Down the Road on the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina

While Earl Scruggs is often credited as the originator of bluegrass banjo, he was actually an innovator within a broader tradition of three-finger banjo playing. Predating bluegrass, it was made famous by banjo players from the hills and mountains of the Carolinas, all of whom had their own personal takes on the style. In addition to Scruggs, these pioneers included Wade Mainer, Smith Hammett, Snuffy Jenkins, and Don Reno.

In 1948, when Don Reno heard that Earl Scruggs had left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he took his banjo to a concert that the band was giving in North Carolina, and without invitation or warning, joined them on stage. Monroe welcomed him, and for the next year Don toured as a Blue Grass Boy.

Though playing banjo for the Blue Grass Boys was in many ways a dream gig for a young musician, leaving that band cleared the way for Reno to form the band in which he would find the greatest success, his partnership with fellow Carolina mountain musician and veteran Red Smiley.

In Jackson County, North Carolina, the Queen family has long played, sung, and shared the music of their native home. The matriarch of the Queen family was Mary Jane Queen. Her father, James Sylvester Prince, born in 1876, was known as a great banjo player. Mary Jane also absorbed many old songs from her singing grandmothers, and one of her brothers was said to be the first person in the Caney Fork section of Jackson County to own a guitar. Though the old music was always in Mary Jane Queen’s memory, it wasn’t until later in life, after she’d raised eight children and become a widow, that she began to focus on singing and sharing the old songs that she’d grown up with.

It all began when David Holt was a college student at UC Santa Barbara. At a campus concert, he heard Ralph Stanley play the clawhammer banjo, the driving style Ralph’s mother played. After the show, David approached Ralph and asked him, “where can I learn to play the banjo like that?” Ralph told him, “You’ll have to go back to the Southern Mountains where I grew up. Go to Virginia go to North Carolina.” That’s just what David Holt did.

Fiddler Lillian Chase is young–she was born in 2003–but she is the steward of a centuries-old musical tradition of her native Blue Ridge Mountains. Raised in a family that has been living in the mountains for six generations, Lillian had an early ear for Appalachian music. At the age of four she decided that she wanted to play the fiddle, and two years later, began to learn the instrument. Now an accomplished musician in a variety of genres – including old-time, bluegrass, and classical – Lillian exemplifies the stylistic versatility for which musicians around Asheville, North Carolina, are known.

Back in 1969, while still a college student, Joe Sam Queen, grandson of legendary dancer Sam Love Queen, was asked by the town of Waynesville to call a square dance on the streets of downtown. The square dance became the Smoky Mountain Folk Festival and this Labor Day weekend, in 2019, it celebrates 50 years.

It’s not unusual for a mountain musician to be a part of several different musical traditions. A Blue Ridge fiddler might play in a mountain swing session on Friday night, sit in with an old-time band playing for a square dance on Saturday night, and sing in the church choir on Sunday morning. In this respect, Carley Arrowood is in good company. But Carley stands out in her youth: few artists as young as she have already mastered so many genres. She plays, sings, and writes bluegrass and gospel music, and was a classical performer as a child.

Recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in mountain music among musicians who were born in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the youngest of this cohort, North Carolina fiddler Rhiannon Ramsey epitomizes a blend of great musical chops and continuation of mountain traditions. Her native Madison County is famously musical, a place that the early ballad collector Cecil Sharp referred to as “a nest of singing birds.” She leads her own band, Rhiannon and the Relics, and in 2018 she joined the Stony Creek Boys, a band that has been an anchor of Asheville’s traditional music community for more than fifty years.

The husband-and-wife duo of Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller perform under their middle names. Zoe and Cloyd represents not only the partnership between Natalya and John, but a coming-together of two families’ musical traditions. Natalya is the daughter of a jazz pianist, and the granddaughter of a Russian klezmer musician. She herself plays klezmer and classical as well as mountain music. John is the grandson of Jim Shumate, a North Carolina Heritage Award recipient who made pioneering recordings as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Flatt and Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys.

Bluegrass banjo player Raymond Fairchild of Haywood County, North Carolina, embodies the spirit of originality found in many of the best mountain musicians. He has always done things his own way. His “Fairchild” style has gained countless admirers over the course of a long music career. Raymond has played many times at the Grand Ole Opry, and recorded more than 20 albums—two of which have sold more than a million copies each.

In 1941, the famed folklorist and field recorder Alan Lomax, along with two colleagues, recorded a banjo player from the Blue Ridge Mountains named Bascom Lamar Lunsford. One of the songs he recorded in 1941, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” tells a very local story about a universal theme – the human cost of progress.