50 plus: For Lynchburg man, music is a way of life

Editor's Note: 50 Plus is a regular special feature profiling Central Virginians ages 50 and over and focusing on a particular theme. This edition's theme is music. Click here for more 50 Plus stories.

Steve Wilson remembers the exact night he decided to become a musician.

Thirteen-year-old Wilson was at a middle school dance with the girl of his dreams.

“I remember going home that night heartbroken,” he says.

It turned out that his date was more interested in the boys in the band than in Wilson. Dejected but determined, he decided to play music to get the girl.

Three decades later, 50-year-old Wilson has built a life around music. He has spent years on the road, touring the United States and Canada with banjo legend Don Reno, and big names in bluegrass.

If Wilson ever found the girl who rejected him at that middle school dance, he would thank her.

Though teenage heartbreak was the catalyst, Wilson’s path to music was paved from an early age. He grew up listening to his parents’ old-time bluegrass music. As a teenager, he experimented with whatever string instrument he could get his hands on, starting with the guitar. The dobro became his specialty.

“The dobro is like an acoustic guitar that has a big aluminum speaker on the top, a resonator, that gives the guitar a loud, bell-like metallic sounds,” he explains.

“Growing up, we couldn’t afford a dobro, so my dad made one for me out of an old guitar.”

Today, several years after his father’s death, the makeshift dobro is one of his most prized possessions.

Wilson was still a student at Brookville High School when he landed his first professional gig — playing backup for Charlie Monroe’s band, Cecil Hall and the Dominion Bluegrass Boys.

Soon after, that job brought him face-to-face with his boyhood bluegrass hero, Cliff Waldron, an accomplished dobro player and pivotal member of Washington, D.C.’s nascent bluegrass scene. While playing a show in Berryville, Waldron heard Wilson play and invited him to play dobro in his band, the Seldom Scene.

“Naturally, I jumped right on it. I had to. I was like, ‘Man, this is my big chance.’”

In 1978, Wilson got an offer from banjo legend Don Reno, who was living in the Lynchburg area at the time and needed a bass player in his band, Don Reno and the Tennessee Cut-Ups. Though Wilson was more passionate about the dobro than the bass, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

He played throughout the United States and Canada with the band.

“There was tight camaraderie. We were almost like a traveling family on the road.”

In 1982, Wilson left Reno’s band for The Lost and Found.

During these years, Wilson began to grow tired of the rampant drug and alcohol use on the road.

“Thank goodness I’ve always had a conscience. It’s easy to fall in with the wrong crowd, with all those parties taking place. I was right in the middle of it.”

Weary from the years of travel, he left the bluegrass circuit in 1987 and settled down in Lynchburg, where he worked at Robert’s Piano. One year later, his daughter Amanda was born.

In the past two decades, Wilson has strengthened his relationship with God and focused on gospel music, instead of bluegrass.

Today, he works at the Lynchburg Music Center and is a member of Solid Rock Baptist Church in Madison Heights. He tours the church circuit in Virginia with his gospel group, The Solid Rock Three.

“I’m happiest when I’m in the middle playing music. No matter what’s bothering me, it goes away when I’m involved in music.”