Larry Beasley

He was born on 29 January 1953. By 1972 he was playing banjo with Carl Story, on a live album for Jessup with Harold Austin, Red Rector on mandolin and Mitchell Moser on bass. In May 1974 he filled in with Ralph Stanley at Stanley’s festival in McClure, Virginia.

When Story signed with the new CMH label, Beasley was in the band that recorded at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1976, singing harmony as well as playing banjo, with Mike McKellar on guitar, Jeff Dalton on mandolin and Moser on bass, and with Red Rector and Arthur Smith sitting in. Those sessions made the two-LP The Bluegrass Gospel Collection and Mountain Music, whose songs include “Roust-a-bout” and “I Saw the Light.” In the first half of 1977 he was Bill Monroe’s banjo player in the Blue Grass Boys, between two spells by Bill Holden.

In 1989 he played banjo on Charlie Sizemore’s sessions in Louisa, Kentucky, and Nashville for the Rutabaga album I’ve Got a Good Memory, with Don Rigsby on mandolin, and he was back on banjo for part of Sizemore’s Rebel album Back Home (1994). The same year he began a long association with Gary Brewer and the Kentucky Ramblers, playing on Brewer’s Copper Creek album Down Home Memories, cut at Fox Farm Recording in Nashville in September 1989, on Brewer’s late-1990s records, including Jimmy Martin Songs for Dinner (1999), and as late as November 2013, when the band recorded Homestretch in Louisville. Under his own name he has released an album on Alpha and recorded for Atteiram, whose Back Porch Pickin’ (1993) included Charlie Sizemore.