Grandpa with Uncle Jim, 1930's? Grandpa Jim

Please note: This first draft (March, 2004) is really the beginning of a much more ambitious project I have in mind for my family musical heritage.

My mom's parents Beth and Jim, lived in New Hampshire for the first 20 years of my life. They moved to California in 1993 to the same town where I was attending college. Their presence in my life has had a profound impact on me and I am grateful for their decision to move west. In 1993 Grandpa played the mandolin. Despite his arthritis and 76 years of living, his enthusiam for pickin' was unabated. I set out to learn songs for us to play and visited frequently to play with him. His musical tastes were more broad than the songs we played together. I'd learn that later.

James Kenneth was born in eastern Kentucky in 1917 and lived there until WWII. His father Claude S. Wells was a fantastic fiddle player with local fame. My impression is that Claude turned away from a traditional mountain style in favor of less stylized, clean playing of contemporary songs. Uncle Jim (James Keaton), brother to Claude, played mandolin/banjolin and guitar. There was definetely family music and church music as well. A lot of that music was played in Claude's photography studio in West Liberty. It is rumored that later a very young Ricky Skaggs was around those parts learning the local tradition of old-time fiddling and spent some time in Claude's studio.

The siblings were also musical: Betsy played piano and organ, Louise played fiddle and piano, Arthur played mandolin, Lorene played guitar. Only glimpses into this oldest period of his life are known as Granpa wasn't known to go into any detail about this time. I recall only vague references to square dances and his father's skill. Grandpa was playing guitar in a band (Thomas Brossang Harmony) that traveled to Huntington, VA in 1934 or 1935 (nearly 500 miles!) and performed on a radio station there. He only recalled Russell Brown playing banjo and mandolin. I think that because his life was so long, and he was not really a reminiscent kind of person, that these stories had lost their sharpness by the 1990's.

By my estimation, the period from just prior to WWII to the 1950's, he didn't really pursue music as a player. In the 1950's he traded an instrument pickup he had (and probably built) to receive a ~1906 Martin bowl back mandolin. Joe Robichaud was a french-canadian fiddler who was probably quite good, and wanted to 'go electric' with his playing. He told my Granpa, "Here you take this. I can't get any music out of it." So in his 40's he began picking out tunes on his mandolin for his livingroom kicks. He recalled many of the tunes of his childhood, and particularly songs from the early 1930's when radio came to their household in Kentucky. He also picked out any melody that caught his fancy from a wide range of musical styles, but I'd rank 60's-70's country as some of his new favorites.

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Last updated: March 14, 2004