Odell McGuire

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• Go to the music blog for more information about McGuire. The blog includes a link to his own account of Lexington’s old-time revival of the 1970s, and memories from Scott Ainslie, a talented and respected blues/roots performer and teacher. Ainslie, once a geology student of McGuire’s, joined him in making old-time sessions real events around the Washington & Lee campus.

It took a geology professor with a deeply curious mind to revive old-time music in Lexington and Rockbridge County.

That professor, Odell McGuire, died Dec. 8 in Lexington after a series of health problems, said his friend, noted multi-instrumentalist and bandleader James Leva. He was 81.

McGuire, who in 1962 came to Washington and Lee University as a buttoned-up conservative, morphed into a clawhammer banjo-playing, environmentally conscious raconteur over the 32 years that followed.

"His passion for old-time music infected a whole generation of us, and his enthusiasm for it made Lexington a mecca of old-time music in the 1970s," Leva said. "He's the one who started taking us to fiddling conventions and introducing us to the old guys ... who thought nobody was interested in their music anymore.

"It was a real cool thing. And I know we all owe it to Odell for getting the thing rolling."

McGuire, a native of Knoxville, Tenn., was exposed to the old-time style at an early age. His grandfather Cal Claxton played banjo, according to McGuire's ex-wife, Mata McGuire. But it didn't take a prominent role in his life until 1968.

Up to that point, he had already been a war hero -- he was a Navy man in World War II and an Army infantryman in the Korean War, where he received the Purple Heart. After the war, he earned a doctorate in geology and worked in Canada for Texaco Exploration Co.

He came to W&L as an instructor in 1962 and became a professor in 1970. He retired in 1994, and was a professor emeritus who continued to exercise his mind, teaching himself Greek and Latin, in part to overcome what he saw as incorrect translations.

"If he got a bug in his ear, he just went for it," Mata McGuire said.

Leva, who met McGuire early on in Lexington's old-time boom, said he was most impressed at his "sense of wonder at all the things in the world, seeing things in geologic time."

"He talked about history, about people, about music," Leva said. "He just found the world an absolutely amazing place. And he shared that."

Odell and Mata McGuire first went to the Old Fiddler's Convention, in Galax, in 1968. There, Odell McGuire heard the music in a way that spoke to his core, performed by old and then-anonymous players.

"It just blew me over," McGuire told The Roanoke Times in a September 1998 interview. In particular, the banjo grabbed him: "There's nothing else that sounds like it. It's an ancient sound."

Mata McGuire said that her ex-husband found someone there who agreed to build him a banjo. He began teaching himself to play, and his enthusiasm for the style spilled over into on-campus interactions -- first with his students, then with others who were hearing word-of-mouth from those students. Field trips to West Virginia and North Carolina exposed them to people who thought their music was forgotten.

"They ate it up," Mata McGuire said of Odell's following. "There was that feeling back in the hippie era, so to speak, that there was some really good stuff that we could learn from those people. And the music was part of it."

The McGuires' homes, and Mata's White Column Inn -- which Odell had described as a combination bar, picking parlor and restaurant -- became the centers of a musical movement that brought players such as Leva, Dave Winston and Andy Williams to Lexington.

On a parallel track, Odell McGuire made a name for himself in geology. He held fellowships with the University of Illinois -- where he had received his doctorate -- and was a leader among members of the National Science Foundation. He once received a grant for a study comparing the Alps with the Appalachians, according to an obituary posted at Washington and Lee's Web site.

"Odell arrived at W&L a conservative, soft-spoken, clean-shaven fellow wearing a three-piece suit, with experience in the oil business and graduate degrees from Illinois and Columbia," Ed Spencer, a fellow professor emeritus of geology, said in the W&L site's obituary. "It would have been hard to imagine that he would be one of the first environmentally green faculty members, that he would become renowned for playing clawhammer banjo or that he would teach himself Greek so he could revise translations of the early Greek philosophers."

McGuire suffered a stroke about a dozen years ago, and for a long time, he did not play. Instead, he turned his attention to such subjects as chaos theory, history and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, he picked the banjo back up, and taught some aspiring players for a while.

Then, beginning last fall, health issues started to amass, including a broken pelvis, which forced him first into a hospital, then a nursing home. He could not beat a virus that was making the rounds, Leva and Mata McGuire said.

"But he was a bull," Leva said. "He was made of iron. He was just an amazingly resilient fellow, both mentally and physically."

According to W&L, a memorial service is scheduled for 4 p.m. Sunday in Lee Chapel. A reception will follow in the science building's great hall. McGuire's family asks that no one send flowers -- instead, send memorials to the Rockbridge Area Conservation Council, P.O. Box 564, Lexington, VA 24450.