Scotty Stoneman

Scotty Stoneman was part of the Stoneman Family (think, Jackson 5 of bluegrass, led by country music pioneer Pop Stoneman), a Virginia family of bluegrass and country musicians. Here is Scotty playing with Jimmy and Donna Stoneman, "a musical family of thirteen children" as it says in the video.

In a 1981 Musican magazine interview with Jerry (archived here), Jerry is prompted to talk about Stoneman after the interviewer says he was "imitating essence, not form" from Coltrane. So presumably, the same was true with Stoneman--Jerry was moved by his essence, his emotionality, rather than his specific licks or technical ability.

A very important model for me was a bluegrass fiddle player named Scotty Sternman [sic], who was just a house-a-fire crazed fiddle player. He was a monster technically, played liked the devil. Anyway, he was terribly burnt-out alcohol case by the time I saw him, but I remember hearing him take a simple fiddle tune and stretch it into this incredible 20-minute extravaganza in which you hear just everything come out of that fiddle, and I was so moved emotionally that he became one of my models...I mean, there I was standing in that audience with just tears rolling out of my eyes, it was just so amazing. And it was the essence that counted, none of the rest of it.

For a musician of such great caliber (who met quite an alcoholic demise), little of his work is commonly available--perhaps only three albums are still commercially available. But there are a number of recordings of his work with the Kentucky Colonels (a partial list is available on etree, but note, not all Kentucky Colonel recordings feature Stoneman). Some Kentucky Colonel recordings are available on the great Steam Powered Preservation Society's website. Here is a FLAC show. You'll have to poke around for other Colonel shows on SPPS, as well as MP3 recordings if that is your format of choice.

I haven't found anything akin to a 20-minute Scotty song, but his short take on Lee Highway Blues says something for sure.