(Fiddle, 1928–2005) Vassar Clements was just 14 years old when he joined Bill Monroe And The Bluegrass Boys in 1949. His virtuosic fiddling won him jobs with Jim And Jesse in 1958 and Jimmy Martin in 1967, but it was Clements’ emergence as a key figure on 1972’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken album that led him to the ...
(Vocals, songwriter, 1911–94) Much underrated and overlooked, Zeke Clements combined cowboy songs with fine yodelling, and moved around the nation’s radio stations – WLS (Chicago), WSM (Nashville) and other locations – before arriving in Hollywood and voicing the cartoon character Bashful in Walt Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937). After several movie appearances, he ...
Few genres are as closely identified with one person as bluegrass is with Bill Monroe (vocals, mandolin, 1911–96). Monroe not only defined the style’s instrumentation, style and repertoire, he also hired most of its major figures and gave the music its name – taken from his group, The Blue Grass Boys. Kentucky Roots Raised on his ...
Lester Flatt (1914–79) was relieved when Dave ‘Stringbean’ Akeman left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945, for Flatt felt the group was better off without a banjo, which had been hindering their efforts to play faster and cleaner than anyone had before. But Monroe agreed to audition a 21-year-old banjoist from western North Carolina, and Earl Scruggs ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1922–2003) In an era when every other singer was trying to sound like Bill Monroe or Carter Stanley, Hylo Brown sounded like no one else. An Ohio defence plant worker who moonlighted at hillbilly bars during the Second World War, Kentucky’s Frank Brown Jr. became renowned for a vocal range that went from a warm ...
In 1981, Sam Bush (mandolin, vocals, b. 1952) lost half of his band, The New Grass Revival, to road weariness. Courtney Johnson (banjo, 1939–96) and Curtis Burch (guitar, vocals, b. 1945) were exhausted by the tours with Leon Russell and the club and festival dates in between. So Bush and his remaining partner ...
The temptation is to think of bluegrass as an ancient music, for its repertoire and instrumentation stretch back into the shadowy mists of the nineteenth century. But in many ways bluegrass was a radical innovation, a music of the modern world, a sound invented just a decade before rock’n’roll. It was a new/old music, and that central ...
When Vassar Clements formed a band called Hillbilly Jazz in 1975, Bill Monroe’s former fiddler pulled the cover off the hidden connection between country music and jazz. The two genres had more in common than most people thought. After all, Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong early in their careers; jazz legend Charlie Christian debuted on Bob Wills’ radio ...
(Vocals, comedienne, actress, 1916–83) Beginning her professional career with brother Leon and sister Diane in Florida, Judy Canova appeared on New York’s Broadway in the early 1930s before beginning her 15-year, 17-movie career with Scatterbrain (1940). She was Republic Picture’s top female attraction, and one of several country-orientated comedy acts to enjoy a substantial film ...
(Vocal group, 1970–2003) A folk rock group formed in Newcastle, England by Alan Hull (guitar, piano, vocals), Simon Cowe (guitar), Ray Jackson (mandolin), Rod Clements (bass, violin) and Ray Laidlaw (drums), Lindisfarne enjoyed a best-selling album with Fog On The Tyne in 1971 and two hit singles ‘Meet Me On The Corner’ and ‘Lady Eleanor’ the ...
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