The Kentucky Colonels

The Whites were a French-Canadian family named LeBlanc from Maine: Roland was born in Madawaska in 1938 and Clarence in Lewiston in 1944. Their first band had all four children in it, Roland on mandolin, Eric Jr. on tenor banjo, Joanne on bass and Clarence on guitar, playing the pop and country hits of the 1940s and 1950s. After the family moved to Burbank in 1954 the three brothers carried on as the Three Little Country Boys. First place in a talent contest run by KXLA radio in Pasadena led to regular spots on local country television, among them Town Hall Party, and in 1955, after Roland brought home Bill Monroe’s “Pike County Breakdown,” the group turned to bluegrass.

By 1959 the band was called the Country Boys and had grown to five, with Billy Ray Latham on banjo and LeRoy Mack (McNees) on Dobro alongside the three brothers. That year they made their first record, a Sundown single pairing “I’m Head Over Heels in Love With You” with “Kentucky Hills.” Around 1960 they began playing the Ash Grove, a Los Angeles folk club, and the exposure led to two 1961 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, “Mayberry on Record” and “Quiet Sam,” and four tracks on Capitol’s Songs, Themes and Laughs from the Andy Griffith Show. When Eric White left in 1961, Roger Bush took over on bass.

Doc Watson’s appearance at the Ash Grove in April 1962, with Clarence Ashley’s group, changed Clarence White’s playing. He also studied Earl Scruggs, Don Reno and Django Reinhardt, and with Roland drafted into the Army for two years, he took over lead as well as rhythm guitar. In September 1962 Clarence, Latham, LeRoy Mack and Roger Bush recorded The New Sound of Bluegrass America for Briar, with Ralph Stanley overseeing the sessions. LeRoy McNees wrote eleven of its fourteen songs, and “I Might Take You Back Again,” “420 Special” and “Won’t You Call Me Darling” were the first records of Clarence’s lead guitar. Because other bands were already called the Country Boys, the producers advised a new name, and the album came out in 1963 as the work of the Kentucky Colonels.

With Roland back from the Army and Bobby Slone briefly added on fiddle, the band recorded Appalachian Swing!, a twelve-track instrumental album that World Pacific issued in May 1964. The records brought engagements in the East, at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, the Newport Folk Festival and Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as the UCLA Folk Festival and the Ash Grove at home, and the band appeared on The Jerry Lewis Show. After Slone left, Scott Stoneman played fiddle for several months, the lineup heard on the Rounder collection Kentucky Colonels 1965–1966.

In its last year the band went electric, playing country and rock covers in a bowling-alley lounge in Azusa, California, and it broke up at the end of October 1965. Clarence and Roland cut demos under the band’s name in 1966 at Second Street Sound in Paramount, California, with Eric White back on bass; they were released in 1978 as Kentucky Colonels 1966. Roland joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys on guitar in May 1967 and later worked with Lester Flatt, Country Gazette and the Nashville Bluegrass Band. Clarence moved into country-rock and studio work. He developed the B-Bender guitar device with Gene Parsons, guested on the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday and Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and was a member of the Byrds from July 1968 until that band broke up in early 1973.

In February 1973 the three brothers re-formed as the New Kentucky Colonels, an acoustic band that toured England, Belgium, Sweden and Holland with Herb Pedersen and then Alan Munde on banjo, and played a single bluegrass festival, at Indian Springs, Maryland. On 14 July 1973 Clarence and Roland played a jam session at a bar in Palmdale, California. Early the next morning, while they were loading their equipment, Clarence was struck by a drunk driver, and he died later that day, aged 29.

The Kentucky Colonels made only two studio albums in their lifetime, and live and demo recordings issued later on Rounder, Sierra and other labels filled out the catalog. Clarence White, whose protégés included Tony Rice, was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2016, Roland in 2017, and the band in 2019. Roland White died in Nashville on 1 April 2022.