Benny Martin

He was born Benjamin Edward Martin in Sparta on 8 May 1928, the hometown of Lester Flatt, into a musical family. He had a fiddle by the age of six or seven, learned from local fiddlers, and by eight or nine was playing in the family band, the Martin Family, on WHUB in Cookeville and at the Upper Cumberland Jamboree. In the early 1940s he hitchhiked to Knoxville to be near WNOX, where the gospel singer Wally Fowler gave him work, and a year or so later Big Jeff Bess took him to Nashville to play with Big Jeff and the Radio Playboys on WLAC. He worked briefly with several Grand Ole Opry acts, among them Curly Fox and the blackface comedy duo Jam Up and Honey, with whom he made his first Opry appearance in 1946. That same year he made his first record, “Me and My Fiddle” with “So Blue to Cry,” for the Pioneer label.

In 1947 he performed and recorded with Red Foley, and later that year he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, then including Flatt, Scruggs and Cedric Rainwater. He stayed into 1948, after Flatt and Scruggs had left, as part of the band that included Don Reno and Jackie Phelps. He then joined Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys and played on some of Acuff’s later Columbia recordings. While with Acuff he cut his first MGM single, “Midnight Flyer” and “Where Is Your Heart Tonight?,” at Castle Studio in Nashville in December 1950, followed by “The Thirteenth of May.”

By the middle of 1952 he was with Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys at WNOX, alongside Everett Lilly on mandolin. He recorded two sets of sessions with them. On 9 November 1952 they cut “Why Did You Wander,” “Flint Hill Special,” “Thinking About You,” “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” and four more, and on 29 and 30 August 1953 “I’ll Go Stepping Too,” “I’d Rather Be Alone,” “Foggy Mountain Chimes,” “Someone Took My Place with You,” “Your Love Is Like a Flower” and three others. His playing on those records, loud, built on double stops and driven by heavy pressure on the bow, is what generations of bluegrass fans remember him for. John Hartford heard in it “as much emotion as I have ever heard any one human being put into music,” pointing to his bow licks, timing, accents and slides.

At the start of 1954 he and Paul Warren, Johnnie & Jack’s fiddler, traded places. From February 1954 to July 1955 Martin recorded seven sessions with Johnnie & Jack, seventeen songs including “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” and “Sincerely,” and two sessions with Kitty Wells, among them her hit “Makin’ Believe.” At the same time he had a two-year solo contract with Mercury, from August 1954, singing and playing guitar on twenty-one released sides while Dale Potter, Shorty Lavender or Howdy Forrester played the fiddle, except on a remake of “Me and My Fiddle.” Going solo in 1955, he took Colonel Tom Parker as his manager and opened for Elvis Presley on about fifty dates in 1955 and early 1956, and he became a member of the Grand Ole Opry, touring with its package shows for several years. Hank Williams nicknamed him “Big Tiger.”

He moved to RCA in 1957 and did a good deal of session work in Nashville. That November he and Howdy Forrester played twin fiddles on the Stanley Brothers’ Mercury session that produced “Daybreak in Dixie.” In 1960 he signed with Starday, recording about forty pieces, eight singles and the album Country Music’s Sensational Entertainer, and “Rosebuds and You” (1963) reached the country charts. In 1965 he left the Opry package circuit and returned to bluegrass in a short-lived partnership with Don Reno. They played the first multi-day bluegrass festival, on Labor Day weekend 1965, recorded a gospel album for Cabin Creek at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, that April, and charted with “Soldier’s Prayer in Viet Nam” in 1966. Later sidemen jobs included Pat Boone (1973–1974) and a brief tour with Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass in 1977, filling in for Paul Warren.

From the mid-1970s John Hartford, who had idolized him since childhood, arranged and produced sessions for him and championed his playing. On these records Martin went back to the fiddle. Tennessee Jubilee (Flying Fish, 1975), recorded at the Soundshop in Nashville, brought in Lester Flatt, Curly Seckler, Hartford and Kenny Ingram, and a run of albums for CMH followed: The Fiddle Collection (1976), Turkey in the Grass with his Electric Turkeys (1977), Big Daddy of the Fiddle and Bow (1979), with Hartford and Bobby Osborne, and The Great American Fiddle Collection with Buddy Spicher (1980). Slumberin’ on the Cumberland, made with Hartford and Pat Burton, came out on Flying Fish in 1979.

He recorded little after 1980. His last records were the star-studded pair The “Big Tiger” Roars Again, Part 1 (1999) and Part 2 (2001), produced by Hugh Moore for OMS, with guests including Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Ronnie McCoury, Ricky Skaggs, Bryan Sutton and Alison Krauss; the first won him an IBMA award for its liner notes. BMI credits him with 134 compositions and arrangements, among them “Me and My Fiddle” and “Ice Cold Love,” and his songs were recorded by Kitty Wells and Roy Acuff. He received the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1997. He died in Nashville on 13 March 2001 and was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Michael Cleveland and Jason Carter are among the fiddlers who cite him as an influence.