Herschel Sizemore

Herschel Lee Sizemore was born on 6 August 1935 in Sheffield, near Muscle Shoals, and grew up in the rural community of Leighton. His mother was a self-taught guitarist, and the old-time fiddler Hugh McCormick was his other early influence. Nothing on the Grand Ole Opry caught his attention until he heard Bill Monroe, and when he was eight his parents took him to see Monroe at the Opry; at about the same time he began playing a mandolin his brother Ross sent home from the Army. At fourteen he had his first paying job, playing schools and square dances with Ned Campbell & the Sunnyside Playboys.

About three years later he turned professional with Rual Yarbrough, Linden Smith, Billy Sizemore and Edison Dooley in the Tennessee Valley Playboys, who became the Dixie Gentlemen when they learned that the name Country Gentlemen was already taken by a band in Washington. Jake Landers replaced Smith, and the group toured the Southeast with its own radio and television spots. Sizemore, Yarbrough and Landers recorded two 1963 LPs for Time as the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, Hootenanny ’N’ Blue Grass and Blue Grass Back Home, and as the Dixie Gentlemen made The Country Style of the Dixie Gentlemen for United Artists the same year; Blues and Bluegrass, with Tut Taylor and Vassar Clements, followed on Tune in 1967. After the band broke up he and Yarbrough worked with Bobby Smith & the Boys from Shiloh, and from 1967 he spent about two years with Jimmy Martin & the Sunny Mountain Boys. He was also friendly with Lester Flatt and was offered Curly Seckler’s place in Flatt & Scruggs, which he turned down.

In April 1969 he moved to Roanoke, Virginia, and joined the Shenandoah Cut-Ups, with Jim Eanes on guitar, Clarence “Tater” Tate on fiddle, Billy Edwards on banjo and John Palmer on bass. Over about five years the band recorded for Revonah and Rebel, and it made Curly Seckler Sings Again (County, 1971) with Seckler. Sizemore then led the Country Grass, with Ricky Skaggs on fiddle and Tom Gray on bass, which made Livin’ Free for Rebel in 1974 and lasted about two years before he took a full-time job outside music.

A session for R. C. Harris with Bobby Hicks and Del McCoury brought him back, and he joined McCoury’s Dixie Pals, with Jerry McCoury on bass, Sonny Miller on fiddle and Dick Smith on banjo; the high point of his two years there was a tour of Japan late in 1979, and he is on the live album Strictly Bluegrass Live, issued in Japan in 1981, and on Take Me to the Mountains (Leather, 1981). While with McCoury he made his own album, Bounce Away (County, 1979), with four of his compositions, among them “Rebecca.” The album showed a way of playing apart from Monroe’s, using open strings and the first and second positions the way Texas fiddlers did. Pickers also credit him with the “Sizemore roll,” a cross-picked pattern across several strings over a held chord that keeps the eighth-note rhythm going through a pause in a vocal melody, much as a banjo uses a forward roll.

In 1980 he stepped back from regular performing, and when he retired from his job he joined the Bluegrass Cardinals of his friends Don and David Parmley, staying from 1991 to 1995; in that time he recorded Back in Business (Hay Holler, 1993), with a new version of “Rebecca” and some tenor singing. He then formed the Herschel Sizemore Band and released My Style (Hay Holler, 2000), with Jim Haley, Terry Baucom, Ron Stewart and Eddie Biggerstaff, and B-Natural (2009), a self-produced set of twelve new compositions with Alan Bibey among the players. He also played on records by Bill Harrell, John Lawless and Curly Seckler, and in 2013 recorded For Old Times Sake with Jake Landers. Jim Mills recorded “Rebecca” on Bound to Ride (Sugar Hill, 1998).

He taught as well. An AcuTab book of his transcriptions (Mel Bay, 2001) and an instructional DVD presented his style, he taught at mandolin seminars, and from November 2002 he co-presented the Roanoke Bluegrass Weekend, an instructional event, for about five years. A benefit concert for him and his wife in Roanoke in February 2012 drew about a dozen bands, among them Punch Brothers and the Seldom Scene, and the documentary Herschel Sizemore: Mandolin in B, directed by Rick Bowman, was released in 2013. He was inducted into the Alabama Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2011 and was nominated for the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. He died at his home in Roanoke on 9 September 2022, aged 87.