Scotty Stoneman

Scotty Stoneman has been called the Jimi Hendrix of the violin by Peter Rowan, and the "bluegrass Charlie Parker" by no less a figure than Jerry Garcia. Yet he's an elusive, mysterious figure -- in some ways even more so than Parker or Hendrix ever were -- with a career that was mostly spent working in tandem with other musicians, but without the kind of unified body of recordings left behind by, say, Hugh Farr of the Sons of the Pioneers (who was, himself, once compared to Fritz Kreisler by Leopold Stokowski). Until he was past 30, Stoneman was best known as part of a performing family who were, in their own right, legends in the field of country music. The Stonemans, or the Stoneman Family, started in music with Ernest Van "Pop" Stoneman (1893-1968), a man who pioneered what is now known as country music before it even existed as an identifiable category of music. The son of a lay preacher and a singer, he came from a family with a rich musical life, a multi-instrumentalist who was seemingly good on every instrument he touched. Ironically, he gravitated toward the autoharp, an instrument that he couldn't afford, and so he'd built his own from pieces of an old piano. He'd worked as a farm hand, a carpenter, and a sweeper at a cotton mill, but as always throughout his life, his main interest was music. That made the union in marriage between him and Hattie Frost, the daughter of a luthier, fiddler, and banjo player, who played the banjo and fiddle herself, seem as much preordained as natural. They had 23 children, of whom 13 lived to become adults, and it was from their ranks that the six performing members of the Stonemans came. Pop Stoneman had made his first recording privately in 1914, and his commercial recording career started a decade later with "The Sinking of...