Folk Music in Overdrive: A Primer on Traditional Country and Bluegrass Artists by Ivan Tribe (review)

Ivan Tribe is emeritus professor of history at the University of Rio Grande in Ohio. His histories of bluegrass and traditional country music, including Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (University of Kentucky Press, 1984), should be well known to fans and students of both genres.

Folk Music in Overdrive: A Primer on Traditional Country and Bluegrass Artists, Tribe’s latest effort, offers a wealth of information for those interested in learning about some of the artists of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s who influenced the sound of what ultimately came to be known as bluegrass music. It draws its title from the overly simplistic phrase used to describe bluegrass in a 1959 Esquire magazine article about the music.

The book is a collection of thirty-nine profiles of bluegrass and early country performers with varying levels of familiarity to even hard-core fans. All but two of the profiles were previously published in magazines dating back to the 1970s, the vast majority of which (thirty-two) appeared in Bluegrass Unlimited, and have been updated from their original publication dates.

These essays do not focus on the widely recognized pioneers of blue-grass music, such as Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs, but instead concentrate on perhaps underappreciated, though important names like Hylo Brown, Carl Story, Charlie Monroe, Curley Lambert, Chubby Wise, and Red Rector, plus others who sustained successful careers in bluegrass, country, and hybrid music styles. Others, such as Roy Hall, J. D. Jarvis, Billy Baker, Claude Boone, and Mel and Stan Hankinson—the Kentucky Twins, are more obscure but deserve acknowledgement for their contributions to the music. Some were flat-out country acts whose songs, styles, and/or subject matter were adapted and absorbed into the early bluegrass canon to become more closely associated with that music than with the original versions.

The Mountain State is present and accounted for in Folk Music in Overdrive with profiles of seminal West Virginia artists, such as Buddy Starcher, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, the Bailes Brothers, the Lilly Brothers, the Goins Brothers, and George “Speedy” Krise. More contemporary performers like Buddy Griffin and Joe Meadows are included, plus others who spent significant periods of their careers in West Virginia, such as Doc and Chickie Williams, and Molly O’Day and Lynn Davis.

Since the book is a compilation of self-contained articles, it is easy to skip around and read in order of preference. Reading more than a couple of profiles in one sitting was, for me, too much of a mental mosh pit of performer names, band names, and radio-station call letters—of which there is a heaping helping. For a variety of reasons bands in those days tended to go through members like a belt-fed machine gun goes through bullets. But thank goodness Tribe included them because they deserve credit for their involvement during the music’s formative period.

The book is also a testament to the huge role radio played in the 1930s, 40s and 50s in establishing artists and the music. Radio gigs in those days were like record deals in the 1960s and 70s. Artists presented live broadcasts often several times a day. They hopped from station to station and back again in search of steadier work, larger or fresh listening audiences, better pay and personal appearance opportunities, or to be closer to family. The book mentions several West Virginia radio stations notable for their presentation of locally and regionally important artists of the time, some of whom went on to achieve more widespread fame. These include WWVA in Wheeling, WCHS in Charleston, WMMN in Fairmont, WSAZ in Huntington, WJLS in Beckley, and WHIS in Bluefield.

In Folk Music in Overdrive, a few of the many deserving sidemen, band leaders, solo singers, composers, brother duets, husband-wife duets, and family bands receive recognition for their accomplishments in early blue-grass and traditional country music. The profiles...