Joe Meadows

He was born Ralph Meadows on 31 December 1934 in Basin, a small coal town in southern West Virginia. His father and neighbors played the fiddle, and he taught himself on his father’s instrument, learning from records and from the Grand Ole Opry and Farm and Fun Time on the radio; he never learned to read music. His first job was with a local country band that played for dances near his home, and at sixteen he began playing with Melvin and Ray Goins, the Goins Brothers, who were working out of Bluefield.

In the fall of 1952 he joined the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys, and he stayed until the spring of 1955. Because the band already had a Ralph in Ralph Stanley, he became known as Joe. He recorded with Carter and Ralph Stanley at four Mercury sessions in Nashville between 30 May 1954 and 5 April 1955: “Memories of Mother” and “I Just Got Wise” at the first, “Hard Times” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” that August, “Baby Girl” and “I Worship You” in November, and “Orange Blossom Special,” “Tragic Love” and “You’d Better Get Right” at the last. On several of them he also sang the baritone or bass part.

After leaving the Stanleys he worked briefly with the Lilly Brothers and then joined Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys at the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, moving with them to Live Oak, Florida. In 1956 he became a Blue Grass Boy and stayed with Bill Monroe for about a year, though none of Monroe’s few sessions of that time included him. Back in West Virginia from 1957, he played with Bill and Mary Reid and then with Buddy Starcher in the Shenandoah Valley. He also rejoined the Stanley Brothers for a session at radio station WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, in August 1958, which produced “Holiday Pickin’,” “Gonna Paint the Town” and “Christmas Is Near” for Starday.

He spent some years off the road before returning to full-time playing in the early 1970s. He recorded with Larry Sparks in 1972 for Where the Sweet Waters Flow, and in 1973 the Jessup label issued a fiddle album, Ralph “Joe” Meadows Rejoins Bluegrass with the Goins Brothers. In 1974 he went back on the road with the Goins Brothers and that year began his longest stay in any band, a second spell with Jim & Jesse that lasted until 1980. He is on their Old Dominion albums of those years, including Jesus Is the Key to the Kingdom (1975), Songs About Our Country (1976), Palace of Songs (1977) and Songs of Inspiration (1978). Over his years on the road he toured Europe four times and Japan once. He also played with Dave Evans, and in February 1981 he recorded again with Larry Sparks, for Ramblin’ Letters.

In 1982 he moved to the Washington area to work for Senator Byrd, running the mailroom of his office in the Hart Senate Office Building. Byrd, himself a fiddler, played and taped informal sessions with him on weekends, and for about two years Meadows played with the local band Appalachian Reign, which often played with the senator at his Capitol office on Sundays. He recorded with Bill Emerson and Pete Goble on Tennessee 1949 (Webco, 1987) and with James King on It’s a Cold, Cold World (Webco, 1989), and from 1990 he was the fiddler on the old-time band Country Ham’s albums for Vetco and its own label, among them Fiddle Instrumentals, issued under his own name with the band. His other albums as a leader include Portrait of a Fiddler for Old Homestead and Mountains, Rivers and Meadows for Patuxent.

He died at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on 8 February 2003, aged 68. Four days later Senator Byrd paid tribute to him on the floor of the Senate.