Lonesome Pine Fiddlers – Windy Mountain
One of bluegrass music’s first bands, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers actually started out in the late 1930s, adopting the bluegrass sound when a young Bobby Osborne and banjoist Larry Richardson joined in 1949. They cut four of the pair’s songs for a small West Virginia label in early 1950, and by 1952 had made the leap to RCA, waxing 22 sides in Nashville between 1952 and 1954. Subsequently signed to Starday, the group survived into the 1960s, when its members finally scattered for good. As this collection of their Cozy and RCA material shows, they left an important legacy.
Given the fluid, marginal state of the music even then, personnel changes were unsurprisingly frequent, with founder and bassist Ezra Cline the only constant. Yet the Fiddlers never wanted for strong lead singers, and this accounts for a considerable part of the music’s muscle. When Osborne left, he was replaced by Paul Williams, who would go on to become Jimmy Martin’s tenor singer and one of bluegrass’ greatest songwriters; when he left, Melvin Goins — still active today — stepped up to the plate. Ably supported by fiddler Curly Ray Cline (later Ralph Stanley’s right-hand man in the Clinch Mountain Boys), Ray Goins and Charlie Cline on banjo and a variety of mandolinists, they delivered stout, impassioned leads backed by ever more precise and polished harmonies.
Indeed, there’s considerable value in these recordings for no other reason than their portrait of a band working hard — and successfully — at nailing down their music when the pattern was not nearly as fixed as it sometimes seems to be today. And there’s a lot of just plain good music here, too, much of it written within the band. The Clines’ “Honky Tonk Blues” (1953), for instance, is every bit as good a song, and performance, as Hank Williams’ better-known tune of the same name, while “My Brown Eyed Darling”, “Windy Mountain”, “No Curb Service” and more are repeatedly, if infrequently, revisited by later generations. Anyone looking for deeper insight into the genre’s early strengths ought to make a beeline for this one.