Tommy Cordell
Tommy Cordell (1957–2022) was a fiddler from St. Albans, West Virginia, who played in Dave Evans and River Bend in the early 1980s, recording three albums with them for Rebel, and then moved to Florida, where he played with Big Timber Bluegrass and made a fiddle album of his own, Florida Blues (1987).
Thomas Cordell was born in St. Albans on 2 March 1957. His father, a truck driver, played guitar for square dances at the American Legion Hall, and Tommy started on guitar at five and kept it as his main instrument until he was seventeen, when he began playing a fiddle that belonged to a member of his father’s band. He took a few lessons from the West Virginia champion fiddler Clark Kessinger and learned what he could from records, with another local fiddler, Mike Humphreys, nearby to learn from.
In the late summer of 1977, while working as a pipefitter at Union Carbide, he joined Bluegrass Heritage, a new band led by Jim Gabehart and the guitarist and singer Bob Ashley. Over the next couple of years he also played with the Wriston Brothers from southern Ohio, with Free Spirit, with the High Time Picken Band and with Don Sowards’s Laurel Mountain Boys, alongside Paul Adkins, at places such as the Mountaineer Opry House in Milton and the Rose Garden Inn near Hurricane. He then left Carbide to join Dave Evans and River Bend and play music full time.
He stayed with Evans for three years. On Goin’ Round This World (Rebel, 1981), recorded at Riverside Sound Studios in Ashland, Kentucky, with Clancy Fields on guitar, Larry Johnson on mandolin and the teenage Kevin Williamson on bass, he played on songs such as “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way” and Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty”; he also sang tenor on A Few More Seasons (1982), whose songs include “Somebody Touched Me” and “Working on a Building,” and played on Poor Rambler (1983). Brief spells followed with Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers and with the Boys from Indiana.
In 1984, playing in North Carolina, he met the Orlando musician Jim Fee, and that led him to Florida and Big Timber Bluegrass, the band Chubby Anthony had led until his death in 1980. On its album Bluegrass on My Mind (A & O, 1985), cut at Arrandem Studio in Hawthorn, Florida, he played fiddle, lead guitar and mandolin and sang. In February 1987 he recorded Florida Blues in Orlando for Old Homestead, a set of well-known fiddle tunes such as “Lee Highway Blues” with John Stineman on guitar, Dennis Bowling on banjo, Allen Eisenman on mandolin and Larry Plyler on bass. In June 1990 he and Big Timber Bluegrass toured for a month, playing the Station Inn in Nashville and the International Country Music Fan Fair, and for a time he led his own Fiddlin’ Tommy Cordell Band. He died in Florida on 30 September 2022, aged 65.
