JACK OF ALL STRINGS
Musician Picks Out Eclectic Mix

By William Porter
THE PHOENIX GAZETTE
August 10, 1994

The lanky man with the lived-in face bends to his banjo, cocks an eyebrow and unleashes a flurry of notes that, in two freewheeling minnutes, careens through a musical primer ranging from Beethoven to Earl Scruggs.

Now, it's arguable that anyone playing matchmaker to the unholy union of "Ode to Joy" and "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" is eiither a genius or a crank.

Or Joe Bethancourt.

At 47, the Phoenix musician has spent 30 years wowing audiences with his jack-of-all-strings skills. Banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, dobro, dulciimer, harp, sitar - if it can be picked, strummed or bowed, Bethancourt will.

"Anything I can lay my hands on, I'll play it," he says. There's not a hint of brag in his voice. He's merely stating fact.

Although heralded as one of the country's best claw-hammer banjo players, Bethancourt resides in the permanent realm of niche musician. He enjoys a small national following but isn't exactly swarmed in airports. Profiled in specialty music magazines, he's ignored by Rolling Stone. His records sell - by the hundreds. He owns a house free and clear, but there's no panoramic mountain view. No Jaguar in the drive, either.

But life as a small-time legend has its rewards.

"You know you're doing something right when you're performing a song at a concert for the first time, and by the second chorus members of the audience are singing it along with you," he says. "It means you've said something they've wanted to say."

Bethancourt sings in a warm baritone. It's near-perfect for this kind of work, slipping in and around a lyric. There are longtime fans who'd never guess that Bethancourt lives with a profound, lifelong stutter.

It can be ferocious. A word will stick, beating futilely against the air like a bird trying to flee a cage. Then it's sprung. The conversation carries on.

"When I first began performing I was real self-conscious about it, which of course made it worse," he says. "I figured since I couldn't master any of the real fast in-between song patter, I'd become the absolute master of the instruments themselves.

"I'm able to do the patter now reasonably well, at least most of the time. If I happen to hang up on a word -oh, well."

His audience is a mixed bag. Some fans are deeply vested in the folk and bluegrass tradition. Others only know that the theme to ."The Beverly Hillbillies" sounds swell. Bethancourt caters to them all.

"I've got several pieces that people go berserk over," he says. "They're flash. And there are other subtler ones that true banjo fans are fanatics about."

Bethancourt is also a songwriter of subversive wit. "Dylan For Dollars" skewers yuppie sell-outs. "Let's Send Barney to Jurassic *Park" - well, there's a man tuned in to popular sentiment.

Bethancourt has a reputation for giving back to the community, too. He's a regular at benefit concerts and has done considerable work in the schools.

He and his wife live in a modest west Phoenix house. Packed with Americana and sundry roving pets, the home is a monument to the musician's eclectic interests. He's a die-hard medieval retor, hence the wicked array of broadswords, pikes and chain mail coats in his parlor. One wall boasts a map of Middle Earth, the wizard-fIlled fantasy world of auuthor J.R.R. Tolkein. Antiques abound.

And there are all those vintage stringed instruments - around 130 at last count. Items range from a double-necked Gibson electric guitar to a handmade banjo that's been in his family since the 1860s.

Three years ago he booked a series of dates at the Mill Avenue Theater in Tempe.

"Over a period of several weekends I brought in absolutely every single instrument I owned and played them all," he says. "Like I said, it took several weekends. But it was fun."

Full-time iconoclast

Bethancourt has the air of a man out of time, though of precisely what era isn't clear. His passion for the past notwithstandding, he's also plugged solidly into the computer world of the Internet; when he sits down at the keyboard, it's a Macintosh, not a Steinway.

Chalk him up as an iconoclast of the first rank. His friends won't argue. Neither will he.

"At heart he's an entertainer, which not enough performers are," says Rick Cyge, a Valley folk musician. "His songs tell really funny stories, and his personality really comes through."

Among musicians who stay in their home towns, Bethancourt is something of an anomaly: He actually extracts a full-time living from music. Except for a short stint at Arizona State University - "I learned all I wanted to and left" - he's spent his adult life playing music in public.

Bethancourt says the closest thing he's had to a "real job" came at the defunct Funny Fellows Sandwich Joynt, where he spent 17 years as the house band. These days he plays at Full House in Phoenix and other venues.

He credits his love of music to his family, which is overrun with musicians on both sides, and to his exposure to old-time music in North Carolina, where he spent much of his youth.

Music in the blood

Bethancourt's "eureka" moment came at his ninth Christmas while visiting his grandfather in Phoenix. "He was fiddling and I was just loving it, because he knew hundreds of songs," he says. "I asked him if I could learn fiddling.

And he said 'No.'

"I asked why and he basically told me that one fiddler in a family at a time was enough, but would I 1 be interested in the banjo?"

His granddad rooted in a fiddle packed closet and emerged with a banjo, a pre-World War I model from Montgomery Ward.

"What can I say?" he says.

"We're a musical family."

This story originally appeared in The Phoenix Gazette.