This banjoist has played alongside some bluegrass greats including fiddler Vassar Clements and dobro picker Jerry Douglas, but remains a fairly obscure figure from the '70s and '80s scene. Bill Runkle is one of the few banjo players of note who cannot claim to have played with Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys, a distinction worth mentioning since it sets him apart from so many others. Runkle is remembered mostly by bluegrass fans who followed the activities of the early Del McCoury bands, known as the Dixie Pals. By the mid-'80s, wide-scale recognition was finally coming McCoury's way, but Runkle is a character on an earlier page, before the bandleader decided to dump the Dixie Pals name and all its connotations in order to begin working as the much classier Del McCoury Band. There were at least three versions of the Dixie Pals beginning in 1967, although McCoury sometimes makes it seem in interviews as if there was a different lineup on-stage every night. The leader himself was basically gigging only on weekends during this period, supporting himself by working as a logger during the week. Most of the sidemen were in the same pickle, so getting together a group for a performance somewhere sometimes depended on grabbing whoever happened to be available. McCoury rolled out three albums for the Rebel label between 1974 and 1984, material that has been reissued in a McCoury retrospective entitled Classic Bluegrass. Runkle is joined by mandolinist Donnie Eldreth, the appetizing-sounding fiddler Bill Poffinberger, and bassist Dewey Renfro for the first stage of the group. Brother Jerry McCoury would come on board as bassist in the next lineup, establishing the Dixie Pals as yet another bluegrass "brother" band. This is how the chronology of the band is explained in the notes to the McCoury, yet the bassists actually showed up in the reverse order in the Dixie Pals discography, no hassle for Runkle who is on hand in both cases. Perhaps this confusion is an outcome of the casual nature of the group, which the leader has described as being more "for fun" than anything in his later career. Bluegrass pundits of the 21st century look back on the '70s and '80s as a type of golden era, and the early works of artists such as J.D. Crowe and McCoury's Dixie Pals as absolutely precious memorabilia from the period. Yet the reception at the time wasn't always cordial, a factor that must have contributed plenty to the players' struggles. The 1973 High on a Mountain, now considered to be something like McCoury's Rubber Soul, came out at a time when the Rounder label had released less than 20 albums -- it was the 19th. Runkle and the McCoury brothers are joined by fiddler Bill Sage and the mandolinist and vocalist Dick Stuber, and the resulting sound led Old Time Music critic Jack O'Ryan to come up with the term "chamber bluegrass." Of course the younger pickers of the day were under attack for supposedly changing the music, so a magazine that served as a mouthpiece for the most conservative styles of Appalachian music is a good place to find out just what sins the radical pickers, newgrassers and chamber bluegrassers were accused of committing. Tracks such as the brilliant "Big Rock in the Road" were said to have "none of that precipitous, exhilarating flangdang quality of early bluegrass..." A follow-up album simply named after the band brings in Poffinberger and Renfro, with Eldreth and Stuber taking turns on mandolin. Here is about the best Runkle on record, a selection of duets with the bandleader himself that show impressive sensitivity if not a heavy flangdang quotient. The earlier album, on the other hand, has one of the lone examples of the banjoist's skills when he sits down to write a song. "I'm so Lonely Tonight," if not the harbinger of a prolific composer, at least shows that Runkle does not feel above writing about typical country & western subjects. ~ Eugene Chadbourne