Clyde Davenport (1921- ) was raised on a mountain farm near the Tennessee line around Mt. Pisgah, the son of William Davenport and Lucy Boston Davenport. Both Clyde’s grandfather, Francis Davenport, and his father, Will, played fiddle. Clyde played clawhammer-style banjo at home for his own amusement, and learned most of his fiddle tunes from […]
Volume 2 continues in the effort to give some measure to Clyde Davenport’s huge repertoire with a well deserved direct to digital recording made upon return from a 2 month cross country recording trip in 1994. Although Dave Spilkia and I had visited Monticello in 1974, we only met Clyde’s music partner W.T. Gregory (2 […]
Clyde Davenport, both a great musician and repository of old tunes from south-central Kentucky, was born near the Tennessee border in 1921 to a farmer and fiddler, William, and Lucy Davenport. In 1943, Clyde returned from WWII combat in Italy to work at an auto factory and to fiddle daily on a Muncie, Indiana radio […]
On many trips to Monticello, Kentucky Clyde Davenport and Clyde Troxell would take me to visit Virgil Anderson (1902-1997), whose house could only be reached by a swinging bridge over a river’s fork. Virgil had played banjo respectably enough to entertain logging camp men at age 10 while serving as water boy. Virgil also learned […]
I came to know the fiddle and banjo duo of Ralph and Clyde Troxell through my visits to Clyde Davenport when he lived in Monticello, Kentucky. The two brothers lived several miles out in the countryside in their hometown of Rocky Branch, Kentucky. Little known before the 1980s, the brothers gained some notice when they […]
Clyde Davenport, Vol. 1 (FRC103), Clyde Davenport, Vol. 2 (FRC104), Clyde Davenport DVD (FRC1004) by Jeff Titon Kentuckian Clyde Davenport is a master old-time fiddler and banjo player. His large repertory of traditional tunes, many of them rare, makes him an important source musician. At 85, he still plays wonderfully well. For almost twenty years old-time […]
Since FRC started in 2004, we have made available the recordings of many collectors of traditional music. To date these include (with CDs they contributed to):
FRC711 – Craig-johnson – Deep Woods and Hollows Official obituary Remembrance written by Dave Shombert (reproduced with permission from Dave Shombert and the Old Time Herald)