Riley Baugus

He was born on 28 November 1965. His father had come down to the Winston-Salem area from Alleghany County, in the Blue Ridge, looking for work, and his mother’s family came from Surry County; his father’s records included Doc Watson, and the family’s Regular Baptist church gave him an early grounding in unaccompanied singing. He started on the fiddle, soon moved to the banjo and built his first one from scrap wood with his father. With his friend and neighbor, the fiddler Kirk Sutphin, he went visiting older musicians in North Carolina and Virginia, learning from Jarrell, Dix Freeman, Chester McMillian, and Verlin Clifton and Paul Sutphin, who had played in the Camp Creek Boys.

For eighteen years he worked as a welder and blacksmith, playing on the side in old-time string bands, among them the Old Hollow String Band, on whose Old Time Music from North Carolina (1986) he appears, and the Red Hots. His first album, Life of Riley, came out on Yodel-Ay-Hee in 2001. Dirk Powell, an old friend who was working on the music for Cold Mountain, persuaded the producers to use Baugus’s handmade banjos, and he was also chosen as the singing voice of Pangle, the character played by Ethan Suplee; afterward he toured with the film’s Great High Mountain concert show. He sang “When Sorrows Encompass Me Round” with Powell on Powell’s Rounder album Time Again (2004), and that year he produced the Lonesome Sisters’ Going Home Shoes, playing lead guitar, banjo and fiddle on it.

His second album, Long Steel Rail (Sugar Hill, 2006), was produced by Tim O’Brien and Powell, and its tracks included “George Collins,” “Wandering Boy,” “Now Is the Cool of the Day,” “June Apple” and “Lonesome Road Blues.” By 2007, when NPR profiled him, music had become his full-time work, and he was teaching a week-long advanced banjo class at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia. T Bone Burnett then brought him in to play banjo on Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007), the album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

He has gone on recording with friends: Long Time Piedmont Pals (2010) with Kirk Sutphin, Lonesome Scenes (2012), a second album with the Lonesome Sisters, and Tomorrow Morn (2015) with Powell, and he plays banjo in the string band Old Buck with Debra Clifford, Emily Schaad and Sabra Guzman. With the dancer Ira Bernstein he presented Appalachian Roots, a show of Appalachian music and dance that the two recorded in 2002. His third solo album, Little Black Train’s a Comin’, followed in 2019. He has taught at the Augusta Heritage Center, the Midwest Banjo Camp, the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington, Sore Fingers Week in England and the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina. On 22 March 2025 the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame inducted him in its Sideperson/Regional Musician category.