Bluegrass Legend Comes to Riner
By Tim Thornton, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Mar. 9–SHADY SPRINGS, W.Va. — They were just little boys.
Everett was 6. His big brother Bea was 8.
Even then, just as the Great Depression was about to hit, they had the beginnings of the high tenor brother harmonies that were the trademark of old country and early bluegrass music. Bea would borrow a guitar from a neighbor and off the boys would go to sing at churches, dances and schoolhouse gatherings around Clear Creek, on a fork of West Virginia’s Coal River.
"We went mostly to get the food," Everett Lilly remembered this week. "And boy did they have the food. The awfulest load of food you ever saw."
Lilly is back to playing rural schools — Everett Lilly and the Lilly Mountaineers will be at Auburn High School on Saturday — but the road from there to here passed through Knoxville, Tenn., Tokyo, Boston, the Grand Ole Opry and the Wheeling Jamboree.
"It’s just like a kid crawling around," Lilly said. "Everthing you do seemly leads to something else."
The Lilly Brothers and banjo player Don Stover were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 2002.
Stover died in 1996. Bea Lilly died in 2003. But Everett Lilly is still singing and fiddling and playing his mandolin.
"I can’t quit it," he said.
When Everett was about 9, he and Bea were invited to sing in a movie house during the intermissions. They got to see the movies for free and they got $15 for about 15 minutes work.
"When we sang and played, you could hear a pin drop," Lilly said.
By then, Bea had a guitar of his own. Their mother sold a calf to get the money. Their father bought Everett a mandolin. Neighbor Brian Toney took the boys to the state capital — they rode standing in the bed of his truck — to play on a WCHS radio show called The Old Farm Hour.
For much of the 1940s, they performed on one radio station or another.
They played on WJLS in Beckley with Lynn Davis and Molly O’Day. They played at WWVA with Red Belcher and the Kentucky Ridgerunners.
At WWVA, the brothers would do a 6 a.m. and a 10 a.m. show every weekday, then the Wheeling Jamboree on Saturday night. And they’d do shows on the road, too, sometimes skipping the Jamboree to do it.
"If you get a big flat rate, you’re pretty apt to take it," Lilly said.
The brothers left for a gig at a Fairmont radio station that made them take a half-dozen other acts on the road with them. It might have been good publicity for the station and its performers, but it split the take from the gate thinly.
"You couldn’t have enough money after you played a show to buy a bag of peanuts," Lilly said.
The brothers moved to Knoxville’s WNOX for the Midday Merry-Go-Round. Then they went back to West Virginia. Then back to WNOX and the Tennessee Barn Dance, where they were part of the Smiling Mountain Boys. That’s when the brothers got a chance to go to the Grand Ole Opry and earn $10 more each week.
They turned it down.
They didn’t want to run out on their band mates.
"We felt like we might be doing them a little wrong," Lilly said.
Then King Records offered a recording contract.
The brothers turned that down because the contract didn’t say "the Lilly Brothers." They were supposed to call the company representative back, but they never did.
"We lost out on King Records and we lost out on the Grand Ole Opry," Lilly said. "It was right in our hand. We just didn’t shut the hand up on it."
Bea went to work for a brake company. Everett started playing mandolin and singing harmony with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who had left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys to start their own band. Then Tex Logan came to talk with Everett Lilly.
Logan was one of the Kentucky Ridgerunners. Logan and Lilly had both been Blue Grass Boys for a time. But when Logan came to talk, he was a research assistant at MIT who fiddled with the Lane Brothers. Frank Lane, the guitar player, had gotten drafted, so Logan was hunting for a replacement. He asked Lilly if the Lilly Brothers were ever getting back together.
There was good work in Boston, Logan said.
Lilly said the only way he’d go to Boston was if Logan could guarantee him a year of bookings.
"I didn’t have any idea he could do it," Lilly said.
Logan booked the Lilly Brothers into the Hillbilly Ranch, a honky-tonk. So Everett left Flatt and Scruggs, Bea left the brake company. Don Stover left a coal mine in Stovepipe, W.Va. They were the house band for the Hillbilly Ranch, playing seven nights a week from 1952 until 1970. Sometimes they took a night off to play a college somewhere. They performed at Carnegie Hall.
New Englanders flocked to hear the Lilly Brothers and to take lessons from them. The brothers had taken bluegrass to a place as foreign it could be.
Then they met the Tainaka brothers.
Robert and Jerry Tainaka came by the Hillbilly Ranch every night. Robert asked if he could record the shows.
Then in 1970, Everett Lilly’s oldest son died in a car crash. Lilly took his boy home to bury him in West Virginia.
And Lilly stayed there.
And he just about quit playing.
One day a nephew called Lilly to say he had a copy of the album the Lilly Brothers made in Japan.
"I said, ‘No you ain’t, boy. Furthermore, I ain’t never been to Japan,’ " Lilly said.
Tainaka had issued some of his recordings as "Live at Hillbilly Ranch," which would be seen in later years as a classic bluegrass album. And then Tainaka asked the brothers to play in Japan.
Bea didn’t really want to go, so Everett quoted what he thought was a high price — $5,000 plus hotels, meals, travel and all other costs.
The Lilly Brothers were a big hit in Tokyo.
"When we put on our show, those people went wild for us," Lilly said of their 1973 tour of Japan. "They done to us what they done to Elvis Presley."
The Lilly Brothers would go on to tour Japan again and make more records. But their schedule was nothing like the old days.
Sometimes Stover and the brothers reunited for a show, and Stover recorded some albums with his own band. But the Lilly Brothers were pretty much over until 2001 when the Lilly Brothers and the Lilly Mountaineers started touring. The Mountaineers are mostly Everett Lilly’s sons: Mark, Daniel and Everett Alan. Rad Lewis, the 2002 West Virginia champion, plays banjo.
Everett Lilly is 82. He’s been through open heart surgery. He has a pacemaker. And he still plays and sings like he did at those square dances in Clear Creek.
"I can’t quit it," he said.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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