Tag: Bluegrass & Old-Time Music

Fiddlin’ John Carson

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It wasn’t the popcorn in the New York’s Palace Theater that spring day of 1923 that got Atlanta businessman Polk Brockman thinking. Instead, it was the newsreel he watched of a Virginia fiddler’s convention that made him scribble this note on a piece of paper: “Record Fiddlin’ John Carson.” Seconds before he had reached in his pocket for his pen and something to write on, Brockman recalled why he came to New York on this most recent trip.

As the owner of a number of furniture stores in the Atlanta area, Brockman also sold what were then

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Blue Sky Boys

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It all began with a misunderstanding. It was early June, 1936, and the teenage brother duet of Bill and Earl Bolick had just abruptly ended a three-month stint at radio WGST in Atlanta over a dispute with the sponsor, W.J. Fincher’s Crazy Water Crystals. Within a matter of days the Bolicks traveled to the RCA Victor studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, to fulfill a contract to make their first recordings.

Perhaps out of spite, W.J. Fincher passed on to RCA Victor the erroneous information that the brothers had broken up their act. For this reason, Eli Oberstein

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Ernest ‘Pop’ Stoneman

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

We couldn’t quite figure out who he was. As the lights were dimmed and the audience hushed, my sister Bonnie and I sat in suspense at the West Hollywood club known as The Ash Grove. All at once, the band started to play and even as our attention became riveted on the spectacle unfolding before us, we wondered about the little old man sitting on stage in a hard-backed chair with an autoharp flat on his lap and a little black hat stuck on his head.

We got a hint when members of the Stoneman Family eventually

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Karl and Harty

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

The search for the core of the roots of bluegrass always leads to the many brother acts that were so popular with rural audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. The familiar names that always crop up include the Monroe brothers, Callahan brothers, Delmore brothers and the Bolick brothers. Practically forgotten, but no less important to the roots of bluegrass, were Karl and Harty. Though “officially” not brothers, both were born in 1905, growing up in Mount Vernon, Kentucky, as if they were brothers. This same area produced such artists as Bradley Kincaid, Red Foley, and John Lair.

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Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Thunderstruck. What better word to use to describe the reaction of fans of old-time fiddle music when they first tuned into the Grand Ole Opry and heard the fiddling of Arthur Smith coming out of their radios? From the time Smith first stepped up to the WMS  microphone in December 1927, the world of southern fiddling would never be the same again. Who was this man that set fiddling so much on its ear?

Born April 10th, 1898, near Bold Springs, Tennessee, Arthur Smith got his first fiddle when his young wife, Nettie, sold enough chickens to

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Henry Whitter & G.B. Grayson

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

No one ever stands up for Henry Whitter anymore. And they never did! Recent scholars have scoffed at his meager guitar skills and at his singing. He is given credit for little more than inspiring others to become recording artists because they knew they could sing and play rings around old Henry. And they were right!

Harry was no guitar virtuoso, and he was not endowed with a great voice. But he was clever, or persistent, enough to get himself a recording contract in New York. Among those who heard his 1924 recording of The Wreck of

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Dock Walsh & The Carolina Tar Heels

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Standing tall among the early pioneers of the roots of bluegrass music was Dock Walsh. Born and raised on a farm in Wilkes County, North Carolina, on July 23, 1901, Dock was one of eight children who all played music from an early age. His first banjo was presented to him by an older brother, who made it out of an axle grease can. Dock eventually outgrew this first instrument in favor of a fancy “store bought” Bruno banjo.

In 1924, 23-year-old Dock heard Henry Whitter’s recording of Lonesome Road Blues and Wreck on the Southern Old

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Vernon Dalhart

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

His name was Marion Try Slaughter, but he took the name Vernon Dalhart from two Texas towns where he had worked as a cowhand when he was a boy. Born in Jefferson, Texas, on April 6, 1883, before he died on September 14, 1948, he had used at least 100 pseudonyms. His grandfather, Marion Try Slaughter I, had been a Confederate soldier who joined the KKK after the Civil War. Dalhart’s father was killed in a barroom knife fight with his brother-in-law, Bob Castleberry, while Dalhart was still a boy. By the time he was 12 or

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Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

There are so many stories about Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers, that it’s hard to know where to begin. As one of nine kids, Charlie dropped out of school so early that he only learned to read and write as an adult. Growing up in the Haw River area of North Carolina, he was known as a prankster and a scrapper who never shied away from a fight. He was arrested so many times for his wild drinking and fighting that he was on a first-name basis with the local police. Many times when the

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Eck Robertson, Master Fiddler

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Eck Robertson was a true fiddle master. Fortunately, he was unafraid to step up to the plate and say so.

The story begins shortly after the turn of the twentieth century when Amarillo, Texas, fiddler Eck Robertson honed his fiddle chops enough to start winning fiddler’s conventions. Competition at Texas fiddle contests was notoriously fierce, and winning any of them was no mean trick. One story has Robertson in a showdown playoff with the father of legendary fiddler Bob Wills. In a last-ditch effort to give himself an edge, legend has it that he broke off a

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