Al Hopkins - Early Career

Early Career

In 1910 Al Hopkins launched his professional music career. He and his younger brothers Joe, Elmer, and John formed a group called the Old Mohawk Quartet, which played regularly at Washington's Majestic Theater.

About 1912 the family built a large new house at 63 Kennedy Street in an area of Northwest Washington, D.C. that was not yet built out. Hopkins' mother and the younger children summered at the family farm in Gap Creek, North Carolina, so their contact with rural life remained strong. In the early 1920s Hopkins' oldest brother, Jacob, a surgeon and musician, established a rural hospital/clinic in Galax, Virginia, where he often invited local banjo players to entertain the hospital patients. Doctor Hopkins was renowned and active as a surgeon and musician. Al Hopkins worked for him in Galax as hospital office manager and secretary. Joe, who would later play with Al in his recorded bands, worked at this time as a Railway Express agent in White Top Gap, Virginia. Joe played guitar here and there in his spare time, including at his brother's clinic.

In late spring 1924, Joe met fiddler and journeyman barber Alonzo Elvis "Tony" Alderman in the latter's Galax barber shop. The two of them and Al Hopkins were soon a trio. John Rector, a local general store keeper and five-string banjo player who has already, recorded decided that they were better than his current band, and joined them. They soon traveled to New York City to record, a three-day trip in a Ford Model T. That initial recording session was a disaster: the technology for recording such groups was still in its infancy. That wasn't their only bad fortune that year: Doctor Hopkins died July 26, 1924.

Early the next year they made it back to New York (this time in a new Dodge Rector had bought) and, on January 15, 1925 recorded six pieces much more successfully for Ralph Peer at OKeh.