Larry Richardson

Musician · 1927–2007 · Galax, Virginia
Best known for Banjo

Larry Richardson was a banjo player and singer from the Galax area of Virginia who played with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers and Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys around 1950, and who co-wrote “Pain in My Heart” with Bobby Osborne. He later recorded with the Blue Ridge Boys and spent the last thirty years of his life singing gospel and preaching.

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He was born on 9 August 1927. With the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers of Bluefield, West Virginia, he played banjo and sang alongside Bobby Osborne, who played guitar, and in March 1950 the band recorded four songs the two had written for the Cozy label at the WHIS studio in Bluefield, “Pain in My Heart,” “Lonesome, Sad and Blue,” “Don’t Forget Me” and “Will I Meet Mother in Heaven,” with Ray Morgan on fiddle and Ezra Cline on bass. Osborne and Richardson sang the duets. Besides the banjo, Richardson was a capable lead guitarist. He then worked as a banjo player with Bill Monroe in 1950 and 1951, though he made no records with him.

He is one of the banjo players on the Folkways LP American Banjo Three-Finger and Scruggs Style (1957), playing “Little Maggie,” “Dear Old Dixie,” “Take Me Back to the Sweet Sunny South,” “Bucking Mule” and “Lonesome Road Blues.” Folkways’ Galax, Virginia: Old Fiddlers’ Convention (1964) has him playing “Turkey in the Straw” with Sonny Miller and Johnny Jackson.

With the singer Happy Smith and the Blue Ridge Boys he made singles for the Blue Ridge label, among them “Just Let Me Fall” and his own “I’m Lonesome” (1952) and his “Nashville Jail” with “Silver Belle” (1962). County Records’ Blue Ridge Bluegrass (1965), credited to Larry Richardson, Red Barker & the Blue Ridge Boys, has Richardson on banjo and vocals with Red Barker and Buddy Crisp on guitars, Ronnie Prevette on mandolin, Buddy Pendleton on fiddle and Curly Blake on bass, and opens with “Let Me Fall.” More of the Happy Smith sides, most from 1958, were collected on County’s Springtime in the Mountains (1975). In 1965 the Silver-Belle label issued his “Sad and Lonesome Day” with Monroe’s “I’ll Meet You in Church Sunday Morning,” and in the late 1960s he had a television show in the Winston-Salem area.

His later recordings were gospel, among them Walking & Talking with My Lord (Rite, 1974) and Ship of Zion (LifeLine, 1983), on which he played banjo and guitar with Alan Bibey on mandolin. He died at his home in Lake Butler, Florida, on 17 June 2007.

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