Back to the Cabin in Caroline – A Tribute to Bluegrass Pioneer, John ‘Ralph’ Pennington is a new release of mostly older material, which is precisely what the title suggests. The project was a huge undertaking and devoted to the memory of the groundbreaking North Carolina bluegrass musician by his daughter, Vivian Pennington-Hopkins. It is more than just good bluegrass music with top notch musicians, it is a history lesson in early bluegrass music of western North Carolina, particularly Wilkes County.
Hopkins explained the origin of the album…
“This project has been several years in the making. [COVID and the sickness/death of her husband slowed the process.] I’m proud to finally produce this compilation of songs written by my dad during the early pioneering years of bluegrass.
I’m honored to have so many world-class musicians with me on this album, and I owe a special thank you to Herb Pedersen who was immediately interested in being involved. Herb sings on four cuts, including the iconic bluegrass standard, My Cabin in Caroline, which also includes longtime family friend, Jim Buchanan, on fiddle.
The inspiration for this album came from conversations with Matteo Ringressi of Forti, Italy during his research into the music of the Church Brothers, a pioneer bluegrass band from Wilkes County, NC. My dad was a band member and was also a cousin to the brothers. He wrote several songs recorded by the band in the early 1950s which are included on this project.”
…and how it came to fruition.
“In those conversations I thought, ‘I really need to compile Dad’s best songs.’ The possibility of doing a compilation tribute CD just came from my conversations with Matt. I credit him with the inspiration to record this album.”
David Johnson, her co-producer and performer on the album (guitar, mandolin, and vocals), stressed…
“It’s a preservation of not only a man’s work, his life, and his life’s passion, but it’s also a preservation of early day bluegrass I think that needed to be. I’m just tickled to death that she did it because I don’t know if anybody else would have. She did it as a labor of love. I think it’s going to mean something, not just to the historians of the music, but to people who like the music. I think they’re going to enjoy Ralph’s songs anew, particularly if they know the stories behind the songs.
I was glad to be involved with it. Vivian did all the grunt work. All most of us had to do was make sure we knew the songs and play them.”
The album contains ten original tunes. Seven composed by Ralph (though a couple were documented to others), and two penned by Vivian about her mom’s homeplace, the same setting that had motivated her dad to compose My Cabin in Caroline many years earlier. Though My Cabin in Caroline is credited to Lester Flatt, Vivian has an interesting back story.
With a newly formed band, Flatt & Scruggs were looking for fresh material for their first recording.
Vivian shared this bit of bluegrass history.
“Lester approached my dad and paid him $50 for the rights to record My Cabin in Caroline. They went to Knoxville, Tennessee to record for the Mercury sessions in the fall of 1948. This was the first song that Flatt & Scruggs recorded as the Foggy Mountain Boys.
Daddy never talked about it or advertised that he wrote the song. It was just something that was commonly known. We never thought anything about it. In those days when he was writing so many great songs, he never thought about the impact his songwriting would have on the music industry.”
Johnson pondered the history behind the signature song.
“Then there’s always this mystique about the first song, My Cabin in Caroline, that Flatt recorded in Knoxville. It’s a little unusual for Lester to have sung. That was a normal thing for sidemen to provide songs sometimes. It was not hard for me to believe that Ralph came up with that song, particularly considering that Vivian’s mom was raised and Ralph courted her while she was living in a cabin at the edge of the pines in Carolina, not Tennessee.
I know they were trying to write songs quick, and that recording session was coming up. They had this new thing going with Mercury and they had to come up with some songs. I just couldn’t see how Lester could have written a song at that time in his life about a blue-eyed girl in Caroline. I don’t know what color eyes Gladys’ were, but she was not a blond and she didn’t live in Caroline.
Ralph was courting Ruby, and she lived here. That whole thing was interesting to me. It is probably one of those things that never will have a universal resolution, but it sure makes sense.”
Balsam Range banjoist, Marc Pruett, heard the same story.
“In 1974, I attended a bluegrass festival close to Knoxville called Red Gate. Lester Flatt was one of the headliners, and I had a chance to visit with Lester’s tenor singer, Curly Seckler.
At one point, our conversation turned to old songs, and I asked Curly about the origin of Cabin in Caroline that had been on an early Flatt and Scruggs recording.
In his classic tenor voice, Curly said, ‘Lester Flatt bought that song from a guy over in North Carolina in 1948 for fifty dollars!’ That’s one of the ‘deep information tidbits’ that bluegrass geeks like me treasure knowing.
When I was inducted into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame a couple of years ago, my wife, Anita, and I played Cabin in Caroline after I had told Curly’s story. Later in the evening, a lady introduced herself as Vivian Pennington Hopkins, and she said, ‘I can tell you who wrote Cabin in Caroline … it was my dad, Ralph Pennington!’
Visiting with Vivian and talking about her dad’s song gave me smiling comfort to finally know the author of Cabin in Caroline, Ralph Pennington!”
Johnson assisted in the making of the tribute project and recommended a studio. He stressed to Hopkins, “You need to go to Van Atkins’ studio. He’s a world class bluegrass engineer and has done numerous albums for Doyle Lawson. It was a great place to go.”
Johnson watched her project grow.
“Then she got Herb Pedersen involved in this thing. Vivian knows a lot of people. I’m happy for her to have done this project. I just wanted to make sure that it got recorded in a good fashion. She’s a good cheerleader and was very patient. It’s a long process when you involve a lot of players from different areas with different liabilities. It takes a while to get a recording done. It spanned the planet – North Carolina, Tennessee, California, and Italy!”
Herb Pedersen shared…
“I became involved with this project through Mark Fain, our bass player in J2B2. He called me about his conversation with Vivian. I was happy to put my part on in California. It’s a great song.”
With Pedersen singing three parts (lead, tenor, and baritone), with unexpected key changes between the instrumental breaks and the singing (swapping from A to B and back again), the old song takes on new life.
Hopkins noted. “Danny Bowers and I came up with a little melody change. That arrangement sounds awesome, and I loved what we did.”
Another Pennington original on the project, An Angel with Wings, is credited to Bill Church.
“It was written by my father in 1952 and recorded by the Church Brothers. It was written following the loss of my mom and dad’s third child, a little girl. Born prematurely, she lived just shy of 24 hours. My dad held her the whole time until she passed. So that song was written at that time and recorded by the Church Brothers who were Dad’s cousins. It was credited to Bill Church since he sang lead.”
There were more stories behind the other songs Vivian selected from her father’s repertoire.
“The best songs were made from real life experiences. Way Down in Ole Caroline was a really good one. Herb actually ended up singing on that one, too.
There was an article written in Bluegrass Unlimited on songs about war. The Battle Over in Korea wasn’t mentioned. So in the next issue, Sonny Osborne made a comment that ‘there was another real fine war song written by Ralph Pennington.'”
A number of Vivian’s own originals are included on the project: Papa’s Farm and Back to the Cabin in Caroline with her singing lead and Pedersen adding harmonies.
“Daddy was playing music all over, so we spent a lot of time at Granny and Poppy’s on weekends and summers. Mama told me a lot of stuff about growing up there. I started writing notes about what I remembered. Papa’s Farm is about the farm that My Cabin in Caroline was written about. It’s where we all grew up.
When I decided to do the album, I wanted to finish the song. I give Danny Bowers credit for helping me figure out a melody for Papa’s Farm and Back to the Cabin in Caroline. I wrote Back to the Cabin when I started seriously thinking about recording the album.”
Bowers responded…
“I was so honored to be asked to add some melodies to several ‘tone poems’ that Vivian Hopkins wanted to add to this project. I believe it helped connect the older songs that her father, Ralph Pennington, wrote, to the later ones that Vivian wrote, while maintaining a style of heartfeltness that can only come from family. I’m glad that, in a musical way, I’m part of that family.”
In addition to vocals, the album also includes a Pennington original instrumental, Mandolin Chimes. It had never been recorded until released on this project. A duo with two mandolins, it is played by North Carolina picker, Jeff Michael, along with Wayne Benson.
Vivian related how she learned about this tune.
“I had no recording of that song. My dad taught it to Jeff Michael, and I recorded Jeff playing it. Then I asked Jeff if he would come record that with Dale Mills [on banjo], because my dad had played with both musicians.”
Hopkins unearthed more of her dad’s artifacts.
“”I found a signed contract for Way Down in Ole Caroline, and a sealed envelope addressed to Windwood Music which was Pete Kuykendall. It was never mailed. When I opened the envelope, I found Pages of Time in his handwriting. As an afterthought, I said, ‘I’ve got another song that I’ve got to put on this album.’
Danny helped with that melody and picked banjo on that song, and David Mode put in the lead vocals with my nephew, Joe Couch, on tenor, and Johnny Ridge on baritone.
Then I brought in Chuck Harris, who is so supportive of everything I do, [to sing lead] on I Won’t Write You Another Letter.”
The core music tracks were recorded at The Shop Studio in Candler, NC with Van Atkins, but vocals and instrumentation from two other states and a foreign country were added.
Vivian stressed…
“It went around the world and back! David Johnson wrote all the charts for these songs, because none of the musicians had ever heard any of the songs besides My Cabin in Caroline. In one or two days, we recorded all the music.
I approached Matt Ringressi to sing An Angel with Blue Eyes and When Jesus Calls You Home. Both those vocal tracks were recorded in Forti, Italy.
With Herb, we sent the music to Los Angeles, California and he recorded all his vocal parts out there. Jim Buchanan added fiddle on My Cabin in Caroline in a studio in Nashville.”
Not only was Ralph Pennington a musician and composer, he was also a self-taught luthier, and he did it all with missing digits. Hopkins explained the loss of her dad’s fingers in 1947.
“He was actually doing instrument repairs in his late teenage years before he went into the Navy. When he came out of the service at age 22, he was working at the furniture factory in Hickory, and that’s where he cut his fingers off. He was making a bass fiddle bridge on his lunch hour when he caught his hands in the band saw, and cut fingers off both hands. He lost his index and middle fingers on his right hand, which were his banjo-picking fingers, and on his left hand, he lost middle finger, ring finger, and pinkie.”
The loss of Pennington’s extremities didn’t keep him from playing and building. His daughter said…
“It didn’t stop him. [After relocating to central North Carolina] he was offered a position with Homes by Fisher which later became Oakwood Mobile Homes, and worked there until he retired at 65. He was just shy of 69 when he passed away [from a sudden heart attack]. He was in his workshop and was getting ready to refinish a guitar. It was as if he just sat down and laid back.”
Michael reflected…
“I was honored to be able to participate in this tribute. Ralph was the reason I ended up playing fiddle. I had gotten really disgusted with it until I met him as a kid. I decided if he could do it with the nubs, I should be able to do it with fingers.”
Though her daddy isn’t alive to hear her recording, Hopkins is happy with the end result.
“I am well pleased with it. The mix is really good. Van did a phenomenal job. My only regret is that I really wanted my brother, Johnny, to be a part of this, but his cancer took him down so quick and he wasn’t able to do it.”
She is pleased that her dad is being recognized in this way.
“There’s been countless comments from musicians that had no idea that my dad wrote My Cabin in Caroline.”
Johnson concluded…
“I can’t wait for other folks to hear it. It’s a wonderful thing to see something preserved, and get to be a part of, that I grew up listening to, and that was part of our region. Ralph is part of this area and a great big part of the musical area. He impressed me growing up. He is part of the fingers that have reached all the way to California.”
The next step is a music video!
