Hoke Jenkins
Hoke Jenkins was a banjo player from Harris, North Carolina, a nephew of the three-finger banjo pioneer Snuffy Jenkins, who taught him to play. He led the Smoky Mountaineers on the radio in Augusta, Georgia, in 1949, the year Jesse McReynolds began copying his backward banjo roll on the mandolin, and in 1952 he played banjo on Jim & Jesse’s first Capitol recordings.
When Carl Story came out of the Navy in 1945 and re-formed the Rambling Mountaineers, Jenkins was his banjo player, with the brothers Jack and Curley Shelton and the bassist Claude Boone. The band went to WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, and played the station’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round. Jenkins also played banjo for the Bailey Brothers.
Around 1949 he had his own band, Hoke Jenkins & the Smoky Mountaineers, on WGAC in Augusta, Georgia, with Les Sandy on bass. That year, when work in the coal country was slow, Jim and Jesse McReynolds went to Augusta with Curly Seckler for a short stint with the band. In idle moments Jesse worked out how to play Jenkins’s backward roll on the mandolin with a flat pick, and the crosspicking that grew out of it quickly became a mandolin style of its own.
In the summer and fall of 1951 Jenkins was the banjo player with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys on WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina, where the guitarist George Shuffler was also in the band. On 13 June 1952 he was in the studio for both of the duo’s first Capitol sessions, at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, with Seckler on guitar, Sonny James on fiddle and Bob Moore on bass. The eight sides they cut that afternoon and evening included “I’ll Wash Your Love from My Heart,” the Louvin Brothers’ “Are You Missing Me?,” “Virginia Waltz,” “Are You Lost in Sin?” and Seckler’s “Purple Heart.”
