Ted Lundy

He was born in Galax on 26 January 1937, in the Grayson County fiddle-and-banjo country that had produced the old-time fiddler Emmett Lundy. He learned guitar and banjo young, playing the banjo first in his father’s clawhammer style before switching to the three-finger style of Earl Scruggs. He worked with Jimmy Williams and the Shady Valley Boys, and in 1959 he filled in on banjo with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Like many families from the Galax area, the Lundys moved north to the corner of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland for work, and Lundy brought the local banjo and fiddle music with him.

In the Wilmington area he played banjo with Alex Campbell, Ola Belle Reed and the New River Boys, and he is on their Starday album Travel On (1965), with Campbell on guitar, Reed on banjo, John Jackson on fiddle and Earl Wallace on bass. His own band, the Southern Mountain Boys, started with Fred Hannah on mandolin, Bob Paisley on guitar and his cousin Jerry Lundy on fiddle. In 1962 Campbell’s New River label issued a four-song EP credited to Ted Lundy, Fred Hanna and the Southern Mountain Boys, with Lundy singing “Never Been So Lonesome,” “Please Don’t Honey Please,” “Dark Hollow” and “Poor Ellen Smith.” From around 1964 he and Paisley worked the area together as a team.

The band’s first LP, issued by GHP in Germany in 1972, set Lundy’s banjo beside Paisley’s guitar, Jerry Lundy’s mandolin, Joe Edd King and Wes Rineer on bass, and mixed fiddle tunes such as “Dusty Miller” and “Ryestraw” with songs including “Prison Walls of Love” and “I’ve Never Been So Lonesome.” For Rounder the band recorded The Old Swinging Bridge in August 1972 (released 1973), with Jerry Lundy now on fiddle and John Haftl on mandolin, and Slipping Away (1976), on which Lundy and Paisley shared the lead singing, with Don Eldreth on mandolin and baritone. At the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival in 1973 he sang lead on “I’ll Go Stepping Too” and played “Mountain Sally Ann” with Jerry Lundy’s fiddle. By the last LP, Lovesick and Sorrow (Rounder, 1978), the next generation had come in: Paisley’s son Danny sang lead, Lundy’s son T. J. played mandolin, and Lundy sang harmony and played banjo.

Ted Lundy died on 23 June 1980. Paisley kept the band going as Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass, and Ted’s sons T. J. and Bobby stayed with it into its later form, Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass. In 2012 Old Blue Records reissued the GHP recordings with additional tracks on the CD Ted Lundy & the Southern Mountain Boys.