Tomorrow March 30, is the birthday of one of my favorite fiddlers, Leslie Keith who passed away in 1977. Now there was a guy who could saw that fiddle and get your juices going so that you just had to dance! Every bluegrass fiddler needs to listen to Leslie Keith and most of them have if they’re serious about the instrument.
What bluegrass fan hasn’t heard Black Mountain Rag, or more properly Black Mountain Blues as Leslie named it when he composed it in the thirties? He took an old time tune, the Lost Child, morphed it with another old time melody and put it out there. It became a huge hit. Tommy Magness turned it into a showpiece tune which he called the Black Mountain Rag. Years later Keith played it with Ralph and Carter Stanley and the tune became part of the bluegrass repertoire.
Leslie Keith cut his chops as a contest fiddler. In 1938, Leslie and another champion fiddler rented a park and invited fiddlers to compete. It was evidently successful, as 27 fiddlers and a crowd of 9,400 showed up. In many ways, Keith was a bridge between old time fiddlers and what would become bluegrass fiddlers. He had a different style than his predecessors like Arthur Smith and Clayton McMichen but he didn’t have quite the bluegrass punch and drive of later masters like Kenny Baker.
By the late 1940s, Leslie was the fiddler for Curly King and the Tennessee Hilltoppers. And when the Stanley Brothers decided to adopt a bluegrass sound a la Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Keith replaced Booby Sumner and thus became one of the original bluegrass fiddlers. Only Chubby Wise and perhaps Sumner can claim priority.
I love to listen to Keith on the old Rich-R-Tone recordings from the Stanley Brothers. Especially in his live recordings, you can tell that he was a contest fiddler at heart. He knew how to please a crowd with danceable fiddle music. That’s the same kind of music I look forward to hearing again at the Cloverdale Fiddle Festival on April 11 in Cloverdale.
Happy Birthday, Leslie Keith!
