Tony Ellis
Tony Ellis is a banjo player, fiddler and composer from Sylva, North Carolina, who played with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys from 1960 to 1962 and later, settled in Circleville, Ohio, made his name with original pieces for solo banjo. His albums include Dixie Banner (1987), and in 2003 he received the first Ohio Heritage Fellowship for the performing arts.
Paul Anthony Ellis was born in Sylva on 29 July 1939. His grandmother played the banjo, and as a small child he would ask her to play it for him at bedtime. He grew up wanting to play banjo for Bill Monroe, and in February 1960 he joined the Blue Grass Boys, staying about two and a half years and taking part in eight recording sessions that produced 25 sides.
At the first of them, on 3 December 1960 at Bradley Film & Recording Studio in Nashville, he played bass behind Carl Butler, Curtis McPeake and Dale Potter on “Big River,” “Flowers of Love,” “It’s Mighty Dark to Travel” and “Bluegrass Part 1.” From November 1961 he was the band’s banjo player on record: “Danny Boy,” “Cotton Fields” and “Journey’s End” on 30 November, and four days later the instrumentals “John Hardy,” “Bugle Call Rag” and “Old Joe Clark,” with Jimmy Maynard on guitar. Five sessions in April and May 1962, with Frank Buchanan on guitar and lead vocals, produced “Cheap Love Affair,” “Columbus Stockade Blues,” “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues” and “How Will I Explain About You,” along with gospel quartets including “Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” “On the Jericho Road,” “Somebody Touched Me” and “We’ll Understand It Better.”
He had resolved that any band of his own would not be a Monroe-style bluegrass band, and he became known for his own lyrical compositions, which he often plays alone. Dixie Banner, recorded in September 1985, mixed at TGS Studio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and issued by Flying Fish in 1987, has him on banjo and fiddle, with Bill Ellis on guitar, Jack Herrick on bass, mandolin and cello, Mike Craver on piano and pump organ, and Stephen Wade sitting in; Ellis wrote its title piece. Farewell My Home followed on Flying Fish in 1993 and Quaker Girl on County in 1998. With Dudley Connell, Lester Woodie and Tom Gray he made Sounds Like Bluegrass to Me (Copper Creek, 1999), recorded at Private Ear Recording in Hyattsville, Maryland, and he issued The Quest himself in 2005. In 1993 he toured with the National Council for the Traditional Arts’ Masters of the Banjo show, and Arhoolie issued an album from those concerts.
In Ohio he has composed more than 80 works and received eleven ASCAP awards. He has served as a master artist in apprenticeships funded by the Ohio Arts Council, represented Ohio folk music on international tours, and started an organization in Pickaway County that presents traditional musicians from around the world; he has performed and lectured in Japan, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles. His music has been used in several Ken Burns documentaries, and in 2003 he received the inaugural Ohio Heritage Fellowship for the performing arts. In 2011 he appeared in the PBS documentary Give Me the Banjo, narrated by Steve Martin, who had found Ellis’s recording of “The Wild Fox” online; the two played together in Minneapolis that June.
