Doug McKelway

He was born in 1954 and raised in Washington, D.C., and graduated from the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland, and from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. In January 1974, as a Skidmore sophomore learning the banjo, he looked up Wakefield, who was living outside Saratoga, and visited him with his friend and fellow student Tim Malony. Wakefield’s band, the Good Ol’ Boys, had not turned up for a show that night at the Red Rail in Nanuet, New York, and within an hour of meeting them he asked the two students to play it with him.

Over the next three or four years in Saratoga McKelway played with Wakefield at dates in Vermont, New Hampshire and across upstate New York, and in a weekly bar job at Sage’s on Caroline Street. He has written that Wakefield taught him old traditional songs, how to project volume, and when to lay back and when to come on strong, and that the banjo became all-consuming for him in those years.

He played only rarely once his broadcasting career began. His first television news job was at WPCQ-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1980 to 1982, and after stations in Kansas, Missouri and Florida he returned to Washington, where he was a reporter and anchor at WRC-TV until 2001 and then at WJLA-TV. He joined Fox News’s Washington bureau in November 2010 and left the network in 2020. He found Wakefield again in Saratoga in 2010 and played with him, and he visited him a last time in the summer of 2023.

He recorded “Big Sciota” for The Patuxent Banjo Project (Patuxent CD 250, released 21 July 2014), produced by Mark Delaney and Randy Barrett; among the other players on the set are Eddie Adcock, Bill Emerson, Roni Stoneman, Walter Hensley and Tom Adams. In March 2022, as he was about to launch the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s news program Centerpoint, he appeared on TBN’s Huckabee and played Earl Scruggs’s “Groundspeed” with the show’s staff band, on a new Huber Truetone banjo that his friend the banjo maker Steve Huber brought to the taping. After Wakefield’s death in April 2024 he wrote a long remembrance of their years together for Bluegrass Today.