Jimmy Haley

In the early 1970s he played guitar in the Bluegrass Buddies, with Jeff Hooker on mandolin, Lou Reid on bass and Myron Nunn on banjo. He and Reid then worked together in Southbound, a band doing mostly club work out of Greenville, South Carolina, whose album Southbound (Rebel SLP 1570), was recorded at Track Recorders in March 1977 and released that year. Haley played rhythm and lead guitar, with Reid on banjo and fiddle, Dennis Severt on mandolin, Doug Campbell on bass and Mike Auldridge as a guest on Dobro, and he sang lead on seven of its eleven songs: his own “Look Into My Eyes,” Hooker’s “The Witch,” Severt’s “Stand Beside Me,” “Friend of the Devil,” Kenny Loggins’s “House at Pooh Corner,” “Carolina” and Michael Martin Murphey’s “Carolina in the Pines.” Doyle Lawson produced one side of the record and later said he remembered the group for its singing, “especially Lou Reid and Jimmy Haley.”

When Lawson left the Country Gentlemen in 1979 to start a band of his own, he called Haley, who brought in Reid, then doing something else, and Southbound’s banjo player, Terry Baucom. After a few shows as Doyle Lawson & Foxfire the band settled on the name Quicksilver, and it played its first public show on 10 May 1979 at Buddy’s Bar-B-Que in Knoxville, Tennessee. Haley was its guitarist and one of its four singers. On the first album, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver (Sugar Hill, 1979), with Jerry Douglas and Bobby Hicks as guests, all four members sang on every track, among them Hooker’s “I’ll Be With You,” “Mighty Mississippi” and Bill Monroe’s “On and On.” The same quartet recorded Rock My Soul at Bias Recording Studios in Springfield, Virginia, and Quicksilver Rides Again (1982). With Randy Graham in Reid’s place on bass, Haley played on the gospel album Heavenly Treasures (1983) and on Once and for Always (1985), which brought “Carolina in the Pines” back into his repertoire.

In 1985 he, Baucom and Graham left Lawson and formed the New Quicksilver with Bibey. Its album Ready for the Times (Cross Current, 1985) included Haley’s song “You’re the One,” Wes Golding’s “Hitchhiking to California” and “I’m Country,” Charlie Moore’s “On a High, High Mountain” and Jake Landers’s “Waves of Sorrow,” but Lawson persuaded the four to drop the name and the group did not last. Rebel reissued those eleven songs with three more, “Black Eyed Susie,” “The Lantern” and “Our Last Goodbye,” as Baucom, Bibey, Graham & Haley in 1998, the year Baucom and Bibey brought the lineup back together under the four names; after Graham and Haley left, the group went on as Baucom, Bibey & BlueRidge.

Haley has recorded with his old bandmates since. On Lawson’s A School of Bluegrass (Crossroads, May 2004) he played guitar with Lawson, Baucom and Reid on “Mississippi Queen,” the Bee Gees’ “Come On Over,” Monroe’s “The Little Community Church,” “Train 45” and “On the Sea of Life,” and with Graham on bass he sang lead on “Carolina in the Pines” once more. In 2011 the original four recorded Cody Shuler’s gospel song “My Eyes Shall Be on Canaansland” for Baucom’s album In a Groove. As of 2014 he was playing music locally in North Carolina and joining Lawson, Reid and Baucom for occasional reunion shows of the original band.