Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2018 - 33

PROTECTING DEEP ROOTS: The Blue
Ridge region where Eddie Bond lives has produced
more bluegrass and old-time musicians per capita
than any other area in the world.

one of the important people in the region
carrying on this heritage," says Lohman,
Virginia Folklife Program director at Virginia Humanities.
Bond is fiddler and lead singer for the
New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters, one
of Virginia's best-known old-time string
bands. He has performed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Kennedy Center,
the Library of Congress, and on stages
from Australia to Ireland. He has been
named "Best All-around Performer" twice
at Galax Old Fiddlers' Convention, the nation's largest fiddlers' convention.
Yet Bond remains a familiar presence
at local music festivals and picking parties
in parking lots, country stores and other
informal settings where musicians gather.
He seldom misses the weekly Thursday
night jams in his hometown of Fries (pronounced "Freeze").
Bond was raised in an extended family of musicians, folks well documented in
the Library of Congress' archival recordings. He had a guitar by age three, oldtime lessons from his Granny Widner at
eight, and began performing at nine, starting in church.
While all of his great grandfathers and
three of his grandparents played old-time
music, Bond's own generation did not.
Bond, 47, is demographically in traditional music's "lost generation," but he was
never lost.
"I was an old-time nerd. It was definitely not cool with kids my age," Bond says.
"Most of my friends were over 70. I still
hear them in my mind."
Bond never took formal lessons-he
just learned by watching and listening.
"You just picked up what you could,"
he says. "Just listened and tried to keep
the music in your head. You'd say 'How
do you play 'Soldier's Joy?"' and they'd
play it for you and you'd try to copy it."
Bond teaches his traditional string
band students at Grayson County High
School the same way. The only Virginia
high school with a traditional string band,
Grayson County has Bond teaching string
band part-time and machine shop the rest
of the day.

'Eddie has
spent his entire
life at the feet
of the masters
learning the
traditional
songs and then
making them
completely his
own.'

"People learn so much from recordings and the Internet these days. I hate to
think they're all going to sound generic,
that you won't hear regional differences
anymore," he says.
When he was 17, Bond joined the
army and ended up in the first Gulf War.
His sergeant asked Bond to put on a show
with a banjo player he knew.
"There wasn't much to do in Saudi,"
Bond says. "So we got together and played

for the troops. We played anything anybody knew to play."
When it was Bond's turn to pick the
song, he played "Cackling Hen," because
it was a fairly simple tune to follow along
on.
"When we finished, Jim Greer, the
banjo player, he looked at me and said
'Where are you from?' and I told him
'You've never heard of it,' and he said 'I
bet I have-you learned that song from
Albert Hash, didn't you?' I said 'Now how
did you know that?' and he said 'I'm from
Whitetop,'" Bond says. "You used to be
able to tell where a fiddler came from by
the way he played. Thousands of Army
guys in Saudi and two guys from Grayson
County ended up playing together."
When Bond left the army, he played
in his own band, Old Time Tradition, and
joined the Bogtrotters in 2001. He married Bonnie Bird, who plays bass in the
band. He manages to write songs, including "Furniture Factory Blues" about his
first job, and he plays the tunes he grew
up hearing.
Bond shares the National Heritage Fellowship with the likes of bluesman B.B.
King, gospel singer Mavis Staples and
Bond's personal hero, old-time musician
Tommy Jarrell.
"I don't feel like I'm worthy of receiving this honor," Bond says. "But I feel like
all the people who taught me are getting
their due. When I got the call, my mind
flooded with memories of all the oldtimers I learned these tunes from. I feel so
blessed I get to carry it on."

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018

Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2018

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