Rose Maddox and the Vern Williams Band

Maddox was born in Boaz, Alabama, and came to California with her sharecropping family in March 1933. From 1937 she sang on KTRB in Modesto with her brothers as the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who became popular in the Central Valley and then across the West, and recorded for Four Star and Columbia. After the band broke up she signed with Capitol in 1959, had hits with “Sing a Little Song of Heartache” and with her duets with Buck Owens, and in the early 1960s recorded with Bill Monroe and Don Reno. By 1980 she was playing folk and bluegrass festivals as well as country clubs and dance halls. The Vern Williams Band, led by the Arkansas-born mandolinist and singer Vern Williams with his son Delbert on guitar and Keith Little on banjo, had grown out of Williams’s long partnership with the fiddler Ray Park as Vern and Ray.

This Is Rose Maddox was recorded on 20 and 21 September 1980 at 1750 Arch Street in Berkeley and produced by Chris Strachwitz and Maddox. Vern and Delbert Williams and Little were joined by J. D. Rhynes on bass, by Ray Park on fiddle, the first time Vern and Ray had been on a record together since they split up, and by Kraig Hutchens on electric lead guitar, whom Maddox chose to play the kind of licks heard on the old Maddox Brothers and Rose records. The fourteen songs mixed her own repertoire, such as “Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down” and “Single Girl,” with Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer,” Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” “Ashes of Love,” “Foggy Mountain Top” and “Rocky Top,” with Vern Williams singing behind her.

On 20 November 1982, at Bay Records in Alameda, the band itself, now with Ed Neff on fiddle and Kevin Thompson on bass, backed her on Beautiful Bouquet (Arhoolie, 1983), fourteen gospel songs including “Life’s Evening Sun,” “Farther Along,” “Turn Your Radio On,” “Take Me in the Lifeboat,” Albert E. Brumley’s “If We Never Meet Again” and the title song, with the Williamses and Little singing harmony throughout. Rose Maddox died in 1998.