The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers

Ezra Cline, born in 1907 at Gilbert Creek, West Virginia, organized the band in 1938 with his cousins Ireland “Lazy Ned” Cline on banjo and Ray “Curly Ray” Cline on fiddle, and a radio announcer, Gordon Jennings, on guitar. They won a spot on WHIS in Bluefield. During the Second World War Ned Cline joined the army and was killed in the D-Day landings, and his brother Charlie took his place; wartime gasoline shortages kept the band off the radio until 1945.

The change to bluegrass came in 1949, when Bobby Osborne joined on guitar and Larry Richardson on banjo, alongside Ezra on bass and Ray Morgan on fiddle. That lineup made the band’s first records, four sides for Cozy Records of Davis, West Virginia: “Pain in My Heart,” “Lonesome, Sad and Blue,” “Don’t Forget Me” and “Will I Meet Mother in Heaven,” issued in 1950. Flatt & Scruggs later recorded “Pain in My Heart.”

When Osborne and Richardson left in the summer of 1951, Ezra rebuilt the band with Paul Williams on guitar, Curly Ray on fiddle and Charlie Cline on banjo, who was soon replaced by the sixteen-year-old Ray Goins. Signed to RCA Victor, they held their first session in May 1952, with Rex Parker on mandolin, and two more followed by August 1953, with Charlie Cline back on banjo and Albert Punturi on mandolin. The fourteen songs from those sessions include “You Broke Your Promise,” “Nobody Cares,” “My Brown-Eyed Darling,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Dirty Dishes Blues” and the instrumentals “Lonesome Pine Breakdown” and “5-String Rag.” In the fall of 1952 the band moved from Bluefield to Oak Hill, West Virginia; from January to November 1953 it was based in Detroit, on WJR and the Big Barn Frolic, where it backed the Davis Sisters on one of their early records; and by November 1953 it had settled in Pikeville, Kentucky, on WLSI.

In 1954 Ray Goins came back on banjo with his brother Melvin on guitar, and with Ezra, Curly Ray and the mandolin player James Roberts they recorded two more RCA sessions, in February and September. “Windy Mountain,” the band’s signature piece, came from the September session. By mid-1955 the Goins brothers had gone, replaced by the guitarist Udell McPeak, who also played the comic character “Jasper,” and the banjo player Billy Edwards; Paul Williams returned briefly before leaving to play mandolin with Jimmy Martin. In the late 1950s the group was Ezra, Curly Ray, Charlie Cline on electric guitar and Charlie’s wife Lee on vocals, working radio in Pikeville and a weekly television show on WSAZ in Huntington, until Charlie and Lee left around 1960.

Melvin and Ray Goins returned for one last stretch in the early and middle 1960s, when the band made four albums for Starday, among them 14 Mountain Songs Featuring 5-String Banjo (1961), Bluegrass! (1962) and More Bluegrass! (1963), and one that paired it with Hylo Brown. It also had a fifteen-month run on WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia. That lineup broke up in 1964. Ezra kept a part-time group going for several more years, with Kentucky Slim (Eddie Branham) among its members, while running a restaurant in Pikeville, until it folded in 1968 and he moved back to West Virginia. He died at Gilbert Creek in 1984.

Many of its players went on to long careers: Bobby Osborne in the Osborne Brothers, Larry Richardson with Bill Monroe and the Sauceman Brothers, Charlie Cline with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, Paul Williams with Jimmy Martin, Curly Ray Cline for twenty-six years with Ralph Stanley, and Melvin and Ray Goins as the Goins Brothers.