Charlie Poole
Musician
Charlie Poole was a banjoist and bandleader of the North Carolina Ramblers — one of the most commercially successful old-time string bands of the 1920s and a pivotal figure in the prehistory of bluegrass. Though he composed few of the songs he recorded, his arrangements and choices of repertoire (“White House Blues,” “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” “He Rambled,” “If the River Was Whiskey”) defined a body of standards that bluegrass and country artists have drawn from ever since.
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- Born Charlie Clay Poole on March 22, 1892, near Franklinville, North Carolina — cotton-mill country in Randolph County.
- Learned banjo as a child; his distinctive three-finger picking style developed after a baseball injury made it difficult to play the more common clawhammer technique.
- Formed the North Carolina Ramblers in the early 1920s with brother-in-law fiddler Posey Rorer and guitarist Norman Woodlief; the trio was the canonical lineup that recorded for Columbia from 1925 onward.
- Cut more than 70 sides for Columbia between 1925 and 1930, plus sessions for Paramount and Brunswick. By 1931 the Ramblers had sold close to a million records.
- Poole is rarely credited as composer (most recordings were old folk songs given new arrangements), but the recorded versions became the source recordings for many bluegrass and country covers — effectively his songwriting credit through curation.
- Hired in 1931 by a Hollywood studio to record music for a western, but suffered a fatal heart attack on May 21, 1931, in Spray (Eden), North Carolina, days before he was to leave for California. He was 39.
- Inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.