Curly Seckler

He was born on 25 December 1919, the fourth of eight children of Carrie and Calvin Sechler. His father played old-time fiddle, harmonica and autoharp, and his mother taught him the organ. He worked in a cotton mill and learned the five-string banjo from a local player, Happy Trexler. With his brothers he formed the Yodeling Rangers, a group that began performing on WSTP in Salisbury and was later renamed the Trail Riders.

In July 1939 he joined Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Pardners at WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, singing tenor and playing banjo for $20 a week. Tours with Tommy Scott and Leonard Stokes followed, and in those years he moved from banjo to mandolin, buying his first mandolin in 1941. He rejoined Charlie Monroe in 1945; on 30 September 1946 they recorded “Mother’s Not Dead, She’s Only Sleeping” and other songs, and through the 1940s he also played with the Happy Valley Boys, the Smokey Mountaineers and Mac Wiseman’s Country Boys. In March 1948 he turned down an offer to replace Lester Flatt as lead singer with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

A year later he joined Flatt himself. Seckler came into Flatt and Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in Bristol, Virginia, in late March 1949; within a week the band had moved to WROL in Knoxville, and that September they became stars of the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance in Lexington. He first recorded with them in April or May 1949, and on 11 December 1949 the band recorded his own song “No Mother or Dad.” He left in 1951 and worked with the Sauceman Brothers, the Stanley Brothers and Jim and Jesse McReynolds before returning to Flatt and Scruggs.

He moved to Nashville with the band in 1953, and in 1956 the Foggy Mountain Boys became members of the Grand Ole Opry. He sang tenor and played mandolin on “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” “Salty Dog Blues” and “I’ll Go Stepping Too,” and he wrote or co-wrote “No Mother or Dad” and “I’ll Never Shed Another Tear.” A few weeks after a gospel session on 26 April 1958 he left the band again, came back in May 1959, and left for good in 1962.

In the late 1960s he drove a truck while appearing at festivals as a guest with groups including Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass, Jimmy Martin and the Shenandoah Cut-Ups. He released his first solo LP in 1971, and he changed the spelling of his surname to Seckler to make its pronunciation clearer. In 1973 he joined Flatt’s Nashville Grass. Marty Stuart joined the band at 13, and Seckler became his mentor. On 27 November 1978 Seckler and the Nashville Grass recorded the LP No Doubt About It for Revonah in Nashville. Flatt died on 11 May 1979, having asked Seckler to take over the band, and Seckler led it for another 15 years. Willis Spears joined in 1981 and became his partner in 1987, and in 1988 Seckler recorded several songs with David Grisman for Grisman’s double album Home Is Where the Heart Is on Rounder.

He retired the Nashville Grass in 1994 but went on recording and appearing at festivals. Sixty Years of Bluegrass with My Friends came out on Copper Creek in 2005, and he released a last solo album in 2007. His last television appearance was on The Marty Stuart Show in 2011; Stuart called him “the greatest tenor singer of all time.” Penny Parsons’s biography of him, Foggy Mountain Troubadour: The Life and Music of Curly Seckler, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016. He died on 27 December 2017 in Hendersonville, Tennessee, two days after his 98th birthday.

• 1996: Distinguished Achievement Award, International Bluegrass Music Association
• 2004: IBMA Hall of Fame
• 2010: North Carolina Music Hall of Fame
• 2011: Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame