Art Stamper

He was born on 1 November 1933 near Hindman, in a log house on Terry Fork of Ball Creek. His father, Hiram Stamper, was an old-time fiddler of note, and Art started on the fiddle at about nine after first playing the banjo. By sixteen he was playing professionally, with Jim McReynolds, Buster Pack and the Sauceman Brothers.

He joined Carter and Ralph Stanley in 1952. Around June that year he recorded with them for Rich-R-Tone at radio station WLSI in Pikeville, Kentucky, with Jim Williams on mandolin, cutting Bill Monroe’s “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake” and “Little Birdie.” On 9 August 1953, at the brothers’ first session for Mercury, at Bradley Studios in Nashville, he played on “Say Won’t You Be Mine,” “This Weary Heart You Stole Away,” “I’m Lonesome Without You” and “Our Last Goodbye,” with Williams and George Shuffler on bass. After Army service he was back with the Stanleys on 19 December 1955 for the Mercury session that produced “Angel Band,” “Clinch Mountain Blues” and “Will He Wait a Little Longer,” with Curley Lambert on mandolin.

He then worked with Red Allen and Sonny and Bobby Osborne. He played on the audition that won them a contract with MGM and on their July 1956 MGM session, which produced “Ruby, Are You Mad?” and “Teardrops in My Eyes.” That year he gave up full-time music to raise a family. He trained in cosmetology on the GI Bill and ran his own salon in Louisville, The Way of Art, where musicians gathered to play between haircuts. He still recorded with the Stanley Brothers now and then: at King sessions in Cincinnati on 15 and 16 January 1961, which made much of the albums Sing the Songs They Like Best and Folk Song Festival, including “The Story of the Lawson Family,” “Wild Bill Jones,” “Little Joe” and “Handsome Molly,” and on 16 and 17 July 1964, with Earl Taylor on mandolin and harmonica.

He returned to music full time in 1978, first with the Goins Brothers. His first solo album, The Lost Fiddler (County, 1982), had J. D. Crowe on banjo. From then on he worked mostly as a freelance, nominally in several bands. He played on Larry Sparks’s Silver Reflections (Rebel, 1987), recorded at Chandler Audio in Ashland, Kentucky, and Travelin’ (Rebel, 1992), and with Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys in the early 1990s, sharing the fiddle with Curly Ray Cline on Saturday Night (Freeland, 1992). The SPBGMA named him its best old-time fiddler three years running, from 1986 to 1988, and from the 1980s he taught, among other places at the Blackwell Farm Fiddle Camp in Niangua, Missouri.

His later albums turned to the old-time tunes he had learned from his father and other eastern Kentucky fiddlers. Goodbye Girls, I’m Going to Boston (County, 2000) had Dirk Powell on guitar, John Herrmann on clawhammer banjo and Meredith McIntosh on bass. His last, Wake Up Darlin’ Corey, was recorded in February 2004 with Doc Hamilton and Harry Bickel on guitar and banjo and Tim O’Brien singing a few songs, and came out late that year, shortly after the IBMA’s award. He died in Louisville on 23 January 2005, aged 71, and was buried in Knott County. Part of Kentucky State Route 550 in Knott County is named for him, and the house near Hindman where he and his father lived was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.