Tommy Neal

Born in York, he started taking an interest in music at thirteen or fourteen, studying Merle Travis and Chet Atkins and playing electric guitar in the Khedives, a rock ’n’ roll band at his Baltimore high school. Before he left school he had switched to bluegrass, and at sixteen he had his first paying job, with Oddie Jones and the Foggy Hollow Boys. Soon afterward, on 9 December 1967, he played bass on the first day of the sessions for Del McCoury Sings Bluegrass (Arhoolie, 1968), recorded at Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, with Bill Emerson on banjo, Wayne Yates on mandolin and Billy Baker on fiddle. In those early years he also practiced and played with the banjo player Walter Hensley, filled in on mandolin and banjo with Hensley’s Dukes of Bluegrass, and stood in for Don Reno with the Tennessee Cut-Ups.

With a wife and two children he chose steady work as a heavy-equipment operator and mechanic and kept music for the weekends. In the early 1970s he recorded with the group Pickin’ Around the Cookstove, whose Rounder album came out in 1975; his A-minor “John Hardy” from it was reissued on the Rounder CD Son of Rounder Banjo (1992). In the spring of 1973 he spent five months as the banjo player in Cliff Waldron and the New Shades of Grass and played on three sessions for the Rebel album Bluegrass Time, with Jimmy Arnold and Curly Lambert, including “Lost and I’ll Never Find the Way.” Afterward he played in Baltimore with Grass on the Rocks and Country Grass, and around 1977 he was the banjo player on the rare album Frank Campbell & the Country Blues.

In the early 1990s he worked with Jeff Presley’s South Central Bluegrass, and when that band broke up in the summer of 1993 he, Dick Laird and Carroll Swam formed Keystone, later renamed Bluestone. The band played festivals and halls in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, among them the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival and the DC Bluegrass Festival, appeared on the public-television series Song of the Mountains, and made five recordings, from Bluestone (1993) to What Goes On (Patuxent, 2015). He left the band in 2018.

Banjoland (Patuxent, June 2013) was his one album under his own name, recorded in three sessions with Michael Cleveland and Jon Glik on fiddle, Frank Solivan on mandolin, Russ Hooper on Dobro and Marshall Wilborn on bass. Its producer, the banjo player Mike Munford, heard in his playing a Scruggs and J. D. Crowe foundation with touches of Reno, Bill Keith and Alan Munde; Neal named Reno as his first influence. His own compositions include the instrumentals “Moonshine Run,” “Lincoln Highway” and “Tyler’s Tune” and the song “Calvary,” and his playing was also included on Patuxent’s Banjoland: The Patuxent Banjo Project (2014). He died on 11 January 2022, aged 73.