Carl Story and His Rambling Mountaineers

He was born on 29 May 1916 in Lenoir. His father was an old-time fiddler who collected records by Charlie Poole and by Grayson and Whitter, and Carl took up the fiddle himself at nine, later learning guitar and clawhammer banjo as well.

The first Rambling Mountaineers came together on 13 October 1934. After a short stay with J. E. Clark and the Lonesome Mountaineers in the mid-1930s, Story went back to leading a band of his own, with Ed McMahan and Dudley Watson on guitars and Johnnie Whisnant on banjo. Whisnant picked with three fingers, in a style much like the one Earl Scruggs and Don Reno would later make familiar. In one form or another the band worked from 1935 until the draft broke it up in 1942. A meeting with Clyde Moody then led Story to Bill Monroe, and he played fiddle in the Blue Grass Boys from the end of 1942 until October 1943, when he was called into the Navy.

Discharged in 1945, he put the Rambling Mountaineers back together with the brothers Jack and Curley Shelton, banjoist Hoke Jenkins and bassist Claude Boone, and took the band to WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, where it played the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round for about five years. Mercury producer Dee Kilpatrick heard the group on the air, and in September 1947 Story made his first session for the label in Knoxville. “I’ve Found a Hiding Place,” backed with “He’s Waiting There,” came out as Mercury 6068 that November. Over eleven sessions between 1947 and 1953 he cut fifty songs for Mercury, at first mixing secular and gospel material: “I Watched You Walk Away” and “Tennessee Border” shared a single, Mercury 6165, in January 1949, and “Faded Love” came from the same years. He was also the first to put several Louvin Brothers songs on record, among them “Are You Afraid to Die?”

In 1953 he moved to Columbia and over the next three years recorded eighteen songs at Castle Studio in Nashville, with Don Law producing and Red Rector on banjo. His first Columbia session, on 1 June 1953, produced “My Lord Keeps a Record” and “Love and Wealth.” Returning to Mercury in 1955, he brought the five-string banjo into the band, played first by Bud Brewster and then by Bobby Thompson, and his singles now set a gospel song on one side against a banjo instrumental such as “Banjolina” or “Fire on the Banjo” on the other. Mercury issued Gospel Quartet Favorites in February 1958.

That same year Mercury and Starday ended their partnership, and Story went with Starday. Over roughly a decade he made a dozen albums for the label, many of them with the Brewster brothers, Bud and Willie, and Claude Boone, and one, The Lewis Family Sings the Gospel with Carl Story, with the Lewis Family. A 1958 session at radio station WFLW in Monticello, Kentucky, with Tater Tate on fiddle, gave him “Old Country Baptizing” and “Angel Band.”

In the 1970s he recorded for Atteiram Records of Marietta, Georgia, and for the newly founded CMH label, where Mountain Music and the two-LP The Bluegrass Gospel Collection, both from 1976, revisited songs he had cut years before; A Lonesome Wail from the Hills followed in 1978. His Mercury and Columbia sides have since been reissued by the German label Bear Family.

Some 178 compositions are credited to him through BMI, “I Love the Hymns They Sang at Mother’s Grave” among them. “I Overlooked an Orchid” carries his name as well, though its authorship is disputed; Carl Smith recorded it in 1950, and Mickey Gilley took it to number one in 1974. Story spent his last thirty years in Greer, South Carolina, touring and working as a disc jockey during the week, and died on 31 March 1995. He was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2007.