J.E. Mainer with Red Smiley and the Bluegrass Cutups

Mainer, born near Weaverville, North Carolina, on 20 July 1898, had led Mainer’s Mountaineers in the 1930s. At the band’s first Bluebird session, in Atlanta on 6 August 1935, he played fiddle with his brother Wade on banjo and Zeke Morris and “Daddy” John Love on guitars, and he sang “Seven and a Half” that day; he cut it again for Arhoolie in Concord, North Carolina, in 1963, and it opens the Rural Rhythm album. From 1967 Rural Rhythm, the label run by “Uncle” Jim O’Neal, issued a long run of Mainer albums, from Old Time Mountain Music (RRJE-185) to a twentieth volume of The Legendary J. E. Mainer, many of them released after his death on 12 June 1971.

Smiley was then leading the Bluegrass Cutups in Roanoke, Virginia, on the weekday television show Top O’ the Morning on WDBJ-TV, and Rural Rhythm used the band to accompany several of its artists. The fiddler Clarence “Tater” Tate, the banjo player Billy Edwards and the bassist John Palmer helped make albums for Mainer, Jim Eanes, Hylo Brown, Lee Moore and Shot Jackson, and the mandolin player and guitarist Gene Burrows also worked on the Mainer and Eanes records; the Eanes album, Jim Eanes with Red Smiley & the Bluegrass Cutups, has the next catalog number, RRJE 197. The Mainer volume came out again on cassette as 16 Bluegrass Favorites (RR 198) and on CD in 2014 (RUR 198). Mainer was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2012.