Billy Ray Latham

He was born on 12 January 1938 in Arkansas. When he was a boy his family moved to Michigan, where he grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry, learned to play the banjo and played on the radio in Ann Arbor with a friend. After school he worked for General Motors, and when he was laid off he and his brother set out for California. In Los Angeles he was working at a gas station and giving banjo lessons when Clarence White met him and invited him home to dinner with the family.

By 1959 he was the banjo player in the White brothers’ band, by then called the Country Boys, with Roland White on mandolin, Clarence on guitar, Eric White on bass and LeRoy Mack on Dobro. The band played the Ash Grove folk club, appeared in two 1961 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, and in September 1962 recorded The New Sound of Bluegrass America for Briar, issued in 1963 under the new name the Kentucky Colonels. Latham is on banjo throughout Appalachian Swing! (World Pacific, May 1964), the band’s instrumental album, from “Clinch Mountain Backstep” and “Nine Pound Hammer” to “Prisoner’s Song.” He played with the band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1964 and stayed until it broke up in 1965. Live tapes from those years were later issued as Livin’ in the Past (Briar, 1975), Kentucky Colonels 1965–1966 (Rounder, 1976), Onstage and Long Journey Home (Vanguard, 1991); on the first of them he is credited with high lead, tenor and high baritone vocals as well as banjo. The Colonels’ playing reached other banjo players through tapes passed around the country; Alan Munde, who first heard Latham that way, counted him and Bill Keith as the first players he heard combining Keith’s approach with the Scruggs roll. In Los Angeles Latham also gave some banjo lessons to a young Jerry Garcia.

After the Colonels he toured with Rick Nelson and played banjo on Nelson’s country sessions for Decca, among them “Louisiana Man,” “Hello Walls” and “Night Train to Memphis,” with Clarence White and James Burton on guitars. By 1971 he was with the Dillards, then moving toward country rock: he plays guitar on their Anthem single “It’s About Time” (1971) and is in the band on Roots and Branches (Anthem, 1972), Tribute to the American Duck (1973) and The Dillards Versus the Incredible L.A. Time Machine (Flying Fish, 1977), on banjo, guitar and backing vocals. He also played on Doug Dillard’s solo albums Duelin’ Banjo (1973) and You Don’t Need a Reason to Sing (1974). He left the Dillards in 1979 and went to work for Roger Miller.

In the 1990s he was a member of the Laurel Canyon Ramblers with Herb Pedersen, Kenny Blackwell and Bill Bryson, recording Rambler’s Blues (Sugar Hill, 1995) and Blue Rambler 2 (Sugar Hill, 1996), on which he plays guitar and sings. After moving to Nashville he did studio work there; he also recorded with Johnny Cash, Bobby Vee and Scotty Stoneman, and with LeRoy Mack on Leroy Mack & Friends. He died in Nashville on 19 August 2018, aged 80. The Kentucky Colonels, with Latham among the members honored, were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2019.