The Knodes

It was a student-oriented business, mainly selling and renting band and orchestra instruments to beginners, holding franchises with major brands such as Selmer, Gretsch, Getzen, and Gemeinhardt. The store sold some guitars, banjos, and ukuleles, but the popularity of these instruments—the guitar in particular—had yet to take off as they soon would. “He was a horn guy,” says Emery. And a character. “He’d sometimes make a spectacle of himself—Pop was a showman.” Often when someone he knew drove by the shop, Nelson would stick his head out the door and play the Lone Ranger theme, or the theme from the William Tell Overture.

 

A fortuitous aspect of the store was its location next to Catonsville Elementary School. Emery Knode recalls:

 

"Back in the day, we had the elementary school down the street from us, and frequently the kids would get their mouthpieces stuck in their horns, and the music teacher, Les Luco [see section on Music Teachers below], would send them to go down to see Mr. Nelson. And of course they would show up with a tattered old rental horn that looked like it’d been run over by a wagon and horses, and he’d pull the mouthpiece out. And then he’d play William Tell on that beat-up old trumpet, and the kids’ eyes would get big and they’d smile. Then they’d grab the horn and run up the road and get back to class. Something you couldn’t do today! It was always fun to see the kids, because my dad could make the horn sound like something, and here’s a kid who was making awful noises on it. And it would give the kid inspiration. “Hey, if this horn can do it, so can I. It’s not the horn, it’s me.”

 

Nelson Knode’s life was deeply woven into the fabric of the Catonsville community in other ways, too—he was involved in the 4th of July celebrations, church life, social clubs, events with Parks and Recreation. “He was a community sort of guy from the get-go,” recalls Emery.

 

"He always loved people, to talk to people when they came in. I think he might’ve made a whole lot more money if he’d talked about selling guitars more than other things! He liked to philosophize with people. For years after his death [in 2010], I’ve had a parade of people who’d come in and tell me stories. You know, about the first time they came in the store when they were seven years old, and now they’re seventy. It affected their lives. He was the sort of person who really changed people."

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Nearing the end of his second decade running the store, Nelson, truly a musician at heart, had grown somewhat tired of the retail business and wanted to pursue other interests—he had studied karate in Japan, and ultimately taught martial arts with Baltimore County Parks and Recreation at UMBC and CCBC. In the late 70’s he sponsored a Japanese Folk festival at Lurman Theater, with music, art, food, and dance. A health scare in 1977 marked a definitive turning point, leading to Emery to take the helm at the age of eighteen:

 

"Dad was on the floor and got all gray-colored. I had to call 911, and there was the heart attack. The next day, someone had to open the store, and so it was game on for me. By 1980, his interests had gone elsewhere, and I thought someone’s got to run the business. I needed a livelihood, and I didn’t want a job. That would hurt too much!"

 

So, with the help of his high school sweetheart and wife Charlene, Emery took over in 1980 and formally renamed the store The Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe (for reasons shortly to be explained). By then, there were several music stores lining Frederick Road. This efflorescence was no accident: Knode’s Music Center had seeded it all. “I would have to say that the nucleus was born on the corner,” says Knode the younger, but like all the music merchants in town, he recognizes the importance of the local music ecosystem:

 

"Bill’s is important to my business, and I’m important to his. It’s like a mall—you have a Sears on one end, and JC Penny on the other. You can go to a hundred Guitar Centers, and they’re all the same. It may look like they have a lot, and compared to any one of us guys, they do. But bring us all together, in Catonsville, and they can’t hold a candle to us."

 

Catonsville was and is clearly a good community in which to run a music business. Emery reflects:

 

"I often wonder what effect the music stores have had on the community. This is an epicenter: this is a store that’s been selling guitars, giving lessons, supporting music for decades—61 years now. How do the ripples go out? As far as talent—how people play, what they play? I know we’ve affected people from far and wide. People come from all over the country to visit us. I’m certain other businesses have done the same."

 

Emery Knode grew up listening to the music his father was playing, but also newer things, especially the British art rock of the 1970’s. But then he discovered bluegrass. “That was the transition point,” he says. “I was actually starting to pay attention to the music—not just the Beverly Hillbillies.” It wasn’t long before the store gained a reputation amongst bluegrass and folk players far and wide as the go-to place for instruments, parts, and repairs. And to hang out and play.

 

The latter was abetted by one of the store’s fiddle instructors. In 1979 Paul Fehrenbach was a violinist and master’s student of composition at Peabody. (He would eventually become a professor of music at Penn State University-DuBois, a position he held for three decades, while keeping up a busy performing and recording career, among other things as fiddle player with the award-winning Celtic group Fieldstone.) At the time, he supported himself teaching fiddle at the store, eventually moving to Catonsville with one of his students, Frank Ditman. The two of them began holding Tuesday night bluegrass jams at the house they shared (120 Sanford Avenue, nicknamed “Ditman’s Farm”) with an eclectic group of local players. (One regular, guitarist Leon Curley, who also lived on Sanford Avenue, was a musician and woodworker who’d built a harpsichord in his basement.) The spaghetti-and-beer jams soon outgrew the house, and so they moved to the store. A large bluegrass ensemble, The Tuesday Night Strings, grew out of that and began playing dates around the area. That band in turn was heard by Clem Bierly, the local Busch Beer distributor, who was impressed enough to sponsor a smaller unit, the Busch County Mountaineers, which became a prominent bluegrass band playing widely in the Delmarva region.