Granville Bowlin

In the liner notes to the album Mountain Music of Kentucky, John Cohen writes:

“Granville Bowlin took great pleasure in playing his banjo. In his punctuated two-finger style, most notes were of equal loudness. He liked the brassy, clanky sound produced by his resonator banjo…’Bad Eye’ Bowlin had been a miner and had lost a finger off each hand in mine accidents. At this time he was a farmer.”

Paul Brown

On the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area’s Traditional Artist Directory, it states:

“Paul started picking banjo on a new Sears Silvertone when he was ten. He developed his own two- and three-finger styles, and also learned the clawhammer style. His interest, and his discovery of the Clawhammer Banjo albums, inspired him to make frequent trips to visit as many of the older players as he could. He has visited and played music with a number of the older artists in the Southern Appalachian region.

Paul spent years learning music directly from some of the last fiddle, banjo, and guitar players to emerge before the age of radio and recordings, including Tommy Jarrell, Gilmer Woodruff, Fields Ward, Robert Sykes, Luther Davis, Verlen Clifton, and Paul Sutphin. Paul studied banjo intensively with Tommy Jarrell, and he learned much from the playing of Wade Ward. He spent considerable time with Wade’s nephew, Fields, a fine guitarist, banjo player and singer. He also played in the Smokey Valley Boys with Benton Flippen, Verlen Clifton, and Paul Sutphin.”

Check out Paul playing “Cacklin’ Hen” on Way Down in North Carolina, his duet album with Mike Seeger:

Benton Flippen

On the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area’s Traditional Artist Directory, it states:

“Benton Flippen, a 1990 North Carolina Folk Heritage Award recipient, was one of the innovators of a distinctive and driving style of old-time string music that has brought national recognition to the area between Mt. Airy, his home, and Galax, Virginia. Born in Surry County in 1920, he started playing the banjo in his early teens and picked up the fiddle when he was about eighteen years old. Benton was celebrated chiefly for his fiddle playing, but he was also admired by those who know him well for his knowledge of the five-string banjo and the guitar.”

Listen to him play “June Apple” on the banjo here:

Dee Hicks

Roscoe Holcomb

 Roscoe Holcomb may be the most influential two-finger banjo player of all time. Holcomb was also a powerful singer who had a propulsive guitar style. Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and John Hartford were all fans of his inimitable music.

John Cohen wrote in the liner notes to the CD The High Lonesome Sound:

“When I met him in 1959 he said he was 48 years old, which means Roscoe was born around 1911 (the same year Bill Monroe was born). He lived all his life in the tiny community of Daisy, Kentucky, except for the few times he left to find work or to get away from personal predicaments. Daisy was about ten miles from Viper, Kentucky, where Jean Ritchie was raised, and she suggests that they are distant cousins. At a recent (1995) Holcomb family gathering I learned that Roscoe’s mother was an Osborne and a direct relative of the well-known bluegrass musicians the Osborne Brothers.”

Lee Sexton

Adapted from here:

Lee Sexton (1927-2021) was an American banjo player from Letcher County, Kentucky. He began playing the banjo at the age of eight and was proficient in the two-finger picking and ‘drop-thumb’ (clawhammer) traditional styles of east Kentucky. He also sang. His Whoa Mule album includes recordings from a 1952 home recording with fiddler Fernando Lusk and recordings made in 2001. Four solo songs also appear on Smithsonian Folkways album Mountain Music of Kentucky, the same album where Granville Bowlin’s music appears. In 1999, Kentucky governor Paul Patton presented Lee with the Governor's Award in the Arts. Lee Sexton and his wife Opal lived on Line Fork, about a hundred yards from his birthplace.

Morgan Sexton

Morgan Sexton of Linefork, Kentucky was a 1991 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow. From the NEA website:

“Morgan Sexton was born January 28, 1911, in Linefork, Kentucky, to Shaderick (Shade) and Harriet Cornett Sexton. As a young boy, he said, ‘my cousin, Press Whitaker, and me got some old lard buckets and cut the bottoms out and fixed us some banjos. They sounded awful, but we played them like they were real banjos.’

Sexton's father was a banjo player, and he began to teach his son to play, but shortly thereafter he became ill and died, leaving his wife with seven children and no source of income. ‘When I was about 11 years, I quit school to go to work for my uncle gathering crops. I was 13 when I worked in a sawmill for 50 cents a day. From there, I went to work cutting railroad ties,’ Sexton recalled.

Despite the long hours and hard labor, Sexton continued to play the banjo, helped along by his sister, Hettie. When he was 17, he bought his first real banjo for $10.86 from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. ‘I had to walk four miles to Ulvah to pick it up,’ he said. ‘I played it all the way back home. I would try to play it every day when I got home from work.’

Sexton was 25 when he met and married his wife, Virgie Hayes. At that time, he was working ‘up on Bull Creek logging timber.’ A year later, he started working in the coal mines. ‘This was long before they started to use the rockdust (powdered limestone) they use now (to keep the coal dust down).’ The conditions in the mines were oppressive, and by the time Sexton retired in 1976, he had contracted silicosis, a disease of the lungs caused by coal (or quarry) dust.

Over the years, playing the banjo was a great joy for Sexton. Throughout his lifetime, he played for his family and friends, keeping active his repertoire of hundreds of traditional ballads, love songs, and dance tunes. When neighbors came to his house, he liked to entertain them with his music and stories of his childhood in Kentucky. Everyone in Sexton's family played the banjo, including his mother, who died in 1947.

Both Sexton's singing and instrumental styles were unaffected by contemporary influences and musical ideas. His banjo picking was a delicate and absolute individualized version of the Appalachian two-fingered style, liquid and serene, each melody using its own particular tuning in the old-fashioned way. Although Sexton usually played by himself, he was sometimes joined by his neighbor Boyd Watts, a fiddler, at schoolhouse events, at Christmas, and in end-of-the-school-year programs. At square dances, however, the banjo alone was passed from one player to the next.

During the last decade of his life, Sexton began to play and sing in public, performing at the Celebration of Traditional Music at Berea College and the Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival in Whitesburg, Kentucky, in addition to demonstrating his talents on many radio programs and at local events. He was honored at the Banjo Institute in Lebanon, Tennessee. Sexton prided himself in preserving the old-time banjo styles he learned growing up and in teaching his nephew, Lee Sexton, to carry this tradition on for future generations.”