Tribute albums such as this were comparatively rare in 1980. While this one was not the first (that honor goes to Flatt & Scruggs), it just might be one of the best. What makes it work so well is that Watson, Thompson and Craver understand what makes the Carter Family’s music so special: It’s about [...]

Long before country music came to be dominated by guitar-picking crooners, the fiddle was king. Throughout the 1930s, radio barn dance programs, among which the Grand Ole Opry quickly rose to prominence, featured numerous string bands and fiddlers, playing hoedowns and a few old-time songs. Show fiddlers such as J.E. Mainer, Arthur Smith, Curly Fox [...]

Kentucky has long held a special allure for folk song scholars, collectors of hillbilly 78s, revivalists and other aficionados of old-time music. It’s a near-mythical place in the minds of these folks, a place where fact and legend often overlap. It’s a plain fact, however, that Kentucky has long been a wellspring of hillbilly music, [...]

Old-time fiddling is the foundation upon which country music was built — at least as far as the Grand Ole Opry is concerned. For the Opry’s first decade, fiddlers and string bands playing hoedowns outnumbered all other types of performers combined. Among these pioneering string band musicians was a young fiddler from Humphreys County, Tennessee, [...]

Although you’d be hard-pressed to find much evidence of it these days, there was a time when the fiddle reigned supreme in all kinds of American vernacular music, among black as well as white musicians. Until the turn of the last century, the repertoires and playing styles of black and white country entertainers overlapped a [...]