Raymond McLain
Raymond McLain is a banjo player, fiddler and tenor singer from Kentucky who has played in the McLain Family Band since his father started it in 1968, spent the 1990s on banjo with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys, and then became a teacher of bluegrass and old-time music. At East Tennessee State University he developed the first university major in traditional music in the country, and from 2010 to 2022 he directed the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music at Morehead State University.
Raymond Winslow McLain was born in 1953, the eldest child of Raymond Kane McLain, who in 1954 became director of the Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky and there introduced his three oldest children, Raymond, Alice and Ruth, to bluegrass. In 1968 the four formed the family band, first called Bluegrass State, with Raymond on banjo, Alice on mandolin, Ruth on bass and their father on guitar, and played a weekly television show on WKYH-TV for two years. In 1970 the family moved to Berea, where Raymond enrolled at Berea College and where his father taught the first college courses in bluegrass and Appalachian music. Raymond took nearly all the lead breaks in the band’s early years and added fiddle as the younger children joined.
The McLain Family Band toured the world for the State Department from 1972, when its first tour took it to Italy, West Germany and Belgium, and went on to play in all fifty states and more than sixty countries. It played Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Grand Ole Opry, ran its own festival near Berea from 1978 to 1987, and made more than 230 appearances as soloists with orchestras, often in Phillip Rhodes’s Concerto for Bluegrass Band and Orchestra (1973), written for them. Raymond and his father wrote “Kentucky Wind” while homesick on a South American tour, and Raymond wrote “Troublesome Creek,” about the stream at Hindman. He played on all of the band’s recordings for its own Country Life label.
When the family band stopped touring full time around 1990, he joined Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys on banjo. He is on their gospel album I’m Gonna Sing, Sing, Sing (Double J, 1990), recorded at Fox Farm in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with Glen Duncan on fiddle and Mike Stevens on harmonica; on Tribute to Bill Monroe: The Father of Bluegrass Music (AMI), with his brother Michael on guitar and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass; and on I Like the Old Time Way (Old Dominion, 1995). Touring with Jim & Jesse, he played the Grand Ole Opry more than a thousand times. He also recorded with Don Reno and Bill Harrell, Joe and Janette Carter and the Jordanaires, and made two albums of his own, A Place of My Own (1992), mostly his own instrumentals with fiddle tunes such as Howdy Forrester’s “Wild Fiddler’s Rag,” and Kentucky Mountain Banjo (Country Life, 1995). Later in the 1990s he formed the McLains with Michael and Michael’s wife, Jennifer, who made More Fun Than We Ought to Have for Pinecastle in 1999.
After teaching as adjunct faculty at Belmont University, he went to East Tennessee State University in 2000 as assistant director to Jack Tottle in its bluegrass program. He spent ten years there, five as director, and developed the country’s first university major in traditional music. At the start of 2010 he moved to Morehead State University to direct its Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, succeeding Don Rigsby; his sister Ruth also teaches there. He retired from Morehead in May 2022 to write, record and tour with the McLain Family Band again, and he is part of its core touring lineup with Ruth, Alice and her husband Al White, and the banjo player Daxson Lewis, who now directs the Morehead center. The band received the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2013 and was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2024.
