Byard Ray and Obray Ramsey Make Long, Strange Trip into Pop Culture

01/17/20 • 2 min

Down the Road on the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina

It’s not unusual for traditional musicians to influence artists in other styles, and that kind of cross-pollination was especially common in the 1960s and ’70s, as pop and rock musicians mined the depths of old-time, blues, and other folk styles. But few traditional musicians of that era had quite such a long, strange trip into the world of pop culture as North Carolina’s Byard Ray and Obray Ramsey.
Ray and Ramsey were cousins from Madison County, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Asheville. Madison County has been home to renowned traditional ballad singers and instrumentalists for generations, and the two men were part of the network of families whose musical heritage has made the county famous. Obray Ramsey was a banjo player with an old-time three-finger picking style and a smooth, high singing voice. Byard Ray was a skilled fiddler whose musical roots drew from the playing of some of the early fiddlers of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, including J. D. Harris, who influenced many other great musicians of the region.

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Young Presley Barker Dazzles on the Flatpicked Guitar

The Blue Ridge Mountains of northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia have produced legendary bluegrass and old-time guitarists. Presley Barker is the newest member of the lineage of virtuosic flatpickers inspired by Doc Watson. Presley first started to learn the guitar in 2012, when he was only seven years old. It didn’t take long for the traditional music community in his native North Carolina mountains to take note.

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Jack Guy Compiled a Treasure Trove of Mountain Music

For more than a hundred years, folklorists and other scholars have been visiting the community of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. Perhaps the most prolific collector of the community’s music and stories was himself a native of Old Beech.
In the 1960s, Jack Guy began selling mountain handcrafts and folk toys to tourists, helping local artists make a living through their heritage crafts. He operated his business out of a small log cabin, selling classic mountain toys like limberjacks and gee-haw-whimmy-diddles, alongside many other items, including musical instruments made by renowned local luthiers.
And while he was at it, Jack created a venue for Beech Mountain’s musicians to perform, share their music, and be recorded for posterity. He hosted many concerts and informal jams at the shop, featuring great local bands, solo musicians, and storytellers. As they performed, Jack was often at work in the background recording the music on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. He created an enormous archive of Beech Mountain music and folklore.
Soon you’ll be able to visit the North Carolina Folklife Institute’s website, ncfolk.org, to listen to more than 100 audio tapes of mountain music, accompanied by hundreds of old photos of life on Beech Mountain, recordings and stories by the artists who carry on Beech Mountain’s traditions today.