Al Hopkins - Hill Billies and Buckle Busters

Hill Billies and Buckle Busters

Lacking a band name, at the OKeh session Hopkins (whose now-urban father had been kidding him about the direction his life was taking) told Peer "We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. Call us anything." In fact, no one in the band conformed to the stereotype of a backwoods hillbilly. The Hopkins brothers father was a legislator and civil servant; Rector owned a store; Alderman had grown up in an isolated cabin, but his father was a surveyor, civil engineer, and justice of the peace. Still, they became The Hill Billies, and although they soon had qualms about the name (Alderman would later say, "Hillbilly was not only a funny word; it was a fighting word."), fellow musician Ernest Stoneman encouraged them to keep it: "Well, boys, you have come up with a good one. Nobody could beat it."

With Hopkins' doctor brother dead, there was no reason to stay in Galax, and the band based itself in Washington, D.C, where they soon became regulars on WRC; on the radio, Hopkins mother sang with them on the ballads.

On May 8, 1925 they played at an enormous fiddler's convention in Mountain City, Tennessee, sponsored by the local Ku Klux Klan. At this time Charlie Bowman joined the band as an additional fiddler. Other members would later come and go, but this completed the classic lineup.

They played gigs from South Carolina to New York. commenced – at schools, vaudeville shows, fiddlers' competitions, political rallies, and even a White House Press Correspondents' gathering before President Coolidge.

For OKeh they recorded only the on 1925 session produced by Ralph Peer. Later, they would record for Vocalion (as The Hill Billies), and Brunswick (as Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters). The Vocalion and Brunswick recordings were identical except for the band names.

Hopkins and his band tried at one point to control the name "Hill Billy" as it applied to music. They incorporated their group January 21, 1929 as Al Hopkins' Original Hill Billies, but ultimately accepted that their band name had become the name of a genre of music.

Hopkins and his band continued to perform until his death in a car accident in Winchester, Virginia, in 1932. The band broke up after his death.