Bobby Thompson
Bobby Thompson was a banjo player and guitarist from South Carolina who, as a member of Jim and Jesse’s Virginia Boys in the late 1950s, worked out a way of altering the three-finger roll to catch more of a melody’s notes, one of the first versions of what became known as the melodic style. He went on to two decades as a Nashville session musician, played in the Hee Haw staff band for seventeen years and was a member of Area Code 615.
Robert Clark Thompson was born in Converse, South Carolina, on 5 July 1937. He was playing banjo with Carl Story by 1957: on 3 August that year he played and sang on Story’s Mercury session that produced “Family Reunion,” “Saviour’s Love” and the instrumentals “Banjolina” and “Fire on the Banjo.”
He then joined Jim and Jesse McReynolds, then based in Valdosta, Georgia. He had worked out his melodic approach in 1957, and fragments of it are heard on two instrumentals he recorded with them, “Border Ride,” from a session in Jacksonville, Florida, on 23 October 1958, and “Dixie Hoedown,” from July 1959. Those Jacksonville sessions, with Don McHan on bass, also gave Starday “Pardon Me,” “Hard Hearted,” “Let Me Whisper” and “Nobody But You,” and in October 1959 a set of gospel songs. Bill Keith reached a similar method on his own at about the same time, and because Keith’s playing gave it wide exposure, many players came to call it Keith style without knowing of Thompson’s part.
Thompson was drafted in the early 1960s. Afterwards he rejoined Jim and Jesse, and he is on their Epic sessions at the Columbia studio in Nashville from 1967 to 1969: the truck-driving album Diesel on My Tail, cut on 1 and 2 May 1967 with Lloyd Green on steel and Buddy Harman, an instrumental album in the spring of 1968, and the 1969 sessions for their Louvin Brothers tribute, among them “Cash on the Barrel Head,” “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby” and “Knoxville Girl.”
He left the band in the late 1960s, took up acoustic guitar alongside the banjo and became one of the busiest session players in Nashville, at times working fifteen sessions a week. His session career ran from the 1960s into the 1980s, on records by Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Elvis Presley, Tammy Wynette, Perry Como and the Monkees, and on Dolly Parton’s Jolene (1974), George Strait’s Strait Country (1981) and Loretta Lynn’s I Lie (1982). At the end of the 1960s he joined Charlie McCoy, Weldon Myrick and other session players in Area Code 615, which made two albums mixing country, rock and bluegrass, and he spent seventeen years in the staff band of Hee Haw. He played banjo on the steel guitarist Doug Jernigan’s Roadside Rag (Flying Fish, 1976), and in 1979 he was back in the studio with Jim and Jesse, on guitar and banjo, for The Jim and Jesse Story.
Thompson died on 18 May 2005, at the age of 67.
