Raymond Fairchild

He was born on 15 March 1939 in Cherokee and lived most of his life around there; he was half Cherokee. He took up the banjo at eighteen, learning on a fretless instrument, and quickly picked up the three-finger style of Earl Scruggs, Don Reno and his fellow North Carolinian Snuffy Jenkins. As a young man he played for tips at a tourist shop run by Ted Sutton, whom he credited with teaching him how to entertain.

His first album, America’s Most Authentic Banjo, was made in 1963 for Ka$h, a label founded that year, with Roy Acuff’s band behind him. The same year Rural Rhythm issued King of the Smokey Mountain Banjo Players, the start of a long run of albums for the label. His first band, the Frosty Mountain Boys, is on Mama Likes Bluegrass Music (1966); it soon became the Maggie Valley Boys, a name he kept for the rest of his life, and their first album under that name came out in 1967. Later Rural Rhythm records include Honky Tonkin’ Country Blues (1971) and a 1976 series billed as by the “King of the 5-String Banjo,” recorded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1975 with the brothers Wallace and Wayne Crowe, which covered country favorites, old-time songs and gospel. Rural Rhythm kept these recordings in print, reissuing them on CD from the late 1990s.

In 1975 he joined Wallace “Josh” Crowe and Wayne Crowe, the Crowe Brothers, and the three played together until 1991, the brothers singing duets and Fairchild playing banjo at top speed, mixing the Scruggs and Reno styles. They first played the Grand Ole Opry in 1977. Records from those years include Picking & Singing in Maggie Valley (Atteiram, 1978), shared with Frank Buchanan, the Crowe Brothers’ Always True (Skyline, 1981), The Gospel Way (1984), The Winds Are Blowing in Maggie Valley (1985) and Jesus Is Coming (1988), and Fairchild’s own Skyline albums The Legendary Raymond Fairchild Plays “Little Zane” (1981), Raymond Fairchild Plays Requests (1985) and World Champion Banjo Plays John’s Dream (1987), several of them cut at the WES Sound Shop in Asheville. The novelty number “Whoa Mule” became one of his best-remembered pieces. In 1989 he made an album with Ralph Stanley for Rebel, Ralph Stanley & Raymond Fairchild.

After the trio ended he formed the New Maggie Valley Boys with his son Zane. His later albums include Me and My Banjo at Home in Maggie Valley (Atteiram, 1992), From the Old School with Robert White (1992), Swinging on the Old Swinging Bridge with Arthur Smith (CMH, 1993), Carolina Home (1995) and Smoky Mountain Christmas (Rural Rhythm, 2003). The Maggie Valley Opry House, which he and Shirley opened in 1988, ran each season from May through October, and in his last years it was nearly the only place he played. He won five world banjo championships, was voted into the Society for the Preservation of Blue Grass Music in America’s Hall of Greats, and in 2015 was elected to Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame in Bean Blossom, Indiana, where Larry Sparks welcomed him. He died on 13 October 2019, at 80, and his family closed the Opry House for good the next month, after 33 seasons.