Hill Billies

This eclectic band played music rooted in the Southern Appalachians and was founded by banjo player John Rector (b. c. 1900, USA, d. 28 August 1985, USA), who owns a general shop in Fries, Virginia. Rector documented in NY for OKeh Information with Henry Whitter and Adam Sutphin as Whitter’s Virginia Breakdowners. In Galax, Virginia, in 1924, Rector noticed guitarist Joe Hopkins, his vocalist sibling, Al Hopkins (b. 1889, d. 1932) and fiddler Alonzo Elvis ‘Tony’ Alderman (b. 1900, d. 1983), and persuaded these to record with him in NY. The Victor Documenting Company slice the initial sides with the up to now unnamed music group of whom Al Hopkins was nominal head. Due to poor mike placement, the outcomes were technically insufficient. The group came back to NY in January 1925, this time around to OKeh, where A&R guy Ralph Peer impulsively called the music group the Hill Billies carrying out a joking remark created by Al Hopkins. One of the primary pieces recorded had been ‘Silly Costs’ and ‘Aged Period Cinda’ and in Apr they also trim ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘Sally Ann’. Various other music in the music group’s repertoire had been ‘Fisher’s Hornpipe’, ‘Dark Eyed Susie’, ‘Bristol Tennessee Blues’ and ‘Circular City Gals’. The Hill Billies after that turned to Vocalion Information, keeping their name, and in addition documented for the linked Brunswick Information as Al Hopkins And His Buckle Busters. The word hill-billies have been around since 1900, but had not been in general make use of. Now, the word was found by others in showbusiness as well as the group integrated themselves as Al Hopkins’ Initial Hill Billies. Using the Hopkins house in Washington, DC, as its foundation for trips of schools, politics rallies, stage displays and radio broadcasts, including showing up on WRC, the music group became extremely popular. IN-MAY 1925, fiddler Charlie Bowman (b. 1889, d. 1962) joined up with the music group, having fulfilled up with them at a fiddlers’ convention (sponsored from the Ku Klux Klan). Other people who performed in the music group included fiddlers Uncle ‘Am’ Stuart, Fred Roe, ‘Father’ Williams and Ed Belcher, harmonica participant Elmer Hopkins, guitarists Elbert Bowman and Walter ‘Sparkplug’ Hughes, slip guitarist Frank Wilson, banjo players Jack port Reedy and Walter Bowman, bassist Henry Rowe, and ukulele participant John Hopkins. In 1929, the music group produced a Vitaphone brief film that was utilized as a truck for Al Jolson’s The Performing Fool (1928). Shortly after the loss of life of Al Hopkins inside a road incident the group folded.