Biography
A North Carolina string band active during the 1920s and 1930s acquired its name through an offhand remark made inside a recording studio. While preparing to cut sides for the Okeh label, one member remarked, “Well, we’re all from Hickory, and we’re a bunch of nuts,” and the Hickory Nuts were thereby christened. The lineup consisted of Julius Plato “Nish” McClured on banjo and vocal, Horace Propst on guitar and vocal, and Perry Probst on fiddle. At the time of the group’s formation, McClured was employed at a textile mill in Newton, North Carolina. The trio performed regularly at square dances and fiddle conventions and also supplied background music for silent films, an uncommon role for an old-time string band of that era. In 1927 the musicians journeyed to Winston Salem, where they recorded six titles for Okeh, two of which remained unissued. Among the released performances, “Louisville Burglar” later appeared on the County anthology Old Time Ballads From the Southern Mountains. McClured had acquired his three-finger banjo technique during childhood in Cleveland County, yet he never attained the international prominence enjoyed by another three-finger stylist from the same region, Earl Scruggs, whose recordings reached wide audiences through film and television soundtracks such as The Beverly Hillbillies and “Theme from Bonnie and Clyde.” McClured nonetheless continued performing with the band into the 1930s. Following Horace Propst’s death in 1929, Gurney Thomas assumed the guitar chair. In the early 1970s a journalist from Old Time Music Magazine located McClured’s son, who stated that the group had made additional recordings during the 1930s; those masters, however, have never surfaced. The Hickory Nuts disbanded in 1935 after the death of Perry Probst.