Country music.

Abstract Growing up in low country South Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s, Jim Smoak immersed himself in the music of his family and of the live radio broadcasts to which they listened.  Smoak especially admired the innovative banjo playing of Snuffy Jenkins, whom he heard daily on Columbia’s WIS Station.  Jenkins would become a family friend and mentor, inspiring Smoak to pursue work as a banjo player.  Smoak would become one of the first generation of banjo players to bring three-finger style to...

Abstract The McLain Family Band came to be as the result of an interest in Bluegrass music developed by Raymond K. McLain (1928-2003) while Director of Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky where he had moved in 1954 with his wife, Betty.  This interest owed much to both family influence and formal academic training.  McLain’s mother had been director of Southern Folk Life Studies at the University of Alabama. He had majored in music theory at Denison University and done graduate work...