Iron Mountain String Band

The band’s material came out of fieldwork. From 1956 Davidson, joined later by Finch and by Paul Newman, a former guitarist with the band, recorded traditional musicians in two counties of southwestern Virginia and nearby North Carolina, and Folkways published several albums from that collection, among them Traditional Music of Grayson and Carroll Counties (1962), Band Music of Grayson and Carroll Counties, Virginia (1967) and Uncle Wade (1973), a memorial to the banjo player Wade Ward. Davidson learned clawhammer banjo from Ward, who had played with the Grayson County Bogtrotters, the Galax-area band of the 1930s that the musicians took as their chief model. Between 1964 and 1966 the collectors brought Ward and his nephew Fields Ward, another former Bogtrotter, together with the Hillsville fiddler Glen Smith to recreate the Bogtrotters’ music, and Finch learned much of his fiddling from Ward and Smith. The band took its name from Iron Mountain, a wooded ridge near Independence, Virginia, where the collectors often camped on their trips.

In New York the band played in clubs and taverns, at weddings and at colleges, among them the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Sarah Lawrence, gave concerts at the Town Hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at the UFO in Columbia, South Carolina, and presented a series of radio broadcasts over WBAI. Its instrumentation was deliberately limited to fiddle, banjo and guitar, without the mandolin, dobro or bass of later bluegrass bands, and its aim, in the words of its first album’s notes, was to recreate “as accurately as possible” the Appalachian songs, ballads and dance tunes that could no longer be heard live. In the late 1960s Peggy Haine was its guitarist and ballad singer.

Its first album, The Iron Mountain String Band: An Old Time Southern Mountain String Band (Folkways FA 2473, 1973), with Davidson, Finch and Haine, ranged from the old banjo-fiddle music of “Sally Goodin,” “Cluck Old Hen” and “Cumberland Gap” through the Galax band style of “Western Country” and “Train on the Island” to the part singing of “Short Life of Trouble” and “Lewis Collins.” By then the band had moved to Southern California, where it was based from about 1972. Brooke Moyer, a flatpicking guitarist with a background in traditional and bluegrass music, replaced Haine in 1974, and the trio of Moyer, Davidson and Finch made Walkin’ in the Parlor (Folkways FA 2477, 1975), sixteen pieces all drawn from field recordings, including “Sugar Hill,” “East Virginia,” “John Hardy,” “Pretty Polly” and “Ida Red.”

The same lineup recorded Someday We’ll Meet Again: Old Time Music of the Southern Mountains (Folkways FA 3836, 1981), issued as the band’s third volume, with “Sally Anne,” “Chicken Reel,” “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender” and “Sourwood Mountain.” Its notes record two decades of performances at festivals, concerts, colleges, clubs, taverns and dances from South Carolina to Massachusetts and across California, and regular appearances on radio. Smithsonian Folkways reissued Walkin’ in the Parlor in 2001.