Fletcher Bright and Bill Evans

Bright, a lifelong resident of Lookout Mountain, had studied violin before he heard Bill Monroe on the radio as a student at the McCallie School in the 1940s. With classmates he formed the band that became the Dismembered Tennesseans, which kept playing for more than seventy years. He made his living as a Chattanooga real estate developer, held weekly picking parties at his home for decades, taught fiddle across the country and in England and Canada, and attended music camps to learn from other fiddlers. Evans, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had played in the 1980s with the Charlottesville band Cloud Valley and, by the time of these recordings, had made the solo albums Native and Fine (1995), Bill Evans Plays Banjo (2001) and In Good Company (2012). The two first met at a music camp.

Fine Times at Fletcher’s House: Fiddle and Banjo Music from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee was recorded live, without overdubs, at Bright’s home on 11–14 December 2012, when he was eighty-one, and released on 18 June 2013 (Native and Fine 906-10). Its sixteen tracks drew on Bright’s wide repertoire: Monroe’s “Whitehorse Breakdown” and “Northern White Clouds,” “Two O’Clock,” a piece associated with Earl Scruggs and Benny Martin, “Fiddler’s Dream,” “Blackjack Grove” learned from John Hartford, newer pieces such as Blaine Sprouse’s “Blue Ridge Reel” and the Shetland fiddler Tom Anderson’s “Da Slokit Light,” old-time tunes such as “Greasy Coat” and “Yellow Barber,” and a closing medley of “St. Anne’s Reel,” “Angeline the Baker” and “Soldier’s Joy.” Murphy Henry wrote the liner notes.

For the second album, Evans organized the sessions and brought in his old friends Norman and Nancy Blake, and the four cut sixteen tracks over three days in the same living room. Bright played an early nineteenth-century Panormo fiddle and Evans a 1930 Gibson Granada banjo, with Norman Blake on guitar. Alongside traditional pieces such as “Cluck Old Hen” and “Snowbird in the Ashbank,” the set included new compositions by the players, among them “Blake’s March” and “Berkeley Shanghai.” Songs That Are Mostly Older Than Us came out on Native and Fine in 2016. In 2017 the International Bluegrass Music Association gave Bright its Distinguished Achievement Award, and he died at his home on Lookout Mountain on 25 December 2017, at eighty-six.