The Coon Creek Girls

Lily May Ledford, born in the Red River Gorge area in 1917, grew up in a musical family and played fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass with her brothers and sisters. After she won a contest in 1935, Lair, then working for the Chicago radio station WLS, signed her to a five-year contract, and her older sister Rosie soon joined her there. Lair planned a barn dance of his own, back home in Kentucky, with an all-girl band as one of its features. When the Renfro Valley Barn Dance began in 1937, broadcast at first from Cincinnati over WLW while the Kentucky site was being built, the Coon Creek Girls were Lily May on banjo, Rosie on guitar, Esther Koehler on mandolin and Evelyn Lange on bass, the last two taking the flower names Violet and Daisy to go with the sisters’. Lair encouraged Lily May to play banjo, in her own tunings and the clawhammer style. Besides their own act they backed the comedian Aunt Idy on the show and toured with her through Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

On 30 May 1938 the band recorded in Chicago for Vocalion, with Aunt Idy (Idy Harper): thirteen sides, among them “Pretty Polly,” “Little Birdie,” “Poor Naomi Wise,” “Sowing on the Mountain” and Lily May’s banjo feature “Banjo Pickin’ Girl.” Vocalion issued them on six records between July 1938 and March 1939, and the Conqueror label reissued several, “The Soldier and the Lady” backed with “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” among them, in December 1938.

On 8 June 1939 they played in the East Room of the White House for President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, on a program that also had Marian Anderson, Lawrence Tibbett and Kate Smith; their set included “Cindy,” “The Soldier and the Lady” and “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?” Later that year, as the Renfro Valley site in Kentucky was finished, Violet and Daisy left, and the Ledfords’ younger sister Minnie, known as Black Eyed Susan, took their place. As a trio of sisters the Coon Creek Girls went on playing the Renfro Valley shows for many years, heard on radio transcriptions such as Renfro Valley Gatherin’, and in June 1955 they recorded for Capitol at Castle Studio in Nashville, two sides with Ferlin Husky and two of their own.

The band broke up in 1957. In 1967 Lily May, Rosie and Susie Ledford recorded fourteen songs, among them “Banjo Picking Girl,” “Pretty Polly” and “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat,” for the County album Coon Creek Girls, issued in 1968. Lily May Ledford died in 1985. At the end of the 1970s Lair revived the name for a new group, the New Coon Creek Girls.