Gordon Terry

He was born on 7 October 1931 in Decatur. At nine he played fiddle and mandolin in his father’s family band, Floyd Terry and His Young ’Uns, when his father took them to Nashville in 1941 and got them onto the Grand Ole Opry without an invitation. At fourteen he won the Alabama Fiddling Championship in Birmingham, and in 1950 he auditioned successfully for Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

His first Monroe sessions, at Castle Studio in Nashville in July 1951 with Carter Stanley on guitar and Rudy Lyle on banjo, produced “Rotation Blues,” “Lonesome Truck Driver’s Blues,” “Sugar Coated Love,” “Cabin of Love,” “You’re Drifting Away” and “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray,” and on 28 October 1951 he played on “Christmas Time’s A-Coming” and “The First Whippoorwill.” His Army service during the Korean War, part of it in Special Services with Faron Young, interrupted his career. Back with Monroe, he was one of three fiddlers, with Red Taylor and Charlie Cline, on “Close By,” “My Little Georgia Rose” and “Put My Little Shoes Away” in June 1954 and on the new “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on 4 September 1954. With Tommy Jackson he twinned on “Used to Be,” “Tall Timber” and “Brown County Breakdown” on 16 September 1955, and in April and May 1957 he played on “A Fallen Star,” “Four Walls,” “Cry Cry Darlin’,” “I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Molly and Tenbrooks,” “Roane County Prison,” “In Despair” and “Come Back to Me in My Dreams.” In those years he also played mandolin on Hylo Brown’s first Capitol session (November 1954) and fiddle on the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen’s MGM session of 29 December 1956, which produced “Wild Mountain Honey” and “Down in the Willow Garden.”

His own records began with a Columbia session produced by Don Law on 2 November 1955, from which “You’ll Regret” and “Maybe” were issued. In 1957 Cadence, Archie Bleyer’s label, issued fiddle showpieces (“Black Mountain Rag” with “Orange Blossom Special,” and “Johnson’s Ole Grey Mule”) and a vocal, “Service with a Smile,” then Boudleaux Bryant’s pop-styled “(Sweet) Wild Honey.” At RCA Victor from 1958 he was produced first by Chet Atkins in Nashville (“It Ain’t Right,” with the Jordanaires) and then by Neely Plumb in Hollywood, where he recorded his own “A Lotta Lotta Women” and Roger Miller’s “Trouble on the Turnpike.” He also acted in several westerns, beginning with Hidden Guns (1956), and appeared on the television shows Ranch Party and Town Hall Party. On 24 and 26 November 1961 in Hollywood he recorded Square Dance Party with Gordon Terry (RCA Victor, 1962), with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis, Buck Graves, Paul Warren and Jake Tullock behind his fiddle on “Old Joe Clark,” “Sally Goodin,” “Black Mountain Rag” and other dance numbers.

After RCA he recorded for Liberty (1962–63), Epic (1965), Chart (1967–69), where he cut a duet single with Maxine Brown, and Capitol, where “The Ballad of J.C.,” his own humorous tribute to his friend Johnny Cash set to the melody of “The Battle of New Orleans” and produced by Glen Campbell, became his only country chart hit in 1970. That April he was one of the fiddlers, with Johnny Gimble and Joe Holley, on Merle Haggard’s Bob Wills tribute album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, and in December he was back in a Monroe session at Bradley’s Barn alongside Kenny Baker. By the late 1970s he was a member of Haggard’s band the Strangers, playing fiddle with Paul Anastasio on Austin City Limits in January 1978 and on Haggard’s shows and sessions into 1981. His later albums included Disco Country (Plantation, 1977) and My Favorite Fiddle Tunes (History, 1981). He went into semi-retirement in 1983 and died on 9 April 2006 in Spring Hill, Tennessee, at seventy-four. He was a charter member of the Fiddlers Hall of Fame in 1981, and Decatur named the Gordon Terry Parkway after him.