This revered practitioner of North Carolina old-time music and master of the clawhammer banjo originated the enduring folk staple “Tom Dooley” along with roughly fifty additional traditional pieces and banjo tunes. Those who wince at the title “Tom Dooley” would do well to discard their Kingston Trio recordings and instead explore the Frank Proffitt rendition titled “Tom Dula,” a spelling that captures the distinctive Northwest Carolinian inflection. Far removed from the polished folk-revival milieu of the 1960s, Proffitt’s delivery of the “Missing Bride” lyric describing maggots “like a bowlful of rice moving” inside the skull elicits unanimous nods of startled, even queasy, recognition. Traditional-music enthusiasts nevertheless acknowledge the successful legal action in which the Kingston Trio and its major-label backers were compelled to relinquish claims once the Proffitt family secured copyright to the Dooley/Dula composition. Prior to that judgment, numerous parties—including several major record companies, lesser-known European arrangers who placed the melody in Muzak libraries, and the widely recognized musicologist Alan Lomax—had asserted authorship of the piece. Although Lomax had no hand in composing the song, his name still appears on numerous greatest-hits anthologies. The melody’s reach extends across Irish folk collections, songs of the American West, hit-parade rock anthologies, country-and-western compilations, and love-song sets, with versions by the Nashville Brass, the Nashville Guitars, the Nashville Dobros, and the Nashville Harmonicas illustrating how readily the track can be referenced without leaving a single city. Despite eventual public fatigue that might have placed the number among the most reviled recordings ever made, several fresh interpretations emerged in the late 1990s. The resulting financial returns constituted a fitting Proffitt profit, an image perhaps recalled when the traditional performer requested that the hymn “Palms of Victory” be performed at his deathbed.
“Tom Dooley” nevertheless exerted the most decisive influence on an Appalachian musician already familiar with hardship. At the height of the song’s pop-chart success, Proffitt had abandoned the region in search of employment and had set aside his guitar and music altogether. Prompted by his father, Wiley Proffitt, and his aunt, Nancy Prather, he resumed performing and subsequently appeared at festivals nationwide, including the 1964 World’s Fair.
In common with other mountain musicians, Proffitt also crafted banjos, and traditional players especially prize his fretless instruments fashioned from walnut and groundhog hide, materials that lend particular veracity to renditions of pieces such as “Groundhog.” He upheld the principles of old-time banjo playing to the last, once expressing his view of bluegrass luminary Earl Scruggs’s virtuosic technique with the remark, “I’d like to learn to play like that, and then not do it.” His banjo workshop, the family farm acquired with proceeds from the Kingston Trio settlement, and the practice of old-time music itself passed to his son, Frank Proffitt Jr., who issued the album Kickin’ Up Dust on the Cloudlands label.
