The Blue Sky Boys

Bill (born 28 October 1917) and Earl (born 16 November 1919) grew up in West Hickory, the fourth and fifth of six children, in a religious family that taught them hymns and gospel songs. A neighbor taught Bill guitar and banjo, while Earl started on mandolin and guitar; they later swapped, Bill settling on the mandolin and Earl on the guitar. They made their radio debut in 1935 on WWNC in Asheville as part of the Crazy Hickory Nuts, and late that year, with Homer Sherrill, they became the Good Coffee Boys for a coffee company sponsor. In 1936 the brothers moved to WGST in Atlanta, where, under a Crazy Water Crystals sponsorship, they had to work as the Blue Ridge Hillbillies.

In Atlanta they auditioned for RCA’s Eli Oberstein, who at first thought they were copying the Monroe Brothers and changed his mind once he heard them. Because Sherrill kept the Blue Ridge Hillbillies name, they took a new one from western North Carolina’s nickname, the Land of the Sky. Their first session, at the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte on 16 June 1936, produced ten sides, among them “Sunny Side of Life” and “Where the Soul Never Dies,” issued together on Bluebird, and “Down on the Banks of the Ohio.” The record sold quickly enough for the pair to be billed as the New Hillbilly Kings. Further Bluebird sessions followed in Charlotte in October 1936, August 1937 and January 1938, where they cut “Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes,” at Rock Hill, South Carolina, in September 1938, and in Atlanta in 1939 and 1940; at the last of these, on 7 October 1940, they recorded “Turn Your Radio On.” By then they had some ninety sides behind them. In 1941 they were broadcasting on WPTF in Raleigh, with Sam “Curly” Parker on fiddle.

Both brothers then served in the military until 1946. Back in Atlanta, they returned to WGST, where Parker again played fiddle on their broadcasts, and to RCA, now recording in New York: four sides on 30 September 1946, including “Dust on the Bible,” eight in May 1947 and eight more on 16 December 1947, including “Behind These Prison Walls of Love” and “The Cross on the Hill.” They had several hits in those years, but they disliked the new honky-tonk style and would not record it, and when RCA asked them to use an electric guitar they refused and stopped recording. They came back for a session at the Fox Theatre Building in Atlanta on 31 January 1949 and a last one at Brown Radio Productions in Nashville on 26 March 1950, where they recut “Sunny Side of Life.” In 1951 they retired; Bill became a postal clerk in North Carolina and Earl went to work for Lockheed Aircraft in Atlanta.

When Starday released an LP of their radio recordings, A Treasury of Rare Song Gems from the Past, in 1962, they agreed to record again. Two Starday albums of new material followed, the secular Together Again and the sacred Precious Moments (both 1964), produced by Tommy Hill, and RCA Camden reissued their early sides as The Original and Great Blue Sky Boys the same year. They played folk festivals and campus concerts; a show at the University of Illinois on 17 October 1964 was issued years later by Rounder. A trip to California for the UCLA Folk Festival brought two days at Capitol’s Hollywood studio on 17 and 18 May 1965, recording ballads and folk songs such as “The Unquiet Grave,” “Midnight Special” and “Cotton Mill Colic” for Presenting the Blue Sky Boys. By the end of the 1960s they had stopped again.

In the mid-1970s they were persuaded to record once more, for Rounder, at Gusto’s studio in Nashville, with Bill on mandolin; the album, Bill and Earl Bolick, included “The Lawson Family Tragedy” and “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave,” and another round of folk and bluegrass dates followed. Afterwards Bill moved back to Longview, North Carolina, and Earl retired to Tucker, Georgia. In the 1990s Copper Creek issued four volumes of their 1940s radio transcriptions, and Patuxent later collected broadcasts from 1939 to 1949. Earl died on 19 April 1998 and Bill on 13 March 2008.