Junior Blankenship

Hillard “Junior” Blankenship started out in his father’s band, the Rocky Mountain Boys, a Dickenson County group that included his father, Hillard Blankenship Sr., on guitar and mandolin, Hubert Powers on fiddle and Donnie Joe Mullins on banjo. He joined it in early 1974. Its first LP, Burning Bluegrass, recorded at Maggard Sound in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, on 21 February 1976, when he was sixteen, has him on lead guitar and singing lead on the Marshall Family’s “Come Springtime”; on the second, Homestead Bluegrass (1977), he took the guitar breaks on “Salt Creek” and “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die.” The band was billed at Stanley’s Hills of Home festival from 1976 to 1984, and Blankenship had been going to the festival since the first one in 1971.

Stanley hired him in November 1977, a few days before Charlie Sizemore. His first record with the Clinch Mountain Boys was Curly Ray Cline’s Who’s Gonna Mow My Grass?, recorded on 5 January 1978 at Messa Studios in Wise, Virginia, and his first Stanley album was Down Where the River Bends, recorded at Lemco Studios in Lexington, Kentucky, on 29 March 1978 and issued by Rebel that May. For the next eight years the band settled around him, Sizemore, Jack Cooke on bass and Cline on fiddle, with Blankenship on lead guitar and now and then mandolin, through the Rebel albums I’ll Wear a White Robe (recorded 1979), The Stanley Sound Today (1981), The Memory of Your Smile (recorded December 1981), Child of the King (1983), I Can Tell You the Time (1985) and Lonesome and Blue (1986), as well as Sings Sixteen Years (1986) and Like Father, Like Son (recorded December 1989).

He left in April or May of 1990 and came back in the autumn of 1991. In this second spell he played on Back to the Cross, recorded at Music Row Audio in Nashville on 19 March 1992 as the first release on Dick Freeland’s new label, on the 1992 sessions for Saturday Night / Sunday Morning, where the guest singers included Dwight Yoakam, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, George Jones and Bill Monroe, and on Stanley’s 1993 Christmas album. With Ernie Thacker on mandolin and Ron Stewart on fiddle and banjo he also made the cassette Old Virginia for Lundy, most likely in 1992 or 1993, singing lead on “(Bury Me Beneath the) Weeping Willow” and “Old Home Town.”

Blankenship and Thacker left Stanley in early March 1994 to start a band of their own, and James Alan Shelton took over the guitar. In April and May 1994 the pair recorded Tears of Gold at Hickory Hill studios in Parkersburg, West Virginia, with James Price playing most of the backing, and in November they cut Tennessee Blues for Copper Creek with Barry Clevenger on banjo, Butch Bailey on electric bass and Art Stamper sitting in on fiddle; both came out in 1995. He also played on records by John Wright and Johnny Collins in the 1990s, and at the Clinch Mountain Boys reunion for Stanley’s fiftieth anniversary in May 1996 he played with Charlie Sizemore.

The Newsboy (2006), credited to Junior Blankenship & Friends and produced by Ralph Stanley II, is mostly instrumental standards led by his guitar, with Dewey Brown on fiddle, Jack Cooke on bass, John Rigsby on mandolin and Steve Sparkman on banjo; he sings lead on “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” “Mary Ann” and “More Pretty Girls Than One.” In 2014, when Shelton could no longer play with the band, Blankenship helped out once again, and he played lead guitar on Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow, recorded in November 2014 at Jim Lauderdale’s house with Dewey Brown, Randall Hibbits, Mitchell Van Dyke and Nathan Stanley, and sold through Cracker Barrel.