Roby Huffman
Roby Huffman (1938–2012) was a tenor singer and guitarist from North Carolina who led Roby Huffman and the Bluegrass Cut-Ups from the late 1950s until shortly before his death. The band recorded for Sound City, Major and Grassound in the 1970s, made an album for Folkways with the banjo player Hugh Moore in 1985, and released four CDs after it was re-formed in the late 1990s.
Roby Leroy Huffman was born on 15 July 1938 in rural Burke County, North Carolina. In 1954 he moved east to the Smithfield area, looking for work in the cleanup after Hurricane Hazel, and Smithfield was his home for the rest of his life. He formed the Bluegrass Cut-Ups in the late 1950s, and his high tenor was the center of the band’s sound; listeners often remarked on how close it was to Bobby Osborne’s. The band toured, at times abroad, and Lorraine Jordan, later of Carolina Road, got her first professional bluegrass job with Huffman in the 1970s.
The Cut-Ups’ first album, Bluegrass from Carolina (Sound City, 1971), had Huffman singing tenor and playing guitar with Willie Lee on guitar, Pat Holland on mandolin, Jesse Harmon on banjo, Kenneth Glover on bass and Bob Creech on fiddle, on songs such as “Ruby,” “Rocky Top” and “Fox on the Run.” Al Batten played banjo with the band between 1968 and 1972 when Harmon could not. The same players, with Steve Wilson on dobro, made ‘Bacco Barn Pickin’ (Major, 1974) at Major Recording Studios in Waynesboro, Virginia, and Colorado River (Grassound, 1978) was cut at JRM Studio in Salem, Virginia, with Herschel Sizemore on mandolin, Kenneth Peade on banjo, Doug Francis on mandolin and guitar and Les Woodie on fiddle. There was also a single on East Coast Sound, “I’m So Lonesome” and “She Went Away and Left Me.”
In August 1985, at Star Recording in Millers Creek, North Carolina, Huffman and the Cut-Ups recorded Hello City Limits with Hugh Moore for Folkways. Moore was also in the band in 1996, with Huffman’s son Jeff on lead guitar, Tom Mendenhall on mandolin and Tim Ashley on bass, for an album that was never released. The band was reconstituted in 1997, and Jeff Huffman became its regular lead guitarist. Their CDs were Almost Level (2000) and One More Time (2002), both cut at Circle Sound Studios in Newton Grove with Daniel Casey on banjo, Mike Rose on mandolin and Ray Bridgers on bass, and Old Blue (2004) and the gospel album Meet Me Over Yonder (2007), both made at AudioFarm in Goldsboro.
In his last years Huffman played mostly at festivals, venues and churches near Smithfield, including more than a dozen shows at the R.A. Fountain music venue. He died in Smithfield on 29 December 2012, aged 74.
