James Bryan

He was born on 24 November 1953 in Boaz, Alabama, and grew up there. He started on the fiddle at eleven, learning his first pieces from his father, Joe Bryan, a guitarist, and won his first contest at twelve. He became Kenny Baker’s apprentice, and he won the Fiddle King title at the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention in Athens, Alabama, in 1970, at sixteen, and again in 1973. In between, he played fiddle on Secret of the Waterfall (Old Homestead, 1972) by Rual Yarbrough & the Dixiemen, with Yarbrough on banjo and Jake Landers on guitar.

In the late summer and early fall of 1977 he worked with Bill Monroe for about three months. He then played on the sessions for Together Again, the album Bill Monroe made with his son James Monroe at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, in January and February 1978, with Bryan and Kenny Baker both on fiddle; MCA issued it in June 1978. Bryan was then a member of James Monroe’s Midnight Ramblers.

In 1979 Norman and Nancy Blake added him to their act to form the Rising Fawn String Ensemble, and he played on the Blakes’ Rounder albums Rising Fawn String Ensemble (1979) and Full Moon on the Farm (1981), sometimes in twin and triple fiddle parts with Norman and Nancy. He is also on Hazel Dickens’s Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (Rounder, 1980), playing fiddle with the Blakes behind her singing of Si Kahn’s “Aragon Mill.” Through the 1980s he performed on his own and with the Blakes.

Rounder released his first solo album, Lookout Blues, in 1983 and The First of May about two years later. About a decade after that he recorded Two Pictures with the guitarist Carl Jones, with whom he still appeared in concert in 2011. He has played at the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial festival on the National Mall and on the Grand Ole Opry, and he has been a master artist in the Alabama State Council on the Arts apprenticeship program, teaching younger fiddlers. The council gave him its Alabama Folk Heritage Award in 2011, listing him as a fiddler of Mentone, Alabama.