Darrell Sanders

Early in 1977 Harrell and the bass player Ed Ferris left Don Reno’s Tennessee Cut-Ups and put together a new Virginians with the veteran fiddler Carl Nelson and the young Sanders on banjo. Harrell said he wanted a group that would stay together, and that core did, for about a decade. Their first album, Ballads & Bluegrass (Adelphi, 1978), recorded at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Mike Auldridge on Dobro, has Sanders singing tenor behind Harrell’s lead and included “I Never Will Marry.” With Larry Stephenson on mandolin the band made I Can Hear Virginia Calling Me (Rebel, 1980), with “Green Rolling Hills,” and, at Threshold Recording in Roanoke, the Leather albums Bluegrass Gospel, Pure & Simple (1980), The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore (1981) and Blue Ridge Mountain Boy (1981). Walking in the Early Morning Dew (Rebel, 1983) was cut at Omega Studio in Kensington, Maryland, with Auldridge again on resonator guitar.

His own album, West Virginia Style, was recorded at the Webco studio in 1982 with the Virginians behind him: Harrell on rhythm guitar, Stephenson, Nelson, Ferris and Auldridge. Its instrumentals include three of his own, “Rush Hour,” “Amtrak Express” and the title piece, along with “Whoa Mule Whoa,” “Snow Deer,” Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and “Love Me Tender,” on which he also plays lead guitar. Webco issued it in 1983 and reissued it on CD in 2012.

In the band’s later Rebel albums he took on more than the banjo. On Do You Remember? (1985), recorded at Bias in Springfield, Virginia, from April 1984 with Eddie King on mandolin, he played banjo, resonator guitar and lead guitar, on songs such as “Alabama Bound” and “Come Back Little Pal”; on Blue Virginia Blue (1986), with Paul Adkins on mandolin, he is credited with banjo, Dobro, fingerpicked guitar and baritone vocals; and he played the same range of instruments on A Song for Everyone (1987), back at Threshold in Roanoke. He and Ferris left the Virginians in the late 1980s, and by 1988 Nelson was the only one of the 1977 band still with Harrell.