Larry Robbins

Robbins was born in Montgomery County on 25 April 1945. He joined the Johnson Mountain Boys, then a young band from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, in the summer of 1979, taking over the bass from Mark Prindle at the same time as Richard Underwood replaced Frannie Davidson on banjo. With Dudley Connell on guitar and lead vocals, Underwood, Eddie D’Zmura on mandolin and Eddie Stubbs on fiddle, he recorded the band’s first Rounder album at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, in August 1980; it came out in April 1981. That five-man lineup, with David McLaughlin soon back in the band on mandolin in place of D’Zmura, stayed largely unchanged through the early and middle 1980s.

With McLaughlin he played on Walls of Time (recorded at Bias in the summer of 1981, released 1982), Working Close (recorded October to December 1982, released 1983) and We’ll Still Sing On (Rounder 0205, recorded 1984–85). On 5 April 1983 the band recorded a live album at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, and on it Robbins sings lead, with Connell on tenor, on Lester Flatt and Curly Seckler’s “We Can’t Be Darlings Anymore.” By then the band was playing about 150 dates a year, and after Working Close its booking agency, Lance LeRoy’s Lancer Agency, took it to the White House, Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center and the Grand Ole Opry; in 1984 it made a month-long United States Information Agency tour of Africa.

Connell, McLaughlin and Robbins also backed Hazel Dickens on five tracks of her Rounder album By the Sweat of My Brow (1983), among them her own “Only the Lonely” and “Your Greedy Heart.” Robbins left the Johnson Mountain Boys in 1986, and Marshall Wilborn took over the bass for Let the Whole World Talk (1987). The band was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2020.