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Old Dominion Barn Dance
Old Dominion Barn Dance is an American country music radio show broadcast over WRVA, Richmond, Virginia each Saturday night. Mary Workman, better known as "Sunshine Sue" was the host (1946–1957). Gregg Kimball of the Library of Virginia said of the program, "It was unique because it featured a female host and gained a national audience through syndication on CBS radio." In 1957, Carlton Haney began the ''New Dominion Barn Dance'', which WRVA broadcast until 1964. The music and humor show was broadcast live on radio in over 38 states and Canada and were transmitted to military personnel overseas via recordings on the Armed Forces Radio Service. The broadcasts originated at the Lyric Theater (later renamed the WRVA Theater) on North 9th Street and East Broad Street. The theater was filled to capacity every Saturday night with lines that wrapped around the block. Two shows broadcast, one at 7:30pm and the other at 9:30pm nationwide and introduced America to Country Music. This sho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Country Music
Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, old-time, and American folk music forms including Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, and the cowboy Western music styles of Hawaiian, New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country. Country music often consists of ballads and honky-tonk dance tunes with generally simple form, folk lyrics, and harmonies often accompanied by string instruments such as electric and acoustic guitars, steel guitars (such as pedal steels and dobros), banjos, and fiddles as well as harmonicas. Blues modes have been used extensively throughout its recorded history. The term ''country music'' gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to '' hillbilly music'', with "country music" being used today to describe many styles and subgenres. It came to encomp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilma Lee Cooper
Wilma Lee Leary (February 7, 1921 – September 13, 2011), known professionally as Wilma Lee Cooper, was an American country music entertainer. She was a guitarist, banjo player and vocalist, and was given the title of “First Lady of Bluegrass” by Smithsonian Institute in 1974. In 1994 She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the IBMA. Biography Leary, according to the 1930 U.S. Census, was born Willma Leigh Leary in Valley Head, West Virginia whose mother was a schoolteacher and father who was a coal miner. Wilma’s mother played pump organ. She had two siblings, Jerry and Peggy. She began singing at the age of five. She sang in her youth with her family's gospel music group, The Leary Family, which included her parents and sisters. They recorded for the Library Of Congress in 1938. That year, they were also recognized at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C, having been chosen through a competition to represent the state of West Virginia. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Red Smiley
Red is the color at the long wavelength end of the visible spectrum of light, next to orange and opposite violet. It has a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–740 nanometres. It is a primary color in the RGB color model and a secondary color (made from magenta and yellow) in the CMYK color model, and is the complementary color of cyan. Reds range from the brilliant yellow-tinged scarlet and vermillion to bluish-red crimson, and vary in shade from the pale red pink to the dark red burgundy. Red pigment made from ochre was one of the first colors used in prehistoric art. The Ancient Egyptians and Mayans colored their faces red in ceremonies; Roman generals had their bodies colored red to celebrate victories. It was also an important color in China, where it was used to color early pottery and later the gates and walls of palaces. In the Renaissance, the brilliant red costumes for the nobility and wealthy were dyed with kermes and cochineal. The 19th century brought the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Shelton
Allen Shelton was an American five-string banjo player mostly known for being a member of the bluegrass band Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys since the 1960s. Shelton was born in Rockingham County, North Carolina on July 2, 1936. Shelton started playing the banjo when he was fourteen. His father Troy Shelton was a guitar player mainly, but also played mandolin and banjo. A local musician named Junior Biggs showed him some three-finger style rolls. Career Shelton played with a wide variety of people throughout several genres in his career. The most notable of them were Jim and Jesse, whom he spent most of his professional career with. He played with Mac Wiseman, and the Country Boys where Mac at the time was working for WRVA the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond. Playing with Wiseman was Allen's first recording experience. Shelton got his first full-time job as a musician when he was sixteen playing with Jim Eanes he was the banjo player on most of Eanes' Starday Records record ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earl Scruggs
Earl Eugene Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called "Scruggs style", which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. His three-finger style of playing was radically different from the traditional way the five-string banjo had previously been played. This new style of playing became popular and elevated the banjo from its previous role as a background rhythm instrument to featured solo status. He popularized the instrument across several genres of music. Scruggs' career began at age 21 when he was hired to play in Bill Monroe's band, the Blue Grass Boys. The name "bluegrass" eventually became the eponym for the entire genre of country music now known by that title. Despite considerable success with Monroe, performing on the Grand Ole Opry and recording classic hits such as "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Scruggs resigned from the group in 1946 because of their exhausting t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don Reno
Donald Wesley Reno (February 21, 1926Trischka, Tony, "Don Reno", ''Banjo Song Book'', Oak Publications, 1977, – October 16, 1984) was an American bluegrass and country musician, best known as a pioneering banjo and guitar player who partnered with Red Smiley, and later with guitarist Bill Harrell. Life and career Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States, Don Reno grew up on a farm in Haywood County, North Carolina. He began learning acoustic guitar at the age of five after borrowing a neighbors guitar, and not long after began learning banjo. In 1939, the 13-year-old Reno joined the Morris Brothers in performing at a local radio station. He left one year later to join Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, with whom he would years later record " Feudin' Banjos". In 1943, he received an offer from Bill Monroe to become a member of the Bluegrass Boys, but chose instead to enlist in the United States Army. Trained as a horse soldier at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was sent to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clyde Moody
Clyde Moody (September 19, 1915 – April 7, 1989), also known as the "Hillbilly Waltz King" and sometimes as "The Genial Gentleman of Country Music" was one of the great founders of American Bluegrass music. Early life and career Born in Cherokee, North Carolina, United States, Moody got his start in the late 1930s in the string band J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers. In September 1940 he joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry. Moody's guitar style was unique, with him finger picking with his thumb and index finger. Moody also had a mellow voice that was a good contrast to Bill Monroe's voice. He appeared on Monroe's first solo recording session for RCA Victor's Bluebird label on October 7 of that year, playing guitar and singing lead vocals and bass on the Blue Grass Quartet's first recording ("Cryin' Holy Unto My Lord"). He was featured on that session singing "Six White Horses", a blues-based original. He also has the rare distinction of having played mandol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Janis Martin
Janis Darlene Martin (March 27, 1940 – September 3, 2007) was an American rockabilly and country music singer. She was one of the few women working in the male-dominated rock and roll music field during the 1950s and one of country music's early female innovators. Martin was nicknamed the Female Elvis for her dance moves on stage, similar to those of Elvis Presley. Biography Early life and rise to fame Martin was born in Sutherlin, Virginia, east of Danville. Her mother was a stage mother, and her father and uncle were both musicians. Before she was six, Martin was already singing and playing the guitar, inspired by Eddy Arnold and Hank Williams. Over the years, this resulted in statewide contests with over 200 contestants, which she won. As a result, Janis was asked to play on the same bill as Cowboy Copas and Sunshine Sue. Through them Martin became a member of the Old Dominion Barndance on WRVA, which came out of Richmond every Saturday Night on CBS network. Whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joe Maphis
Otis Wilson "Joe" Maphis (May 12, 1921 – June 27, 1986), was an American country music guitarist. He married singer Rose Lee Maphis in 1953 and they performed together, later referred to as "Mr & Mrs Country Music". One of the flashiest country guitarists of the 1950s and 1960s, Joe Maphis was known as "The King of the Strings". He was able to play many stringed instruments with great facility. However, he specialized in dazzling guitar virtuosity. Biography Early life Maphis was born in Suffolk, Virginia, United States. His family moved to Cumberland, Maryland, in 1926 when his father Robert Maphis landed a job with the B&O Railroad. Joe Maphis's first band was called the Maryland Rail Splitters. He also played in the local (Cumberland) Foggy Mountain Boys as well as The Sonnateers before Maphis hit the road in 1939. He played across Virginia until he became a regular featured performer on the "Old Dominion Barn Dance," broadcast live on radio WRVA-AM and aired in 38 st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grandpa Jones
Louis Marshall Jones (October 20, 1913 – February 19, 1998), known professionally as Grandpa Jones, was an American banjo player and "old time" country and gospel music singer. He is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.McCall, Michael; Rumble, John; Kingsbury, Paul, eds. (1 February 2012). The Encyclopedia of Country Music (Second ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 269–270. . Biography Jones was born in the small farming community of Niagara in Henderson County, Kentucky, the youngest of 10 children in a sharecropper's family. His father was an old-time fiddle player, and his mother was a ballad singer and herself adept on the concertina. His first instrument was guitar. Ramona Riggins, one of several women who began to gain some recognition in a musical form long dominated by men was Grandpa's wife and musical partner of over thirty years.Jones, Grandpa (1939). Family Album honographbr>Leon McIntyre Collection, 1970-2011 Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lester Flatt
Lester Raymond Flatt (June 19, 1914 – May 11, 1979) was an American bluegrass guitarist and mandolinist, best known for his collaboration with banjo picker Earl Scruggs in the duo Flatt and Scruggs. Flatt's career spanned multiple decades, breaking out as a member of Bill Monroe's band during the 1940s and including multiple solo and collaboration works exclusive of Scruggs. He first reached a mainstream audience through his performance on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", the theme for the network television series ''The Beverly Hillbillies'', in the early 1960s. Biography Flatt was born in Duncan's Chapel, Overton County, Tennessee, United States, to Nannie Mae Haney and Isaac Columbus Flatt. In 1943, he played mandolin and sang tenor in The Kentucky Pardners, the band of Bill Monroe's older brother Charlie. He first came to prominence as a member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1945 and played a thumb-and-index guitar style that was in part derived from the playing of C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jim Eanes
Jim Eanes (December 6, 1923 – November 21, 1995) was an American bluegrass and country music singer and guitarist. Biography Homer Robert Eanes Jr. was born in Mountain Valley, Virginia and grew up in Martinsville. Eanes learned to play the guitar at an early age despite an injury to his left hand. He had his first musical training as a rhythm guitarist in his father's string band. In 1940, he joined "Roy Hall's Blue Ridge Entertainers" performing at a radio station in Roanoke, Virginia until 1943 when Roy Hall died. In the mid-1940s, Eanes joined "Uncle Joe and the Blue Mountain Boys". He also performed with Flatt & Scruggs, and in 1948, with Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. In 1949, he made his solo recording debut on the Capitol label together with Homer Sherrill on fiddle and Snuffy Jenkins on banjo. Two years later, in 1951, Eanes formed "The Shenandoah Valley Boys" recording for both the Blue Ridge and Rich-R-Tone label. The Shenandoah Valley Boys performed at radio st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
