Tom Morgan

He was born at Morgan Springs on 19 April 1932 and heard country music early on stations such as WDOD, WDXB and WSM, home of the Grand Ole Opry, and from neighbors such as the banjo player Ed Cullis. In 1950 he enrolled at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he began playing upright bass and guitar and met country musicians and radio personalities such as Lowell Blanchard and Cas Walker. He then enlisted in the Air Force, serving from 1952 to 1972; after short postings in Texas and New York he was assigned to Washington, where he worked as a medic at Walter Reed and lived in Arlington, Virginia, and Takoma Park, Maryland.

His first professional work there was with Buzz Busby, singing lead and playing guitar on Busby’s radio program over WARL in the mid to late 1950s. He was the original bass player of the Country Gentlemen, after a very brief try with Larry Leahy, and he is on the band’s first record, “Going to the Races” backed with “Heavenward Bound,” recorded at WARL in Arlington in October 1957 and issued on the Dixie label, with Charlie Waller on guitar, John Duffey on mandolin, Bill Emerson on banjo and John Hall on fiddle. On “Going to the Races” he sang the bass part.

By 1961 he was the regular bass player of Red Allen and Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians, and in 1961 and 1962 he was on their Sunday afternoon show over WDON in Wheaton, Maryland. He lent Allen his own Martin D-45, and Allen played it on all his recordings from 1960 to 1964. Morgan is on bass on the band’s 1963 recordings at Wynwood Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, with Pete Kuykendall on banjo, which Patuxent issued in 2014 as The WDON Recordings, 1963; on one of them, “I Guess I’ll Go On Dreaming,” he sang lead. He also played on the September 1963 Wynwood sessions for the Folkways LP Bluegrass (1964), adding the bass voice to “Shake Hands with Mother Again,” and on “Little Birdie” and “Faded Memory,” issued by Rebel in 1963, with Bill Emerson on banjo and Billy Baker on fiddle.

In May 1963 he made six recordings of his own at Ben Adelman’s studio in Takoma Park, singing and playing bass, with Red Allen on guitar, Bill Emerson on banjo, Frank Wakefield on mandolin, Carl Nelson on fiddle and Kenny Haddock on resonator guitar, and with Allen and Emerson singing harmony. They stayed in storage for twenty years, until Folkways issued them in 1983 as Bluegrass with Family and Friends, alongside seven tracks recorded with his family on 3 December 1982 at Vassar’s Recording Studio in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The album includes “Red Wing,” “Take Me Back to Happy Valley,” “Farewell Blues” and “Dixie Breakdown,” and his own liner notes tell the story of the sessions and of the instruments he built for himself and his family.

In the Washington years he became known as an instrument builder and repairman. He built necks for the banjos of local players, made several mandolins and a number of f-hole autoharps, and repaired and maintained instruments for many of the players who passed through. Besides the Country Gentlemen and the Kentuckians, he performed in that period with Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Bill Harrell, Mike Seeger, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, and he did studio work on other artists’ sessions.

When he retired from the Air Force in 1972 he returned to family land at Morgan Springs, kept building and repairing instruments, and led a family band with his wife, Mary, and their sons, Thomas and George. In 1977 the fiddler Curly Fox joined his band. The family recorded LPs for Davis Unlimited and Folkways, and Morgan helped organize the Chattanooga Area Friends of Folk Music. Later he performed around Chattanooga on guitar with Lynne Haas on autoharp and a grandson on mandolin, about two dozen shows a year. In October 1997 he played bass in a Kentuckians reunion set at the IBMA convention in Owensboro, Kentucky, with Frank Wakefield, Pete Kuykendall and Harley Allen, who filled in for his father, Red Allen. From 2009 he gave his papers and photographs to the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, which reissued his album Music from Morgan Springs on its Spring Fed label in 2015.

Tom Morgan died at his home in Morgan Springs on 26 September 2024, aged 92.