Junior Barber

His given name was Antoine. Before he took up bluegrass work he served in the military, including time in Vietnam during the war.

He worked with the Gibson Brothers for about seven years as they were getting started in the 1990s, alongside his son Mike, who joined them on bass in 1993 and stayed for decades. Junior played resophonic guitar on Long Forgotten Dream, the album the brothers released on Virginia’s Hay Holler label in 1996. Eric Gibson remembered him as one of the first professional musicians he and Leigh worked with, and credited him with teaching them restraint, taste and tone. Barber left when the band began talking about making a country record, preferring to stay with bluegrass; one account dates his departure to 2002, after which fiddler Clayton Campbell joined.

Later he played with a western swing band, with his cousins Tom and Jewel Venne in Beartracks, and with Gary Ferguson. In the early 2000s he recorded a solo instrumental album, Steffi’s Waltz, produced by Alan O’Bryant. He liked to play without a capo, finding tones he wanted in B and Bb in open G tuning, and late in life he began experimenting with C6 tuning, more often heard on Hawaiian steel guitar.