On August 14, 1945, Steve Martin was born. You might not have expected to see Martin in our “Music Memories” series, because he’s still better known as a comedian and actor. But he’s also a Grammy-winning and Tony-nominated musician, and today, we’re focusing on that side of his career.
Martin began to play the banjo in his teens. He was largely self-taught; he says that he’d play bluegrass records at half speed, tuning his banjo so that the pitches would match, and learn to play pieces by ear, gradually speeding up to full speed. He did have some help along the way and took lessons from John McEuen, who would later become a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
While he was a student at UCLA, Martin began performing in Los Angeles comedy clubs. The connections he made there helped him get work as a TV writer, working on variety series. He won an Emmy in 1969 as a member of the writing staff for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
By the mid-1970s, he was successful enough as a comic that he began to appear frequently on television, most notably on Saturday Night Live. The show’s audience was significantly larger when Martin hosted.
The banjo was always a part of Martin’s act. He’d interrupt the jokes at random moments with a short solo, dancing with a fit of “happy feet.” And when he started to record comedy albums, there was usually some music—“Grandmother’s Song” on Let’s Get Small, the instrumental “Drop Thumb Medley” on Comedy Is Not Pretty.
In 1978, the exhibit “Treasures of Tutankhamun” was touring US museums, starting a small pop culture craze for ancient Egypt. Martin was preparing for another appearance on Saturday Night Live, and asked if he could perform his Egypt-themed song. Producer Lorne Michaels loved the idea, and built one of the most elaborate, expensive sets the show had ever used for the premiere of the song “King Tut.”
And Martin himself had gone all out for this one. He was backed by his old friend John McEuen and other members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band—billed as the “Toot Uncommons”—and the song became a top twenty hit.
Martin showed off more of his musical talents later that year when he made his first major film appearance in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
When his final comedy album, The Steve Martin Brothers, was released in 1981, it was only half a comedy album. The titular “brothers” were the two sides of Martin, identified on the two sides of the album as “The Rich Comedian” and “The Peace-Loving Hippie Banjo Player.”
Martin made another musical film appearance in 1986, appearing as a sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. He only had one song, but “Dentist!” was one of the movie’s highlights.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Martin focused primarily on acting and writing, though he did appear in 2001 as a guest on an album with bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs; their performance of Scruggs’s classic “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, with several of the album’s guest artists, won a Grammy award.
Martin returned to music in 2009, when he released his first all-music album, The Crow. It was a #1 album on the Bluegrass chart, as have been all of the albums he’s released since then, and won a Grammy as the year’s best bluegrass album. He began touring that year with the veteran bluegrass band, the Steep Canyon Rangers. They’ve now recorded three albums together, most recently The Long-Awaited Album in 2017.
In 2013, Martin began another productive collaboration, this time with singer Edie Brickell. The title song from their 2013 album Love Has Come for You won another Grammy; they followed up with So Familiar in 2015. Martin and Brickell expanded some of their songs into a musical, Bright Star, which ran on Broadway for several months in 2016.
Martin’s love for the banjo goes beyond his own performing. In 2010, he created the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass to reward talented artists and increase the visibility of bluegrass; each recipient receives $50,000 and a bronze sculpture. And in 2011, Martin narrated Give Me the Banjo, a documentary about the history of the banjo in America.