Byard Ray

A lifetime musician, this North Carolina fiddler and banjo player received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and did a smattering of recordings in the late '70s and early '80s. Then Byard Ray pretty much slipped out of both the sights and minds of old time music enthusiasts, not even earning a nod of recognition from collectors who know the name of similar artists from the '20s who made one or two records. Ray began playing fiddle when he was seven, his greatest inspirations were players born in the mid- to late 19th century, such as J. Dedrick Harris, Ashbury McDevitt, and Ray's great uncle, Mitchell Wallin. His natural talent on the instrument was kept a secret from everyone but his brother, Otis, because the youngsters had been strictly forbidden to touch the instrument out of fear that they would wreck it. Finally the truth came out when the two brothers were hanging around one day with a visiting fiddler, who thought he would do the little boy a favor and give him his first fiddle lesson. Despite Ray's account of the tale, in which the fiddler threatens to kill his mother if she "whups" the boy for touching the fiddle without permission, fiddling seems to have been a family tradition with players such as great grandfather Morris Gosnell, his mother Rilla May Wallin, and his father William Morris Ray. And those are just the relatives whose names he could remember. Ray grew up in a tradition of music, stories, and ballads being passed along orally among family members and friends in the community. He also adapted to modern times and the more urban environments that developed, in which the instruction of this type of cultural material began to be focused around university settings. By the '80s, Ray had become a fiddle and banjo teacher at a variety of colleges,...