Leonard Rutherford

Leonard Rutherford was half of the good Monticello, KY, string music group duo Burnett & Rutherford. His clean, sliding fiddle audio, in conjunction with Richard Burnett’s keening vocals and modal banjo playing, make their best-known music, the archaic-sounding “Willie Moore,” a genuine nationwide treasure. Rutherford was just an adolescent when he started using Burnett in 1914, as well as the duo performed through the entire South before 1950s, when their association finished with Rutherford’s loss of life in 1954. Burnett retired from professional music and is at his nineties when he passed away in 1977.