Jackie Phelps
Jackie Phelps was a guitarist, banjo player and comedian who played with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in three stretches between 1948 and 1964, worked with Grandpa Jones and Roy Acuff, and became best known as half of the “Eephin’ and Hambonin’” act with Jimmie Riddle on Hee Haw from 1969 to 1986.
Claude Jackson Phelps Jr. was born in 1925. When Lester Flatt left Monroe in 1948, Phelps came in as the band’s guitarist, and in that band he worked alongside Don Reno, Chubby Wise and Mac Wiseman. In Cincinnati on 10 April 1950 he played rhythm guitar and banjo on a King session for Grandpa Jones, with Billy Grammer on lead guitar, and on 29 October 1951 he played guitar for Jones again, with Jerry Byrd on steel and Tommy Jackson on fiddle. In March 1951 he played steel and sang with Tommy Magness and His Tennessee Buddies, a King session that also featured Red Smiley and Don Reno. He went on recording with Jones into the RCA Victor years, on guitar or steel at sessions in Nashville in 1953, 1954 and 1955, and on guitar alongside Merle Travis and Harold Bradley in September 1960.
He rejoined Monroe in 1954. At a Decca session on 31 December that year, with Hubert Davis on banjo and Charlie Cline and Bobby Hicks on fiddles, he played guitar on Monroe’s instrumentals “Wheel Hoss,” “Cheyenne” and “Roanoke” and on “You’ll Find Her Name Written There.” On 28 January 1955 he sang the chorus lead on “Wait a Little Longer, Please Jesus” and the lead on “Let the Light Shine Down on Me,” with Monroe on tenor, and that year he appeared with the band in Al Gannaway’s filmed performances, playing guitar and, on one number, banjo. In the mid-1950s he joined Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys. He came back to Monroe’s sessions twice more: on 27 March 1963, with Bill Keith and Kenny Baker, for “Pike County Breakdown,” “Shenandoah Breakdown” and “Santa Claus,” and on 9 April 1964 for “Louisville Breakdown,” “Never Again,” “Just Over in the Gloryland” and “Fire on the Mountain.”
From 1969 through 1986 he was a regular in the cast of Hee Haw, usually paired with Jimmie Riddle in a routine of “eephin’” vocal sounds, thigh-slapping and spoon playing. In a December 1975 interview for the Country Music Hall of Fame’s oral history program he looked back on Monroe’s baseball club and on his work as a sideman with Monroe, Acuff, Grandpa Jones, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Porter Wagoner, on the Opry and on Hee Haw. He died at his home in Nashville on 22 April 1990.
