Jim McReynolds

He was born on 13 February 1927 in Carfax, into a family that was musical on both sides and made its living from farming, coal mining and, during the Depression, the WPA. Jim learned guitar and gospel music from his mother. As a teenager he followed his father into the mines, but he did not go back after his father was nearly killed in a mining accident.

At the end of World War II he spent about two years in the Army, and he came home with a mandolin. He soon joined Jesse and their sister’s husband in a local dance and radio band, the McReynolds Brothers and the Cumberland Mountain Boys, which moved from one station to the next and found its best bookings on the coal-country circuit when the mines were busy. The brothers went with Curly Seckler to Augusta, Georgia, for a short stint with Hoke Jenkins and his Smoky Mountaineers, and a year later they were in Iowa and Kansas, working as singing radio cowboys.

Their first television and recording work came in southwestern Ohio in 1951 and 1952, in Middletown, Dayton and Cincinnati. As the Virginia Trio they cut ten gospel songs for the Kentucky label. An audition for King in Cincinnati came to nothing, but at the Jimmie Skinner Music Center they met Capitol’s Ken Nelson, who invited them to record in Nashville and suggested a new name: Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys. Capitol sessions in 1952, 1953 and 1955 produced twenty tracks, sixteen of them released as singles, among them the Louvin Brothers’ “Are You Missing Me” and two songs of the brothers’ own, “I Will Be Waiting for You” and “Just Wondering Why.” In between, Jesse was drafted for service in Korea, and Jim farmed from 1953 to 1954.

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s the band worked out of Danville, Virginia; Burlington, North Carolina; Wheeling; Knoxville; and Live Oak, Florida, playing television shows sponsored by Ford Tractors and Martha White Mills. Its fiddlers in those years included Vassar Clements, Jimmy Buchanan and Jim Brock, and its banjo players Bobby Thompson and Allen Shelton. In 1958 and 1959 the brothers produced three sessions of their own in Jacksonville, Florida, for Starday, including “Hard Hearted” and “Border Ride.”

Don Law signed them to Columbia in 1960, and on Columbia and its subsidiary Epic they reached the country top 100 with “Cotton Mill Man” and “Better Times a-Coming” in 1964, “Diesel on My Tail” and “Ballad of Thunder Road” in 1967, “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman” and “Yonder Comes a Freight Train” in 1968, and “The Golden Rocket” in 1970. They joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1964 and moved to Nashville. As the folk audience shrank, the pressure to record and perform as a mainstream country act, with electric instruments and drums, grew strong; in 1973 they started their own label, Old Dominion, and went back almost entirely to bluegrass.

The brothers married sisters and lived in adjoining houses at the Double J Ranch in Gallatin, near Nashville, and through the 1980s and 1990s they toured internationally and played festivals. Jim began having trouble with his voice around 2000 and was diagnosed with cancer early in 2002. He kept performing when he could, and he died in Gallatin on 31 December 2002. He was buried on a mountain overlooking his childhood home in Carfax.