Born in a one-room log cabin in North Carolina in 1898,
J.E. Mainer
was playing the banjo by the time he was nine-years old. By the time he formed the first version of his bluegrass band
the Mountaineers
, however, he had switched his main instrument to fiddle, and it is as a fiddler, songwriter, and bandleader that
Mainer
is treasured today by the bluegrass nation.
Mainer & His Mountaineers
recorded 24 songs for
King Records
in 1946, and then returned in 1961 to track an additional album and a couple of singles for the label. This budget 20-song set collects the best of those
King
sessions. ~ Steve Leggett