Mike Lilly

He played the banjo from childhood. At eleven he was a featured guest on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, at thirteen he was invited to play on the Grand Ole Opry, and while still in high school he joined the Powell Brothers.

Shortly after Larry Sparks left Ralph Stanley to start a band of his own, he hired Lilly, who joined in 1969 and stayed until 1973. With Wendy Miller on mandolin, he is on New Gospel Songs (Pine Tree, 1971), Bluegrass Old & New (Old Homestead, 1972) and Ramblin’ Bluegrass (Starday, 1972), singing baritone under Sparks’s lead and Miller’s tenor. Ramblin’ Bluegrass carried several of the songs Sparks became known for, among them “Goodbye Little Darlin’,” “Too Much Mountain Dew,” “A Face in the Crowd” and “Dark Hollow.”

In 1973, when Bill Emerson left the Country Gentlemen to lead the newly formed U.S. Navy bluegrass band, Lilly went to the Gentlemen in his place. Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas were in the band in his time, but he stayed only about a year and made no records with it. Back home, he helped Sparks out again in the middle of the decade, playing banjo on Pickin’ & Singin’ (Pine Tree, 1975), Thank You Lord (Old Homestead, 1976) and You Could Have Called (King Bluegrass, 1976), the last with Skaggs on mandolin and fiddle and Tommy Boyd on Dobro. In those years he also filled in with Jimmy Martin, Bill Monroe, James Monroe and the Russell Brothers’ Boogie Grass Band, among others.

Lilly and Miller had begun recording as a duo for Old Homestead while they were still with Sparks: New Grass Instrumentals (1972), a single the same year pairing “Windy Chimes” with “Pic-a-Lilly,” and Solid Grass (1973). Country Grass (1975), with Vernon McIntyre Jr. on rhythm guitar and Boyd on Dobro, and Hot n’ Grassy (1976) followed, and Country Grass became the name of the band the two led from the mid-1970s. In 1977 they joined the singer and guitarist Vernon McIntyre for Vernon McIntyre’s Appalachian Grass, with Lilly again singing baritone. By 1980 he was leading Mike Lilly & the Country Grass, with John Cox on guitar and lead vocals and Terry Johnson on mandolin, on The House on the Hill (Old Homestead, 1980); Looking for a New Way to Go followed on the same label in 1985.

In the early 1980s he teamed up with Harley Allen and worked with him for about five years. He played banjo on Allen’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains (Folkways, 1983), which also had J.D. Crowe, Vassar Clements and Josh Graves among its players, and the two shared the billing on Suzanne (Folkways, 1985). Tony Trischka and Pete Wernick included him in their book Masters of the 5-String Banjo (1988). After the years with Allen he gave up music as a career and drove trucks long-distance.

In 2010 he and Miller revived Country Grass, with Lilly on banjo and baritone, Miller on mandolin and tenor, Miller’s son Chris on guitar and lead vocals and Jeff Dotson on bass. His banjo style has been described as combining the chordal work of Don Reno, the drive of Earl Scruggs and the jazzier ideas of Eddie Adcock and Sonny Osborne, played with an aggressive right hand. He died in hospice care in Dayton on 12 February 2020.