Traditional Music And Traditional Tattoos Live On At The Parlor Room

This story originally aired in the March 16, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

As a kid, John Haywood had two loves: art and music. When all his cousins were into sports, Haywood just wanted to draw and play guitar.

He eventually figured out a way to marry his two loves. After all, his favorite rock musicians were covered in tattoos.

“I started drawing tattoos on myself and on my friends with markers and fancy pens. It got to where people would ask me to draw a tattoo on them in school, with just a marker,” Haywood says. “We were so fascinated by it, when the opportunity came to get a real one, we jumped.”

“Real” is a relative term. It was a “real” tattoo in the sense that Haywood still has it. It was little less than real because he got it from a friend’s older brother, using purloined art supplies.

“He used a sewing needle and thread and India ink that I got from my middle school,” Haywood says. “Between the art department and the home ec department I was able to get everything I needed to do a tattoo.”

Haywood’s career as a thief was short-lived. His passion for art was not. He went on to study art at Morehead State University and later in grad school at the University of Louisville.

Once out of school, he was unsure what to do next. That’s when “Big Daddy” Trey Benham offered Haywood an apprenticeship at his tattoo shop in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

But big city living grew tiresome after a while. Haywood moved back to Eastern Kentucky. He needed to make money, so he started looking for a job as a public school art teacher. Until he had a fateful encounter with another candidate.

“We were actually in line to do the drug test where you pee in a cup and all that,” Haywood remembers. “I was drawing up a design. And a guy said ‘Man, if you can draw and all that stuff, why are you doing all this with us? Having to pee in a cup, having to answer the board of education, hope you’re going to get hired? Why don’t you have your own shop?”

The question stuck with Haywood.

“Why don’t I have my own shop? I was apprenticed under a good tattoo artist who was apprenticed under a great tattoo artist, and there’s really something to that in tattooing,” he says.

So Haywood gave up on the school system. He found a former pharmacy in downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky and opened his own shop — The Parlor Room.

That was 13 years ago. Haywood’s shop has since outgrown its original basement space and now occupies the whole first floor. The walls are covered with an overwhelming amount of art, even by tattoo shop standards. 

“The lobby pretty much serves as an art gallery, just to vibe the place up,” he says. “Everybody tends to bring in a lot of the same-old same-old on the Internet. So we try to keep something to get their brains looking at some art or some traditional books and stuff like that.”

Some of the art is Haywood’s. The rest is done by his kids, his friends, his clients and the shop’s other artists. The Parlor Room now boasts five tattooers in all. Two of them are Haywood’s own apprentices.

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“You can go online and find someone explaining everything you want to know about this,” Haywood says. “But what you don’t get from that is the importance of learning how to connect with clientele, seeing what they may be going through when they come through the doors.”

The Parlor Room has its own unique way of connecting with clients. Hang around on a slow day and somebody will inevitably pick up one of the many musical instruments laying around the shop. Before long, they’re joined by someone else, thumping on a bass or strumming a guitar. If he doesn’t have a tattoo machine in his hand, Haywood will be right in the middle of this impromptu jam session, picking away on his open back banjo.

Those banjo stylings are the result of another important apprenticeship for Haywood. Around the time he was planning to move back from Louisville, he did an art show here in Whitesburg, selling some paintings.

“I was doing a lot of banjo-y paintings. Like, old timers playing the banjo. At some point I did an art show at Appalshop. George Gibson came by, saw the art show, bought a painting or two and left me with an album of his,” Haywood says.

Haywood had been aware of George Gibson for a while. They kept crossing paths at music festivals. He knew Gibson was both an accomplished banjo player and a historian of the instrument. 

Gibson learned to play from his neighbors in Knott County, Kentucky, soaking up a regional traditional banjo style that had largely been forgotten as the instrument became more associated with commercial bluegrass music. 

“He would learn a lot of stuff from people that didn’t even own instruments but could play a song or two,” Haywood says.

Gibson later moved to Philadelphia and then Florida, becoming a successful businessman. But his love of the banjo kept him coming back to Kentucky.

When he ran into Haywood at that art show, he saw something in the young artist. And offered him a deal. In exchange for one painting a year, Haywood could live in a house on Gibson’s Knott County property and study banjo with him.

“We never did too many lessons. A lesson would be him telling me these stories about people, or him encouraging me to read some kind of book. Or sometimes me sitting on the porch with him while he played,” Haywood says.

Through these informal lessons, Haywood began to absorb the banjo styles that Gibson had spent his life studying.

Haywood doesn’t just play his banjo between tattoos. He regularly plays gigs and festivals all over Kentucky and beyond. He appeared on Tyler Childers’ gospel album “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven” and has recorded banjo albums of his own, including one taped right here at the Parlor Room.

While tattoos are usually associated with rock or hip hop music, Haywood sees a strong connection between his study of banjo and his study of tattooing.

“The practice of traditional tattooing is almost exactly like the practice of traditional music. There are designs that were done and executed in the past — say an eagle, done by someone like Sailor Jerry. As a traditional tattooer, when someone wants something like that, I go to that as a reference. I am executing a design that originated maybe over 100 years ago at this point,” Haywood says. “Those are the folk songs.”

Whether we’re talking about tattoos or banjo, Haywood is careful who he shares these hard-won lessons with.

“It’s ‘see me now, hear me later,’” Haywood says.

He once had a “sketchy neighbor” who got a tattoo machine from the Internet. The man stopped Haywood in the middle of the road to ask him how the device worked.

“I told him every single thing about it. You’re supposed to keep that secret,” Haywood said. “I told him everything about it, standing in the middle of the road. And said ‘Well, I’ll see you later. I’ve got to go to work.’”

He drove away, leaving the neighbor more confused than when he started.

“There was so much knowledge, he’s not going to understand any of that unless he goes the path of actually trying to figure that out,” Haywood says.

It’s the same thing with the banjo. The stakes are quite a bit lower — nobody’s getting permanently scarred from a bad rendition of “Cluck Old Hen.” But Haywood can’t pass down any of the knowledge he has gleaned from years of study without a willing student.

“It’s not going to even matter. It’s probably going to waste our time unless you’re ready for it,” he says.

Artists like Haywood dedicate years of study to their craft — learning history and technique so they can bring all that knowledge to bear when they’re standing on a stage or jabbing ink into someone’s bicep.

Yet the whole point of all that practice, study and work is to create art of such depth that the uninitiated can appreciate it without a lifetime of study. We don’t need all that knowledge in our heads or our hands, because we can just feel that it’s good.

That’s certainly true with music. Whether you’ve heard the song before or not, whether you know its history or not, when it’s good — you feel it. 

Haywood says it’s the same way with tattoos.

“It’s funny what tattooing does for folks. When you put something on someone and they walk out of here, you see them feeling better about something,” Haywood says. “It feels pretty good to know you can do that for someone.”

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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.