The Lilly Brothers and Don Stover

Bea (Michael Burt) Lilly was born in 1921 and Everett in 1924 in Clear Creek, across the mountain from Beckley. They learned guitar and mandolin and the two parts of the brother duet from records and radio, with the Monroe Brothers as their particular favorites, and settled into a mandolin-and-guitar duo with Everett on mandolin and most of the tenor singing and Bea on guitar and lead. They made their radio debut in 1938 as the Lonesome Holler Boys on WCHS in Charleston, became regulars on WJLS in Beckley, and in 1945 went to Knoxville with Molly O’Day’s Cumberland Mountain Folks. Early in 1948 they joined Red Belcher’s Kentucky Ridgerunners on WWVA’s Wheeling Jamboree, where they first worked with the fiddler Tex Logan and made their first records, “What Are They Doing in Heaven” and “They Sleep Together Now at Rest,” for the Page label. A dispute with Belcher broke up the group in 1950; Bea went home to work in Beckley, and Everett spent two years playing mandolin and singing tenor with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, recording fourteen sides with them for Columbia.

Don Stover, born in 1928 in the coal camp of Ameagle, a few miles from Clear Creek, had worked out his own three-finger banjo style in the 1940s and was playing with Bea in West Virginia. Late in 1952, at the urging of Logan, who had gone to Boston to study at MIT, the three West Virginians moved north. With Logan they became the Confederate Mountaineers, with a daily show on WCOP and Saturday nights on its Hayloft Jamboree, and worked at the Plaza Bar and the Mohawk Ranch before settling into the Hillbilly Ranch, a club next to the Trailways bus station in the district later known as the Combat Zone. When Logan left for graduate school in New York they carried on as the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover, and many touring musicians sat in with them, among them Bill Monroe, Tex Ritter, Doc Watson and Mike Seeger.

The lineup did not stay fixed. Stover played with Buzz Busby’s Bayou Boys from 1954 to 1956 and spent about six months of 1957 with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys; Joe Val, Bob French and Billy Pack were among the banjo players who filled in. In 1958–59 Everett went back to Flatt & Scruggs for about a year, and Bea and Stover kept the job going with the fiddler Chubby Anthony, recording for Mike Seeger’s Folkways anthology Mountain Music Bluegrass Style. Their own records began with two singles for Al Hawkes’s Event label of Westbrook, Maine: “Tragic Romance” with “Are You Tired of Me, My Darling,” and “John Henry” with “Bring Back My Blue-Eyed Boy to Me,” a record on which Bill Keith later traced the start of his melodic banjo style to a Stover lick. In October 1959 Manuel Greenhill presented them with Merle Travis at Jordan Hall, the first all-country program in that Boston concert hall.

The folk revival brought them new audiences. Seeger recorded Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains (Folkways FA 2433, 1962) at the YMCA hall in Boston on 25–27 January 1961: one side has the brothers alone in the old duet style, the other adds Stover and the fiddler Herb Hooven. Prestige’s Folklore series issued Bluegrass Breakdown, with Hooven and Fritz Richmond on washtub bass, and The Country Songs of the Lilly Brothers, with Everett’s son Everett Alan on bass, both in 1964. With Greenhill as their booker they played the Newport Folk Festival, other folk festivals and colleges, and they appear in the films Festival (1967) and Bluegrass Country Soul (1971). Stover left briefly in 1965 to join Bill Harrell’s Virginians but was back within the year.

In January 1970, after his son Jiles was killed in a car accident, Everett moved his family back to Clear Creek, and after a farewell concert at Jordan Hall the Hillbilly Ranch years were over. Through the 1970s the three reunited for occasional festivals, sometimes with Logan, recorded the gospel album What Will I Leave Behind for County (1973), and made two tours of Japan, booked by Robert and Jerry Tainaka, which produced three live LPs; County also gathered the Event sides on Early Recordings. Everett went on to lead family bands in West Virginia, Bea made little music in his last years, and Stover formed the White Oak Mountain Boys and later toured with Bill Clifton and Red Rector in the First Generation. Stover died in November 1996, Bea in September 2005 and Everett in May 2012.

• 1986: Massachusetts Country Music Hall of Fame (the Lilly Brothers; Don Stover in 1987)
• 2002: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor (now the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame)
• 2008: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame