Rual Yarbrough

Rual Holt Yarbrough was born on 13 January 1930 and grew up hearing Monroe on the radio. He taught himself the banjo, and he was working as a barber in Florence, Alabama, still learning the instrument, when the mandolin player Herschel Sizemore sat in his chair for a haircut and noticed a banjo in the corner. The two started a small band, and when the guitarist Jake Landers joined them they formed the Dixie Gentlemen in 1956.

The Dixie Gentlemen worked radio and television across the Southeast and recorded for several small labels, with Vassar Clements the best known of the fiddlers who played with them. In the spring of 1962, with Clements on fiddle and T. R. Campbell singing, they broadcast regularly on the I.E.H. Dixie Jamboree. United Artists issued The Country Style of the Dixie Gentlemen in December 1963, and on 13 November 1966, with Clements, Jesse Handley on bass and Tut Taylor on Dobro, they recorded Blues & Bluegrass for the Tune label, released in February 1967. In 1968 Yarbrough made a banjo album of his own for Tune, 5-String Banjo, with Landers, Sizemore and Clements. The group broke up in the late 1960s but the three stayed close and reunited from time to time, on Together Once More (Old Homestead, 1973), with Clements and James Bryan on fiddles, and later on Take Me Back to Dixie (Rutabaga, 1989).

After the Dixie Gentlemen he had a short stay with Jimmy Martin and then worked with Flatt & Scruggs, Jim & Jesse and Bobby Smith and the Boys from Shiloh. He was playing with Smith in Columbus, Ohio, when Bill Monroe, whose banjo player Vic Jordan had just left, offered him a job. Two days later, on 26 March 1969, he was at Columbia’s studio in Nashville for Monroe’s first duet with his son James, Damon Black’s “I Haven’t Seen Mary in Years,” with Kenny Baker and Red Hayes on fiddles; the same session produced “Fire Ball Mail” and “The Dead March.” In April came “With Body and Soul,” “Cripple Creek” and “Methodist Preacher.” At Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet that autumn he sang the bass part on “Walk Softly on My Heart,” a song his old partner Landers had written with Monroe, and on “Going Up Caney,” and played on “Tall Pines,” “Candy Gal” and “The Lee Weddin’ Tune.” In all he made more than twenty recordings with Monroe in 1969 and 1970.

His next band, Rual Yarbrough and the Dixiemen, was built around him and Landers, and between 1971 and 1978 the band made six albums for Old Homestead, from The Greatest Day of My Life (1971) and Secret of the Waterfall (1972) to The Old Oak Tree (1975), with Red Rector on mandolin, and the instrumental Bluegrass from Dixieland (1978). Under his own name he recorded Just Me (1976) and Banjo Gentleman (1982) for the same label, Old Time Revival (1982) with the singer and guitarist Julie York at Sweetwater Studios in Muscle Shoals, and, with Rector and the fiddler Joe Stuart, Rual, Red & Joe: Classic Bluegrass (2001). He was also an often uncredited session player in Nashville, on records by Hank Williams Jr. and Mac Davis among others.

He never entirely gave up barbering, and he repaired instruments and for a time ran a music shop, next to his barbershop, in Muscle Shoals. The Alabama Music Hall of Fame listed him among its Alabama Music Achievers. He died at home on 20 September 2010, and in 2011 he was inducted into the Alabama Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.