Jim Williams

As a teenager he sang with his distant cousin Paul Humphrey, who took the stage name Paul Williams so that the pair could be billed as the Williams Brothers. They had a spot on WPUV in Pulaski, Virginia, worked at WWYO in Pineville, West Virginia, with the English Ramblers and in Marion, Virginia, on WMEV with Cousin Zeke Leonard’s Virginia Valley Boys, and early in 1951 both joined Ezra Cline’s Lonesome Pine Fiddlers at WHIS in Bluefield, West Virginia. Jim left before the band’s first RCA Victor session in May 1952.

He went to Mac Wiseman, and played mandolin on two of Wiseman’s Dot sessions in 1952 at the WHIN studio in Gallatin, Tennessee, with Tommy Jackson on fiddle and Ernie Newton on bass. At the second, in the summer, he sang lead on “It’s Goodbye and So Long to You,” with Wiseman on tenor, and tenor to Wiseman’s lead on “Fire in My Heart” and Albert E. Brumley’s “I’d Rather Live by the Side of the Road.”

In the same year he joined Carter and Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys. Around June 1952 he played mandolin, with Art Stamper on fiddle, at the brothers’ last Rich-R-Tone session, held at WLSI in Pikeville, Kentucky, which produced Bill Monroe’s “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” Ernest Tubb’s “Are You Waiting Just for Me,” “The Little Glass of Wine” and “Little Birdie.” He was then on four of their Mercury sessions at Bradley Studios in Nashville, with Dee Kilpatrick producing: on 9 August 1953 (“Say Won’t You Be Mine,” “This Weary Heart You Stole Away,” “I’m Lonesome Without You,” “Our Last Goodbye”), on 25 November 1953 (“Poison Lies,” “Dickson County Breakdown,” “I Long to See the Old Folks,” Monroe’s “A Voice from on High”), on 30 May 1954 (“Memories of Mother,” “Could You Love Me (One More Time),” “Nobody’s Love Is Like Mine”) and on 5 April 1955, when the band cut “So Blue,” “You’d Better Get Right,” “Tragic Love,” “Orange Blossom Special” and the gospel songs “I Hear My Savior Calling” and “Just a Little Talk with Jesus.” Live recordings of the band at New River Ranch in Maryland on 3 July 1955 have him singing lead on “Poor Ellen Smith” and the bass part on “Angel Band” and “A Voice from on High.” His cousin Paul worked briefly in the same band late in 1953.

Unable to make a living from music, he went to work in a Detroit automobile plant, and in 1958 he teamed up with Red Ellis to play and record. As Jimmie Williams and Red Ellis with the Gospel Harmony Boys they made extended-play records for Starday from 1959, the first, “You Can’t Hide from God,” with Cranford Nix on banjo and Bobby Stiltner on bass, and later EPs with George Woody on banjo, Ed Bryant on fiddle and Virgil Shouse on bass; they also recorded for Happy Hearts and for Ellis’s own Pathway label, and Starday gathered their songs on the album Holy Cry from the Hills (SLP 165, 1962).

The duo broke up in 1961 and Williams became a full-time evangelical preacher. He and Ellis came back together for records on Jessup, the Michigan label, beginning with God Brings Bluegrass Back Together (1971) and including Little David’s Harp (1977); Williams also made Summers Gone: Bluegrass Style (Jessup, 1973) and, with the Gospel Grass, Oh Yes, Lord (1976). Both men kept presenting music in a religious setting into the 1990s, Williams carrying on his ministry from Florida. Their Starday recordings were reissued in Britain in 2012 as Classic Bluegrass Gospel (BACM).