Uncle Josh Graves

Burkett Howard "Uncle Josh" Graves was born in Tellico Plains on Sept. 27, 1927, grew up in Alnwick near Maryville, Tennessee, and became a pioneering Dobro player whose instrumental skill helped bring the resonator guitar to the forefront of bluegrass music for decades. Encouraged by his father to play music, he was inspired by Jimmie Rodgers and Cliff Carlisle and, after seeing Carlisle perform around 1939, devoted himself more intensely to the resonator slide guitar even as the instrument was being overshadowed by the electric steel guitar. Graves began playing with the Pierce Brothers in 1942, worked intermittently with Esco Hankins from 1943 to 1950, developed his "Uncle Josh" comic persona, and made his first recordings with Hankins. In 1949 at WVLK in Lexington, Kentucky, he met Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, and Scruggs urged him to adapt his rolling three-finger banjo technique to the Dobro. After moving to Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1951 and then to Richmond, Virginia, where he worked with Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper and later Mac Wiseman, Graves joined Flatt and Scruggs in May 1955 as an upright bassist who also played Dobro in concert. Within two weeks, the group was so impressed by his playing that he chose to switch to Dobro full time, becoming bluegrass music's pioneer Dobroist and helping complete Flatt and Scruggs' signature sound alongside Scruggs on banjo and Paul Warren on fiddle. With the group for nearly 15 years, Graves played as Flatt and Scruggs popularized bluegrass with hits including "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" and appeared at major venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, remaining until the group broke up in 1969. He then played with Lester Flatt's Nashville Grass until early 1972, joined the Earl Scruggs Revue for two and a half years, and went out on his own in mid-1974, recording Alone at Last that year as his first LP as a headliner. He later toured in the United States and overseas, formed a duet with Kenny Baker in 1985, inspired later Dobro players including Jerry Douglas, Mike Auldrige, and Rob Ickes, entered the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1997, and continued playing despite losing both legs to circulatory problems until his death in Nashville on Sept. 30, 2006.

Tellico Plains, Tennessee · United States