Our Lady of Angels · Another Night

Hobo Jack and His Kentucky Pals was the name on several records by Jack Adkins, a singer and songwriter born in Regina, Kentucky, in 1922. After service in the Navy he settled with his wife in Millard, Kentucky, and from about 1946 he played on Kentucky radio stations. His first single, cut in 1952 or 1953, was “I Can’t Be Satisfied” with “My Girl of Kentucky” on Acme 1090, billed as Hobo Jack Adkins and His Melody Mountain Men.

The Kentucky Pals name first appears on the Lucky label in 1954, on “You Have Left Me Memories” and “I Feel So Lonesome” (Lucky 1001). On that session Red Ratliff sang tenor and played mandolin, Ray Elwood Goins played banjo, and Bobby Hamilton played electric guitar. Ezra Cline was on bass and Curly Ray Cline on fiddle, two of the cousins who had started the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers. A 1955 session in Jamestown, Kentucky, with Goins, Ratliff, Forrest Radcliff on bass and Bobby Slone on fiddle, produced Lucky 1002, “Midnight Waltz” and “Talk It Over with Your Heart.” Two singles on Ace followed around 1956.

From 1957 to 1959 Adkins recorded for Starday. The first sessions, in April 1957, filled Starday 45-300 (“Four Little Words” and “Mountain Music,” June 1957) and 45-327 (“Just Wishing” and “Lonesome Old Road,” November 1957). Later dates with Udell McPeak on guitar and baritone and Billy Edwards on banjo and tenor gave 45-350 and 45-363. The B-side of 45-363 was “Kentucky School Bus,” recorded in March 1958, his song about a school-bus tragedy in Floyd County, Kentucky. The Stanley Brothers reworked it as “No School Bus in Heaven.”

Big A 5, credited to Hobo Jack and His Kentucky Pals, came from a session with Kenny Baker on fiddle. Adkins wrote both sides. “Our Lady of Angels” is about the Chicago school fire of 1 December 1958, and the Stanley Brothers recorded “Another Night” in August 1959. His last Starday single, “Union Man” with “Country Boy Went to Town” (45-448), was cut in May 1959 and issued that August.

In 1960 Adkins moved to Cincinnati, took over a recording studio on Juler Avenue and started the Adco label. His records from those years include “Old Man’s Story” and “Kentucky Hobo,” issued on Nashville NV-5128 in 1963, and “Farewell My Love” with “Thirty Inch Coal” (Adco 785, 1966). By the mid-1960s he had become a preacher, and his Adco EPs of 1966 and 1968 are gospel, credited to Reverend and then Brother Jack Adkins. In 1975 he moved back to Millard and ran a record shop and recording studio near Elkhorn City, where he cut a last single, “Life of a Working Man” with “Thirty Inch Coal” (Adco 1017). He died in 1977. In 2013 the British label B.A.C.M. collected twenty-five of his 1952–1963 sides on Early Bluegrass.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.