Description

Lee Hammons plays 41 wistful, airy fiddle tunes from Central West Virginia. Like many fiddlers of his generation, Hammons quit playing music in the mid-1920s, and didn’t pick it back up until 1969. His fiddling has an heirloom quality to it—a window into those long-ago years, when he was a young man, and the music he played then. Wishful, airy, and captivating, the agedness of the tunes gives them an almost hypnotic feel. Primarily solo with occasional banjo accompaniment.

Lee Hammons (1886-1980) was a fiddler and banjo player who lived most of his life in the West Virginia counties of Greenbrier, Webster, Nicholas, and Pocahontas.  He associated with musicians in the logging camps of that area in the early years of the twentieth century.  A neighbor and close musical associate was the celebrated fiddler Edden Hammons.  Lee quit playing banjo in 1923 and afterward stopped fiddling as well, not resuming either instrument until 1969. Although he was familiar with early country music recordings, Lee’s own playing has something of a time-capsule quality.  Over eighty when he was first taped, and playing a low-quality instrument, Lee’s archaic fiddling still shows something of the mastery he had in his earlier years.