Renfro Proffitt

He was born Troy Leen Proffitt on 14 July 1950 in Richlands. He bought his first guitar at ten, got no further than a G chord and traded it for a pocket watch. A year later he bought another, and after hearing the Stanley Brothers’ “Orange Blossom Special” he set about finding all of their records he could and learning from them.

He was playing with a band called the Virginia Drifters when he had the chance to audition for the vacant guitar spot in the Clinch Mountain Boys, joining in on stage on “Will You Miss Me.” He joined in the spring of 1976, taking over the lead guitar from Dan Marshall, and Bluegrass Unlimited announced him in August 1976 as the band’s newest member. Proffitt said that Stanley named him “Renfro” when the band was traveling through Renfro Valley, Kentucky.

One of his first recorded appearances with the band was at the Tall Trees Bluegrass Festival in Modoc, Indiana, on 16–18 July 1976, released by King Bluegrass on a various-artists album, with Stanley, Whitley, Cline and Ed Harris on bass. In 1977 he played lead guitar on Curly Ray Cline’s Rebel album It’s “Bread and Water” for Curly Ray Cline, with Cline on fiddle, Whitley on guitar, Stanley on banjo and Cooke on bass; its twelve tracks run from “Pikeville Jail” and “Blackberry Blossom” to “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” On 12 May 1977, at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, the band recorded Clinch Mountain Gospel (Rebel SLP-1571), with Stanley on banjo, Whitley and Proffitt on guitars, Danny Marshall on mandolin, Cline on fiddle and Cooke on bass. Its songs include “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” “Oh Death,” “Traveling the Highway Home,” “Amazing Grace,” “Are You Afraid to Die” and “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest).” He also appears on Freeland’s Classic Gospel (1996).

He left the Clinch Mountain Boys at the end of 1977. In the 1980s he played and recorded with the Keen Brothers, Carnice, Remus and Phillip, a group heavily influenced by the Stanley Brothers, and appears on their Bluegrass from the Mountain (Old Homestead, 1983), and in later years he was a member of the Big Sandy Bluegrass Boys. In 2018 he was given the Blueridge Carter Stanley Memorial Guitar. He died on 25 July 2019 in Ashland, Kentucky, aged 69.