Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2015 13:57:14 GMT
In September 1927, in one of the earliest recording sessions outside of New York City, representatives from the Okeh record company traveled south to Winston-Salem to record hillbilly musicians at the old West End School. The North Carolina Cooper Boys, a trio from the Lexington area, recorded six cuts at this session. This group had instrumentation and style similar to the North Carolina Ramblers, known as the most popular North Carolina string band of the ’20s. According to Bob Carlin, at the heart of the North Carolina Cooper Boys were two cousins from Rockingham County, Tom Cooper (guitar and vocalist) and Dewey Cooper (fiddle and vocalist) who had settled in the Lexington area, following the classic pattern of farmers turned millworkers. The trio’s banjo player, Clay Everhart from Lexington, also played music as a sideline, making most of his money working in factories in Davidson and Guilford counties. (Originally published as “1920s - ’30s: Northwest Piedmont Stringband Musicians in the Dawn of Hillbilly Recordings” by Carolina Music Ways.)