Don McHan
Don McHan (1933–2003) was a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Swain County, North Carolina, who played banjo and sang harmony with Carl Sauceman and the Green Valley Boys in the early 1950s and recorded with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys from 1958 to 1963, on bass and later on guitar and baritone vocals, and again in 1979. He also ran his own Laurel label and wrote “The Pill,” a Top 5 country hit for Loretta Lynn in 1975.
Alfred Donald McHan was born on 11 July 1933 in Swain County. By March 1952 he was in Carl Sauceman’s Green Valley Boys: at Castle Studio in Nashville on 19 and 20 March, with Ken Nelson producing for Capitol, he played banjo and sang harmony behind Sauceman on sides such as “Handy Man” and “Down the Road to Love.” He was still singing harmony with the band at its Republic session around June 1953, which produced “I’ll Be an Angel Too” and “White Cross Marks His Grave,” and in 1958 the Green Valley Quartet recorded his song “I Need a Friend” at radio station WRAG in Carrollton, Alabama.
His first recordings with Jim and Jesse McReynolds were made in Jacksonville, Florida, on 23 October 1958, with Bobby Thompson on banjo and Vassar Clements on fiddle; McHan played bass and sang, and the session produced the Starday sides “Pardon Me,” “Hard Hearted” and “Let Me Whisper.” Two more Jacksonville sessions in 1959 gave Starday “Have You Lost Your Love for Me” and “Nobody but You” and a set of gospel songs. When the brothers moved to Columbia’s Epic label he stayed on, playing bass at the session of 7 December 1960 that produced “Stormy Horizons,” with Grady Martin, Allen Shelton and Clements, and banjo beside Shelton on 5 May 1961.
From 1962 he was the band’s guitarist. He played guitar with Allen Shelton on banjo, Jimmy Buchanan on fiddle and David Sutherland on bass at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 22 June 1962, when Jim & Jesse cut the twelve songs of Bluegrass Special, among them “She Left Me Standing on the Mountain,” “I Wish You Knew” and “Sweet Little Miss Blue Eyes,” and again on 26 and 27 June 1963 for Bluegrass Classics, where he sang baritone on “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” and “What About You.” The same lineup was recorded on Jim & Jesse’s radio shows from WBAM in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1962, later issued on their Old Dominion label.
In 1969 he started releasing records on his own Laurel label, among them Sings Songs of Home (1969), The Country, Bluegrass & Gospel of Don McHan (1970), New Songs I Love and A Message of Hope (1971) and Sings the Gospel (1973), and his later records leaned increasingly to gospel. As a songwriter his biggest success was “The Pill,” written with Lorene Allen and T. D. Bayless, which Loretta Lynn took to No. 5 on the country chart in 1975.
He was back with Jim & Jesse by 1979. In early 1979, at Hilltop Studios in Nashville, he played guitar and sang on the gospel album Songs of Inspiration, with Tim Ellis on banjo, Joe Meadows on fiddle and Keith McReynolds on bass, taking the baritone on most songs and the lead on “There’s a Light Guiding Me”; later that year he played guitar on the brothers’ sessions at Sound Stage Studio. He died in Swain County on 30 April 2003, aged 69.
