Don Parmley

Freeman D. Parmley was born in Monticello, Kentucky, on 19 October 1933. At twelve he began learning clawhammer, or drop-thumb, banjo from his grandfather, but hearing Earl Scruggs on the Grand Ole Opry soon turned him to the three-finger style. He played first for family and then made a name for himself locally, and he worked for a time with the touring bands of Carl Story and Hylo Brown. During the Korean War he served in the Army, trained as a tank driver, and was soon also playing music for his fellow soldiers. In 1956, after his discharge, he married, and with little work to be had in south central Kentucky the Parmleys moved west to Southern California.

There he was a founding member of a band known in turn as the Golden State Boys, the Blue Diamond Boys and the Hillmen, with Vern Gosdin, his brother Rex, and, from late 1963, the eighteen-year-old mandolinist Chris Hillman. On the album they recorded at World Pacific Studios in Hollywood, released by the Together label in 1969 as The Hillmen, Parmley played banjo and sang baritone behind Vern Gosdin’s lead and Rex Gosdin’s tenor. The band was often on local television, and from 1964 Parmley played the incidental banjo music for The Beverly Hillbillies through all nine of its seasons, while Earl Scruggs played the theme. He also recorded with Glen Campbell, Doug Dillard and Billy Strange, who made an album of bluegrass and folk blues with him for GNP Crescendo, the two playing five-string banjo and twelve-string guitar. The Hillmen broke up when Hillman left to join the Byrds.

In 1974 Parmley formed the Bluegrass Cardinals with his fifteen-year-old son David on guitar and lead vocals and Randy Graham on mandolin and tenor. After a fifteen-week stand at Busch Gardens, their first album, The Bluegrass Cardinals (Sierra Briar, 1976), recorded in October 1975, featured some of the earliest a cappella gospel singing on a bluegrass record, and its success led the Parmleys to move the band east to Virginia in 1976. Don’s banjo and baritone stayed at the center of the band through Welcome to Virginia for Rounder (1977), five albums for CMH beginning with Livin’ in the Good Old Days (1978), three for Sugar Hill in the mid-1980s and a run on the band’s own BGC label from On Stage in Nashville, recorded at the Station Inn in 1987. With David and Del, Ronnie and Rob McCoury he made Families of Tradition, the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year for 1991. The Cardinals played the White House and the Grand Ole Opry, and the band’s alumni included Larry Stephenson, Mike Hartgrove, Norman Wright, Dale Perry, Bill Bryson, Barry Berrier, Warren Blair, Don Rigsby and Ernie Sykes.

Parmley retired from full-time touring in 1997 and settled in Franklin County, Virginia. In April 2007 Wayne County, Kentucky, held a “Day with Don Parmley,” and signs on Kentucky Route 90 welcomed visitors to the home of the founder of the Bluegrass Cardinals. He died on 30 July 2016, aged 82. In 2025 the IBMA inducted the Bluegrass Cardinals into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, its citation noting his work on The Beverly Hillbillies.