Eddie Adcock

He was born Edward Windsor Adcock at home in Scottsville, twenty miles south of Charlottesville, on 21 June 1938. His brother Bill brought instruments into the house, a tenor banjo among them, but Eddie first favoured the guitar and the mandolin, and he and his brother Frank sang as a duo in local churches and on Charlottesville radio. He left home at fourteen. When Smokey Graves, a former fiddler for Clyde Moody who led the Blue Star Boys on radio in Crewe, Virginia, and other cities, needed a five-string player, Adcock sold a calf he had raised, bought a Gibson RB-100 and taught himself the three-finger roll in the few weeks before he joined.

Several bands followed. He worked with Mac Wiseman from about 1956, on Don Reno’s recommendation, and then with Bill Harrell’s Rocky Mountain Boys on WARL in Arlington, Virginia, until Harrell was drafted early in 1957. He also played with the Stonemans before joining Buzz Busby and the Bayou Boys in the Washington, D.C., area. On 4 July 1957 Busby, Adcock and other members of the band were hurt in a car accident, and while Adcock spent weeks in the hospital, the uninjured Bill Emerson called in Charlie Waller and John Duffey to cover the band’s bookings; that stand-in group became the Country Gentlemen. Adcock took a job as a school custodian, then spent about six months with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1958, before going back to Virginia to work as a sheet-metal mechanic.

The Country Gentlemen brought him into the band in the spring of 1959. His first session with them, for Starday on 30 June 1959 at the Capitol Transcription Service in Washington, produced “New Freedom Bell” and “The Hills and Home,” with Adcock on banjo and the baritone part. By March 1960 he had recorded his own instrumental “Turkey Knob” for a Folkways album, and from September 1960 Tom Gray played bass, completing the lineup that stayed together until Gray left in July 1964. The band recorded for Starday, Folkways, Mercury, Design, Rebel and Rome, and Folkways taped its concert at Carnegie Hall on 16 September 1961. At Rebel sessions at Syracuse University in February 1965 they cut “Bringing Mary Home,” along with “Northbound,” which Adcock wrote with Duffey, and his own “Uncle Joe”; “Matterhorn” followed in June 1966. His playing started from Earl Scruggs’s three-finger roll, but he took up Don Reno’s single-string approach and added ideas of his own from Merle Travis–style guitar picking, ragtime piano and the pedal steel, including string bends, and he was also valued for his baritone singing and for finding and arranging material.

While still a Country Gentleman he made The Sensational Twin Banjos of Eddie Adcock & Don Reno, recorded for Rebel in July 1968 at Roy Homer’s studio in Clinton, Maryland. Early in 1970 he left the band and went to California, where he played electric guitar in a country-rock setting under the stage name Clinton Codack. Back in the East he formed the IInd Generation with Jimmy Gaudreau, Bob White and Wendy Thatcher. Introducing the IInd Generation, recorded at Rome Studios in Columbus, Ohio, came out on Rome in 1972, followed by Head Cleaner (1974), We Call It Grass (1975) and Second Impression (1976) on Rebel and State of Mind (CMH, 1976), cut at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Martha Hearon, a guitarist and singer, joined the IInd Generation in 1973, and she and Eddie married in 1976. As Eddie & Martha Adcock they recorded The IInd Generation (CMH, 1978), Eddie’s instrumental album Guitar Echoes (1979) and Love Games (1980), all for CMH. In 1978 he invented the Gitbo, a double-necked instrument combining an electric guitar and an electrified banjo. In 1984 and 1985 the couple toured with David Allan Coe, Eddie mostly on electric lead guitar and Martha on harmony vocals, and Coe soon added a short bluegrass set with Eddie on banjo. Their next band, Talk of the Town, had Martha on guitar, Susie Gott on fiddle, the teenage Missy Raines on bass and Jody Maphis on drums, and made two albums for CMH in 1987 and 1988; Eddie Adcock & His Guitar (CMH, 1988) came in the same period.

In 1988 Adcock, Waller, Duffey and Gray recorded together again at Masterworks in Fairfax, Virginia, and Sugar Hill’s Classic Country Gents Reunion was named IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 1990. He was also one of the Masters, with Kenny Baker, Josh Graves, Jesse McReynolds and Martha on guitar; their CMH album The Masters (1989), recorded in 1988, won IBMA’s Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year in 1990, and Saturday Night Fish Fry (CMH, 1990) and Laid Back (Pinecastle, 1997) followed. The Eddie Adcock Band made Dixie Fried (1991) and Talk to Your Heart (1995) for CMH, and from 1996 to 2003 Eddie and Martha recorded for Pinecastle, from Renaissance Man (1996) to Twograss (2003).

In 2008, when a tremor in his right hand threatened his playing, he had an operation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville during which he stayed awake and played the banjo so the surgeons could check their work; video of it was shown around the world. The couple’s own label, RadioTherapy Records, took its name from the procedure, and its first release, in 2008, was by the Country Gentlemen Reunion Band, with Gaudreau, Gray and Charlie Waller’s son Randy. Eddie, Martha and Gray recorded a Country Gentlemen retrospective, Many a Mile, for Patuxent in 2011, and Patuxent also issued his Vintage Banjo Jam in 2017. Beyond the stage, the Adcocks ran Adcock Audio, which provided sound for bluegrass festivals and concerts from the 1970s until 2006, and Eddie served on the boards of the IBMA and the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music. BMI credits him with 134 compositions, co-compositions and arrangements. He died on 19 March 2025, aged 86, in Lebanon, Tennessee, where he and Martha had made their home.

• 1990: two IBMA awards, for Classic Country Gents Reunion and The Masters
• 1993: SPBGMA Preservation Hall of Greats
• 1996: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor, with the Country Gentlemen; America’s Old-Time Country Music Hall of Fame
• 2005: Bill Monroe Hall of Fame
• 2012: Washington Monument Award
• 2014: Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass