Eddie Bond

He grew up in a family of musicians in Fries, a cotton-mill town on the New River six miles from Galax. A maternal grandmother who played guitar and sang taught him songs handed down through the Hill family, his Grandmother Bond taught him old mountain ballads, and his great-uncle Leon Hill, who played guitar in the Whitetop Mountain Band, took him to visit local fiddlers. He started on guitar and then banjo, winning a blue ribbon on banjo at the Fries Fiddlers Convention after about a year, and took up the fiddle when he saw that bands at the conventions were always short of fiddlers. He also plays autoharp.

The New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters were formed in 1986 by Dennis Hall, who revived the name of the Galax Bogtrotters of the 1920s and 1930s in honor of Uncle Eck Dunford, a member of the original band who had lived on Ballards Branch. Bond followed his distant cousin Greg Hooven as the band’s fiddler. The Bogtrotters play community dances around Galax and have often taken first place at the Old Fiddlers’ Convention there, where Bond has won many fiddle contests and twice been named Best All Around Performer. He has performed with the National Council for the Traditional Arts’ “Music from the Crooked Road” tours and at festivals from Australia to Ireland, and he has taught a string band course at a high school in Grayson County.

In 2013 he sang and played fiddle on “Raleigh and Spencer” on Adam Steffey’s album New Primitive (Organic), with Tina Steffey on clawhammer banjo, Zeb Snyder on guitar and Barry Bales on bass.