Hank Bradley
Hank Bradley is an old-time fiddler, multi-instrumentalist and composer who learned Southern fiddling with the Mountain Ramblers of Galax, Virginia, in the 1960s, was Washington state’s fiddle champion in 1974, and has played Greek and Balkan music on bouzouki, tamburitsa and violin for decades. Based in Seattle, he performs with the fiddler Cathie Whitesides, and his solo albums are made up entirely of his own instrumentals and songs.
By his own account his fiddling began when his draft board sent him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1963, and he played with Otis Burris and the Mountain Ramblers of Galax in the 1960s. On the West Coast he worked with the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, which made an LP for Vanguard, the Diesel Ducks and the Spare Change Boys, and by 1968 he was playing the San Diego State Folk Festival, where over the years he appeared solo, in duets with Jody Stecher, Sandy Bradley and Frannie Leopold, and in groups such as the Gypsy Gyppo String Band and the Zagreb Municipal Orchestra.
On Stecher’s Going Up on the Mountain (Bay, 1977), recorded in Alameda, he played fiddle on “Golden Vanity,” behind John Herald on “Wild Bill Jones” and alone with Stecher on “O the Wind and Rain,” and banjo and fiddle on Stecher’s “Rhinoceros.” His own first album, Music of the Poison Coyote Kid, on which he plays the fiddle and every other instrument in the string band, made his name as a writer of instrumentals and songs; it was followed by Hassle the Caller, instrumentals for an old Southern string band in which he again plays fiddle, guitar, mandolin, tamburitsa, bouzouki and several kinds of banjo, and by The Pescadero Blues (2016), made with friends and family, with pieces such as “Benicia Mart” and “Hex Rag.” He also wrote Counterfeiting, Stealing, and Cultural Plundering, a Manual for Applied Ethnomusicologists.
He taught Southern fiddle at Lark in the Morning in Mendocino, Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts and the Augusta Heritage Festival in Elkins, West Virginia, and was on the staff of the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington, for its first decade; he also teaches Greek music and bouzouki. With Cathie Whitesides and Frannie Leopold he formed the Balkan Cafe Orchestra, which played the first fifteen Adams Avenue Roots Festivals in San Diego from 1994 and recorded Moon over Mendocino, mixing Greek and Romanian dance music with old-time fiddle blues and rags. In Seattle he has played tamburitsa and violin with the Croatian group Bonaca, violin and bouzouki in Greek communities in the United States and Canada with Yiannis Novakis, Greek music with Whitesides for more than twenty years at Georgia’s Greek Restaurant, and old-time music in the bands El Fin del Mundo, with Whitesides and WB Reid, and Roscoe’s Gone, with Candy Goldman and Bill Meyer.
