Ezra Cline

He was born on 13 January 1907 at Gilbert Creek, in southern West Virginia. In 1938 he put together a band with his cousins, the brothers Ireland “Lazy Ned” Cline on banjo and Ray “Curly Ray” Cline on fiddle, and a radio announcer, Gordon Jennings, on guitar, and won a spot on WHIS in Bluefield. Ezra played bass and headed the group, which at first sounded more like the Delmore Brothers than Bill Monroe. When Ned was killed in the D-Day landings, his younger brother Charlie took his place, and after wartime gasoline shortages had kept the band off the air it returned to Bluefield radio in 1945.

In 1949 Ezra took on Bobby Osborne on guitar and Larry Richardson on banjo, with Ray Morgan on fiddle, and the band turned to the new bluegrass style. In March 1950 that lineup, with Ezra on bass, recorded four songs at the WHIS studio for Cozy Records: “Pain in My Heart,” “Lonesome, Sad and Blue,” “Don’t Forget Me” and “Will I Meet Mother in Heaven.”

After Osborne and Richardson left in the summer of 1951, he rebuilt the band around Paul Williams on guitar and Curly Ray on fiddle, with Charlie Cline and then the sixteen-year-old Ray Goins on banjo, and won a contract with RCA Victor. Steve Sholes produced the first session, in Nashville on 14 May 1952, with Charles “Rex” Parker on mandolin, and a second there on 19 October 1952. In the fall of 1952 Ezra moved the band to Oak Hill, West Virginia; from January to November 1953 it worked out of Detroit, on WJR and the Big Barn Frolic, and on 4 August 1953 it recorded in Chicago, with Charlie Cline back on banjo and Ezra’s in-law Albert Punturi on mandolin, cutting “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Dirty Dishes Blues” and the instrumentals “Lonesome Pine Breakdown” and “Five String Rag.” By November 1953 the band was in Pikeville, Kentucky, on WLSI.

In Pikeville Ray Goins came back on banjo with his brother Melvin on guitar, and with Curly Ray and the mandolin player James Roberts they made two more RCA sessions in Nashville, on 21 February and 26 September 1954. The second produced “Windy Mountain,” the band’s signature instrumental, issued with “There’s Just One You.” Ezra also played bass, with Curly Ray and Ray Goins, on Hobo Jack Adkins’s 1954 session for the Lucky label. By the middle of 1955 the Goins brothers had left, and Ezra carried on with the guitarist Udell McPeak, who doubled as the comic “Jasper,” and the banjo player Billy Edwards; in this period he issued the band’s only souvenir song and photo booklet. In the late 1950s the band was Ezra, Curly Ray, Charlie Cline on electric guitar and Charlie’s wife Lee singing, on radio in Pikeville and a weekly television show on WSAZ in Huntington, West Virginia, until Charlie and Lee left in 1960 or 1961.

Melvin and Ray Goins came back for a last stretch in the early 1960s, and with Ezra and Curly Ray they recorded for Starday at Tommy Hill’s studio in Madison, Tennessee. A session on 24 May 1961 made up 14 Mountain Songs Featuring 5-String Banjo; a May 1962 session made up most of Bluegrass!, including four songs Ezra wrote with Melvin Goins: “I Walked to the River,” “Lonesome Pine Hill,” “Fly on the Baby’s Nose” and “Drinking Black Coffee.” On 24 November 1962 the band backed Hylo Brown for Hylo Brown Meets the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers and recorded its own More Bluegrass!, which included “Old Reuben” and “Y’all Come.” The band also had a fifteen-month run on WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia, but in 1964 the lineup of Ezra, Curly Ray and the Goins brothers broke up.

Ezra kept a part-time band going for several more years, with Kentucky Slim (Eddie Branham) among its members, while he ran a restaurant in Pikeville. In 1968 that group folded and he moved back to West Virginia. He died at Gilbert Creek on 11 July 1984. The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2009 and the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2023.