Nolan Faulkner

He was born Lee Nolan Faulkner on 18 June 1932 in the Bear Pen community southwest of Campton, in Wolfe County, Kentucky, and grew up on the family farm. Music came into his life in 1946. He started on guitar before moving to mandolin, learning from Pee Wee Lambert on WCYB and Bill Monroe on WSM. His first band experience was playing pie suppers with the King Boys; at sixteen he took over as guitarist in the Powell County Boys, a trio with Harold Booth and Ramah Boyd, on the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance over WVLK in Lexington. In the early 1950s he joined Dallas Riddell’s Kentucky Troubadours, still on guitar, and picked up two-string harmony playing from the band’s mandolinist, Johnnie Johnson.

In the 1950s he followed his brother Jim to Brighton, Michigan, where he worked fifteen years for a gravel company and bought a new Silvertone mandolin. He played and recorded with Red Ellis and his Huron Valley Boys; Ellis was then a disc jockey on WHRV in Ann Arbor. Around May 1963 the band cut two Christmas songs Faulkner wrote with the Dobro player Bill Carpenter, “Christmas Is Not Far Away” and “Home for Christmas,” and he sang on “Two Little Rosebuds,” issued on Ellis’s Starday album Old Time Religion Bluegrass Style (1964). Through the 1960s he made singles for small labels, among them Sun-Ray, with Carpenter, and Irma, which issued his “Alimony Blues” with Ed Bryant and the Big Sandy Boys in 1969. University of Michigan students passed through his band the Big Sandy Boys, among them Doug Green, later of Riders in the Sky, and Andy Stein of Commander Cody.

In the early 1970s he met the Kentuckian Earl Miller in a tavern in the Walled Lake area and joined him and his brothers Charlie and James as the Miller Brothers, playing a bluesy, barroom bluegrass in the style of twenty years earlier. Faulkner said of it, “you kind of played the way you felt.” The band recorded for Jessup of Jackson, Michigan, and Old Homestead of Brighton, including Detroit Blues (1973) and Bluegrass Sound of the Miller Brothers (1974). On The Legendary Kentucky Mandolin of Nolan Faulkner (Old Homestead OHS 90064) he wrote all but one of the pieces. He was much in demand for sessions in the 1970s, sometimes uncredited, with Lee Allen, Wendy Miller and Mike Lilly, Bob Smallwood, Larry Sparks, Wade Mainer, Joe Meadows, Clyde Moody, Charlie Moore and John Hunley’s Kentuckians, and late in the decade he filled in with the Case Brothers.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he played with John Hunley and his Lost Kentuckians at their home base, the Jack Daniel’s Lounge in Lincoln Park, and traveled and recorded with Roy McGinnis and the Sunnysiders and Robert White and the Candy Mountain Boys. With James Miller, a close friend and musical partner for the rest of his life, he made Nolan Faulkner and James Miller (Old Homestead, 1981) and two cassettes, Land of the Thoroughbred (1990) and From the Heart of Bluegrass (1991). In 2012 he started the Cass Valley Ramblers with Dana Cupp. His other songs include “Empty Cradle,” “Playing Hard to Get,” “Lonesome Wind” and “Lexington Girl.” He returned to Kentucky late in life and died at Fancy Farm.