String Bands and Vaudeville
At a Mountain City fiddlers' convention in May 1925, Bowman met Al Hopkins, who invited Bowman to join his band, the "Hill Billies." With Bowman on fiddle, the Hill Billies traveled to New York, where they recorded several sides for Vocalion and Brunswick and even played on Broadway. The band then relocated to Washington, D.C. where they played regularly on D.C.-area radio station WLS, and in 1928, performed at a White House social hosted by President Calvin Coolidge. Later that year, the band played in the Al Jolson motion picture, The Singing Fool. In Fall 1928, Bowman left the band and returned to Gray Station.
In October 1928, Bowman and several family members made several recordings at the Johnson City sessions, a recording audition held by Columbia Records in Johnson City. The following year, Columbia invited Bowman to New York, where he and his brother, Walter (on banjo), recorded "Forked Deer" and "Moonshiner and His Money." Around 1930, Bowman and several family members joined the vaudeville group, the "Blue Ridge Ramblers", with whom they toured the Loew's vaudeville circuit until 1935.
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Famous quotes containing the words string and/or bands:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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