Crooked Road CD Series [Back]

Eddie Bond: Take Me Back

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This recording presents Eddie in the musical context in which he now lives, with good friends and family who live in Grayson County or nearby, artists he met at local fiddler’s conventions, community jam sessions, and other local gatherings.

These are also some of the musicians now making notable contributions to the traditional music of the central Blue Ridge. 

Eddie’s music was also influenced by his growing up in one of the most influential musical communities in America.  That community is Fries, Virginia, a village of 600 perched on a hillside overlooking a sweeping bend and great cascade of the New River.

Terribly misnamed, the New River is in fact the oldest river in the western hemisphere, and among the oldest on earth. It confounds a conventional sense of geography by flowing north, arising on Snake Mountain on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, and flowing across Virginia and West Virginia before emptying into the Ohio River.

Built around a now disappeared cotton mill in 1905, Fries became important in the history of country music when one of its sons was the first to record a country song in 1923.  He was mill-hand Henry Whitter, and some of his songs became very popular, among them The Wreck of the Southern Old 97 and The New River Train.

But there were other musical mill-hands working in the same mill: among them Ernest Stoneman, Kelly Harrell, and John Rector (a founder of the Hill Billies). They assumed if Whitter could be recorded, they could.  By 1926 they were on ten major labels in New York, and Stoneman’s The Sinking of the Titanic was also very popular.

Great fiddler and bandleader Glen Neaves worked 38 years in the same cotton mill, and lived in one of the white mill houses perched in orderly rows above the river.  Recordings made in 1941 at the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax (eight miles from Fries) reveal the Neaves Band (Neaves, the Patton brothers and Raymond Swinney), as one playing what most would assume is bluegrass due to its syncopated sound.

The three-fingered banjoist in that band, Raymond Swinney, was the inspiration for Larry Richardson, Ted Lundy, and others who held to the old-time form of bluegrass often described as “the Galax sound.” Swinney was reared on a farm near Fries, and worked in the mill.

Eddie’s beloved Granny Widner also spent her entire working life in that mill.  His Grandpa Bond performed with Henry Whitter, and, much later, with Glenn Smith.

When Eddie was a child in Fries, it was also home to brilliant banjoist and country rock performer Jimmy Arnold.  Great fiddler and old-time banjoist Glenn “Pap” Smith also lived there, made recordings for Folkways, and presided over a considerable musical family. 

It included his daughter, ballad singer Evelyn Farmer, and his grandson, Jesse Lovell, guitarist, singer and composer and member of the ZD Boys, a band of mill-hands. (The ZD was for zero defects, a goal of these weavers and loom fixers.) Respected ballad singer Gin Burris is Glenn Smith’s great-granddaughter.

Jesse Lovell now presides over the Thursday night jam at the Trail’s End Café in Fries, and Eddie is frequently present.  Tiny Fries is a major stop on Virginia’s Crooked Road, a heritage music trail, and visitors from many distant places come there to jam or listen.

Eddie’s autoharp playing was inspired by another Fries resident, master autoharpist Kilby Snow.

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