John & Emery McClung were musicians who recorded old-time music during the 1920s. They also recorded as The West Virginia Snake Hunters and The McClung Brothers. John Edward McClung (who was the guitar player and singer) was born on August 1, 1906, in Mount Hope, West Virginia, and died on February 15, 1991. Emery Samuel McClung (who was the fiddle player) was born on January 3, 1910, in Beckley, West Virginia, and he died on March 9, 1970.
John and Emery were sons of Caroline Elizabeth Cheetham and Park Walker McClung who were from Raleigh County, West Virginia. Their father Walker was a jeweler but he was also a music teacher and a choir leader of the church they attended in Sprague, West Virginia. Many of Walker's fourteen children learned to play instruments or sing from him.
The failing health of their father led John and Emery to start making music on Beckley street corners to help raise grocery money. In the early 1920s, they formed a string band called The West Virginia Trail Blazers, which included George Ward and John Lanchester, both from Beckley, West Virginia. [1] They took their shows all around the mountains in a big Studebaker, [2] even going to California on one occasion. This band was kept together until about 1934.
In 1927, John and Emery recorded eight songs for Brunswick Records. John played the fiddle and Emery played guitar. The whistling on the songs "Standin' In The Need Of Prayer," "Birdie," and "The Fun Is All Over" were provided by future Country Music Hall of Fame member Carson Robison. [3] They also called themselves The West Virginia Snake Hunters during this time, and started working with carnival musician Cleve Chaffin, who was from Wayne County, West Virginia. Chaffin and the McClung Brothers recorded six songs for Paramount Records in 1929. Chaffin had also recorded with another old-time music band, Fruit Jar Guzzlers. After the session for Paramount, Chaffin and the McClung Brothers never recorded again. Later on, the McClung Brothers had a gospel quartet on the radio station WJLS in Beckley. John won an old-time fiddlers' contest in Beckley in August 1950, and Emery won second place. John lived his retired life in Alexandria, Virginia. [1]
One of the most popular McClung Brothers' songs was "The West Virginia Hills," which was a parody of the West Virginia state anthem about West Virginia moonshine. The McClungs never recorded it but their friend Roy Harvey (also from West Virginia) recorded it as a duet with Earl Shirkey on Columbia Records in 1929. [1] Harvey's version can be found on two CD's "Roy Harvey: Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order Volume 3" (Document #8052) and "Roy Harvey: Early String Band Favorites" (Old Homestead #4017), both released in 1999.
| Authority control databases: Artists |
|---|
Blind Willie McTell was a Piedmont blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. McTell performed in various musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum.
Edward James "Son" House Jr. was an American Delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.
Louis Leo Prima was an American trumpeter, singer, entertainer, and bandleader. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.
Donald Matthew Redman was an American jazz musician, arranger, bandleader, and composer.
Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs was an American old-time singer, songwriter and banjo player. His style of banjo playing, as well as his singing, is considered a unique combination of Appalachian folk music and African-American blues. Contemporary folk musicians and performers consider him a seminal figure, at least in part because of the appearance of two of his recordings from the 1920s, "Sugar Baby" and "Country Blues", on Harry Smith's 1952 collection Anthology of American Folk Music. Boggs was first recorded in 1927 and again in 1929, although he worked primarily as a coal miner for most of his life.
Jesse Lester McReynolds was an American bluegrass musician. He was best known for his innovative crosspicking and split-string styles of mandolin playing.
Robert Hicks, better known as Barbecue Bob, was an early American Piedmont blues musician. His nickname was derived from his working as a cook in a barbecue restaurant. One of the three extant photographs of him show him playing a guitar and wearing a full-length white apron and cook's hat.
Charles Cleveland Poole was an American musician, singer, banjo player, and leader of the North Carolina Ramblers, which was a string band that recorded many popular songs between 1925 and 1930.
Screen Songs are a series of animated cartoons produced at the Fleischer Studios and distributed by Paramount Pictures between 1929 and 1938. Paramount brought back the sing-along cartoons in 1945, now in color, and released them regularly through 1951. Two of Paramount's one-shot cartoons quietly revived the format later: Candy Cabaret (1954) and Hobo's Holiday (1963).
"Midnight Special" is a traditional folk song thought to have originated among prisoners in the American South. The song refers to the passenger train Midnight Special and its "ever-loving light".
"Cocaine Blues" is a Western swing song written by Troy Junius Arnall, a reworking of the traditional song "Little Sadie." Roy Hogsed recorded a well known version of the song in 1947.
Frank Stokes was an American blues musician, songster, and blackface minstrel, who is considered by many musicologists to be the father of the Memphis blues guitar style.
"Darlin' Cory" is a well-known American folk song about love, loss, and moonshine. It is similar in theme to "Little Maggie" and "The Gambling Man" but is not considered the same as those songs.
Cleve Chafin was a carnival musician who recorded old-time music during the 1920s.
Fruit Jar Guzzlers was an old-time music group who recorded during the 1920s.
William Reese Jones was a tenor who recorded during the 1920s and 1930s, finding fame as a radio star on The Happiness Boys radio program.
Gilliam Banmon Grayson was an American Old-time fiddle player and singer. Mostly blind from infancy, Grayson is chiefly remembered for a series of sides recorded with guitarist Henry Whitter between 1927 and 1930 that would later influence numerous country, bluegrass, and rock musicians. Grayson wrote much of his own material, but was also instrumental in adapting several traditional Appalachian ballads to fiddle and guitar formats. His music has been recorded or performed by musicians such as Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Mick Jagger, the Kingston Trio, and dozens of bluegrass artists, including the Stanley Brothers and Mac Wiseman.
Clark Kessinger was an American old-time fiddler. Many of his fiddle tunes made their way to other fiddlers or into the bluegrass music genre.
This is a discography of the Carter Family - Sara Carter, her husband A.P. Carter, and their sister-in-law Maybelle Carter - often cited as "the most influential group in country music history":
Wilmer Watts was an American old time singer, banjo player and bandleader who recorded a series of records for Paramount Records in the 1920s.
