North Carolina contributes to country music history

North Carolina celebrates a musical history milestone in 2024. This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the recording of more than a dozen songs performed by two “mountain women” – the “nation’s first female country music artists.”

Hail to these native daughters – Samantha Biddix Bumgarner and Eva Payne Davis. They traveled from rural western North Carolina to New York City in 1924 with a five-string banjo and a fiddle to record 14 of their traditional string music tunes for Columbia Records.

Samantha Biddix, born in 1878, grew up in the Dillsboro community in Jackson County, on the banks of the Tuckasegee River. Her father, Haselton Leander “Has” Biddix, was a well-known fiddle player. When he was not around, Samantha snitched his fiddle to teach herself how to play.

Her first banjo was “a gourd with a cat’s hide stretched over it and strings made of cotton thread and waxed with beeswax.” By age 15, Samantha and her father were performing together.

 

Eva Payne was born in 1888 into a “musical family” living in the Proctor community in neighboring Swain County, N.C.

 

They were middle-aged, married women when they went to New York City. Some of the songs they recorded were: “Cindy in the Meadows,” “Wide-Eyed Rabbit,” “Wild Bill Jones,” “Georgia Blues,” “I Am My Momma’s Darling Child,” “Last Gold Dollar,” “Down the Road,” “Shout Lou” and “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.”

 

“Eva Davis (shown above) stopped performing after their recording session, but ‘Aunt Samantha’ Bumgarner was just getting started,” wrote Lynn Hotaling (shown below), former editor of The Sylva (N.C.) Herald.

Bumgarner preferred playing to live audiences rather than recording music in a studio. She was recruited to become a featured performer at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, organized in 1928 by promoter Bascom Lamar Lunsford (shown below), who was nicknamed the “Minstrel of the Appalachians.”

 

Lunsford boasted that Bumgarner was the “best all-around musician he’d ever met.”

Hotaling added: “When onstage, Bumgarner mixed the traditional music she had heard and played all her life with original songs. It was said she had a knack for setting mountain stories and legends to music, weaving them into the ballads that set her performances apart.”

 

Aunt Samantha participated in Lunsford’s festival every year through 1959, performing as a musician, vocalist and dancer. (She was a talented clogger.)

Famed folk singer/songwriter Pete Seeger (shown below) of New York City attended Lunsford’s festival in 1936 at the age of 16. Seeger was inspired to learn how to play the five-string banjo after listening to Aunt Samantha Bumgarner’s performance.

 

Also in the 1930s, Bumgarner became a national radio celebrity. She had her own show on the original “border blaster” station – XER-AM – that sprouted up in Villa Acuña, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas.

It was the brainchild of Dr. Richard J. Brinkley (shown below). The station’s signal, powered by up to 1 million watts, was capable of reaching every U.S. market and beyond.

 

(Dr. Brinkley, who was born in 1885, grew up in Beta, an unincorporated settlement within Jackson County, N.C., not too far from the Bumgarner homeplace in Dillsboro. He drove from Villa Acuña in his big, expensive Cadillac to pick up Bumgarner along with another budding fiddler who Bumgarner had tutored – Harry Cagle – and personally delivered them to his compound.)

Dr. Rob Ferguson (shown below), a history professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee (also in Jackson County), wrote: “Samantha Bumgarner deserves an honored place in music. Current and future musicians hoping to carve their own path can find ample inspiration in Samantha Bumgarner.”