David “Stringbean” Akeman

He was born on 17 June 1915 at Annville, in Jackson County, where his father, James Akeman, played the banjo for local dances, and he grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry. He began playing the banjo as a boy and got through the Depression working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, building roads and lookout towers. A talent contest brought him into Asa Martin’s band, and in 1935, during a broadcast on WLAP in Lexington, Martin introduced the tall, thin young man as “String Bean”; the name stayed with him.

Akeman also played semiprofessional baseball, which is how he met Bill Monroe, and late in 1942 he joined the Blue Grass Boys as the band’s first banjo player, in a lineup that included Clyde Moody and Cousin Wilbur Wesbrooks. With Wesbrooks he also worked up a comedy act, String Beans and Cousin Wilbur, and in Monroe’s band he began to wear the costume he kept all his life: a shirt with an extra-long tail tucked into short blue jeans belted near the knees, which made him look like a very tall man on very short legs. On 13 February 1945, at Monroe’s first Columbia session, at the WBBM studios in Chicago with Art Satherley producing, he played banjo with Tex Willis on guitar and lead vocals, Sally Ann Forrester on accordion and Chubby Wise on fiddle on “Rocky Road Blues,” “Kentucky Waltz,” “True Life Blues,” “Footprints in the Snow,” “Goodbye Old Pal” and “Blue Grass Special”; Columbia issued them as singles between 1946 and 1947. Jim Andrews replaced him on banjo in 1945, but he went on playing on Monroe’s baseball team until August 1949.

He was a fixture of the Opry from 1944, apart from a spell touring with Tommy Scott’s show, and he became a protégé of Uncle Dave Macon, the Opry star he had admired since boyhood. He also worked with Grandpa Jones, another banjo player and comedian. In January 1952 he played banjo on Mac Wiseman’s Dot session at the WHIN studio in Gallatin, Tennessee, for “I’ll Still Write Your Name in the Sand” and “Four Walls Around Me,” with Tommy Jackson on fiddle.

His own first single, “Pass the Juice, Miss Lucy,” came out on Herald in 1953. For Cullman, with Hal Smith producing, he cut “I Wonder Where Wanda Went” and “Short Life and Trouble” around September 1958 and “Run Little Rabbit Run” and “Barnyard Banjo Picking” soon after. From 1960 he recorded for Starday at its Nashville studio: Old Time Banjo Pickin’ and Singin’ (1961), with “Birdie” and “Polly”; More of That Old Time Banjo Pickin’ and Singin’ (1962), with “Chewin’ Chewing Gum” and “Opry Time in Tennessee”; A Salute to Uncle Dave Macon (1963), cut around June 1962 with Eddie Wilson on rhythm guitar, Hoss Linneman on Dobro and Jack Drake on bass, with Macon pieces such as “Ida Red,” “Cripple Creek” and “I’m the Man Who Rode the Mule Around the World”; and Way Back in the Hills of Old Kentucky (1964), recorded around August 1963 with Tommy Vaden on fiddle, with “Big Ball in Nashville” and “Banjo Pickin’ Girl.” In 1965 he played the University of Chicago Folk Festival, whose bookers asked him to leave the costume off.

In March 1967 he recorded a set of solo banjo pieces for Cullman at Nugget Studio in Nashville, among them “Going to the Grand Ole Opry (To Make Myself a Name)” and “Cold Creek March,” and the Nugget album Me and My Ole Crow (Got a Good Thing Goin’) followed in 1972. When Hee Haw began in 1969 he joined the cast with Grandpa Jones; his routines included reading a “letter from home” that he could never find in his pockets and playing a scarecrow trading one-liners with the crow on his shoulder. Starday’s Nashville label issued Hee Haw Corn Shucker in 1971.

On the night of 10 November 1973, after playing the Opry, Akeman and his wife, Estelle, were shot dead by burglars waiting at their home near Ridgetop, Tennessee; Grandpa Jones, their neighbor, found them the next morning, and two cousins, John A. Brown and Marvin Douglas Brown, were convicted of the killings. Hee Haw kept airing segments he had already taped until March 1974, and Ovation released Goin’ to the Grand Ole Opry, drawn from the 1967 recordings, in 1976. His Vega No. 9 five-string banjo is in the collection of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, and a full biography by Taylor Hagood, Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend, appeared in 2023.