Washboard Willy pulls his county fair audience like a pied piper

By BILL VARBLE, Mail Tribune

Washboard Willy, aka Larry Hiskett, takes his one-man show on the road down Food Alley Friday at the Jackson County Fair in Central Point. He’s one of several strolling entertainers at the fair.  Bob Pennell

They’re all over the place Thursday morning as Willy (aka Larry Hiskett, 52, ex-jazz drummer and ex-landscape architect) leads snake-dancing revelers in a rollicking version of Harry Belafonte’s "The Banana Boat Song." The throng follows the big, blond dude in the Bob Marley shorts and the Hawaiian shirt.

The procession snakes past vendors of pet identification tags, fat-fried candy bars, cheap sunglasses, an amazing liquid breakthrough that contains "every vitamin, mineral, enzyme and amino acid known to man" and jeans-clad cowgirls in Ralph Lauren sunglasses talking on cell phones.

"Day-o! Day-ay-ay-o!"

"I love him," Kathy Lillie says. "He mesmerizes everybody. We call him the pied piper."

Lillie, 44, of Gold Hill, is here at the Jackson County Fair with a daughter who’s showing steers. She saw Washboard Willy last year and was hoping he’d be back.

"I’d rather watch him than the entertainment over there," she says, waving in the direction of the stage where country singer Dwight Yoakam performed Thursday night.

Washboard Willy is not your usual washboard guy. Hiskett started playing drums in his native Kansas at 10, played professionally in his early 20s, spent several years on the road, burned out on the one-night stands. He earned a degree in landscape architecture at Kansas State University and worked in that field. One day in 1976, at the Tip-Top Tavern in Eureka Springs, Ark., he happened to see a musical duo called Washboard Leo and Cornbread.

"I could do that," he thought.

He didn’t, at least then, but a seed had been planted. Several years later he chanced across an old washboard, a National 134 model, at an antique mall. Bingo.

This time it was a no-brainer. Getting the washboard led to a part-time gig in a bluegrass band. His group would evolve from the Whiskett Rhythm Band to Willy Whiskett to Washboard Willy.

After a 1987 accident, in which a friend riding on the back of his motorcycle was badly hurt, he struggled with depression and guilt for a year. One day his boss, chafing at the long grieving period, asked Hiskett when he thought he’d be able to give 100 percent to his job again.

"Those words stopped me," he says. "It was time to give 100 percent to me."

He quit his landscape architecture job, and in 1988 Washboard Willy became a full-time gig. It’s since taken him around the world.

A turning point in the act came in Japan, where youngsters he was trying to entertain shied from eye contact. In desperation, he found if he put out rhythm instruments such as maracas, claves (Cuban rhythm sticks) and sundry other noise-makers, that when one kid picked one up, the others joined in. Washboard Willy had become a participatory act.

"No more bars and clubs," he thought. "I’m gonna be a children’s entertainer."

He was doing a show in San Francisco in 1999 when he ran into a computer programmer he’d known 14 years earlier in Colorado.

"There he was," Donnis Hiskett says in the couple’s dressing room at the fair, a travel trailer.

After they were married, she became his booking agent, lead rhythm section, Web site designer/pixel queen, percussion wagon ramrod and all-purpose cheerleader. The couple lives in La Pine when they’re not on the road in a 10-month season.

The National washboard is gone, worn out and replaced with a hardwood-backed number of Hiskett’s own design with cowbells, mouth harps and ah-ooga horns a la Spike Jones. Behind Willy comes a small-scale Western chuckwagon laden with maracas and gourds and whistles and things that go clank in the night or day.

Washboard Willy plays danceable versions of blues and folk and pop standards like "The City of New Orleans," "Under the Boardwalk," old Creedence Clearwater Revival, infectious shuffles.

Sierra Hagler, 9, visiting from Salem, Mo., plays a mean maraca behind Willy, giving it up reluctantly as he finally moves on. She says she’s played maracas before, in the Girl Scouts.

"This was better," she says.

There are goofball riffs in the act, too. He’ll slip into the old New Orleans rave-up "Iko Iko," get kids involved in the call and shout of "Hey now! Hey now!" then cry, "See how easily programmed you are."

He asks the crowd if they’ve ever had a song driving them crazy, then plays a song called "That song is Drivin’ Me Crazy."

When he has hold of it, it is a joyful noise. The crowds and the day are heating up, and the sun is getting higher.

"We drink a lot of water," the washboard man says.

Then he’s off again, back into the crowd that’s this day’s Hamlin.