“He said, ‘You have served your country well’ and, ‘We’ve got the greatest country in the world,’ but he cussed a little bit while saying it.”
Those words of encouragement were a big deal to the young soldier who grew up in coal mining country in Clay County, Ky., but that would not be his last brush with a legend. Indeed, he would soon become very good friends with one.
When Jarvis was 6 years old, he started playing guitar and immediately started writing his own tunes.
“I wasn’t worth a quarter,” he said modestly. “My mother and uncle played a little bit. I couldn’t write, so I just memorized the songs.”
When he was still a child, his mother moved to Buckeye Street in Hamilton, and he traveled back and forth a lot as he grew up.
When Jarvis was 14, his father was killed during an altercation while running a taxi service, running coal miners in and out of town to a bar.
After that, Jarvis joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and helped build a campground in South Bend, Ind.
When that job was finished and before he enlisted in the U.S. Army, he went back to Manchester to visit family and met his future wife, Rosie Owens, whose father worked in the mines laying railroad track and electrical lines.
“I was standing at one side of the street and she was on the other with her mother,” he recalled. “I went over and looked at her mother and said, ‘She’s mine, even if I never get her.’ ”
It was also in Manchester that Jarvis enlisted in the Army, trained at Fort Meade then shipped to England and Scotland for further training before being sent to Normandy for the D-Day invasion.
The first thing he did after returning to the states was to go back to Manchester and visit his grandma, he said, because he heard her praying for him while he was in the hospital in Belgium.
Then he went after Rosie, and they were married that year in London, Ky. Rosie had spent the war years going to school and working in a grocery store.
“I had a brother in the war, too, so we just held things together while they were gone,” she said.
The newlyweds settled in Hamilton, where Jarvis started Jarvis and Owens Painting in partnership with Rosie’s brothers.
“I never picked up a paintbrush in my life,” he said. “But after I got discharged, I didn’t think I could pass any examinations because of my legs and my nerves were shot.”
Eight years later, they had their first son, whom they named Lucky, who turned out to be a fine musician on his own.
“He knows chords I’ve been hunting for 70 years,” the father said.
Jarvis began playing gospel bluegrass in the Pentecostal churches in the area and teamed up with Rusty York, who earned some fame as a rockabilly artist but turned to country and bluegrass as he built Jewel Records in Mount Healthy, where Jarvis did most of his recording.
It was York who introduced him to regional favorite Jimmy Skinner, who had recorded for the Capitol, Decca and Mercury labels.
“I’d heard of him and he put up a record shop in Cincinnati. I was talking to Rusty about him and he said, ‘Why don’t you go in there and see him?’
“So we went into the back of the store and started talking to him. He’d heard of me and after that he went and recorded two of my songs.”
Skinner started recording Jarvis in 1948.
Through Skinner, he met Ralph Stanley, the legendary bluegrass musician and part of the Stanley Brothers band. Stanley would become a good friend and frequent house guest, staying at the Jarvis’ Sharon Park home for “two weeks at a time.”
“He always told me this was his second home,” Jarvis said.
Stanley also recorded several of Jarvis’ songs, which helped him earn an award for gospel songwriting.
“They either liked me or felt sorry for me,” he said.
Jarvis ended up recording some 45 albums, mostly with Skinner and York, including some records with his family and with an outfit dubbed the Rocky Mountain Boys.
In addition to several recordings of his songs by Stanley, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley recorded “Take Your Shoes Off Moses” and a few others on the 1971 album “Second Generation.”
Jarvis wrote tunes about the Vietnam war that gained him some national recognition, as did “The Hyden Miners’ Tragedy,” written about the 1970 Hurricane Creek mine disaster, which occurred a year to the day after the passage of the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act and resulted in the deaths of 38 men including one of Jarvis’ uncles and five of his cousins.
That song earned him an invitation to perform in Washington, D.C., in 1973, sharing a bill with country music singer and songwriter Merle Travis, and the Motown singing group the Supremes.
Jarvis said he turned down many invitations to move to Nashville and record, but like his desire to stay a buck private during his Army career, he was content to play small churches and staying close to home.
“They tried to get me to come down there. Everybody wanted me to go to Nashville, but I didn’t want it. They sent you where they wanted you to go,” he said. “I’ve been through too much.
“I’d go 50 miles away from the house to play, but if I got a notion to go, we’d go,” he said, recounting his occasional travels to Michigan, Tennessee and some places he liked to play in the Ozarks.
Jarvis also hosted a radio show for 10 years on the Fairfield station WCNW.
Three years ago, Jarvis suffered three strokes, and according to his wife, the doctors are amazed that he’s pulling out of it.
“After the strokes, he couldn’t tell you anything, but he never forgot his songs,” she said.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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