Virginia

The Hill Billies

The first use of “hill billy” on a phonograph record was made less out of intention than convenience, when after their second recording session (the first had been a failure) Ralph Peer asked what he should call the group, and got the response “We’re nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. Call us anything.”  The band that would become, at turns, The Hill Billies, Al Hopkins’ Original Hill Billies, and Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters, was not initially at ease with the “hillbilly” appellation. It was considered, at best, humorously pejorative to these musicians who thought of themselves and their music as anything but unsophisticated.  Nonetheless, the name stuck and was greeted with good-natured approval back home.

The Hill Billies formed out of a Galax, Virginia barbershop in 1924, when guitarist Joe Hopkins went to get his hair cut and met barber Tony Alderman, who played the fiddle.  The two hit it off immediately, and soon Joe’s brother Al, a pianist, and John Rector, a local shopkeeper and banjo player, joined in.  Al became the leader of the group, considered distinctive for their incorporation of piano, an instrument not typically associated with the Appalachian fiddle tunes in which the group specialized.  By the late 1920s the group had recorded for OKeh (with Peer), Vocalion, and Brunswick, received substantial radio play, and become regulars at fiddler’s conventions, vaudeville shows, and political rallies.  In 1925 they added a second fiddle player, Charlie Bowman, to fill out their sound.  Their frequent appearances on Washington, D.C.’s WRC radio station may have strengthened the connection between the term “hillbilly” and the type of music listeners were hearing increasingly over the airwaves by the mid-1920s.

The Hill Billies recorded and performed under their various names until 1932, when Al Hopkins was killed in a car accident. (Cohen, 1998)

The track featured here, "Cripple Creek," is a classic fiddle tune to which the Hill Billies lend their distinctive sound and instrumentation. Many think the tune's origins lie with the Cripple Creek that flows through Grayson and Carroll Counties in Virginia, emptying into the New River. There is a town by the name of Cripple Creek south of Wytheville, in Wythe County adjacent to Grayson County, near Elk Creek and Bull Mountain (both in Grayson).

A father and leatherworker from the hills of southwest Virginia, James Cowan Powers won regional fame during his early life as a contest fiddler.  His fiddling style, inherited from his family, was built around double stops and remarkable bow dexterity. Upon the death of his wife, Mathilda, in 1916, he decided to take his family of four children on the road and form a string band. (The family included Charles, Ada, Oprha, and Carrie, and all were teenagers or younger when they started performing.) The band was soon playing professionally full-time, making a regular five-state circuit through Appalachia and doing especially well in coal towns of Kentucky and West Virginia. They were one of the first, maybe the first, to turn professional.

In August 1924 they travelled to Camden, New Jersey to make a series of recordings for the Victor Company--the first commercial recordings of a regular mountain string band that had been performing together outside of a studio. The records were commercially successful and were widely used in Victor's early advertising for old-time music. Later the group made recordings for Edison and Okeh Records, but as the family grew and began their own lives, Powers returned to performing as a fiddle soloist. He was still alive and actively playing for the Stanley Brothers when he died onstage at a concert in Saltville, Virginia in the early 1950s. (The Encyclopedia of Country Music, 2004)

The track featured here, "Ida Red," is a classic southwest Virginia fiddle tune. This tune was one of eleven recorded on the second day of recording in New York City on August 19, 1924.