Front Porch String Band

Claire Lynch, who had moved from Kingston, New York, to Huntsville, Alabama, at twelve, joined a band called Hickory Wind during the bluegrass revival of the 1970s; it changed its name to the Front Porch String Band, with her singing at its center. Its first album, Smilin’ at You, came out in 1977 on the band’s own Front Porch label, with Claire Lynch singing lead, Larry Lynch on mandolin, Billy Sandlin on guitar and resonator guitar, Selwyn Blakely on banjo and Murray Ross on bass. Country Rain, on Lanark the same year, had the Lynches, Sandlin and Ross, with “Big Mon,” “East Virginia Blues,” “Train 45” and a second version of the band’s instrumental “Mulberry Fork.”

The self-titled 1981 album on Leather Records had Allen Watkins on banjo and Terry Campbell on bass, and opened with “If You’re Ever in Oklahoma”; it also included “Hills of Alabama,” “Go My Way,” “The Singer,” “Come Unto Me” and “Wabash Cannonball,” and Leather paired “Hills of Alabam’” and “Go My Way” on a single. That year, after this first nationally released record, the band retired from the road, and through the 1980s Claire Lynch worked as a staff songwriter in Nashville and as a session singer.

The band returned in 1991 with Lines & Traces on Rebel, produced by Claire and Larry Lynch: Claire on guitar and lead vocals, Larry on mandolin, fiddle, guitar and bouzouki, Herb Trotman on banjo and guitar and Andy Meginniss on bass and lead vocals, with Bobby Horton on dobro and Jim Connor on harmonica as guests. It included “Hard Times,” “Natchez Trace,” “Kennesaw Line,” “Some Morning Soon” and “Where Dear Friends Will Never Part.” Claire Lynch’s own biography credits the revival with starting her solo career in earnest, and her Rounder albums followed from 1993. Billed as Claire Lynch and the Front Porch String Band, the group played the Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Lyons, Colorado, in August 1994, and its “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” from that weekend appeared on the live album Rocky Grass. In 2012 Rebel drew on the 1981 and 1991 albums for the compilation Hills of Alabam, with notes by Jim Hurst.