By William “Skip” Deegans
When Grammy award winner and bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland performs at Lewisburg’s Carnegie Hall on May 17, he may very well play a tune that came from one of America’s finest and most impactful fiddlers who grew up just down the road in Monroe County. Henry Reed was born into a musical family near Peterstown in 1884. His father, uncle, and two older brothers were musical, and Reed learned to play the fiddle, banjo, and harmonica. He is shown holding a banjo with his brother in the circa 1903 photo.
Reed learned fiddle tunes from old timers in the area, and some of those tunes were brought to the Appalachians from the British Isles. He developed a distinct and unorthodox way of holding the fiddle and had an unusual bow lick.
Reed played for his family and at barn dances. He may have slipped into obscurity had it not been for Alan Jabbour, a Duke University student, who undertook recording traditional music. Jabbour was himself a fiddler, and once he heard Reed play he returned many times to learn and record Reed. One of the first tunes Jabour learned was “West Virginia Gals.” Jabbour passed on Reed’s tunes to the Hollow Rock String Band that played in the Dunham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina area. Other bands like the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, the New Deal String Band, and the Red Clay Ramblers picked up Reed’s tunes. Reed had an unusually large repertoire of tunes that continue to be played by Bluegrass bands.
Jabbour went on to become the director of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, and Reed’s music is preserved in the Library’s collection of traditional Appalachian music. As a young man, Reed began working in southern West Virginia coal mines and then moved to Glen Lyn, Virginia where he worked at an Appalachian Power Company plant. Later he went to work at the Celanese plant in Narrows. He died at his home in Glen Lyn in 1968.
Photo from the Library of Congress.
Sources: Library of Congress, The Washington Post, NPR.