Ray Park

He was born in 1933 in a log cabin on Moccasin Creek in Treat, Arkansas. The cabin had no electricity, and the music he heard was what his parents played on banjo and fiddle, along with his Uncle Joe Tommy and the neighbors who gathered for hoedowns. When he was eight his parents bought him a fiddle and taught him the music of the Ozarks. The family moved to Stockton, California, in 1941, but he spent his early years between the two places, and in his early teens he played hoedowns and square dances in Arkansas with his older brother and cousins.

Back in Stockton in 1950, at seventeen, he worked in the shipyards and played fiddle for bands in the San Joaquin Valley. Through most of the 1950s he played fiddle and steel guitar with Logan Laam and the Happy Hayseeds, who were on KGDM radio for seven years and on Channel 13 television for one. In 1955 he signed with Capitol as a solo country act and recorded four songs in Hollywood; only one was released, his version of Tommy Collins’s “You’re Gonna Have to Bawl, That’s All,” which reached No. 40 on the country chart.

The next year he bought an Ampex tape recorder to make records of his own, and that led him to Vern Williams, who had been recommended to him as a singer. The two became regular jammers, played together in a country band at the Saturday dances at the Oak Grove pavilion east of Stockton, and made their first appearance as a duo at a New Year’s Eve dance in Wallace. With a banjo player added they had a bluegrass band, which found work on a television show from Oakland and backing touring stars such as Little Jimmy Dickens and Mac Wiseman. In March 1961, as the Carroll County Country Boys, they recorded four numbers for a Starday EP, with Park on fiddle: “Cabin on a Mountain,” “Carroll County Breakdown,” “Bluegrass Style” and “Thinking of Home.”

Constant changes of personnel made them stop for a while in 1964. Rick Shubb joined on banjo in 1965 and Herb Pedersen in 1966, and in 1967 the band went to Nashville to try to make a full-time living. The work was not there, and after eighteen months Park went back to California, with Williams following. A set they played with Pedersen at the San Francisco State folk festival in 1968 was issued by Arhoolie in 2006 as San Francisco 1968.

Around 1970 Park took the fourteen-year-old banjo player Keith Little under his wing and introduced him to his son Larry and to Williams’s son Delbert; the three formed a band that played the intermissions at Vern and Ray shows. The duo’s only album, Sounds from the Ozarks (Old Homestead, 1974), had Park on guitar, Williams on mandolin and Pedersen and Shubb on banjo, and Park wrote most of it, including “Old Dick Potter,” “How Many Times,” “Flying Cloud” and “To Hell with the Land.” The partnership ended that year.

Park worked with many West Coast bluegrass and country bands. He played fiddle on the New Riders of the Purple Sage albums Oh, What a Mighty Time and Marin County Line and on Pedersen’s first solo album, Southwest, and in 1982 he recorded Fiddletown (Sierra), a solo album of a dozen of his own fiddle pieces. In September 1980 he fiddled with the Vern Williams Band behind Rose Maddox on This Is Rose Maddox (Arhoolie). He taught his sons Larry and Cary fiddle and guitar, and both later played in the country band Boy Howdy. He and Williams reunited off and on for two decades, the last time in 1999 at the Wolf Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley, California, with Pedersen. Ray Park died on 15 May 2002.

• 1973: California State Old-Time Fiddlers Championship
• 1975: special award from the California Bluegrass Association to Vern and Ray, for promoting bluegrass in California
• 1997: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award, with Vern Williams