Jim Shumate
Jim Shumate was a North Carolina fiddler who played in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945 and fiddled on the first recording session of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948. He is credited with the fiddle kickoff that became standard practice in bluegrass, and in 1995 he received a North Carolina Heritage Award.
James Fred Shumate was born on 21 October 1921 on Chestnut Mountain in northern Wilkes County, North Carolina. As a boy he heard an uncle playing fiddle on the porch of a neighboring farm, and he taught himself to play. He also listened to the Grand Ole Opry fiddler Arthur Smith and worked hard to copy Smith’s long-bow style, with its double stops and bluesy slides. He won his first contest at fourteen. As a young man he went to work in a furniture factory in Hickory and was soon fiddling on the local station WHKY with Don Walker and the Blue Ridge Boys.
Bill Monroe, driving through the area, happened to hear him on that program and telephoned to offer him a job. Shumate joined the Blue Grass Boys in 1945 to replace Chubby Wise, who had left that April. With Monroe he played the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and ballparks, theaters and schoolhouses across the South the rest of the week. On the Opry he began introducing Monroe’s songs with a fiddle kickoff, and the practice spread. He also brought the young banjo player Earl Scruggs, whom he knew from North Carolina, to Monroe’s attention. His time in the band was short. By December 1945 Howdy Forrester was back from the Navy to reclaim the fiddle job, and the Blue Grass Boys made no recordings while Shumate was with them.
In the spring of 1948 he spent a week filling in with the Stanley Brothers, who were between fiddlers. Later that year Flatt and Scruggs, newly out of Monroe’s band, hired him for their Foggy Mountain Boys. Around November 1948, at the WROL studio in Knoxville, Tennessee, with Mac Wiseman singing and Howard Watts on bass, he fiddled on the group’s first Mercury session: “God Loves His Children,” “I’m Going to Make Heaven My Home,” “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart” and “My Cabin in Caroline.” The same year he won the National Fiddlers Convention in Richlands, Virginia. In 1949, tired of life on the road, he went back to Hickory for good and worked in retail furniture sales.
He kept playing and recording. He led his own band, the Sons of the Carolinas, performed solo, and wrote sacred songs, among them “Old Country Baptizing,” which came to be sung in churches in western North Carolina. Anvil issued his LP Bluegrass Fiddle Supreme in 1980, with several Arthur Smith pieces. In the 1990s he made five sessions at Heritage Studio in Galax, Virginia, which produced the cassettes Buckle Up the Backstrap (1993) and Whing-Ding (1994) and a ten-song Tribute to Bill Monroe, and Heritage later gathered his recordings as The Jim Shumate Collection. In 1999 he appeared on the TNN special Grass Roots to Bluegrass, about the originators of the music. Wayne Erbsen’s recordings of him from 1977 and 2002, with Marc Pruett on banjo, were issued by the Field Recorders’ Collective in 2019.
The North Carolina Arts Council gave him a North Carolina Heritage Award in 1995, and he was inducted into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame in 2011. He died on 10 October 2013, eleven days before his ninety-second birthday.
