Lynwood Lunsford

He grew up in a family that mostly played country music. Around 1970 his father, until then an electric guitarist, formed a bluegrass band called the Country Cousins with two of Lynwood’s cousins; that band and the Country Gentlemen’s recording of “Matterhorn” drew him to the banjo. His first job as a banjo player was on the E.J. Harris show, broadcast live on Saturdays over WKRX in Roxboro, where he later hosted a bluegrass record program, and in 1978 he became the Country Cousins’ banjo player, staying six and a half years. The Reno-style picker Briggs Elliott and the playing of Bill Emerson shaped his early style. He then spent two years with Big Sandy, a north-central North Carolina band, and after a split with its manager in 1987 he and the Dobro player David Nance carried on as the Southern Drifters.

He first auditioned for Jimmy Martin at a festival in Arcadia, Maryland, in the fall of 1985. Martin told him his right-hand roll was wrong for the Sunny Mountain Boys’ timing and sent him away to learn the band’s records note for note. After four more tryouts in as many years, Martin hired him in February 1990 at the SPBGMA convention, and with Martin he played the Grand Ole Opry. He later compared that year to basic training, crediting Martin with teaching him both his timing and how to work as a professional.

From 1991 through 1996 he played banjo with Lost & Found, the band led by Allen Mills, alongside the mandolin player Dempsey Young, and appeared with them on the Opry in 1993. He is on three of their albums: January Rain (Rebel, 1992), the instrumental album Just Pickin’ (Copper Creek, 1994) and A Ride Through the Country (Rebel, 1995). He next played with Sand Mountain, recording their 1998 Hay Holler album Molly Rose with the singer James Crain and the fiddler Jason Barie, filled in for about four months with Jeanette Williams & Clearwater, and by 2000 was in Savannah, whose self-titled debut came out on Outlet that year with Herschel Sizemore on mandolin.

Hay Holler released his solo banjo album Pick Along in October 1999, with Sizemore on mandolin, mostly instrumentals such as “Kansas City Railroad Blues,” “Sally Ann” and “Virginia Jazz.” After taking part in the first IBMA Leadership Bluegrass class in Nashville in March 2000, he started Lynwood Lunsford & the Misty Valley Boys on 1 September 2000, with Crain on guitar and lead vocals, Barie on fiddle and Gary Baird on bass; he sang baritone. Modeling the band on J.D. Crowe’s Kentucky Mountain Boys, he produced their first album, A Portrait of the Blues (Hay Holler, 2000), at Eastwood Studios in Cana, Virginia, with songs ranging from Mel Tillis’s “Mental Revenge” to Mark Knopfler’s “How Long.” A second album, It’s a Carolina Morning, was recorded at Crosscut Studios in Hazard, Kentucky, and issued by Crosscut in 2003, with Michael Cleveland on fiddle.

For about nine years, roughly 2007 to late 2015, he played banjo and sang baritone with Big Country Bluegrass, appearing on Twenty Years of Grass (Hay Holler, 2007) and on the band’s Rebel albums Memories of the Past (2013) and Country Livin’ (2015). He was also a regular on The Cumberland Highlanders, Campbell Mercer’s program on RFD-TV.

Late in 2015 he formed the Molly Rose Band, first with Mark Hudson on guitar, David Lewis on mandolin and Gary Baird on bass, playing songs from what they called the “Golden Age” of bluegrass, by the Louvin Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs and his former band Lost & Found among others. Their only album, With All Due Respect, came out on Patuxent in June 2017. In November 2016 the city of Danville, Virginia, honored him at the Bright Leaf Brew Fest for his years in bluegrass. The Molly Rose Band played its last show on 1 March 2019 at the County Line Christian Church in Axton, Virginia, and that October he replaced Rick Briggs on banjo in the Country Gentlemen Tribute Band, which re-creates the sound of the Country Gentlemen.