Cincinnati bluegrass vocalist, bandleader, and radio host Katie Laur died on August 3.
For 27 years she had hosted Music From The Hills Of Home on WNKU, an NPR affiliate station broadcasting from Northern Kentucky University. She started at the station in 1989, doing a Sunday noon program, which ran until WNKU canceled all local programming in 2017. The show was resurrected a year and a half later on Urban Artifact radio, on Sunday mornings at 11:00 a.m. in Cincinnati, which ran for two hours instead of just one.
A native of Paris, TN, Katie’s family moved north to Detroit after WWII, and to Cincinnati in 1966 where she discovered bluegrass music. Already an accomplished performer from working with her family as The Haley Sisters, she took to bluegrass like she was meant to do it. A strong and unique singing voice, with a personality to match, she was soon performing in Ohio with Appalachian Grass, but before long Laur was fronting her own Katie Laur Band, who recorded a pair of albums for the Vetco label in 1975 and ’77.
Her cut of T for Texas on the Good Time Girl record in ’75 was extremely well received by bluegrass radio, and helped put Laur on the map as a bluegrass singer when it was released.
Also appearing on that album were Jeff Roberts on banjo, Buddy Griffin on fiddle, Fred Bartenstein on guitar, Tommy Boyd on reso-guitar, Don Parker and Bill LaWarre on mandolin, and Tom Nutini on bass.
Katie sang on radio several times during the early days of A Prairie Home Companion in St Paul, MN, which gave her a bit of a reputation in the upper mid-west. This was in the days when a female-fronted bluegrass act was certainly an anomaly, though Laur persistently denied being any sort of trailblazer. She always said she was just trying to do the best she could with what was around her.
Given the distinctive sound of her voice, the offer to host on the radio came out of the blue. She had never done any sort of broadcasting before, and took the job a bit reluctantly at first. But her easy charm – and the help of experienced engineer Buddy Griffin, who played fiddle with her band – got her over any initial qualms.
The Katie Laur Band performances helped popularize the radio show, and vice versa, and soon she was a highly recognizable personage in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky. She and her group toured all over the eastern US, which Katie loved doing. Though seeing a woman leading a band was groundbreaking in the ’70s, Laur’s love was traditional music, something she did quite well, performing it in public, and teaching the uninitiated about it over the airwaves for nearly three decades.
In the 1990s, she put together the Katie Laur All Girl Bluegrass Band, and recorded an album with them. By this time, she had become involved in writing for several local publications in Cincinnati, and participating in various theater companies.
In 2008, Katie was awarded an Ohio Heritage Fellowship for her contributions to music in the state, and the city of Cincinnati followed suit ten years later, recognizing her importance to the music and arts scene there.
Following the Heritage Fellowship, Laur was featured in a piece for Our Ohio, where she described her first experience hearing bluegrass.
In 2022, Orange Frazer Press released a book of Kate’s stories, Red Dirt Girl, a collection of her autobiographical memoirs.
Katie Laur will be long remembered in Cincinnati, and far beyond, as Music From The Hills Of Home was also streamed online towards the end of its tenure. A true bluegrass pioneer, and one of its most entertaining practitioners, she gave a tremendous amount to the music.
R.I.P., Katie Laur.
