G.B. Grayson
G. B. Grayson was a fiddler and singer from Johnson County, Tennessee, in the corner where Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia meet. With the guitarist Henry Whitter he made about forty recordings for Gennett and Victor between October 1927 and October 1929. They include the first recording of “Tom Dooley” and versions of “Train 45,” “Handsome Molly,” “Little Maggie” and “Nine Pound Hammer” that later generations of bluegrass and folk musicians learned from.
Gilliam Banmon Grayson was born on 11 November 1887 in Crumpler, Ashe County, North Carolina, and his family moved to Johnson County when he was two. He was partially sighted from early childhood. He played banjo first and then the fiddle, which he held against his shoulder rather than under his chin, and as an adult he supported his wife and children by playing at schoolhouses and dances. His uncle, James Grayson, had led the search party that captured the murder suspect Tom Dula, and the family sang the story as “Tom Dooley.”
Around home he played with Clarence “Tom” Ashley of nearby Shouns and with Dock Walsh of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Ashley recalled traveling with him to the West Virginia coal camps, where they played outside the company pay offices. In 1927 Grayson met Henry Whitter, a guitarist and harmonica player from Fries, Virginia, who had been recording for OKeh since 1923 and was then living across the state line in Warrensville, North Carolina. They met at a fiddlers’ convention in Mountain City.
In mid-October 1927 the pair recorded eight sides for Gennett, six of which were issued, among them “Handsome Molly,” “Train No. 45” and “I’ll Never Be Yours,” their version of “The Banks of the Ohio.” On 18 October they recorded six more for Victor in Atlanta, including “Rose Conley,” “Ommie Wise” and new versions of “Handsome Mollie” and “Train 45.” Victor issued those two back to back on Victor 21189 in March 1928, and the record sold more than 50,000 copies over the next five years. On “Train 45,” which Grayson built on the banjo piece “Reuben,” Whitter asks where he is bound, and Grayson answers that he is going to Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee. A second Gennett session brought “Sally Gooden,” “Cluck Old Hen” and “Old Jimmy Sutton,” and Gennett also sold the pair’s records on its Champion label under invented names.
Victor recorded them in New York on 31 July and 1 August 1928, when they cut “Short Life of Trouble,” “The Nine-Pound Hammer,” “I’ve Always Been a Rambler,” “A Dark Road Is a Hard Road to Travel” and “Little Maggie with a Dram Glass in Her Hand.” Grayson had learned “Nine Pound Hammer” from the fiddler Charlie Bowman. Their last session was in Memphis on 30 September and 1 October 1929. It produced “Tom Dooley,” “Going Down the Lee Highway” and “I Saw a Man at the Close of Day.” Victor kept issuing the sides after Grayson’s death: “I’ve Always Been a Rambler,” backed with “I Saw a Man at the Close of Day,” came out in November 1930, and “Going Down the Lee Highway” followed in July 1931.
The 1930 census listed Grayson as a musician who owned a house on Birch Branch Road near Laurel Bloomery. On 16 August 1930 he had walked to Damascus, Virginia, to see his brother and caught a ride home. He was riding on the running board of the car when a truck struck him, and he was killed. He is buried in the Gentry Cemetery at Laurel Bloomery.
Other singers had recorded some of these ballads before Grayson and Whitter, but their records were the ones later musicians kept returning to. “Tom Dooley” became a number one hit for the Kingston Trio in 1958. “Handsome Molly” was recorded by the Stanley Brothers, by Doc Watson with Gaither Carlton, by Mike Seeger and by Bob Dylan. In November 1995 Ralph Stanley recorded an album of the duo’s songs, Short Life of Trouble: The Songs of Grayson & Whitter, released by Rebel in 1996. The International Bluegrass Music Association later gave Grayson its Award of Merit.
