Richard Underwood
Richard Underwood is a banjo player from Seabrook, Maryland, who played with the Johnson Mountain Boys from 1979 to 1986 and is on all six of the albums they made in those years. He came to the band from Buzz Busby’s Bayou Boys, wrote the instrumentals “Five Speed,” “Newton Grove” and “Johnson Mountain Chimes,” and is among the members named in the band’s 2020 induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
Richard Dean Underwood was born on 14 July 1956 in Seabrook. He first heard bluegrass on television, watching the Earl Scruggs Revue play “Nashville Blues,” and took up the banjo at fifteen with a teacher who used tablature. Before going full-time he played weekend jobs with two or three bands, and the most important of them was Buzz Busby’s Bayou Boys. Through Busby he met Dudley Connell, David McLaughlin and the bassist Gary Reid, who were starting the Johnson Mountain Boys and often helped Busby out when they had no dates of their own.
In the summer of 1979 Underwood replaced Frannie Davidson on banjo, and the lineup of Connell, Underwood, Eddie Stubbs, Ed D’Zmura and Larry Robbins stayed largely the same through the early and middle 1980s, with McLaughlin returning on mandolin in 1981. With them he recorded The Johnson Mountain Boys (Rounder, 1981), Walls of Time (1982), Working Close (1983), Live at the Birchmere, taped at the Alexandria club on 5 April 1983, the gospel We’ll Still Sing On (1985) and Let the Whole World Talk (1987), singing lead on some tracks as well as playing banjo. Those were the years in which the band played around 150 to 200 dates a year, with bookings at the White House, Madison Square Garden and the Grand Ole Opry and a 1984 tour of Africa. He left in October 1986, after recording Let the Whole World Talk, to take a nine-to-five job, and Tom Adams, recently of Jimmy Martin’s band, took his place.
During his Johnson Mountain years he also played on records by others: Phyllis Boyens’s I Really Care (1983), Hazel Dickens’s By the Sweat of My Brow (Rounder, 1983), Delia Bell and Bill Grant’s The Cheer of the Home Fires (1984) and A Few Dollars More (1985), Gloria Belle’s The Love of the Mountains (1986), which he also mixed, and Del and Jerry McCoury’s The McCoury Brothers (Rounder, 1987). Later he worked with Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass, on whose Steeped in Tradition (1998) he played, and with the Lynn Morris Band, the Seth Sawyer Band, the Scott Brannon Band, Seneca Rocks, the Zion Mountain Boys of Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Reunion Band of Boston. His “Five Speed” was recorded in 2025 by the banjo player Russ Carson on Songs That Birds Don’t Sing.
