with Terri  McMurray and Chester McMillian
North Carolina
fiddle, banjo, guitar

A musician since childhood, Paul Brown spent years collecting and documenting traditional music in southwestern Virginia and northwest North Carolina, particularly the stunningly rich traditions around Mount Airy in the region known as Round Peak. As a performer, a record producer, and a radio host—formerly of Mount Airy’s famous hometown station, WPAQ, and now reaching a national audience as a newscaster and reporter for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition—Paul Brown has introduced millions to the special world of Round Peak music, and helped to ensure its preservation and vitality for future generations.

Paul started picking banjo on a new Sears Silvertone when he was ten. He developed his own two- and three-finger styles, and also learned the clawhammer style. His interest, and his discovery of the Clawhammer Banjo albums, inspired him to make frequent trips to visit as many of the older players as he could. He has visited and played music with a number of the older artists in the Southern Appalachian region.

Paul spent years learning music directly from some of the last fiddle, banjo, and guitar players to emerge before the age of radio and recordings, including Tommy Jarrell, Gilmer Woodruff, Fields Ward, Robert Sykes, Luther Davis, Verlen Clifton, and Paul Sutphin. Paul studied banjo intensively with Tommy Jarrell, and he learned much from the playing of Wade Ward. He spent considerable time with Wade’s nephew, Fields, a fine guitarist, banjo player and singer. He also played in the Smokey Valley Boys with Benton Flippen, Verlen Clifton, and Paul Sutphin. When Paul Sutphin died, Paul Brown wrote about how Sutphin influenced the musicians: “More than anything else, he would infuse the performance with focused energy, intensity and happiness that drove the rest of us to play harder and better than we thought we could.”

Terri McMurray is a sought-after teacher of the traditional music of the Blue Ridge region, with decades of performing and recording experience as a string band banjo, guitar and ukulele player. Music drew her from Wisconsin to the southern Appalachian mountains in 1982, when she came to study banjo with Tommy Jarrell of Surry County, North Carolina. She played with many other great banjoists including Dix Freeman, Fields Ward, Earnest East, Benton Flippen, Matokie Slaughter, and Kyle Creed. She won the 1982 banjo prize at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax, Virginia. Terri co-founded the Old Hollow String Band with Riley Baugus and Kirk Sutphin. She performed for 25 years with the Toast String Stretchers. More recently, she has played in duos and string bands with Paul Brown, including the Mostly Mountain Boys and the Mountain Birch Duo. As a teacher, Terri is well loved for her engaging manner, patience, and ability to work with students of all ages and abilities.

Chester McMillian was born in Carroll County, Virginia, into a musical family and community. He has played traditional oldtime Round Peak style music since childhood. By the time he was eleven or twelve years old, he was living in Surry County and taking an active part in the Round Peak music community. He has played with Dix Freeman, Tommy Jarrell, Greg Hooven, and with his own group Backstep that today includes his son, Nick.

“I had music on both sides of my family,” says Chester. His father was an oldtime banjo player, and his mother’s brothers played fiddle. Chester remembers going to house dances and listening to his father and uncle play. When he was young, his father helped him make an instrument out of a cigar box. He and his brother soon acquired a mandolin and guitar, and they started playing music together.

Chester played mandolin and a little fiddle, but he eventually settled into the guitar as his main instrument. In 1962, Chester married into Dix Freeman’s family, and the two began playing a lot of music together. “Each community had their own musicians back then,” he says, adding that most musicians therefore had individual styles. Chester played guitar with finger picks on his thumb, index, and middle fingers. He worked as an auto mechanic and smashed his finger on the same day he had to play a square dance with Whit Sizemore. His middle finger hurt to up-pick, so he turned the pick around and began strumming down with his middle finger. “It’s a style that nobody else plays like,” he says.

Chester played guitar with Tommy Jarrell for fifteen years, and he developed his guitar style specifically to play with Tommy. “You just didn’t strum the guitar behind Tommy,” he explains. “I had to develop to play notes behind the fiddle and banjo.” He accompanied Tommy on numerous trips to local and national events, including trips to Washington, D.C., to perform for festivals. Chester recorded albums with Tommy, and he plays with Tommy on parts of three documentary films produced by Les Blank, Sprout Wings and Fly, Julie, and Tommy’s Fiddle.

Chester has also kept busy teaching music to children in Surry County. He teaches guitar, fiddle, banjo, and mandolin beginning with the church melodies that they already know. “I teach them to play gospel,” he says, “Then they can learn what they want afterwards.” When asked what he likes, Chester says, “I enjoy all kinds of music, but I like to play the Round Peak style of oldtime music.”