Johnny Bellar
Johnny Bellar is a resonator guitar player from Springfield, Tennessee, who played Dobro with the Stonemans for more than a decade, recording with them from 1976 into the early 1980s, and later worked for many years in Wilma Lee Cooper’s Clinch Mountain Clan on the Grand Ole Opry. He was inducted into the Old Time Music Hall of Fame in 2007.
He grew up in Springfield, where his father, Johnnie, played in a local band, the Cumberland River Boys, and while still in grade school he tuned the band’s instruments. He took up the resonator guitar at fourteen after hearing his uncle Felix play it, and he learned from the records of Josh Graves and Bashful Brother Oswald. By seventeen he had been a guest on stage with Graves at the Bluegrass Inn, and soon afterward he won his first contest.
With the Stonemans he recorded Cuttin’ the Grass for CMH in 1976 at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Van, Patsy and Jimmy Stoneman and Dave Dougherty on banjo; it included “Let’s All Go Down to the River” and “Watermelon on the Vine.” He was on the band’s sessions in Albuquerque in late March 1977 for On the Road with the Stonemans, on The First Family of Country Music, cut at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville early in 1981 with Eddie Mueller on banjo, and on a live recording made at the Roy Acuff Theater in Nashville on 31 October 1981, with Donna Stoneman on mandolin.
He also founded the bluegrass band New Tradition, and his own career has taken in ten albums and a number of instrumentals of his own. His records include Songs of Yesteryear (Old Homestead, 1993) and Carry Me Back to the Mountains, both with the singer Roy Harper, and Resophonic Roots (2011) with Bev King. In 1999 and 2000 he was one of four featured players on the National Council for the Traditional Arts’ “Masters of the Steel String Guitar” tours. In 2021, living in Ashland City, Tennessee, he taught the banjo player Joey Gipson of Manchester, Tennessee, through the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.
