Tom Ashley and Band

"Peg and Awl" by Tom Ashley (1895-1967)
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This is Tom Ashley, the well known old country singer with his band. His real name was Thomas Clarence McCurry, but his grandparents raised him, and he went by their last name. His daughter, Eva, still lives in Virginia and is the sweetest woman you could meet. She used to get on stage with her father and dance for the crowd. He had several records out and played on the Grand Ole Opry. He married my grandmother's sister, Hettie Osborne. (Tom is the one on the right of the picture.)

Photograph and information submitted by Nancy Baker

Additional information submitted by Jan K Woods Williams

Clarence "Tom" Ashley

Raised by his mother and grandparents in Mountain City, Tennessee, Clarence Tom Ashley learned to sing and to play the banjo under the tutelage of his music loving family. At 16, Tom asked his grandfathers permission to join a traveling medicine show and spent the next several years developing his gifts for banjo playing and story telling. In 1914, Ashley married Hettie Osborne and continued his performing career, singing on the streets and at festivals and fairs. Throughout his busking days, Ashley met many talented musicians and had opportunities to sing and play with many different groups of performers. In 1925, Ashley met Doc Walsh and formed the Carolina Tar Heels. Ashley continued to travel the medicine show circuit until 1943, and during that time had the opportunity to share the stage with Charlie Monroe, Lester Flatt and the Stanley Brothers.

October 1929 had a profound impact on Tom Ashley as well as on the nation. Six days before the stock market crash on Wall Street, Tom Ashley recorded "The Coo Coo Bird" for Columbia records, a significant recording individually and, according to some students of folk music, also an important one in the period of renewed interest in folk music during the late 1950's and early 1960's.

When Ashley recorded "The Coo Coo Bird" in 1929, he was thirty-four years old. He had grown up and lived in an atmosphere of traditional music that had traveled across the Atlantic from the British Isles. The Ashley family, "part Dutch", as Tom's daughter Eva Moore says. left Ireland and arrived in the United States in the 1690's. Part of the family remained in East Virginia and part went on west to North Carolina. It was in Ashe County, soon after the Civil War, that Enoch Ashley (son of Tom's great-grandfather Joe Ashley) was married to Tas Robinson's daughter Martha (Mat or Maddy). The young couple frequently sang old ballads, and their three daughters came to love the old songs as did their parents. One of the daughters, Rosie Belle, developed a good singing voice and was often asked to sing in churches; the two older girls, Ira (pronounced Arey) and Daisy, were instrumentalists.

The family did not remain in North Carolina, however; Tom said, "My people left Ashe County, North Carolina, about 1892, and went to Bristol where my mama and daddy were married." The marriage took place in 1894, against the wishes of Rosie Belle's parents. The groom, known as One-eyed Fiddling George McCurry, had a bar in Bristol. The two were together for about a year, because McCurry had another wife and he was asked to move. Rose Belle returned home to her parents; and about two weeks later, on September 29, 1895, in Bristol, Virginia, she gave birth to a son, Clarence Earl McCurry.

Although Rosie Belle named her son Clarence Earl McCurry, no one knew him by that name. The lively and playful young boy was nicknamed by his grandfather and the boarders "Tommy Tiddy Waddy". As Clarence grew older the "Tiddy Waddy" was dropped, but "Tommy" stuck; and because he was reared by his grandparents, "Ashley" became the surname he used. Eventually he dropped the "Earl" and used "Thomas Clarence," signing as either Thomas C. Ashley or Tom C. Ashley. In Johnson County, however, he was known simply as Tom Ashley. Some people have believed that Tom Ashley and Clarence Ashley were two different men, partly because he recorded under both names. Adding to this confusion is the use on record labels of various combinations of his given names, as well as the use of pseudonyms Oscar Brown and Tom Hutchinson.

It was not until Tom Ashley was well into adulthood that he saw his father for the first time. All his life, he had wondered where his father was, what he was like; and he had hoped that some day he would be able to meet him. That day came. As Eva tells the story, Tom was with the medicine show in Greenville, Tennessee, at the time.

Daddy was sitting on the porch of an evening with the man who ran the hotel where he was staying. When he found out the man was a McCurry, he asked him if he knew fiddling One-eyed George, and the man said that he was his brother. Daddy asked if he was living, and the man said he was, and he agreed to take Daddy over there the following Sunday to see him. He got in touch George McCurry, then, but didn't tell him who it was that he was bringing with him. When they got there on Sunday, Daddy's father was sitting across a little branch under a big oak tree, as Daddy told it; and as Daddy and his Uncle were crossing the little bridge over the branch he came and grabbed Daddy and said to him, "how in the world (actually another word was used) can a man get so old in thirty-nine years?" He recognized him immediately, and he knew exactly how old Daddy was. He hadn't known if he was a boy or a girl till then.

At any rate, Tom and his father became friends after that meeting, even though there were harsh feelings toward McCurry among part of the Ashley family; and McCurry became "Granddaddy" to Eva and J. D.

Obituary of THOMAS C. ASHLEY

June 1967

SHOUNS - Thomas C. Ashley, 71, Fords Creek Community, Shouns, died in Baptist Hospital Winston-Salem, N.C., at 8 P.M. Friday following a long illness.

He was a native of Virginia, but had made his home in Johnson County most of his life. He was a retired farmer. Mr. Ashley was a member of the First Baptist Church, Mountain City.

Survivors include his widow, Mrs. Hettie Ashley, Shouns; one son, J.D. Ashley, Shouns; one daughter, Mrs. Eva Moore, Saltville, Va.; four sisters, Mrs. Daisy Gilbert, Glades Springs, Va., Mrs. Pearl Pennington Oxford of Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Verda Mae Tolbert, Hampton Roads, Va.; and two grandchildren and several nieces and nephews.