Vic Jordan

Victor Howard Jordan was born on 19 October 1938 in Washington, D.C., and served in the U.S. Air Force. After moving to Nashville in 1964 he worked first for Jimmy Martin, cutting three songs with him, and was one of three banjo players, with Bill Emerson and J. D. Crowe, on Martin’s album Big and Country Instrumentals (1967). He then played with Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper.

In the summer of 1967 he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and stayed about eighteen months, recording nine songs and instrumentals at Columbia’s studio in Nashville with Roland White on guitar and James Monroe on bass. On 23 August 1967, with Byron Berline on fiddle, the band cut “The Gold Rush,” “Sally Goodin’” and “Virginia Darlin’”; on 9 November, with Benny Williams and Vassar Clements, “Is the Blue Moon Still Shining?,” “Train 45 (Heading South)” and “Kentucky Mandolin”; and on 14 November 1968, with Kenny Baker, “I Want to Go With You,” “Crossing the Cumberlands” and “Walls of Time.” He also played on Baker’s Portrait of a Bluegrass Fiddler (1969), and he was back with Baker in March 1976 for Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe.

He left Monroe in late February or early March 1969, and he and Roland White, independently, both tried out for Lester Flatt’s new band, the Nashville Grass. Jordan stayed until 1971, alongside Josh Graves on Dobro, White on mandolin, Jake Tullock on bass and Paul Warren on fiddle, on Flatt’s Columbia sessions of 1969, the Nugget album The One and Only Lester Flatt (1970) and the RCA Victor albums Flatt on Victor and Lester ’n’ Mac with Mac Wiseman (both 1971) and On the South Bound (1972). It was while driving Flatt’s bus one night that White saw a road sign for Pickaway, West Virginia, at three in the morning and suggested the name for Jordan’s new banjo instrumental. The instrumental has since been recorded by many others, the Seldom Scene among them on Live at the Cellar Door (1975).

From 1972 to 1974 he played with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys, on The Jim & Jesse Show (Old Dominion, 1972) and Superior Sounds of Bluegrass (1974), and he played on the fiddler Jim Brock’s first album, Sawdust from the Bow of Jim Brock (Atteiram, 1974). His own album Pickaway came out on Atteiram (API 1027) in 1973, followed by Banjo Nashville (Sugar Hill SH 3704) in 1978 and a banjo album of Christmas songs, Greatest Christmas Songs of Our Land (Power Pak, 1981). Players learning the melodic, scale-based style that was then loosely called “chromatic” studied pieces such as his “Jordan’s Hornpipe,” which runs ascending and descending patterns in G and C.

From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s he worked mainly as a session musician, on guitar as well as banjo, for artists including Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Jr., the Oak Ridge Boys, Jerry Reed and Loretta Lynn, and he played banjo on the soundtracks of Smokey and the Bandit and Coal Miner’s Daughter. He rejoined Jim & Jesse in the late 1980s and is on their Rounder album Music Among Friends (1991). In the 1990s he led his own band, Old Hickory, played in the show band for Hee Haw in 1992 and toured with Wayne Newton in Las Vegas and Branson before going back to session work in Nashville. He received IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2013, and he died in Nashville on 26 August 2016, aged 77.