Charles “Jody” Rainwater
Charles Edward Johnson, known on stage as Jody Rainwater, was the bass player, bass singer and comedian of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys from 1950 to 1952, and their booking agent before that. He wrote “I’m Waiting to Hear You Call Me Darling,” recorded at the band’s first Columbia session, and afterwards spent about twenty years as the morning disc jockey on WSVS in Crewe, Virginia.
He was born near Mount Airy, North Carolina, on 13 April 1919, one of thirteen children, and grew up hearing his father play the fiddle. As a teenager he took up the mandolin, encouraged by his older sister Nonnie, and with an older brother on guitar he formed a duo, Chuck and Slim, the Johnson Brothers, who played reunions and other gatherings in the area. In 1936 the brothers went on the air at WMFR in High Point, though the job did not last, and at the Fourth of July Horse Show in Kernersville in 1937 they won a prize as Best Individual Entertainers. After his brother married in 1938 he played little, and he served in the Marine Corps during World War II.
Discharged in April 1945, he took a job at an auto dealership in Winston-Salem, where he met the musician Woody Hauser; together they formed the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, who became regulars on the new Winston-Salem station WTOB in 1946. In three years with that band he created the comic character “Little Jody,” in baggy pants, suspenders and old shirts. Playing the intermission of a Bill Monroe road show in Lexington, North Carolina, he met Lester Flatt for the first time, and in 1948 he moved to Roanoke, Virginia, to join Smokey Graves and the Blue Star Boys on WDBJ.
In the fall of 1949 Flatt and Scruggs took him on as publicist and booking agent for the Foggy Mountain Boys. On the band’s Saturday-night spot on the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance in Lexington, Kentucky, he also did comedy with their bassist, Howard Watts, who performed as Cedric Rainwater. The pairing went over well enough that Jody was billed as Cedric’s younger brother, and Flatt suggested the name Jody Rainwater; the two men were not related. In the summer of 1950 he joined the band as a player, on bass and mandolin, singing bass and keeping his comedy routines while he went on booking the shows. He had hoped to be a mandolin-playing tenor singer, but with Flatt and Scruggs he almost always played and sang bass, and by 1952 his comedy was popular enough to earn him separate billing in the band’s advertisements.
His first recordings with the Foggy Mountain Boys were twelve sides for Mercury, made at radio station WDAE in Tampa, Florida, on 20 October 1950, among them “Doin’ My Time,” “Pike County Breakdown,” “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” “Take Me in a Lifeboat” and “Back to the Cross,” on which he played mandolin. A month later, on 21 November 1950, the band made its first Columbia recordings, at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel. They included his song “I’m Waiting to Hear You Call Me Darling,” credited to Flatt and C. Johnson, along with “Come Back Darling,” “The Old Home Town” and “We Can’t Be Darlings Anymore.” Two more Columbia sessions, on 9 May and 24 October 1951, produced fourteen songs, and on the gospel quartets “I’m Working on a Road,” “Get in Line Brother” and “Brother, I’m Getting Ready to Go” he sang bass, with Everett Lilly on tenor.
Booking and playing seven days a week wore him down, and in June 1952 he left the band. He was back on bass for its Columbia session in Nashville on 9 November 1952, which produced “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” and the instrumental “Dear Old Dixie.”
By then he had settled in Crewe, Virginia, as the morning disc jockey on WSVS, where he played bluegrass, gospel and classic country, brought bands into the studio to perform live, and arranged for Flatt and Scruggs to have a daily noontime show on the station from September 1954 to January 1955. He promoted concerts and acted as emcee for shows in the Richmond area and later at bluegrass festivals around the Southeast, and he played on the side with his own band, the Jamboree Gang. He left WSVS in 1971 and worked at other stations in Virginia and North Carolina until he retired in 1984.
He kept playing. In January 1992 he took part in a Foggy Mountain Boys reunion show at Jekyll Island, and in October 2008 he joined Curly Seckler in the WSVS studios to talk about the early days; in his last years he was back at the station as a consultant. He was inducted into the Virginia Folk Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 2000 and received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2009. He died in Richmond on 24 December 2011, aged 92.
