Foggy Mountain Troubadour: The Life and Music of Curly Seckler by Penny Parsons, and: Dwight Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician by Lewis M. Stern (review)

There has been a flood of studies of country music since the original publication of Bill C. Malone's groundbreaking Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, 1968). Since that book's influential appearance, Malone has followed with updated editions as well as numerous more specialized studies, focusing on country music's southern commercial musicians and the genre's broader developments. Penny Parsons's biography of Curly Seckler, based on extensive interviews, follows in this tradition, while Lewis M. Stern's study of Dwight Diller deals mostly with a musician who had a brief professional career but had much more grassroots influence.

Born on Christmas Day, 1919, in China Grove, North Carolina, John Ray "Curly" Seckler has over the last century mostly led a professional country music life, with a few detours. Raised on a farm with few amenities, the Sechler (the original spelling) family struggled through the seemingly prosperous 1920s into the Depression of the 1930s. Listening to country music over various radio stations, particularly WBT in Charlotte, Seckler and his brothers were influenced by the Mainer's Mountaineers and the Tennessee Ramblers. Their family band, the Yodeling Rangers, began performing on Salisbury's WSTP in April 1939, one of the many stations (North and South) that featured string bands and other country-style performers. Within a few months Charlie Monroe hired Seckler, mostly because of his distinctive tenor voice, to appear on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, with his new band the Kentucky Partners. Seckler, however, was soon back with his brothers, forming a new group called the Trail Riders, and then he moved to WAIM to perform with Tommy Scott on the mandolin, which became Seckler's standard instrument. There were scores of country music stations, mostly in the South, that featured musical groups and programs, and Foggy Mountain Troubadour: The Life and Music of Curly Seckler includes fascinating details about them as Seckler's career accelerated. World War II briefly interrupted, but Seckler rejoined Charlie Monroe and the Kentucky Partners, and they began recording for RCA Victor in 1946. For the remainder of the 1940s Seckler performed with various noted musicians, including Malcolm B. "Mac" Wiseman, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the highly influential Foggy Mountain Boys, and the popular Stanley Brothers.

Foggy Mountain Troubadour contains interesting aspects of the history of country music throughout the 1950s, focusing on the Foggy Mountain Boys. Parsons gives their detailed history, particularly following Seckler's return in 1952 after a brief respite; the group settled in Nashville in 1955, but they continued their extensive touring. Seckler was dismissed from the band in 1962, although he performed extensively with various partners until joining Flatt and the Nashville Grass in 1972, playing until the 1990s (though Flatt had died in 1979). While reaching an advanced age, Seckler continued to record and perform well into the twenty-first century, earning many awards along the way. Parsons started working with Seckler in 2005 as his manager and booking agent, although she had begun interviewing him two years earlier. She has produced a fascinating, personal history of almost a century of country music and its countless professional musicians.

Stern's biography of Dwight Diller, based on extensive quotations from Diller's autobiographical writings, focuses on an influential banjo instructor who had a scant professional life but who represents a much wider swath of country music history than Curly Seckler. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1946, Diller began learning the five-string banjo from Hamp Carpenter in 1968. He soon began...