Eddie Stubbs

Edward Lawrence Stubbs was born on 25 November 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, and grew up in Gaithersburg, in a family that had lived in Montgomery County for five generations. In the fall of 1978, while still a sixteen-year-old high-school senior, he replaced David McLaughlin, who had left for college, as fiddler of the Johnson Mountain Boys, the band led by singer and guitarist Dudley Connell. He played weekends until he graduated from Gaithersburg High School the following May, and one of his first dates as a full-time member was the Indian Springs Bluegrass Festival in June 1979, the band’s first festival booking.

With Connell, Richard Underwood on banjo, Eddie D’Zmura on mandolin and Larry Robbins on bass he recorded the band’s first Rounder album, The Johnson Mountain Boys (1981), and the lineup stayed largely the same through the mid-1980s, with an album a year: Walls of Time (1982), Working Close (1983) and others. The title song of Let the Whole World Talk (1987), with twin fiddles by Stubbs and the returning McLaughlin, became the band’s breakthrough. Unable to earn five members a decent wage, the band played what was billed as its farewell concert on 20 February 1988 at the Lucketts Community Center in Lucketts, Virginia; Rounder released it as At the Old Schoolhouse (1989), which was nominated for a Grammy and named IBMA Album of the Year in 1990. Connell, McLaughlin, Stubbs and Tom Adams then regrouped with Earl Yager on bass to play twenty-five to thirty dates a year, and recorded the Grammy-nominated Blue Diamond (1993). The band broke up for good after a festival in Myrtle Beach in November 1996.

His radio career began in 1983 with a weekly bluegrass show on WYII in Williamsport, Maryland, which paid twenty dollars a program. In 1984 WAMU in Washington, D.C., hired him to work alongside the country disc jockey Gary Henderson, and in 1990 he got his own show there. He also became friends with Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright and played with them when they appeared around Washington. In 1995 they persuaded him to move to Nashville and join them full-time, and within seventeen days of arriving he was hired as a regular announcer on the Grand Ole Opry. On WSM he hosted a weeknight show from 7 p.m. to midnight, which the station’s nighttime clear-channel signal carried across much of the United States and Canada, and he was one of the two regular announcers on the Opry’s Tuesday, Friday and Saturday broadcasts. His WAMU show continued until April 2007.

He has also written album notes on country and bluegrass history: the IBMA gave its Liner Notes of the Year award to Stubbs and Charles Wolfe for Bear Family’s Mac Wiseman set ’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered in 2004, and to Stubbs and others for the Chuck Wagon Gang’s Complete Recordings 1936–1955 in 2015. He was among the musicians on Everett Lilly & Everybody and Their Brother, the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2008. The Country Music Association named him Large Market Air Personality of the Year in 2002. He announced his retirement from WSM and the Opry on 21 July 2020, effective 29 July, and that October he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame as a member of the Johnson Mountain Boys.