The Primitive Quartet

The group began on a 1973 fishing trip to Fontana Lake in Graham County, when the Riddles and the Wilsons took a guitar and a mandolin along and, that night, sang four-part harmony together for the first time. The Riddles had grown up on farms in Madison and Buncombe Counties; the Wilsons came from Franklin and had learned shape-note singing from their father, a minister for fifty-seven years. With their parents’ and pastor’s encouragement they sang in area churches as the Riddle-Wilson Quartet.

In 1978 they decided to make the music a full-time ministry. Furman Wilson left, a third Riddle brother, Mike, joined, and the group renamed itself the Primitive Quartet in honor of the old-time gospel singing it drew on. Randy Fox, a singer and instrumentalist from Indiana, joined in 1986, and about ten years later Jeff Tolbert came in, first as an instrumentalist and then, after Norman Wilson’s death in 2014, as one of the singers. On It’s Real (2014), recorded at Crossroads Studios in Arden, North Carolina, Mike and Reagan Riddle played guitar, Norman Wilson mandolin, Tolbert fiddle, banjo and mandolin, and Fox bass, with all of them singing.

Their early LPs came out on small labels including Pisgah, WES, Dawn, Wind Chime and the group’s own Primitive label, among them Live at Hominy Valley (Dawn, 1981). From the 1990s they recorded for Mountain Heritage, from The Blessings of a Friend (1993) and Family on Both Sides (1996) through 40th Anniversary Live! (2013) and That’s Grace: 45th Anniversary (2018), and they released more than a dozen videos and DVDs. The group toured across the United States and overseas, was the subject of a BBC documentary in 1984, and for several years in a row was among the top five nominees for the readers’ Band of the Year award of Singing News. At Hominy Valley Singing Grounds they hosted the Hominy Valley Homecoming each Fourth of July weekend and afternoon Fall Color Singing concerts on October weekends.

From the fall of 2021 Mountain Home Music Company began reissuing their catalog to streaming services for the first time in Through the Years, a digital series curated by Mike Riddle and Greg Bentley and planned at eight volumes. In March 2023 the group announced that its touring days were ending after fifty years and released Stay Their Arms, its last studio recording, which closes their catalog with mostly original songs alongside Albert E. Brumley’s “If We Never Meet Again” and R. E. Winsett’s “Will You Meet Me Over Yonder.”