Herb Hooven

He was born in 1931 near West Jefferson, North Carolina, to parents who both played, and he took up the fiddle in 1949; he also played banjo and electric guitar. In 1952 he played banjo with Toby Stroud on WWVA in Wheeling and with Mac Wiseman in Shreveport.

On 17 August 1960 he played fiddle in Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys at two Decca sessions in Owen Bradley’s studio in Nashville, with J. D. Crowe on banjo, Paul Williams on mandolin, Junior Huskey on bass and Willie Ackerman on drums. They produced “Hi-De Diddle,” “My Walking Shoes,” “Old Fashioned Christmas” and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” and Hooven sang the bass part on “My Walking Shoes” and “Old Fashioned Christmas.”

From about 1959 he worked off and on with the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover in Boston. When Mike Seeger recorded them at the YMCA Hall there on 25–27 January 1961 for Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains (Folkways, 1962), the brothers sang alone on one side, and on the other Hooven joined them and Stover on fiddle or bass, on songs such as “Banks of the Ohio,” “Little Annie” and “Barbara Allen.” He is also the fiddler on their Prestige album Bluegrass Breakdown (1964), with Fritz Richmond on washtub bass.

In 1962 he played fiddle on Livin’ on the Mountain, the album Bill Keith and Jim Rooney made with Joe Val on mandolin, Herb Applin on guitar and Fritz Richmond on washtub bass, on fiddle tunes such as “Devil’s Dream” and “Jody’s Hornpipe” and songs such as “Salty Dog” and “Log Cabin in the Lane”; Prestige/Folklore released it in September 1963. More than a decade later, in 1974, he was the fiddler on Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys’ Rounder album Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys (1975), with “Sing Me Back Home” and “Sally Goodin.”