey Crockett at Frontier Town in the Adirondacks (a precursor of today's theme parks). He'd lead hordes of kids through town in pursuit of the always-to-end-up-vanquished bad guys.

He drove the stagecoach. Actually drove it in a good deal of stock, Hollywood western-movie footage that was shot at Frontier Town. Only man I ever knew who got a real ticket for parking a stagecoach in a no-parking zone (in downtown Syracuse, NY - the mayor took care of it, Dick said).

In the late 1940s, he recorded an album of square dance sides for a subsidiary of Decca Records, the old singing squares he'd taught at the dude ranches. And he called at dude ranch reunions in New York City...at least once at the Waldorf Astoria.

When "Kentucky mountain boy" Bradley Kincaid was big on early radio, he had a chicken farm at Stafford's Bridge, NY, maybe fifteen miles from the young Dick Richards's home. Dick's parents had been vaudeville entertainers, and he was one of those kids who could often pick up a song or a tune on one hearing. He'd bicycle over the mountain and sing old songs to Bradley Kincaid, who'd give him a chicken for every song he hadn't heard before. Dick allowed he rode home most Saturdays with chickens swinging from both handlebars. Eventually he switched to bringing home live chickens in a sack. He'd earned more than his family could eat fresh-killed, so the family story goes.

In the days when country music stars toured venues in upstate NY by bus (venues that were sometimes as remote as the Hogtown Inn in West Fort Anne), Dick was a pickup bass player of choice for many. I recall Porter Wagoner as one he played with.

How'd he do it ? Dick had been one of those kid-prodigy fiddlers. He was playing and calling square dances at age twelve, and making better money - he said - than many a grown man working for a wage at the time (ca. 1930). At the age of seventeen, having left school, he found work - as many young guys did - in a paper mill. Came the day he was put on a new machine with little or no training. He was pulled into it and lost his left hand. The family story is that when he regained consciousness after surgery, he turned to his mother at his bedside and said, "I've figured out how I can play the guitar; I'm still trying to figure out the fiddle." Nine months later, he won a fiddle contest.

That was Dick. He looked forward, not back. He said he'd been lucky. If the surgeon had taken a bit more or less of his forearm, or not attached the tendons to the stump as he did, Dick couldn't have reached the fingerboard. As it was, he'd put a clean sock over the stump and note with the callouses he developed on the end of it. As a standup bass player, he was plenty accurate. In practise, he'd tune the guitar open, as Kendall said, and bar chords, or sometimes hit individual notes. He'd tune the fiddle open as well. I don't know how he held in originally. In later years, he used a short around-the-neck strap his son Jack invented for him that held the fiddle snugly to his chin. He bowed with his right hand, supported the fiddle with his bicep (more or less there) and flexed the stump of his forearm to note. There's a PBS documentary 'Songs from the Heart of the Adirondacks' that has him fiddling "Old Rattler" just a few years ago.

I said it before, but it keeps coming back. He did everything. Taught me how to repair a slate roof (he done that with his dad after the accident). People who knew him in his drinking days took a long time to accept the sober Dick. But when Ethel, his wife, was slipping into Alzheimers, he kept her safe and at home long after most folks could have. I only heard him say it once, and not loudly, "She put up with me all those years." He was in his late seventies and turning eighty then.

I look at all this, and it is too long and doesn't scratch the surface. Dick with his bass and his one hand, and his blind buddy Harry with his big ol' Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, played God knows how many hospitals (for adults and kids) over the years. It just goes on. But to wrap up in a paragraph or two...

The Friday before he died on Sunday, Dick as the "head liar" presided over a meeting of the Adirondack Liars' Club, a performance group of born-to-it yarnspinners originally inspired by my wife, Vaughn Ward. Typically for Dick, it was a benefit for the regional cultural nonprofit organization Vaughn directs, the Black Crow Network. The following day he played in Rutland, Vermont, at the Rutland Fair, I believe. He was on his way to a gathering of the Adirondack Fiddlers (another of his many favorite adopted organizations) on Sunday, when he suffered a heart attack.

"Dick is dead ?" someone called to ask.

"He died yeaterday," Vaughn said, "at eighty-two and in the prime of life"

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: GUEST,Michael in Swansea
Date: 03 Oct 00 - 04:29 AM

Unfortunately I'd not heard of Daddy Dick, he sounds like the sort of person I would have been proud to know.
The world will be a sadder place without him.
R.I.P.

Mike

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: Midchuck
Date: 03 Oct 00 - 07:10 AM

I, like bigchuck, got to jam with him a few times. If I hadn't seen, I'd call anyone who described it a liar.

It isn't that he had no left hand. He had no left arm from about 3-4 inches below the elbow. First time I saw him take out the fiddle, I said to myself, "What the hell is he going to do with that?" But he could really play.

I'm amazed that he was that old, though. I'a of said in his sixties.

Peter.

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 03 Oct 00 - 07:26 AM

As I always tell people, this world is so much more interesting than the crap that gets into the mass media.

Any links to pictures/tapes etc?

Why don't they make movies about people like that?

Subject: RE: BS: Daddy Dick
From: kendall
Date: 03 Oct 00 - 09:10 AM

He made a 45 record years ago, doubt that it is still available though.