Louis Innis

Louis Todd Innis was born on 20 June 1919. By the mid-1940s he was working in Nashville, where he made his first records, for Sterling, in 1946 at the WSM studio, as Louis and the Innis Clan. With the guitarist Zeke Turner, the steel player Jerry Byrd and the fiddler Tommy Jackson he played in Red Foley’s band, the Cumberland Valley Boys, a group later counted as the first Nashville “A-team” because the four were soon doing studio work for all kinds of artists and labels. The same four worked at WLW in Cincinnati in 1947 and 1948 as the Pleasant Valley Boys and backed Foley on his sessions at Castle Studio in Nashville between August and December 1947.

His session work in those years ran across country music. In January 1946, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, he played guitar with Merle Travis behind the Delmore Brothers on “Hillbilly Boogie,” and with Travis on the first session of the Brown’s Ferry Four, the gospel quartet of Travis, Grandpa Jones and the Delmores, which produced “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” He played bass on Hank Williams’s Sterling session of 13 February 1947 and rhythm guitar on his first MGM session, at Castle Studio on 21 April 1947, which produced “Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light.” He was on rhythm guitar again when Williams recorded “Lovesick Blues” at the E. T. Herzog studio in Cincinnati on 22 December 1948 and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” there on 30 August 1949. For King in Cincinnati he played bass and guitar for the Delmore Brothers from 1947 into 1951, possibly including the May 1949 session that produced “Blues Stay Away from Me,” and for Grandpa Jones from 1947, on bass, rhythm guitar and harmony vocals; he was still on Jones’s RCA sessions in Nashville in 1953 and 1954.

Under his own name he recorded for King in November 1947, then for Mercury from 1949 to 1951 as Louie Innis and the String Dusters, the name under which Mercury signed the WLW band, with novelty and boogie numbers such as “Chattanoogie Boogie,” “Jug Band Boogie” and “Honky Tonk Man.” He returned to King from 1953 to 1955, and in March 1953 cut “Mexican Joe” and “(You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Female) Hound Dog” there as a duet with Charlie Gore.

In Nashville he recorded with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs at Castle Studio on 29 and 30 August 1953, the sessions for “I’ll Go Stepping Too,” “I’d Rather Be Alone,” “Foggy Mountain Chimes,” “Someone Took My Place with You” and “Your Love Is Like a Flower,” with Curly Seckler, Benny Martin and Bob Moore, and played guitar for them again on 19 May 1954 for “Till the End of the World Rolls Round,” “Don’t This Road Look Rough and Rocky” and “Foggy Mountain Special.” Later he worked for King as a producer: he produced Don Reno and Bill Harrell’s King sessions in Cincinnati in November and December 1967 and June 1968. He died on 20 August 1982.