Red Allen, Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians

The partnership was older than the band. Allen and Wakefield had first played together in Dayton, Ohio, in 1951, with Noah Crase on banjo. In 1960 Wakefield came east to Baltimore with the Dobro player Kenny Haddock, and when Allen arrived in the Washington area some months later the two joined up again with Haddock and the banjo player Porter Church, playing two D.C. clubs, Whitney’s and the Famous. That group became the Kentuckians. Its main venue became Cousin Nick’s on 14th Street, and it broadcast regularly over WDON in Wheaton, Maryland.

The lineup changed around the two leaders. The bassist Tom Morgan, an Air Force staff sergeant who built and repaired instruments, played bass and sang the bass part in the quartets; Allen played Morgan’s Martin D-45, and after Wakefield sold his Gibson F-5 Morgan built him a mandolin. The banjo chair passed from Robbie Robinson to Bill Emerson, to Bill Keith, who came to Washington in 1962 and worked with the band in the area and on the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling before leaving to join Bill Monroe in 1963, and then to Pete Kuykendall, who recorded as Pete Roberts, and Ben Eldridge. Scott Stoneman played fiddle with them, and Red Spurlock, Chubby Wise, Don Reno, Bob Yellin, Eric Weissberg and Billy Baker also played or recorded with the two. Recording for Rebel at Kuykendall’s Wynwood Studio, the band issued singles in 1963, among them “Little Birdie” and “Faded Memory.” On 21 September 1963 it made its New York debut at the annual Sing Out! concert at Carnegie Hall, and in December it played Gerde’s Folk City.

The Folkways album started as a speculative budget record. Kuykendall cut the first session at Wynwood in the fall of 1963, with himself on banjo and Morgan on bass, hoping to place it with one of the 99-cent drugstore labels through the Starday talent scout Ben Adelman. The songs were chosen with that market in mind: traditional pieces rather than originals, many of them taken from Bill Clifton’s songbook 150 Old-Time Folk and Gospel Songs. The tapes reached Moses Asch at Folkways, and in the spring of 1964 David Grisman, who with Peter Siegel had already made home recordings of Allen and Wakefield, organized a second session at Cue Recordings in Manhattan, with Keith on banjo and Fred Weisz on bass. Folkways issued twelve songs that year, from the Morris Brothers’ “Somebody Loves You Darling” and Carl Story’s “Are You Afraid to Die?” to Bill Monroe’s “Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong” and “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” with two of Wakefield’s mandolin instrumentals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip.” Allen sang tenor on all the duets, trios and quartets, Wakefield sang most of the duet leads, and the two shared the arrangements. Grisman wrote the liner notes.

The partnership broke up bitterly by the end of 1964, and Wakefield went to the Greenbriar Boys. Allen kept the Kentuckians going through much of the decade with players such as Bill Emerson, Wayne and Bill Yates, Porter Church, Richard Greene and David Grisman, and used the name again for a Folkways album in 1978. Smithsonian Folkways reissued the 1964 album, with six previously unissued songs from its two sessions, on The Folkways Years, 1964–1983 in 2001, and in 2014 Patuxent issued 22 of the band’s Wynwood recordings, with Kuykendall and Morgan, as The WDON Recordings, 1963.