Eric Davidson
Eric Davidson (1937–2015) was a clawhammer banjo player and field recordist who learned the banjo from Wade Ward of Independence, Virginia, recorded traditional musicians in Grayson and Carroll counties for Folkways from the late 1950s, and was a founding member of the Iron Mountain String Band. Away from music he was Eric H. Davidson, a developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology.
Born in New York City on 13 April 1937, he grew up in the Hudson River Valley of New York and in Massachusetts. His interest in field recording began in his early college years, and from 1957 he was collecting traditional music in southern Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, drawn especially to the instrumental styles of Grayson and Carroll counties. In the late 1950s Wade Ward, the banjo player of the 1930s Galax band the Grayson County Bogtrotters, taught him to play clawhammer.
With Paul Newman he recorded in the field in 1961 for Traditional Music from Grayson and Carroll Counties (Folkways, 1962), whose notes the two wrote while Davidson was a graduate student in biology at the Rockefeller Institute; they also recorded and annotated Songs and Ballads of the Blue Ridge Mountains for Asch. Between 1964 and 1966 he, Caleb Finch, Newman and others brought Wade Ward, his nephew Fields Ward, also a former Bogtrotter, and the Hillsville fiddler Glen Smith together to recreate the Bogtrotters’ sound. After Ward’s death in 1971 Davidson and Jane Rigg assembled and annotated the memorial album Uncle Wade (Folkways FA 2380, 1973).
He and the fiddler Caleb Finch formed the Iron Mountain String Band in New York in the early 1960s, with a guitarist and singer completing the trio, to play the songs, ballads and dance music they had learned from their recordings. Davidson moved to Caltech in 1971, and the band was based in Southern California from about 1972. On its three Folkways albums, The Iron Mountain String Band (1973), with Peggy Haine on guitar, and Walkin’ in the Parlor (1975) and Someday We’ll Meet Again (1981), with Brooke Moyer, he played banjo and sang leads on songs such as “John Hardy.” He died in Pasadena on 1 September 2015, aged 78.
