Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

Hers may not be a household name, but “Aunt Samantha” Bumgarner is an artist to remember as a highly influential musician whose work on the fiddle and banjo is still felt to this day.

Born Samantha Biddix in 1878 in Western North Carolina, Bumgarner’s father, Has Leander Biddix, was a well-known fiddle player in the region, and was Samantha’s inspiration to learn to play not only the fiddle, but also banjo.

By 1910, Bumgarner had married and was becoming a well-known performance artist through her participation in — and frequent winning of — fiddle and banjo contests. and from that time was thereafter known by the moniker “Aunt Samantha” Bumgarner. In 1924, Bumgarner and her friend and fellow musician Eva Davis were invited to New York to record Appalachian music for Columbia Records. In two days, Bumgarner and Davis had recorded about a dozen songs. Not only were the recordings notable for capturing some Appalachian standards, they were also the first recordings to capture five-string banjo — and most importantly, the session made Bumgarner and Davis the first women country artists to ever be recorded.

Among the songs Bumgarner and Davis recorded was the track, “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.” The fidelity of that 100-year-old recording is not quite to standard for airing in its entirety on Radio Heartland, but for our Classic Americana pick, we will feature Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ cover of that song, taken from their 2020 album, All The Good Times (Are Past & Gone).

In 1928, the western North Carolina musician and impresario Bascom Lamar Lunsford invited Bumgarner to perform at his Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C., and Bumgarner performed there every year until her death in 1960. At the 1936 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, a young Harvard student by the name of Pete Seeger was in attendance, and on seeing “Aunt Samantha” Bumgarner perform, was inspired to learn to play banjo. (Incidentally, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival continues in Asheville to this day, making it the longest-running folk festival in the United States.)

In 1939, the musicologist Charles Seeger invited “Aunt Samantha” Bumgarner to perform among a diverse array of artists in Washington, D.C., when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt welcomed Great Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for a concert at the White House representing a broad cross-section of American music.

External Links

“Aunt Samantha” Bumgarner, Traditional Musician – North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources