Buddy Griffin

Buddy Mason Griffin was born on 22 September 1948 in Richwood, Nicholas County, the sixth of eight children of Richard and Erma Griffin, whose favorite music was the songs of the original Carter Family. He started out plucking his family’s bass fiddle at five or six and learned all the instruments from his parents; the five-string banjo was always his own choice, though the fiddle made his name. The family band had radio programs in Oak Hill, Sutton, Richwood and Weston, appeared on Red Smiley’s show on WOAY-TV and, from June 1964, was a semi-regular on the Buddy Starcher Show on WCHS-TV in Charleston; with two players from outside the family it became the Sunny Valley Boys. In 1966 the family moved to Braxton County.

Griffin graduated from Glenville State in 1971 and taught junior high school for a few years. On 1 December 1971 he and the guitarist George Ward backed the fiddler Joe Meadows on an all-instrumental LP, his first recording session. In 1973 he became the staff banjo and fiddle player on Jamboree USA in Wheeling, where he recorded with The Heckels and Slim Lehart, and in October that year he won the West Virginia state banjo and fiddle contests. Work with the Jamboree singer Landon Williams took him to Cincinnati.

In the spring of 1975 he joined the Goins Brothers as their full-time fiddler. With them and Curley Lambert he recorded for Rebel at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, in January 1976, singing and playing guitar, autoharp and fiddle, and that March he fiddled on Lambert’s Blue Grass Evergreen for Old Homestead, cut with the Goins Brothers in Brighton, Michigan. He also recorded with the Katie Laur Band and did session work at Rusty York’s Jewel Studio in Cincinnati with Earl Taylor, Mac Wiseman, Dave Evans and Josh Graves. In the spring of 1978 he played fiddle on Red Allen and the Kentuckians’ Live and Let Live, cut in Columbus, Ohio, and issued by Folkways in 1979, and on Dave Evans’s Call Me Long Gone (Vetco, 1980) he played banjo, guitar, fiddle and bass.

He went back to teaching, at Gassaway Middle School, until 1982, when Johnny Russell, whom he had known at the Jamboree, hired him as a fiddler for a run of shows in Las Vegas; that year he made his first Grand Ole Opry appearance, fiddling with Russell, and he worked with him on and off for several years. In July 1983 he played the Winnipeg Folk Festival with the Doug Dillard Band. In 1988 he issued a cassette as the Buddy Griffin Band on his own Braxton label, playing every instrument and engineering it himself. In the 1990s he lived in northern Arkansas, playing evenings in the Ozark Mountain Hoedown at Eureka Springs and working days in Branson with Christy Lane and Albert Brumley Jr.

His parents’ health brought him back to West Virginia, and in 1997 he became the fiddler with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys, staying on after Jim McReynolds’ death at the end of 2002. He played on their CD Our Kind of Country (2001) and played all the fiddle on the debut album of Jesse’s grandson Luke McKnight. Meanwhile he taught string classes part-time at Glenville State, and in 2002, with the Fine Arts Department, he introduced the first four-year college degree program in bluegrass music and ran it until he retired from the college in 2011. In 2004 he played the banjo tracks for the Disney animated film The Fox and the Hound 2.

After leaving Glenville he moved to the Nashville area, where he still played Opry weekends with Jesse McReynolds and was on the road with Bobby Osborne & the Rocky Top X-Press, including Osborne’s 2014 tour marking his fifty years on the Opry. With the singer and guitarist Ashley Messenger he made three CDs of Reno and Smiley songs under the name Retro and Smiling, and in 2012 he recorded Buddy Griffin Plays Hank Williams, fifteen fiddle numbers. By his own count he played the Opry more than two hundred times. He retired in 2018 but kept taking calls to play, and he died on 4 February 2025, aged 76.

• 2011: Vandalia Award, West Virginia Division of Culture and History
• 2019: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Glenville State College
• 2023: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame