Jimmy Campbell

His grandfather, an old-time fiddler from West Tennessee, was his first inspiration, but it was hearing Kenny Baker that set his course. In the late 1980s he joined Jim & Jesse’s Virginia Boys, a band then made up of Jim and Jesse McReynolds, Allen Shelton on banjo and Keith McReynolds on bass. On 8 March 1988, at Fox Farms Recording Studio, he recorded the cassette Top of the Mornin’, with Jesse McReynolds on mandolin, Shelton on banjo and Robert Bowlin on guitar; it opened with his own title instrumental and included Baker’s “This & That” and Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge.”

In 1990 he was one of two fiddlers, with Tater Tate, on Monroe’s MCA sessions for Cryin’ Holy Unto the Lord: on 21 May for “Shine Hallelujah Shine” and “Harbor of Love,” which Ralph Stanley sang with Monroe and Ricky Skaggs, and on 12 June for “Are You Lost in Sin?,” with Jesse McReynolds guesting on mandolin, and “He’ll Take You In,” with Tom Ewing, Blake Williams and Billy Rose. By that September Tate had moved to bass and Campbell was the band’s fiddler, as on performances filmed with Wayne Lewis and John Hartford in September 1990 and with Marty Stuart in September 1991. He played on Monroe’s Homespun instructional video of March 1992, and in October 1994 he was on the sessions at which Monroe played for the banjo player Butch Robins’s album.

His first full album, Young Opry Fiddler (Pinecastle, 1993), had David Grier on guitar, Mike Compton on mandolin, Richard Bailey on banjo and Terry Eldredge on bass, with Billy Rose and Laura Boosinger guesting. With the Sidemen, who played weekly at Nashville’s Station Inn, he recorded Almost Live at the Station Inn (Red Clay, 1994), with Eldredge, Larry Perkins, Ronnie McCoury, Gene Wooten and Mike Bub, including a number of his own. On 20 March 1995 he produced a session at Top O’ the Hill Recorders in Nashville with Monroe on mandolin, Compton as his duet partner on two numbers, Ronnie McCoury on guitar, Dana Cupp on banjo and Bub on bass. Its twelve fiddle instrumentals, among them Monroe’s “Lonesome Old Farmer,” “Woodstock Hornpipe” and “Ebenezer Scrooge” and “Old Tennessee River,” which he wrote with Monroe and Blake Williams, came out on Red Clay as Pieces of Time in November 1996.

He also played with the Cumberland Highlanders, a group that included the former Blue Grass Boys Wayne Lewis, Billy Rose and Tater Tate, on Cumberland Mountain Home (Rural Rhythm, 2000), and in the late 1990s with the band Ballistic Pinto. He shared the fiddle with Chuck Westerman on Karl Shiflett & the Big Country Show’s In Full Color (Rebel, 2001). Campbell died on 24 October 2003, aged forty, near Clarksville, Tennessee; he had been recording with the songwriter Rosey Carter Adams, who died with him. His son is the mandolinist Casey Campbell.