Jim Fraley
Jim Fraley was a North Carolina banjo player who spent two decades, from 1999 to 2020, in the band Deeper Shade of Blue. He also sang its baritone parts. He won the North Carolina state banjo championship in 1977 and received the first Snuffy Jenkins Memorial Award in 1991.
Watching Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on television on Saturday evenings drew him to the banjo, and he began playing around 1970. A natural left-hander, he learned to play right-handed because he did not know left-handed banjos existed. He went to fiddlers’ conventions and jammed at friends’ houses, especially with Jerry Edmondson, then the banjo player with the Bluegrass Tarheels. His first band was the Bluegrass Travelers, followed by the Boyd Brothers and the Lincoln County Partners. Along the way he played with Chubby Wise, Mac Wiseman and Bobby Hicks.
In late 1999 the bassist Brian Hinson called him about putting a new group together, and the first rehearsal of what became Deeper Shade of Blue took place in October 1999. Fraley’s son Jason came along, joined on lead guitar and soon moved to mandolin. The band recorded Bluegrass to the Bone (2010) and No More Blues (2012) on its own To the Bone label, and then Steam (Mountain Fever, 2018). On Steam Fraley played banjo and sang with Troy Pope, Jason Fraley, the Dobro player Frank Poindexter and bassist Scott Burgess. Pope, who stood beside him for nearly twenty years, singled out his baritone singing as a large part of the band’s harmony sound.
Fraley retired from the band in May 2020, citing health and the long travel, and Steve Wilson took the banjo chair. In 2019 he was among the banjo players honored at Lorraine Jordan’s North Carolina Banjofest, and in 2023 he was presented with an award at the Granite Quarry Fiddlers’ Convention. He also taught banjo, including to his grandchildren. He died on 30 January 2025, at 68.
