Logo designed for Johnson County by Pamela R. Cresswell
Logo designed for Johnson County by Pamela R. Cresswell
Gilliam Banmon Grayson was known to most residents of northeastern Tennessee as "Banmon" when these recordings were made. He was born in Ashe County, N.C. on November 11, 1887. His family moved a few miles west when he was two years old, into Johnson County, Tennessee. That county forms the northeastern tip of Tennessee. He lived there for the rest of his life.
His vision was severely damaged when he was six weeks old. His daughter Lillie said he spent a winter day staring out a window at snow glittering in bright sunlight, "took cold in his eyes" and there after was permanently handicapped. But he was not totally blind and could recognize people by their bulk and tell time by holding a watch with large numbers close to his eyes.
He began playing a fretless homemade banjo as a small boy and became locally well known for his fiddling in her early teens. Unable to farm, work in timber or keep store, he was forced to rely upon music for the support of his wife and six children. An itinerant musician, he traveled from place to place, playing his fiddle and singing at school entertainments, on store porches, street corners, or wherever coins could be earned. He did not own an automobile and walked to jobs or waited for someone passing to offer a ride.
At one time or another, Grayson played with most of the better musicians of the area. His daughter recalled that a favorite was the North Carolina banjoist Doc Walsh. Grayson also played with Clarence (Tom) Ashley, another pioneering old-time musician from his county. Tom recalled trips with Grayson dating back to 1918, including at least two "busting trips" to the West Virginia coal fields where they performed outside pay shacks and passed Grayson's hat. They performed at the famous May 1925 Old Fiddler's Convention in Mountain City, Tennessee, a highly successful event that stimulated the creation of many similar events.
During a two year period in the mid-1920s, Grayson lived within three miles of Ashley's home at Shouns, TN, but spent most of his adult life in Laurel Bloomery, TN, a tiny farming community in a beautiful valley between Damascus, Virginia and Mountain City, Tennessee.
On August 16, 1930, Grayson visited his brother's home in nearby Virginia on foot. He'd been making a bit of money from his recordings and public appearances and seemed finally able to buy a home. He made a down payment on the home place where he was reared. Neighbor Bill Millhorn stopped to offer a ride as he was returning home, but as Millhorn's family had his one-seat roadster fully occupied, Grayson had to stand on the running board outside the car while the little brown Japanese made fiddle he used for all his recording sessions was placed inside. While rounding a blind curve south of the town of Damascus, Millhorn's car collided with a log truck heavily loaded with chestnut timber "extract" and driven by another neighbor, Ferd Gentry. Grayson was hurled from the running board and killed. He was 42.
There is recurring speculation about Gilliam Banmom Grayson's name. Collector and musicologist Ralph Rinzler guessed that his first initial must be for "George" in 1962 and put this error into print. Since then discographers and writers have followed sheep-like in replicating Rinzler's error.
There's a reason for Grayson's unusual actual first name, "Gilliam". Both Grayson brothers named sons for a favorite Federal officer in the Civil War, General Alvin C. Gillem. Major Grayson's son was called by his initials, "A.G." Benjamin's son, Gilliam Banmon Grayson, was always called "Banmon," a family name from his mother's largely Scotch-Irish family, the Roarks. His name was frequently misspelled, usually as "Bandman" and the family was not correct in the spelling of "Gillem", the actual name of the officer the father wished to honor. It was a time when people were creative and had several ways to spell names! That his name was Gilliam Banmon Grayson is clear fromFederal pension records completed by or for his mother (he was the handicapped son of a soldier), death records, and a careful recounting of these matters by his oldest daughter, Lillie Grayson Sturdivant, who carefully spelled out both names when interviewed on tape by Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton and the writer is Rising Sun, Maryland in 1972.
Years earlier when the Civil War broke out and Tennessee seceded from the Union, Major Grayson had joined those organizing "a little rebellion within a big rebellion" against Confederate authority in northeastern Tennessee. When the Carter County Rebellion was suppressed by Confederate General Ledbetter and a large amny, Major Grayson organized one of the first groups of recruits that slipped out of the mountains and joined President Lincoln's armies.
Celebrated Union guide Dan Ellis led them and thousands of others from Confederate held northeastern Tennessee along the mountain tops to Union territory in Kentucky.
Major Grayson helped organize the 4th Tennessee (U.S.) Volunteer Infantry and the 13th Regiment of the Tennessee (U.S.) Volunteer Cavalry.
Benjamin C. Grayson was a private in the ill-fated 4th Tennessee, a unit that was captured by Confederates. James W.M. Grayson was a lieutenant colonel in the unit, but resigned before the capture to become a major in the 13th Tennesse Cavalry, a regiment composed of Johnson and Carter countyu men that became the most wide-ranging unit in the Union army, fighting and raiding over more than three thousand miles in six states.
This band of former refugees killed the noted Confederate raider, General John Hunt Morgan, in one daring raid, and chased Confederate President Jefferson Davis across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia at the end of the war.
During the summer after the Civil War, a young stranger appeared at Major Grayson's farm at Trade, Tennessee and asked for employment as a farm worker. To find out who this young stranger was, please click here
Whitter was a millhand from a cotton mill town, Fries, Virginia, in Grayson Counthy, near the head of the New River Valley. That county and neighborning Carroll county produced many early string band musicians and Whitter was the first from there to record. In 1923, before he met Grayson, Whitter took his guitar and harmonica to New York and persuaded Okeh to record, most notably, The Wreck of the Old Southern 97. In 1924, he also recorded with fiddler Jim Sutphin and banjoist John Rector as Henry Whitter's Virginia Breakdowners.
Skilled in promotion and a good showman, he was living in nearby Warrensville, N.C. when these recordings were made. He was plagued with poor health and died in the State Hospital in Morganton, N.C. in 1940.
G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter met at a fiddler's convention in Mountin City, Tennessee in 1927. During the next two years they recorded some fifty songs and tunes, an amazing number of which became standards of country music.
These include Banks of the Ohio, Tom Dooley, Lee Highway Blues, Little Maggie, Rose Connally, Nine Pound Hammer, Train 45, Ommie Wise, Cluck Old Hen, Old Jimmie Sutton, Handsome Molly and Shout Little Lulu.
The material they chose to record was excellent, as was the quality of their performances. Indeed, the Grayson and Whitter discs are usually preferred to later recordings of many of these standards.
Both men were composers as well as avid song collectors and traders. Grayson converted the well-known banjo tune Reubin into his Train 45, a melody now a favorite of bluegrass banjoists.
He composed Going Down The Lee Highway in September 1929 as Whitter's Model T chugged down U.S. Route 11 in Northeastern Tennessee (known locally as Lee Highway) on the way to a Memphis recording session. This musical exercise soon entered the repertoire of hundreds of fiddlers as the Lee Highway Blues. Tom Dooley was a local ballad associated with the Grayson Family.
One of Graysons, Joke and Henry (mislabeled on the original; disk as Joking Henry), is a close musical relative of Frankie and Johnnie. Actually, it describes the antics of two local boys who had an alcoholic party before going to sleep on the railroad track. They were awakened by a thrown brick shortly before the train arrived. Grayson's recouting of their soiree created much laughter at home.
Grayson learned Nine Pound Hammer from Charlie Bowman, a fiddler from an adjoining Tennessee county, who "wrote it off" a black work song. On it we have another snatch of Grayson's dry humor "Drive her on down," he advises Henry. "Break the handle off."
Short Life of Trouble was recorded by both Grayson and Tom Ashley and may date from their years of playing together. Where Are You Going Alice? is a Grayson composition about a local teenager who married a Civil War veteran and related the old soldier's dismay when she began "running around". The Grayson and Whitter recording of Handsome Molly, though widely copied, is still unmatched. I've Always Been A Rambler is a superb variation of a beloved ballad, The Girl I left Behind Me. Grayson left the inimitable mark of his style on all that he recorded, ranging from the Irish style ballad Rose Connally, to the 1820s American ballad Ommie Wise, to his own compositions. Grayson was the singer and fiddler on all their recordings while Whitter provided Guitar backup, som of the spoken comments, and a few vocal refrains such as the one offered here on Nine Pound Hammer.
Henry Whitter also wrote numerous songs and made the first recording of The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven.
The first recording of the Tom Dooley ballad was by Grayson and Whitter in Memphis in 1929. A 1939 Library of Congress field recording of Frank Proffitt of Pick Britches in Watauga County, North Carolina, singing the ballad led to its popularity during the 1960s fold revival. Proffitt's version seems derived from the Grayson recording.
Proffit's grandfather served under Major Grayson in the 13th Tennessee Cavalry. (As did Tom Ashley's great-uncle and the writer's sixteen year old banjo-picking great-grandfather, Corporal Joseph T. "Lucky Joe" Wilson.
A root of the true vine of country music, Grayson and Whitter have been admired and emulated by other true vine musicians for more than 70 years; among them such paragons as Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and J.E. Mainer. These recordings demonstrate that Grayson and Whitter's rugged and stark music retains an ability to reach across generations and charm the heart.
I learned of these matters from affable and genial J.Luke Grayson, late grandson of Major Grayson and a former Attorney General of Tennesse's First Judicial District. Mister Luke's fiddling son, Frank Grayson, has been a helpful friend. The late Lillie Grayson Sturdivant was a gracious hostess and eager that errors concerning her father's name be corrected. Johnson County's wonderfully knowledgable historian, Captain Tom Gentry, gave exact dates and details concerning the accident that took Banmon Grayson's life and was helpful withother matters. My mother, Josephine Sutherland Wilson, grew up with the children of Banmon Grayson and told me about the family. My great-grandmother, Pruda Melinda South Davis, had a stack of Grayson and Whitter 78 RPM recordings in the parlor of her house above the falls on Roaring Creek. Frank Mare allowed me to hear the very rare first Grayson and Whitter discs in his excellent collection when he lived in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. All have my gratitude.
Joe Wilson
Joe Wilson is Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. He grew up in Trade, Tennessee, near Major Grayson's farm. Words cannot adequately describe my appreciation for all he is doing to preserve not only the musical heritage of Johnson County, Tennessee, but traditional music around the world. Special thanks go to him for sending and allowing me to present snipets of the newly released Grayson & Whitter CD and the tape of other Johnson County musicians. There are 9 musical snipets on the Original Johnson County Genealogy Page - all of them optional to hear.
Mary Floy Katzman
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Copyright © 1999 Mary Floy Katzman All rights reserved