Roy Clark: Country Music Hall of Fame

Roy ClarkThe Country Music Association has announced its nominees for induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009. Roy Clark has been named as one of those inductees.

Clark will be inducted into the category of Career Achieved National Prominence Between World War II and 1975.

The announcement includes interesting and fairly lengthy bios on each of the inductees (Barbara Mandrell and Charlie McCoy are the other two).

Best known as a country guitar player perhaps, Clark was a multi-instrumentalist who began his career by mastering the bluegrass arts.

The son of two amateur musicians, Clark learned to play banjo, guitar, and mandolin at an early age and often performed with his father as a teenager.

It seems he also had an athletic side.

By age 17, he had won 15 consecutive boxing matches as well as two national banjo championships, which earned him his first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry.

It seems the banjo has risen in the social ranks since 1950, as boxing is no longer a necessary skill for banjo players to develop!

Here’s a video of Roy Clark performing Pike County Breakdown, c. 1960’s.