The Drexel Barber Shop

The Drexel Barber Shop has been cutting hair and hosting pickers on South Main Street since 1964, when barber Lawrence Anthony opened the shop and started a jam session with the local police chief.

The front room is barber chairs on red-and-white checkered linoleum. The back is a big sofa, some overstuffed chairs, and walls papered in Polaroids of everyone who has played here. By late morning the scissors go down, the instruments come out, and whoever showed up settles into a rough circle for three or four hours — seasoned road musicians and first-year players in the same ring, coffee and roasted peanuts within reach. As mandolinist Herb Lambert put it: "We can sit down and play all day and never play the same tunes."

Anthony had started barbering in 1949, in a little shop across from the railroad tracks, and he cut hair here for more than fifty years until his death in December 2009. His son Carroll keeps the shop and the music going, alongside David Shirley, Lawrence's partner behind the chair for forty years. Carroll learned to play on the guitar his father carried through the war with Patton's Third Army — it still hangs in the shop.