Don Stover

Recording Artist · Active 1972–1996 · Ameagle · Also a musician
Classic Bluegrass

Don Stover (1928–1996) was a banjo player and songwriter from the coal country of Raleigh County, West Virginia, who went to Boston with Bea and Everett Lilly in 1952 and spent most of the next eighteen years playing with them as the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover. He played with Buzz Busby and with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the 1950s, later led the White Oak Mountain Boys and toured with the First Generation, and was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame with the Lilly Brothers in 2002.

Assisted by AI. Spot something off? Help us fix it.

He was born on 6 March 1928 in Ameagle, a coal company town six miles from the Lillys’ home at Clear Creek. Both his parents played the family banjo, and though he was not allowed to touch it, at seven he played it in secret while they were outside. Hearing Wade Mainer and Emory Martin in early 1941 set him on the instrument in earnest, and by 1945 he had worked out his own three-finger style, much influenced by Earl Scruggs; when a traveling salesman told him that Scruggs used metal picks, he made his first pair from a Prince Albert tobacco tin. In the late 1940s he played with the Coal River Boys in Artie, West Virginia, and around 1951 he was winning contests with Bea Lilly backing him on guitar.

He was earning his living as a coal miner when the Lillys persuaded him to move with them to Massachusetts. Starting late in 1952 they worked every day on WCOP radio and in a string of Boston nightclubs with the fiddler Tex Logan as the Confederate Mountaineers, and the trio later settled into a sixteen-year, seven-nights-a-week booking at the Hillbilly Ranch. Everett called him “Little Don Stover”; Logan, liking the sound of it on stage, called him “Donald Eugene.” At WCOP’s Hayloft Jamboree he met Buzz Busby, Scotty Stoneman and Jack Clement, and from 1954 to 1956 he was with Busby’s Bayou Boys in Washington, D.C., and on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, recording the original “Lost” and “Just Me and the Jukebox.”

For about six months in 1957 he played banjo with Bill Monroe and recorded eleven tracks with the Blue Grass Boys for Decca, among them “I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Out in the Cold World,” “Goodbye Old Pal,” a new “Molly and Tenbrooks” and “In Despair,” on which he sings lead on the trio. Back in Boston, the Lillys’ two singles for Event that year included “Bring Back My Blue-Eyed Boy to Me,” a record on which Bill Keith later said a Stover lick started him toward his melodic banjo style. In 1958–59, while Everett was in Nashville with Flatt & Scruggs, Stover co-led the Hillbilly Ranch band with Bea Lilly and the fiddler Chubby Anthony, and that group recorded for Mike Seeger’s Folkways album Mountain Music Bluegrass Style. With the Lillys he went on to make an album for Folkways and two for Prestige, and to play the Newport Folk Festival; he appears in the films Festival (1967) and Bluegrass Country Soul (1971). He spent part of 1965–66 with Bill Harrell and the Virginians in the Washington–Baltimore area, and in 1968 he went to the Summer Olympics in Mexico City with Doc Watson, Tex Logan and Bukka White, which led to his playing on Watson’s Good Deal! Doc Watson in Nashville (Vanguard) that year.

When the Hillbilly Ranch years ended in early 1970, Stover stayed in Boston, taught banjo, emceed festivals in the Northeast and formed the White Oak Mountain Boys, mostly from the New England bluegrass community. His own albums followed: Things in Life (Rounder, 1972), with David Grisman on mandolin and John Hall on fiddle, nine of whose fourteen pieces are his, among them “Black Diamond,” “White Oak Breakdown,” “Rockwood Deer Chase” and the autobiographical title song; West Virginia Coal Miner’s Blues (Old Homestead, 1973); and Don Stover & the White Oak Mountain Boys (Rounder, 1975), with Jack Tottle on mandolin and Dave Dillon singing tenor. He also recorded for Towa with Everett Lilly’s son Everett Alan, and through the 1970s he rejoined the Lillys for festivals, a County gospel album and two tours of Japan.

From 1978 to the mid-1990s he toured internationally with Bill Clifton and the fiddler Red Rector, and after Rector’s death with Jimmy Gaudreau, as the First Generation, recording for the Elf label; he and Rector played the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville. He later moved back to his childhood home at White Oak, near Artie, and then to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, where Hank Edenborn’s White Oak Records issued his recordings. Stover died at Brandywine, Maryland, on 11 November 1996, two months after Monroe. BMI credits him with thirty compositions and arrangements, and the Hall of Fame names Bob French, Bill Keith, Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck among the players he influenced; Jerry Garcia also cited him as an inspiration.

  • 1987: Massachusetts Country Music Hall of Fame
  • 1991: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
  • 1993: SPBGMA Preservation Hall of Greats
  • 2002: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, with the Lilly Brothers
  • 2008: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame

Share Playlist