Bill Napier

He was born in Wise County, Virginia, on 17 December 1935, and as a small child moved with his family to Harman, near Grundy. One of eleven children, he did not come from a musical family, but he listened closely to WCYB in Bristol, where his favorites were the Stanley Brothers and Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Pardners. The Stanleys’ mandolinist Pee Wee Lambert gave him some first-hand tips, and Bill Monroe was another early inspiration. In his late teens he went north to work in a Detroit factory, bought a good mandolin with his wages and began playing with other mountain musicians in the city, among them the husband-and-wife team Curly Dan and Wilma Ann, on whose first Fortune session he played mandolin.

Encouraged by Jimmy Williams, a former Stanley Brothers mandolinist, he auditioned in Bristol, failed, went back to Detroit to practice, and a few months later returned as a Clinch Mountain Boy. Besides playing mandolin he handled much of the band’s booking and played the comedy character “Dad” or “Grandpop” Napier, whose falsetto voice can be heard on the Stanleys’ King recording of “Train 45.” On 15 November 1957, about four months after he joined, he was on the Mercury session at RCA Victor’s studio in Nashville that produced “Daybreak in Dixie,” “If That’s the Way You Feel” and “I’d Rather Be Forgotten,” with Benny Martin and Howdy Forrester on twin fiddles. Over the next two years he played mandolin on the Stanleys’ Starday sessions at WCYB, including “Gonna Paint the Town” and “Christmas Is Near,” on their first King sessions in Cincinnati on 30 September and 1 October 1958, which produced “Love Me, Darling, Just Tonight,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love” and “Train 45,” and on the 1959 Starday sides cut at WNER in Live Oak, Florida.

The lead guitar came about almost by accident. Restringing Carter Stanley’s guitar, Napier started picking out a mandolin piece, “Rawhide,” on it, and Carter heard a new sound for the band; King’s Syd Nathan, who wanted something new to lift the Stanleys’ sales, agreed. Napier, still mainly a mandolin player, became the first to record guitar cross-picking with the Stanleys, at a King session in September 1959 with George Shuffler on bass, adapting his mandolin licks to the guitar. He stayed for only one or two more sessions in the new style.

In 1960, after the Stanleys played some shows booked by Charlie Moore, Napier joined Moore’s South Carolina band, the Dixie Partners, and the team of Moore and Napier was formed. They first recorded in 1960 for Wayne Raney’s American label at Oxford, Ohio, and then moved to Panama City, Florida, for six television shows a week on WJHG-TV. With no banjo player along, Napier took up the banjo, and from then on he divided his time between lead guitar and banjo, never playing mandolin with the Dixie Partners. Their first King session, in Cincinnati on 28 December 1962, produced “Truck Driver’s Queen,” written by the two of them, and their first album, Folk ’n’ Hill, with Napier on lead guitar and baritone vocals. After losing their Pensacola television show they moved back to Spartanburg. In all they recorded about 108 songs for King across nine albums, among them Grand Ole Opry Hymnal, Songs by Moore and Napier for All the Lonesome Truck Drivers, and Country Music Goes to Viet Nam, whose songs were written and recorded in the studio within an hour or two, as well as an all-instrumental album, Spectacular Instrumentals, cut on 18 November 1964 with numbers such as “Grundy Hoedown” and “Lonesome Guitar.”

The partnership ended amicably in 1968, when Napier needed to get off the road. He lived mostly in the Detroit area afterward, playing lead guitar on some recordings by Curly Dan and Wilma Ann, working occasional shows with Moore and with L. B. Siler and the Round Mountain Boys, and making a reunion album with Moore for Old Homestead in 1975 with the former Stanley sideman Al Elliott on mandolin. In 1984 he recorded Hillbilly Fever for Old Homestead with his Mountain Music Clan, back on mandolin with Audie Blaylock and Steve Carroll on guitars, and after meeting Larry Taylor at a festival in Nashville, Michigan, in 1980 he recorded with Taylor and the Waterloo Bluegrass Boys, including a cassette tribute, We Salute the Stanley Brothers, on which he revisited “Daybreak in Dixie.” He died on 3 May 2000.