Biography
Banjoist Hayes Shepherd, whose given name appears in some sources as Hays, made his home in the Jenkins vicinity of eastern Kentucky, close to the state line with Virginia inside Letcher County, a district long celebrated for its old-time banjo practitioners. Affectionately known as “the Appalachia Vagabond,” he joined his brothers—Bill Shepherd on fiddle and Hence Shepherd on banjo—to cut ten selections in assorted instrumental lineups for Lonesome Ace Records during 1932. Merely four of those sides ever reached the public: two released under Bill Shepherd’s name, “Bound Steel Blues” and “Aunt Jane Blues,” and two issued under Hayes Shepherd’s own credit, “Hard for to Love” and “Peddler and His Wife.” The latter title drew upon the 1896 slaying of a traveling peddler that occasioned the final public execution staged in Harlan County, Kentucky. Much like Dock Boggs, the other blues banjoist from the region, Shepherd passed the greater part of his years laboring in the Appalachian coal mines.