The Knodes
The early roots of Catonsville as “Music City Maryland” propagate out mainly from one man: Nelson William Knode. Born in Baltimore in 1920, raised on Fulton Avenue, he was a natural musician from a young age.
When he was eight or nine years old, his had father lost work with the B&O Railroad, and at Christmastime, as Knode put it in a 1982 Baltimore Sun article,
"We didn't have two pennies to rub together. We were downtown one day, my mom and dad and I, and we passed the Peabody music store on Howard Street, and there was a trumpet in the window on sale for $32.50. We didn’t have the money for it, but we went in, and it turned out my father knew the salesman. And he knew my parents were honorable people, so he told them to take the trumpet and pay whatever they could on it."
Catonsville's First Family of Music
For a period, Knode taught music at The McDonough School in Owings Mills, while still playing his trumpet in dinner theaters, with park bands, in strip joints, and everything in between, to gain experience and earn extra money. “He had a very colorful musician’s life,” recalls his son Emery. By the mid 1950’s, as he married and started a family, says Emery, “He figured it was no place to be, out at night playing music, so he decided to have a go at running a shop. To get a real job, so to speak.”
Thus in 1960 was born Nelson Knode’s Music Center, at the corner of Frederick Road and Bloomsbury Avenue, in the back half of what is now the Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe owned and operated by son Emery Knode today. Nelson had bought the whole building, and before long he expanded to occupy the front facing Frederick Road, which had housed a shoe repair shop and a clock and watch repair business.
As the family headed home on the streetcar, Nelson’s father hummed “Coming Through the Rye”—the old Scottish folk song, perhaps prescient given the trajectory of this story. Later that day, Nelson took the trumpet out and played the melody note-for-note. “You should have seen my father's face. You could have knocked him over with a feather." [Baltimore Sun, 10 January 1982]. He would eventually play with the local Evening Sun Newsboys Band and win a scholarship to study at the Peabody Conservatory under such teachers as Michelangelo Francisco Converso and Edwin Franko Goldman. After graduating, he went on to perform under maestro Reginald Stewart in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and also joined house orchestras at the old State, Stanley, and Keith theaters. Though his first loves were baroque and classical music, his tastes were broad and encompassing, and he developed a special passion for Big Band music.
[image: Original street signs from the sides of Nelson Knode’s Music Center]
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."
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.
Emery Knode’s timing was good, as bluegrass, which had begun in the 1940’s as an amalgam of old-time and traditional “hillbilly” music of the Appalachian region under the influence of such seminal groups as Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and the Stanley Brothers, was experiencing a vigorous rebirth. Emery was attending the bluegrass jams on Sanford Avenue, but also going out to hear area groups such as the Washington, DC-based Seldom Scene, one of the greatest gateway bluegrass bands of the more recent revival of the genre.
Bluegrass was a good fit for a family business in the process of rebranding itself, as the music had a hominess that matched the ambiance and feel of the store. Emery reflects:
"One of the things that struck me was how personable the musicians truly are. It’s real-life people. You can see them on stage playing, and the next thing you know, they’re in the row behind you, listening to the band that came up next. The music’s very social."
At “Ditman’s Farm” he recalls, “You’d have fifty, seventy-five people show up…somebody calls out a song, and everybody knows it, and what key to play it in, and they know all the words, and where to take the breaks. That really caught my attention.” As did a fresh market for the store. The musicians jamming at Ditman’s had particular needs—parts, capos, strings, specialized repairs—that other stores weren’t equipped to meet. Knode saw an opportunity. In 1980, the store formally changed its name to Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe. By 1982, the jams had moved to the store, and they continued there for years. More than a few local marriages, says Knode, came out of those occasions (and maybe, he admits, a few divorces.)
[image: The Busch County Mountaineers, from left to right: Leon Curley – lead guitar, Frank Ditman – Fiddle, Mae Fryfogle – upright bass (kneeling), Paul Fehrenbach – banjo, fiddle and harmony vocals, Dave Pfeiffer – lead vocals, rhythm guitar (sitting on keg), Mike Winstead – Mandolin]
[images: Jamming in the shop, 1981]
[images: Jamming in the shop, 1981]
[image: Nelson Knode trumpeting in Santa Clause, Catonsville Volunteer Fire Department, nd.]
[image: Emery Knode, 2021]
Before long, the name and reputation of The Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe got around the country. “You’d be hard pressed in the bluegrass world to find anybody who hasn’t at least heard of us.” If anyone far outside of town had ever heard of Catonsville, it was probably because of one of two things: the Catonsville Nine, or the store. Major recording artists such as Del McCoury, David Grisman, Ronda Vincent, Marty Stuart, David Bromburg have been customers over the years.
An important key to the store’s success has been the quality of the acoustic instrument service. “I’m naturally a guy who can fix stuff. That’s one of my god-given talents,” says Knode. “If it’s broken, give it to me, and I’ll figure a way of fixing it—as long as it’s not electronics.” Knode studied violin-making with the Washington, DC master luthier William Gault, he was trained at Martin Guitars in Nazareth Pennsylvania, and he learned from Ken duBourg (then a resident of Arbutus who came to work in the Knodes’ shop). DuBourg is now a revered acoustic guitar maker. His claim to fame at the time was building guitars for the legendary acoustic guitar player Michael Hedges.
[image: David Bromberg with fiddler and vocalist Warren Blair, nd]
[image: Ken duBourg with a duBourg 12-string in the shop at Appalacian Bluegrass, nd]
Among the many special moments in the life of the store, one in particular stands out to Knode. When Hurricane Floyd came up the Chesapeake Bay in 1999, it fatally damaged Maryland’s Liberty Tree, a tulip poplar on the campus of St. John’s College in Annapolis where Maryland colonists of revolutionary period had gathered and plotted). Learning of the demise of the tree, Knode made a frantic call to Bob Taylor, of Taylor guitars in California. “If anyone could figure out how to make a good-sounding guitar out of poplar [not typically a guitar wood], it would be Bob,” he realized at the time. Taylor eventually made 400 guitars from the salvaged wood, each with decorative inlays commemorating their origin. The Appalacian Bluegrass Shoppe ultimately got eight of the guitars—seven of which sold rapidly, and one of which Emery kept.
A critical part of the store’s success was Emery’s wife, Charlene. They’d been childhood sweethearts, had raised a family together, and ran the business as a couple. Charlene was well- known to customers, as she was often the first person to greet them in the door, with an uncanny memory for people’s names, always lending a genuinely interested and sympathetic ear for their stories. Sadly, she passed in 2019. “She truly was a person who was enthusiastic about other people’s good,” recalls Emery. “We did everything together—lived together, worked together, made mistakes together. Losing her was losing half the shop. If I could have figured out how to close up, I would have.” She ran the operation. “She was my governor.”
Daughter Emily Rose and son Christopher are now in their twenties. Though Christopher is a big bluegrass fan and mandolin player, they have no great interest in taking on the business, and Emery says he’s not really encouraging them. “Small business is hard. And harder than ever”—mainly due to the internet. “I’m working twice as hard as I did twenty years ago, for less money.” Though he has an online shop, he wasn’t an enthusiastic early adopter of on-line sales: “You can’t buy a guitar on line! You have to play the thing first.” Time will tell if this anchor of Music City Maryland stays in place.
[image: Emery and Charlene Knode in the shop, 1995]
The early roots of Catonsville as “Music City Maryland” propagate out mainly from one man: Nelson William Knode. Born in Baltimore in 1920, raised on Fulton Avenue, he was a natural musician from a young age.
When he was eight or nine years old, his had father lost work with the B&O Railroad, and at Christmastime, as Knode put it in a 1982 Baltimore Sun article,
"We didn't have two pennies to rub together. We were downtown one day, my mom and dad and I, and we passed the Peabody music store on Howard Street, and there was a trumpet in the window on sale for $32.50. We didn’t have the money for it, but we went in, and it turned out my father knew the salesman. And he knew my parents were honorable people, so he told them to take the trumpet and pay whatever they could on it."
[image: Emery and Charlene Knode in the shop, 1995]
[image: The Busch County Mountaineers, from left to right: Leon Curley – lead guitar, Frank Ditman – Fiddle, Mae Fryfogle – upright bass (kneeling), Paul Fehrenbach – banjo, fiddle and harmony vocals, Dave Pfeiffer – lead vocals, rhythm guitar (sitting on keg), Mike Winstead – Mandolin]