Crooked Road CD Series [Back]

Eddie Bond: Take Me Back

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As this recording demonstrates, Eddie Bond has talents that can bring an audience out of their seats. He is a powerful singer in a soulful Blue Ridge Mountain tradition, as well as one of the most respected old-time fiddlers in the Blue Ridge.

Like many other great fiddlers from this region, he is also a skilled old-time banjoist. Here the fiddle and banjo are still welded in a Virginia dance tradition that reaches back some 300 years. He also shows he has considerable skills with guitar and Autoharp.

A performer since childhood, Eddie is an avid participant in the many traditional fiddler’s conventions that enliven summers in the southwestern Virginia mountains.  Three of the best are held in his native Grayson County: in Elk Creek, Fries, and Galax.  Eddie has won top prizes, but says he has benefited most from hearing great players he has met at these events.

Eddie is the fiddler and lead singer in the Ballard’s Branch Bogtrotters, among the most respected of Virginia’s old-time string bands, and one heard often at the governor’s mansion.  But while he is a hardcore traditionalist, Eddie has other interests, and feels one best helps tradition by improving it whenever possible.

His head is crammed with hundreds of handed-down tunes, but he sometimes improvises on them, and also composes his own.  His song, Furniture Factory Blues, is based upon youthful experience, and is a fine addition to the list of Southern songs humorously telling about the travails of mill and factory work. And of course they are part of a much larger group of songs complaining about other work, the contrary nature of mules, the eating habits of the boll weevil, and more.  Eddie knows some of those songs as well.

His lovely melody, Shane’s Reel, is a tribute to his wife.  A devoted family man, Eddie loves performing for dancers, and especially the flatfooting of Shane and their daughter, Hannah.

Eddie’s devotion to family also reaches to earlier generations.  His first and most important musical influences were his Grandpa and Grandma Bond, both fine singers and guitarists.

The maternal side of his family was also musically powerful.  He spent major amounts of time with Granny Widner, who played guitar and sung in a style reminiscent of the Carter Family. 

Granny Widner’s brother, Leon Hill, was a singer who headed a band called the Hillside Boys.  Eddie got his start as a performer at age 3, earning tossed quarters, dancing to the music of Great-Uncle Leon and his band, which at times included autoharpist Kilby Snow and fiddler Leake Caudill.
Clawhammer banjo playing was a tradition in both sides of the family.  Granny Widner was delighted when Eddie began playing in that style because her mother, Dora Williams, had been a banjoist.

When Eddie showed his new old-time banjo skills to Grandpa Bond, he was told that he sounded like his banjo-playing great-grandpa, Lee Bond.  Grandma Bond’s father, Coy Cox, was also a banjoist.

Eddie and his family now own and live in Grandma Widner’s house, and it still rings with tunes that Eddie played first for her.  She was the finest flatfooter in the family, yet would never dance in public. But she danced for Eddie, and his memories of her are precious.

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