John Henry · Bring Back My Blue Eyed Boy to Me

Everett and Bea Lilly were born in Clear Creek, West Virginia, Bea in 1921 and Everett in 1924. As teenagers they made their radio debut in 1938 on the Old Farm Hour at WCHS in Charleston, and in 1945 they moved to WNOX in Knoxville, where they worked with Molly O’Day. Three years later they joined Red Belcher’s Kentucky Ridge Runners at WWVA in Wheeling, and from those years comes their first record: a 1948 78 on the Page label pairing “What Are They Doing in Heaven” with “They Sleep Together Now at Rest” (Page 505).

A dispute with Belcher ended the Wheeling job in 1950. For about two years Everett played mandolin and sang tenor with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and he took part in two of their recording sessions. Early in 1952 the fiddler Tex Logan, whom the brothers had met at WWVA, persuaded them to move to Boston. There the banjo player Don Stover, born in Ameagle, West Virginia, joined them. As the Confederate Mountaineers they started on WCOP’s Hayloft Jamboree and went on to the city’s country clubs, above all the Hillbilly Ranch in Park Square. They played the Boston area for eighteen years.

Their only commercial singles from Boston came from sessions at Event’s studio in Westbrook, Maine, dated 1956–57. Event E 4261, issued in February 1957, coupled “Tragic Romance” with “Are You Tired of Me, My Darling,” with Bea on guitar, Everett on mandolin and Stover on banjo. The second single, E 4272, paired “John Henry,” in Everett’s arrangement, with A. P. Carter’s “Bring Back My Blue Eyed Boy to Me”; it did not appear until February 1959. Seven more sides from the same sessions stayed unissued until 1970. That year County released all eleven on the LP Early Recordings of the Lilly Brothers, which also credits Dave Miller on fiddle, and Rebel reissued the set on CD in 2002.

After Event, the group recorded albums rather than singles. Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains (Folkways, 1962) came from a January 1961 concert at the YMCA hall in Boston with Mike Seeger on bass. Two Prestige Folklore LPs followed, Bluegrass Breakdown (1964) and The Country Songs of the Lilly Brothers (October 1964), recorded in Boston with Fritz Richmond on bass and Herb Hooven on fiddle. The death of Everett’s son in January 1970 ended the Boston years. The trio toured Japan in the 1970s, and in 1973 they made a gospel album for County, What Will I Leave Behind. In 2002 the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.