Biography
Born in 1918 in Huddleston, Virginia (Bedford County), Rufus Kasey belonged to a family that had remained in the area for several generations. He first picked up the banjo at age eight and refined a drop-thumb clawhammer technique on his weathered resonator-backed Kay, the same instrument heard on his singular take of "Coo Coo Bird" that opens the Smithsonian/Folkways anthology Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia, a 1998 set drawn from field recordings.