Billy Constable

He was born in upstate New York and moved as a young child, after his father died, to his mother’s home area around Spruce Pine in Avery County. Through his mother, Lois, he belonged to Avery County’s musical Wiseman family, which includes Scotty Wiseman and the banjo player Kent Wiseman, Lois’s brother; for many years she promoted a festival in Kent’s memory. Lois married the singer Charlie Moore while Billy was a boy, and the couple drew national bluegrass acts to the Spruce Pine area, so he grew up around players such as Don Reno and Bill Monroe. He learned nearly every bluegrass instrument.

He played guitar in Moore’s band, the Dixie Partners, as a teenager, and he is on the band’s Old Homestead sessions at Brighton, Michigan, from 1973. On The Fiddler (1975) he played guitar. At sessions in late 1975 and early 1976 he sang tenor to Moore’s lead on songs such as “Knoxville Girl” and “Hills of Roane County,” and played guitar, banjo and autoharp; the recordings were issued on two LPs, Country Music Memories Vol. 1 (1982) and Vol. 2. He also played guitar on four tracks at a 1975 session for the fiddler Johnny Dacus. He wrote “The Same Old Place Tonight,” which Bob Smallwood recorded for Old Homestead in 1975.

In 1979 he played lead guitar with the Doug Dillard Band, alongside Dillard, the fiddlers Byron Berline and Ray Park, Bill Bryson on bass and Skip Conover on Dobro, on the live album Jackrabbit! (Flying Fish), recorded at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in June and at the Dillards’ homecoming in Salem, Missouri, in August. Moore died that December, and the family moved to California, where Constable concentrated on the banjo in the family band, the Constables. He also toured with the fiddler Kenny Baker and the Dobro player Josh Graves. After the family came back east, he led the Constable Family Band for a time.

He then moved into jam-band music. He toured widely and recorded with Hypnotic Clambake, a band that played klezmer among much else, and he worked with Acoustic Forum from New York, Max Creek from New England and the Larry Keel Experience. He appeared on many shows with Leftover Salmon and was a guest at String Cheese Incident shows and on their album Carnival 99. He was a member of the seasonal Big Daddy Bluegrass Band with Steve McMurry, Curtis Burch and Larry Keel. In his later years he played regularly around Boone and Asheville, most often with the mandolinist Mark Schimick, his partner in the band Sassagrass, which played a reunion show at the Music Fest in Sugar Grove in July 2014. Constable died on 22 August 2015, at the age of fifty-six.