Carl Story

He was born on 29 May 1916 in Lenoir. His father was an old-time fiddler who collected records by Charlie Poole and by G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, and Carl took up the fiddle at nine, later learning guitar and clawhammer banjo; Riley Puckett and Uncle Dave Macon were among his early models. After winning a fiddle contest he joined J. E. Clark and the Lonesome Mountaineers, a band heard on WLVA in Lynchburg, Virginia, but he soon left to lead his own group.

The first Rambling Mountaineers came together on 13 October 1934. Story played fiddle and sang, with Ed McMahan and Dudley Watson on guitars and Johnnie Whisnant on banjo, and Whisnant already picked with three fingers, in a style close to the one Earl Scruggs and Don Reno would later make familiar. Within a year the band was on WHKY in Hickory, and later it played over WSPA in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and WWNC in Asheville. Story recalled cutting records for OKeh that were never released, but radio recordings survive: on 3 March 1939, at WWNC’s studio in Leicester, North Carolina, he sang and fiddled on “The Great Speckled Bird,” “San Antonio Rose” and “Shout Lulu,” with Whisnant on banjo and Watson on mandolin, and on a second set from March 1942 he is heard on guitar and banjo as well as fiddle. The draft broke the band up in 1942. A chance meeting with Clyde Moody led him to Bill Monroe, and he fiddled with the Blue Grass Boys, in place of the drafted Howdy Forrester, from the last days of 1942 until October 1943, when he was called into the Navy.

The fiddle had been his instrument for the first decade of his career. When he re-formed the Rambling Mountaineers after his discharge in 1945, with the brothers Jack and Curley Shelton, the banjo player Hoke Jenkins and the bassist Claude Boone, he moved to guitar and lead singing. The band spent five years on WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, playing the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round and sharing show dates with Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks, and it was there that Mercury’s Dee Kilpatrick heard it on the air. At his first Mercury session, on 14 September 1947, probably at radio station WROL in Knoxville, Story sang and played guitar, taking up the fiddle again for one number, with Carl Thacker on electric guitar, Boone on bass and Clyde and Hack Johnson singing harmony; “I’ve Found a Hiding Place,” backed with “He’s Waiting There,” came out as Mercury 6068 that November. For those first sessions the group briefly called itself the Melody Four Quartet. Between 1947 and 1953 he recorded eleven Mercury sessions and fifty songs, mixing secular numbers such as “I Watched You Walk Away,” “Tennessee Border” and “Faded Love” with quartet gospel such as “Keep on the Firing Line” and “He Will Set Your Fields on Fire.” Knoxville songwriters supplied much of the material, among them Arthur Q. Smith and Ira and Charlie Louvin, and Story was the first to record the Louvins’ “God Saved My Soul” and “Are You Afraid to Die.” From the late 1940s Red Rector played mandolin and sang with him, Cotton Gaylon added steel guitar and vocals, and Boone sang bass.

Like most country acts of the time, the band moved from station to station. Story left WNOX for WPAQ in Mount Airy, North Carolina, in the summer of 1951; in January 1952 he went to WCYB in Bristol and its Farm and Fun Time, and then to WAYS in Charlotte, where he also worked as a disc jockey. By the mid-1950s he was back in Knoxville, on WNOX and on grocer Cas Walker’s television show.

In 1953 he moved to Columbia, recording eighteen songs over three years at Castle Studio in Nashville with Don Law producing. His first Columbia session, on 1 June 1953, had Rector on banjo and Jerry Rivers on fiddle; Rector sang lead on the Louvins’ “Love and Wealth,” and the Columbia sides also included “My Lord Keeps a Record” and Story’s own “I Love the Hymns They Sang at Mother’s Grave.” Back at Mercury from 1955, he often sang tenor in the quartet, with Rector or Jimmy Haynie on lead and Boone on bass, and he made the five-string banjo part of the sound. At a session on 25 February 1957, with Bud Brewster on banjo, Willie Brewster on mandolin and Tater Tate on fiddle, he recorded “Light at the River” and “Mocking Banjo,” a version of the Arthur Smith and Don Reno instrumental “Feudin’ Banjos,” issued together as Mercury 71088. On 3 August 1957 Bobby Thompson played banjo and Tommy Jackson fiddle on “Family Reunion,” “Saviour’s Love,” “Banjolina” and “Fire on the Banjo,” and for a time his singles paired a gospel song with a banjo instrumental. Mercury gathered his quartet sides on Gospel Quartet Favorites in February 1958, an album credited as the first all-bluegrass gospel LP on a major label.

When Mercury and Starday ended their partnership in 1958, Story went with Starday and over the next ten years made a dozen albums for the label, many with the Brewster brothers and Boone. Some were cut at radio station WFLW in Monticello, Kentucky, where he worked as a disc jockey from 1960; a session there on 8 October 1958 produced “Old Country Baptizing” and “Angel Band.” The Starday albums included Everybody Will Be Happy and Get Religion (both 1961), Mighty Close to Heaven (1963), All Day Singing, recorded live at Calvary Baptist Church in Rittman, Ohio, in May 1963, Sacred Songs of Life and the Hereafter and There’s Nothing on Earth That Heaven Can’t Cure (both 1965), The Lewis Family Sings the Gospel with Carl Story (1966) and Daddy Sang Bass (1969), whose cover of Johnny Cash’s title song sold well through the Capitol Record Club. From the 1960s he toured widely in the United States and Europe.

The bluegrass festivals of the 1970s gave his career a fresh lift. He recorded Light at the River (1974) and Mother’s Last Words (1975) for Atteiram of Marietta, Georgia, and for CMH, the new Los Angeles label of Arthur Smith and Martin Haerle, he re-recorded older songs for Mountain Music and the two-LP The Bluegrass Gospel Collection (both 1976), cut at Smith’s studio in Charlotte with Rector back on mandolin and Smith on fiddle; A Lonesome Wail from the Hills followed in 1978. On 2 May 1985 he sang “True Life Blues” with Bill Monroe at a session for MCA in Nashville, and he was still singing and playing guitar on a gospel album recorded in Marion, North Carolina, in 1994. Many of his Mercury and Columbia sides, long unavailable in North America, were later reissued by Bear Family.

Story spent his last thirty years in Greer, South Carolina, where he based the Rambling Mountaineers and, between tours, worked as a disc jockey, on WCKI in Greer and finally for five years on WESC in Greenville. He died on 31 March 1995, aged 78. BMI credits him with 178 compositions and arrangements, among them “I Love the Hymns They Sang at Mother’s Grave” and “I Heard My Mother Weeping.” “I Overlooked an Orchid” carries his name too, though its authorship is disputed; Carl Smith first recorded it in 1950, and Mickey Gilley took it to number one on the country chart in 1974. Red Rector, Bud and Willie Brewster, Bobby Thompson and Tater Tate all worked in his bands, and in 2007 he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.