Don Stover

Don Stover ranked among the most cherished figures in bluegrass music. In November 1994 a benefit concert at Somerville Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts assembled Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, Laurie Lewis, Chesapeake, Bill Keith, and Jim Rooney and generated more than nine thousand dollars toward Stover’s brain-tumor surgery; Homespun Tapes later issued a video of the evening. As a longtime member of the Lilly Brothers, the house band at Boston’s Hillbilly Ranch from 1952 to 1970, Stover helped popularize the genre throughout the northeast. Apart from a brief 1957 period with Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, he appeared with the Lilly Brothers at the club six nights a week for fifty weeks annually and also performed daily on WCOP radio. A July 4, 1967 set by Stover and the Lilly Brothers was recorded and issued in 1996 as Live at the Hillbilly Ranch. Although the group dissolved in 1970, Stover continued to shape younger players; he formed the White Oak Mountain Boys and cut the solo album Things in Life, which featured mandolinist David Grisman and first appeared in 1972 before its 1995 reissue. Taught clawhammer technique by his mother, Stover switched to the three-finger approach after catching an Earl Scruggs broadcast on the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys. Throughout the 1940s he worked full-time as a coal miner while playing with the Coal River Valley Boys. In the mid-1970s he moved to Maryland, where he died of cancer on November 11, 1996, at age 68.