Porter Church

He was born in Bristol on 17 April 1934. In the 1950s he played banjo in Ralph Mayo’s Southern Mountain Boys on WCYB’s Farm and Fun Time in Bristol, a band with Jack Cassidy, known as Blind Boy Jack, singing lead and Lindy Clear on bass; it made no recordings.

In the Washington area he joined Scotty, Donna and Jimmy Stoneman and the guitarist Jimmy Case in the Blue Grass Champs, which won a spot on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts on television with “Salty Dog Blues.” The band went on to guest regularly on Jimmy Dean’s television show, played the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree, and broadcast on WARL in Arlington and weekly on WEAM in Fairfax, Virginia. In 1957 Church played banjo with Charlie Waller on Buzz Busby’s Starday recording of “Lonesome Road.” He also played banjo with Wayne and Bill Yates’s Clinch Mountain Ramblers, which for a time worked shows with Patsy Stoneman. In 1960 he went to Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, playing banjo and guitar for part of the year, though he made no records with Monroe.

The same year Frank Wakefield came to Baltimore with the Dobro player Kenny Haddock, and when Red Allen reached the Washington area some months later, the three of them and Church began playing two D.C. clubs, Whitney’s and the Famous; that partnership grew into the Kentuckians. Church came back into Allen’s band in the mid-1960s. In the fall of 1965, with Scotty Stoneman on fiddle, he played on the Rebel single that Allen and the Yates brothers made of Allen’s “Keep On Going” and “Froggy Went a-Courtin’,” and on 3 December 1965, at Mastertone Studios in New York, Allen, Church and the Yates brothers recorded Bluegrass Country (County 704), issued in March 1966, with “Whose Shoulder Will You Cry On,” “That’s How I Can Count on You” and “Out on the Ocean.” In March 1966 he played on the band’s broadcast from WKCR at Columbia University, with David Grisman on mandolin, later issued in Japan and in 2011 by Acoustic Disc. On 17 September 1966, at the WBAI radio studio in New York, he was the banjo player on the band’s second County album, Red Allen and the Kentuckians (County 710), produced by Grisman, with Craig Winfield on Dobro and Jerry McCoury on bass, including “Love Gone Cold,” “If That’s the Way You Feel” and “No Mother or Dad.”

In 1987 he recorded with Allen and Grisman again, for Home Is Where the Heart Is, Grisman’s traditional bluegrass double album for Rounder, recorded in 1987 and released in 1988, which was nominated the following year for the first Grammy given for bluegrass. Church played banjo on the tracks with Allen, alongside Grisman, Jim Buchanan on fiddle and James Kerwin on bass. Porter Church died at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on 18 August 1995, aged 61.