Charlie Gearheart, 1939-2024

Charlie Gearheart of Goose Creek Symphony.

Few Kentucky-born rock ‘n’ roll odysseys match the scope and distinction of Goose Creek Symphony.

It was a band whose music reveled in the Appalachian charm Floyd County founder Charlie Gearheart grew up with. Yet its beginnings came in Arizona, where Gearheart and his family flew for the health of his asthmatic mother. And so in 1970, music inspired by a holler in Eastern Kentucky but instigated by a batch of musicians moonlighting after hours in a Phoenix area recording studio began to surface. Four albums would be released through 1974 that underscored the homespun nature of Gearheart’s lyrics with music that possessed the rustic Americana of The Band, the jam-happy extremes of numerous psychedelic bands (including, but hardly limited to, the Grateful Dead) and a mix of playfulness and solemnity of more overlooked ensembles like the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

And then, nothing. After 1974’s “Do Your Thing But Don’t Touch Mine” album, the band quietly dispersed, engaging in what Gearhart would later call a “14 year fishing trip.” Inspired by interest garnered on a visit back to Floyd County and eventual interest from Appalshop in Whitesburg, Goose Creek came to life again in the 1990s first as an acoustic trio with its three principal members – Gearheart with fellow guitarists Paul “Pearl” Spradlin and Bob “Willard” Henke – and later as a nine-member troupe boasting twin fiddlers and a horn section.

Gearheart, long the face and frontman of Goose Creek Symphony, died on Jan. 10 at the age of 84.

The saga would turn more fascinating because Goose Creek’s ‘90s revival became a bigger deal regionally then the early ‘70s run that produced much of the music that defined the band. They regularly sold out Lexington clubs during their renaissance, capitalizing on the support of a growing jam-band community. To the generation that filled those rooms, Goose Creek was an entirely new enterprise and the songs from the band’s early albums were tunes of the here and now.

From 1990 to a gradual slowdown that began in 2015, Gearheart and Goose Creek released nine albums boasting new material, old songs, old unreleased songs and live recordings spanning multiple generations. But it was the music of the band’s first three albums, all for Capitol Records, that introduced a cross-cultural brand of electric mountain music – 1970’s “Goose Creek Symphony” (sometimes titled “Est. 1970”), 1971’s “Welcome to Goose Creek” and 1972’s “Words of Earnest.”

Fronting it all was the good natured Southwestern-by-way-of Eastern Kentucky spirit of Gearheart, who had already worked in various avenues of the music and record industry under the name of Ritchie Hart. When Goose Creek took flight again in the ‘90s, Gearheart came across onstage as a kind of hippie grandfather. He would spin musical fables like “Talking About Goose Creek and Other Important Places” where a sense of almost childlike country chill played out in jams that regularly took the tune past the 20-minute mark.

“To me, Kentucky is still at the basic roots of our music,” Gearheart told me prior to when Goose Creek performed at the Lexington Opera House in May 1995. “When I’m first writing a tune, when the situation is just me and my guitar, I’m reminded a lot of the Appalachians. My roots are really there.

“Of course, from there, we started adding all the other instruments and the music started turning around a little bit. We like to do that. We try not to restrict anything. When it comes to a song, we just say, ‘Okay, let ‘er fly.’”

When word of Gearheart’s passing spread last week, the Goose Creek song I reached for wasn’t among the celebratory hippie-country yarns that regularly populated concert setlists in the band’s later years. Instead, I cued up “Symphony Music,” the concluding song to the debut Goose Creek Symphony album from 1970. It is performed as a hymn, slow and quietly solemn, calling to spirits one suspects that lived beyond the hills of Appalachia. Fittingly, once the song fades, the music briefly returns via the piano-led finale chorus of “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s a beautiful farewell.

“My wife says, ‘When you walk onstage, you step into another world,” Gearheart told me in a different interview prior to a 2009 performance at the long-since-demolished Main St. location of The Dame. “And that’s really what happens. Everything goes away except the music and that’s a wonderful feeling. As you get older, you realize and appreciate that.”