“Can you play that thing, old man?” the fiddler asked.

“I might be able to get a little something out of it,” he answered.

Saying that his hands were a little stiff, and that he didn’t know how well he’d be able to do this late at night, the newcomer took a while to get his fiddle out and rosin his bow. When he finally started fiddling, you could almost hear the jaws around the campsite dropping.

Buddy Pendleton has that effect on people.

Buddy was a mailman in Patrick County, Virginia, for just over forty years. His previous job was fiddling for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. Before that, he played and recorded with the Greenbriar Boys and performed with Joan Baez. After Buddy became a mailman, he won the title of World Champion Fiddler at Union Grove contest five consecutive years. And his fluid, powerful playing still takes people by surprise.

Buddy lives about a mile and a half from where he was born, in Lone Ivy, just below Lovers Leap. He came into the world a little more than two weeks before Christmas in 1935. Buddy tried the banjo and guitar before settling on the fiddle.

“Santa Claus brought me a fiddle when I was about eleven or twelve years old and I started trying to saw on it,” Buddy said. “At that time there wasn’t a teacher in the whole valley there. Not one close enough for me to tune in on.”

So Buddy turned to the family’s crank-up record player for instruction. “After I got started working on the fiddle some, I liked Tommy Jackson’s fiddling pretty well. He had some records out and I used to get a few of those to learn tunes from,” he said. “And there was a fiddler, Buddy Durham. His records were advertised some. I used to hear some of that. And I listened to the Grand Ole Opry a little bit.”

Buddy mentioned Howdy Forrester, Kenny Baker, and Chubby Wise as influences, too. “I liked that old Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith,” Buddy said. “Not the one, you know, that came along later and created ‘Dueling Banjos,’ but the one that was into the fiddling.”

But not every song he learned came off a record or out of a radio. His mother played guitar and harmonica. His father played Charlie Poole-style banjo. His uncle played fiddle.

“I’d also been listening to my dad and my uncle play some music. Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon they’d have a little session at my Grandpa Pendleton’s home. So after Santa Claus brought me the fiddle, I started trying to learn to play it. And after I learned to keep time a little bit, I was able to pick up a few tunes from my uncle Delmar that way.

“There was one other fiddler I would hear play some. But I didn’t concentrate on learning tunes from him as much as I did my uncle Delmar. The other fiddler was a Pendleton, too, and I guess we were related a little bit. His name was Gervis Pendleton. He played quite a bit around through the community there.”

Pendletons settled in Patrick County nearly two decades before the Revolutionary War began and they’re still pretty thick on the ground there. And they’ve long been playing music there. His father and uncle played at Christmas parties back when Christmas was celebrated for two weeks or so.

“And also there used to be old-timey corn shuckings going on up in the valley there,” Buddy said. Farmers would gather in their corn and then invite the neighbors. “And the neighbor farmers would come in and the women folk would cook up a big supper, and the men folk would shuck out the pile of corn. And I used to hear a little music, you know, the local music at those corn shuckings.”

Buddy played at Lone Ivy gatherings, too. He played at frolics and square dances and the Buffalo Ridge Pentecostal Church. And when he was fourteen, Buddy played in his first fiddler’s contest. He won. “So I got interested in fiddlers’ conventions,” Buddy said.

He played and won at a lot of regional conventions. His best stretch was thirteen wins in a row. He won Galax. He won Union Grove. He’s the only person to win it five times in a row.

It was at Union Grove that Buddy met Ralph Rinzler, mandolin player for the Greenbriar Boys. Buddy joined the band for its first album on the Vanguard label. He was with the band when they played with Joan Baez. A couple of years later, Rinzler was Bill Monroe’s band manager. He called Buddy to ask if he’d like to be a Bluegrass Boy. It sounded like exciting times, driving around in an old Oldsmobile station wagon with a bass fiddle tied on top, playing with legends and legends-to-be every night, collecting stories.

Once, Buddy and his band mates didn’t think to haul the bass in when they stopped for the night. When Monroe caught up to the band the next morning, the bass was still on top of the car and water from the night’s rain was sloshing around inside.

Another time, Monroe was napping in the front passenger seat while Buddy drove. Buddy didn’t slow down quite enough when he came to a set of railroad tracks. The station wagon bounced hard enough to break a bolt holding the steering together –– and to wake the Father of Bluegrass pretty completely.

Buddy was with the band for less than a year. But it wasn’t his driving or his playing or his part in the soggy bass episode that ended his time with the Bluegrass Boys. Buddy didn’t like the traveling. He’d just gotten married. And he had a job offer back in Patrick County, working for the postal service. Those jobs don’t come along very often. People who get them tend to hold onto them until they retire. And that’s what Buddy did. He came off the road with the Bluegrass Boys to deliver mail along the rural roads of Patrick County.

…

[For the rest of this article, as well as Jack Hinshelwood’s transcription of “Angeline the Baker” as played by Buddy Pendleton, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine, or purchase the summer 2010 issue.]

Recordings available from:
www.summerskyproductions.com; www.oldbluerecords.com

[Tim Thornton grew up in Appalachia and then got a degree for studying it. He teaches English and works on the radio in Roanoke, but he lives, writes, and plays most of his music in Shawsville, Virginia. His fiddle is nearly six feet tall and is almost always played pizzicato.]

Photo above by Christine McKenney.