Pete Kuykendall

Peter Van Kuykendall was born in Washington on 15 January 1938 and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. His mother taught piano, and he played clarinet in his junior high and high school concert bands before turning to boogie-woogie and then to country and bluegrass, which he heard at night on WARL in Arlington, WGAY in Silver Spring and WWVA in Wheeling. Earl Scruggs’s banjo on the radio made him want to play the instrument, and he learned banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle and bass. He was also a record collector from his teens, and in the 1950s he wrote a bluegrass column and some of the first discographies of Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley and the Stanley Brothers for Disc Collector; the historian Neil Rosenberg later called him the first discographer of bluegrass music.

In the mid-1950s he played with the Log Cabin Boys and with the husband-and-wife act Benny & Vallie Cain, who moved him from fiddle to banjo; because they found his Dutch surname hard to say, he performed and later wrote songs as Pete Roberts. In 1956 he won the banjo contest at the National Country Music Contest in Warrenton, Virginia. After high school he studied at the Capitol Radio and Electronics Institute, and in 1957 he took a job as a disc jockey and engineer at WKIK in Leonardtown, Maryland.

He was around the Country Gentlemen from their first nights in 1957, playing bass at first, and he is on their earliest Starday records: on bass at the December 1957 session, singing tenor and playing lead guitar on “The Church Back Home,” which he wrote with John Duffey, in 1958, and singing lead on his own “Rollin’ Stone” that November. When Bill Emerson left he took over the banjo, and he played it at the band’s session of May 1959, which produced “I’ll Never Marry” and “Nobody’s Business.” A job at the Library of Congress, transferring field recordings from discs and cylinders to tape, ended his time as a regular member, and Eddie Adcock took the banjo. He stayed close to the band, though, finding old songs for its radio shows, contributing his own songs and later engineering many of its records.

In the early 1960s he built Wynwood Recording Studio in the basement of his house in Falls Church, Virginia, and founded Wynwood Music to publish songs. At Wynwood he recorded bluegrass, country and blues: the Country Gentlemen’s Mercury album Folk Session Inside was made there in September 1963, with Kuykendall himself on guitar on “The Galveston Flood” and banjo on “This Morning at Nine,” and the band’s June 1964 sessions there were issued much later as Nashville Jail. He played banjo with Red Allen, Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians, recording with them at Wynwood in 1963. For the Melodeon and Piedmont labels he recorded the country blues singers Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and the Rev. Robert Wilkins, none of whom had recorded since the 1920s or 1930s, and Wynwood secured copyrights on their songs. From 1965 he worked as an engineer at WETA-TV.

His songs include “Journey’s End,” first recorded by Red Allen’s band; “Remembrance of You” and “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest),” recorded by the Country Gentlemen; “Down Where the Still Waters Flow,” “No Blind Ones There” and “Out on the Ocean.” The Cox Family’s recording of “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)” was featured in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

On a spring evening in 1966, at the Kuykendalls’ house, he met with the radio host Gary Henderson, Dick Freeland of Rebel Records, Dick Spottswood of Melodeon and the listeners Dianne and Vince Sims to start a mimeographed newsletter listing bluegrass shows in the Washington–Baltimore area; it became Bluegrass Unlimited. In 1970 Wynwood’s royalties from Cream’s recording of Skip James’s “I’m So Glad” and the Rolling Stones’ version of Wilkins’s “Prodigal Son” let him leave his television job, become the magazine’s editor and turn it into a full-time monthly with reviews, show listings and profiles. He ran it as editor and general manager for nearly forty years. From 1972 to 1980 the magazine, under his direction, staged the Indian Springs Bluegrass Festival near Hagerstown, Maryland, seventeen times; it included Bill Clifton’s first American appearance after years abroad. Rebel Records’ David Freeman credited the magazine with spreading word of the music at a low point and helping to move it beyond the barrooms where it had been heard in the 1950s.

Kuykendall was one of the founders of the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1985 and served on its board, and he was instrumental in founding the International Bluegrass Music Museum in 1991. In 1996 he was elected to the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, the same year as the Country Gentlemen. He died on 24 August 2017 at a nursing center in Warrenton, Virginia, at seventy-nine.

• 1956 – banjo contest winner, National Country Music Contest, Warrenton, Virginia
• 1996 – International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame