Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,779

This is the grave of Al Hopkins.

Born in 1889 in Watauga County, North Carolina, Hopkins grew up in a locally prominent and musical family. His father was in the state legislature at a time, played a bunch of instruments, and built organs for fun. His mother was a locally known singer too, both in the church and in the old-time Scotch-Irish ballads of the era. Al himself might have just followed his father. But in 1904, the family moved to Washington, D.C., when his father got a job with the Census Bureau. This exposed this western North Carolina boy to a whole other world; importantly for Al’s future, this was early 20th century popular music.

In 1910, Hopkins and his brothers Joe, Elmer, and John formed a family band in DC called the Old Mohawk Quartet, which was popular in Washington and had regular gigs. The family was back and forth between DC and Appalachia all the time. Now well off, they had a nice big home in northwestern DC but also had a home back in North Carolina, where his mother and younger siblings were quite often. Another brother became a doctor in Galax, Virginia by the early 20s and after his service in World War I, Al went down there to help him out. His brother wanted to find something for his hospital patients to do, so he hired local banjo players to put on shows. Al got to know them too.

So in the spring of 1924, Hopkins started playing with some local musicians in Galax. One was a fiddler named Tony Alderman, who owned a barbershop in the town. Another was a banjo player who owned a store named John Rector. They joined Al, who mostly played piano, and his brother Joe on guitar, to form a band. They became the Hill Billies, which is one of the first known uses of this word to describe country people from the South. There was some irony in the fact, in that the Hopkins boys came from money, Rector was definitively middle class, and Alderman grew up very poor, but was in an upwardly mobile family. In 1925, they headed to New York but the early recording sessions for Ralph Peer were a disaster, as the technology didn’t work. Then Hopkins’ doctor brother died and there was no reason to go back to Galax.

So Hopkins and the Hill Billies set themselves up in DC and they became locally popular. The great early country musician Ernest Stoneman loved the name and encouraged them to keep it. Hopkins wasn’t really sure and for awhile they were known as Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters, which is how I first ran into them back on some Document Records reissues that my brother found when he worked for a music company and tended to horde the old-time country and blues CDs no one else at the company wanted to touch. It also seems the band was trying to maximize exposure. They recorded the exact same material as the Buckle Busters for Brunswick Records as they did as the Hill Billies for Vocalion Records. Maybe they were maximizing opportunities to get big.

Well, they got about as big as any old-timey band could. In truth, the Hill Billies were a more modern band that a lot of the old-time music being recorded in the 20s, like Fiddlin’ John Carson, who really did sound like he was just in from the mountains. While for the rest of the country, this so-called old-time music was from another time and place, in truth, the South was already changing rapidly and most of the people who took advantage of this, whether Hopkins or someone like Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, or just slightly later, The Carter Family, were thoroughly modern people leading thoroughly modern lives.

Well Hopkins and his band became pretty big on the east coast in the late 20s and early 30s. They played at the first big country music festivals, such as the fiddlers’ convention put on by the Ku Klux Klan in Johnson City, Tennessee in 1925. Once again, lest you think the KKK was just a bunch of violent racists in weird costumes–though they were that–, it was also the nation’s largest voluntarily organization at this time and for all that people excuse away Harry Truman’s brief flirtation with the Klan at this time, the only reason he didn’t go all the way is that he was close to the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City, which was a fundamentally Catholic political machine and Truman didn’t want to cut those ties. Truman of course went on to desegregate the military as president a couple of decades later. None of that excuses the KKK, but understand that them putting on a big music festival would have been seen as completely normal in 1925. I have no idea what Hopkins’ views of race were; I very much doubt they were good, but I don’t know.

In any case, Hopkins and his band also played before Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the first time a country band played for a president. Coolidge was very much not a Klansman, so they’d play for anyone, as most musicians will. This was at a White House Press Correspondents event, which is a great moment to mention once again the grotesquery of what this has become, with the Beltway media sucking up to our horrible politicians and the liberal media world being actually worse on this issue than right-wingers. NERD PROM!!!!! Gross.

I find Hopkins’ recordings some of the weirdest of the old-time genre and that’s precisely because they were less influenced by Appalachia than most of that music. Lots of obvious Tin Pan Alley references in this music.

The Great Depression was horrible for the old-time musicians. Most of them disappeared quickly as the recording studios shut their doors. That was true for both Black and white musicians. The folk revival of the 60s had relatively little interest in the old-timey white musicians, unlike the Blues musicians, where so many were rediscovered and had late life actually kind of big careers. But Hopkins’ fate would be different, and sadder. He died in a car accident in 1932 in Winchester, Virginia. He was 43 years old.

Al Hopkins is buried in the confiscated land of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

Let’s listen to some of Al Hopkins’ work.

If you would like this series to visit more old-time musicians, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Gid Tanner is in Dacula, Georgia and Fiddlin’ John Carson is in Atlanta. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.