Ola Belle Reed

She was born Ola Wave Campbell on 17 August 1916, near Grassy Creek, and grew up in what is now Lansing, North Carolina, one of thirteen children of Arthur Harrison Campbell, a schoolteacher and storekeeper. Music ran through both sides of the family. Her grandfather Alexander Campbell was a Primitive Baptist preacher and fiddler; her father played fiddle, banjo, guitar and organ, and from 1910 into the 1920s led a local string band, the New River Boys and Girls, with his brother Dockery and sister Ellen; an uncle, Herb Osborne, sang mining songs from the West Virginia coalfields, and her mother and grandmother sang ballads. Her uncle Dockery Campbell taught her clawhammer banjo in the early 1920s.

The Depression drove the family north, and in 1934 they settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania, near the Mason–Dixon line, among other mountain families who had come looking for work. In 1936 Shorty Woods asked her to sing in his band, the North Carolina Ridge Runners, and she played banjo and sang with them until 1948 on local radio and at the music parks, carnivals and dances of the Maryland–Delaware–Pennsylvania area; their first radio program, on WILM in Wilmington, Delaware, came in 1939. In the mid-1940s Roy Acuff offered her a place in his band at $100 a week, and she turned it down. She married Ralph “Bud” Reed, a local harmonica player and guitarist, in 1949.

Her brother Alex Campbell came home from the Second World War and joined the Ridge Runners, and by the end of the 1940s the two had started their own band, the New River Boys and Girls, named after their father’s, with Ted Lundy on banjo, Deacon Brumfield on Dobro and John Miller on fiddle. In 1951 the Campbell and Reed families opened the New River Ranch, a music park near Rising Sun, Maryland, where the band played as house band on Sundays, opening for Flatt & Scruggs in the park’s first season and for Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Hank Williams and Grandpa Jones; young city musicians such as Ralph Rinzler and Mike Seeger came down to hear the music there. A heavy snow in 1958 brought down most of the buildings, and the band became the house band at Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania, where it stayed until about 1979.

Radio carried the music further. From 1949 she and Alex hosted Campbell’s Corner on WASA in Havre de Grace, Maryland, and in 1960 they opened a general store of the same name in Oxford, Pennsylvania, selling southern groceries, instruments and records, with a stage in the back from which the show was broadcast on WCOJ in Coatesville; in the mid-1960s the band also had a late-night hour on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. She and Alex ran the store until 1969, and the radio program lasted until 1984. Their first record was made in Washington, D.C., in 1960 for Don Owens, “Little Moses” on the Blue Ridge label, and in 1962 Alex Campbell, Ola Belle and the New River Boys, with Lundy, Brumfield, John Jackson on fiddle and Earl Wallace on bass, issued a run of singles on their own New River label that Starday collected on 16 Radio Favorites (1963); a second Starday album, Travel On, followed in 1965.

In 1965 the folklorists Henry Glassie and Gei Zantzinger came to the store and began recording her, and in 1969, when Pennsylvania was the featured state, the Campbell–Reed family band of Alex, Ola Belle, Bud, her son David and John Miller played the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall; they returned in 1972 and for the Bicentennial festival of 1976. Zantzinger recorded her at his home in Devault, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1972, with Bud, David and Miller, and Rounder released Ola Belle Reed in 1973. It set traditional pieces such as “Wayfaring Pilgrim” and “Billy in the Lowground” beside her own “High on a Mountain” and “My Epitaph,” and it brought her to a much wider audience. Folkways issued My Epitaph (1976), a documentary of her talk and songs made with the folk singer Kevin Roth, and All in One Evening (1978), with Bud and Roth; Rounder followed with Ola Belle Reed and Family (1977), which included “I’ve Endured,” written with David, and “Where the Wild, Wild Flowers Grow.”

Other musicians took up her songs. Del McCoury recorded “High on a Mountain” in August 1972 as the title song of his first Rounder album, issued in 1973, and later “I’ve Endured” on Del McCoury (Rebel, 1975); Hot Rize and Tim O’Brien recorded them too, and Marty Stuart’s country-rock “High on a Mountain Top,” from his 1992 album This One’s Gonna Hurt You, reached No. 24 on the country singles chart in 1993. Cathy Fink recorded her “Only the Leading Role Will Do,” and the New York band Ollabelle took its name from her.

A stroke in 1987 ended her performing career, and she died on 16 August 2002, a day before her eighty-sixth birthday. Smithsonian Folkways’ Rising Sun Melodies (2010) gathered her Folkways tracks with previously unreleased recordings from the 1972 and 1976 festivals, and in 2015 Dust-to-Digital published Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line, a book and two-CD set by Henry Glassie, Clifford Murphy and Douglas Dowling Peach. Lansing holds an annual festival in her honor.

• 1978: Honorary doctorate of letters, University of Maryland
• 1986: National Heritage Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
• 1988: Distinguished Achievement Award, International Bluegrass Music Association
• 2008: Honored as a “bluegrass pioneer,” with Bud, David and Ralph Reed Jr., at the International Bluegrass Music Museum, Owensboro, Kentucky
• 2009: Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame
• 2019: Ola Belle Reed (Rounder, 1973) added to the National Recording Registry (2018 class)