J. Max McKee honored by music hall of fame

Megan Ward, Star Staff Writer

SHELBY

    When J. Max McKee was 7 years old he hid under the porch and listened to his uncles pick the banjo and sing. He learned chords and songs and smoked the lit Camels they flicked under the porch.

    McKee was about that age when his father gave him his first guitar. Frustrated that he couldn’t make it sound like his uncle did, McKee smashed it over a fence post.

    “You know how young’n’s are,” he said. He begged his father for a while and eventually got a new one from Sears and Roebuck in Shelby.

    “This one came with a chord book,” he said, “and I learned to play the guitar.”

    McKee pronounces it gee-tar.

    McKee eventually traded his guitar for the banjo. Now McKee and his band travel across the country in his RV playing bluegrass festivals and concerts. He has about a dozen albums and fans who recognize him — especially if he’s wearing his tall black-felt cowboy hat. He can’t pick without it.

    McKee was inducted into the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame, home to such stars as Johnny Paycheck, Brenda Lee and Billy Joe Royal. Although he’s from Shelby, he has played a lot in Georgia.

    “I don’t know why Georgia took up with me but they did,” he said.

    At his home in Shelby last week, McKee wore his hat and a black suit that is just a little shiny. He calls his banjo “Earl,” an Earl Scruggs Golden Deluxe.

    His fingers, strapped in metal picks, plucked the banjo strings furiously and delicately. He crossed his right hand behind his left and played behind the bridge for the song “Crosshanded Ruben.” He tapped his feet and shrugged his shoulders.

    When he’s playing with his band, which includes his wife and mother, he dances. He shakes his leg like Elvis. He jets across the floor pointing his banjo like a rifle when doing his version of Chuck Berry’s “Duck Walk.” McKee calls it the “Crow Walk.”

    Sometimes he walks on stage soberly then smiles at the crowd showing a pair of plastic, hillbilly teeth. He tells the audience he can play “Wildwood Flower” backwards and turns his back to the crowd and plays. Eventually, he turns around and really plays the song backwards.

    He’ll tell the crowd he’s 39 years old (he’s really 56), jokes with them and tells them outlandish stories. He speaks so seriously that fans and friends ask his wife, Teena, if his stories are true.

    Teena McKee laughs hard, slaps her leg at her husband’s jokes and stories even though she’s heard them over and over.

    "I just get so tickled,” Mrs. McKee said. “Especially watching the crowd react to him.”

    On the banjo, he plays serious bluegrass music, country and gospel, as well as the famous surfer song “Wipeout.” He also plays a song he wrote called “Cecil and the Cement Truck,” about a man who fills his wife’s lover’s Cadillac with cement.

    Before he walks on stage, without fail, McKee prays.

    “You have to when you do this without a song list,” he said.

    His wife Teena, who plays guitar in the band, said she doesn’t know which songs he will play before they get on stage.

    “You never know what he’s going to do,” she said. “He’s so good at feeling out a crowd.”

    Bluegrass fans are a special group, McKee said. They are welcoming and appreciative and become instant friends.

    Yankees from Vermont respond to the music just as easily as Southerners from West Virginia, he said.

    And people from all over show up at the McKees’ door in Shelby.

    “They say, ‘Is this where J. Max lives?’” Mrs. McKee said. “If they travel through Shelby they look us up.”

    McKee helps other players now. They knock on the door to his RV during festivals and ask him to come pick with them.  He can’t say no.

    Even though his dining room in Shelby is filled with mandolins, banjos, guitars and Dobros that he plays, McKee remembers what it is like for those just getting started.

    McKee knows he has talent. Some of it, he says, is God-given and the rest is a result of relentless practicing.

    In the early days, after shifts at Fiber Industries, he would drink coffee and practice all night long. He still practices every day except Sundays.

    “People ask me when I’ll retire,” he said. “I tell them, when they throw dirt on me, I’ll quit.”