By Penny Parsons

As a boy growing up in the 1930s near Bluefield, W.Va., Melvin Goins aspired to become a lawyer, and it’s easy to imagine that he would have been a good one. But, once he discovered the sounds of string band music emanating from WCYB radio in the late 1940s, the course of his life was forever changed. Though he turned his focus toward music rather than law, Melvin’s skills as an orator and an advocate, his eye for detail, his resourcefulness, and his tenacity have all served him well in his chosen profession. Over his nearly sixty-year career, Melvin has worked tirelessly in almost every capacity in the bluegrass business, including musician, bandleader, emcee, comedian, booking agent, manager, festival promoter, disc jockey, producer, historian…and cook. But, like a lot of us, Melvin began as a fan.

“Back when I was just a young boy, they had a show at Bristol called Farm And Fun Time,” he recalls. “It was two hours every day, from twelve o’clock until two o’clock. They had Curly King and the Tennessee Hilltoppers and the Stanley Brothers on there. Charlie Monroe and the Kentucky Pardners, Flatt & Scruggs worked there. I know many a day I’d be working in the cornfield, I’d miss my dinner break just to get to hear Lester and Earl and the Stanley Brothers and Curly King and them on WCBY in Bristol. They had two fifteen-minute shows a day each.”

Melvin was mesmerized by the sound of the banjos he heard on the radio, and his heroes were Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs. He still remembers the first time he saw Scruggs live in 1948. “The first time I seen Flatt & Scruggs was at Princeton, West Virginia, at Glenwood Park,” he relates. “It was Lester and Earl and Mac Wiseman and Jimmy Shumate and Cedric Rainwater. Back then, they dressed in riding pants and leggings and wore the hats and the white shirts and the great big wide ties. I wanted to learn to play the banjo so bad when Scruggs came out. I remember their theme song then was ‘Train 45.’

“Ezra Cline [and the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers] was working on WHIS in Bluefield, and Ezra’d bring these shows in on Sunday afternoon at Glenwood Park, and the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers would open the show. Larry Richardson was a banjo picker from Galax, Virginia. Bobby Osborne was about 16 years old, and Ray Morgan and Ezra—that was the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers. They had a banjo contest between Earl and Larry Richardson. That drew a lot of people, because everybody was already aware of both of them.”

Inspired by seeing Flatt & Scruggs, Melvin soon managed to acquire an old banjo from a neighbor by trading him several chickens. However, before he could learn to play it, his younger brother, Ray, picked it up. Recognizing Ray’s proficiency on the banjo, Melvin decided he needed to master a different instrument. A cousin who was staying with the Goins family gave Melvin his guitar. “It was an old archtop Harmony guitar,” Melvin recalls. “It was just cracked and busted all over the place, strings tied together and everything. I went to Bluefield and I found a little drugstore there and they had guitar strings for a dollar a set—Black Diamond strings.

“We had a cousin—was an old-time fiddle player—and on the weekends we’d go to his house and he’d play hoedown fiddle tunes. It was about two miles way back in the country. He had a great old big white house that sat out in a big field, and he had a big apple orchard all around it. We’d go there and play and, boy, you could smell those apples blooming. We sat out on a porch, and his wife would make a big old churn of lemonade. And we’d invite everybody in for jam sessions—banjo players and fiddle players—and people would just come from everywhere, maybe eight or ten musicians, and play at one time.”

As teenagers, Melvin and Ray would spend many weekends playing in the woods, pretending to be performers like their idols on WCYB. They built a little stage from trees they had cut, put a Carnation cream can on the end of a pole to serve as a microphone and sang to an audience of family dogs. At age 16, Melvin made his first foray into public singing. “They had a band contest out of Bluefield, and I done one of Flatt & Scruggs’ songs, ‘I’m Gonna Settle Down,’ and I won first prize—ten dollars. Boy, I thought I was the biggest man in town!”

Eventually, Melvin and Ray were able to get better instruments. “Ray went to this music store and bought a Gibson RB-100 banjo. I bought a Southern Jumbo Gibson guitar, and we paid five dollars a month on them until we got them paid off.”

In the winter of 1951, the brothers played their first radio show on WKOY in Bluefield. Soon after that, Ezra Cline was looking for a banjo player for the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers to fill the slot vacated by Larry Richardson earlier that year. Ray auditioned and got the job. In March of 1952, at age 16, he joined the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers. Also in the band were Curly Ray Cline and 16-year-old Paul Williams.

While Ray was with the Fiddlers, Melvin stayed at home and played square dances locally on weekends. In late 1952, when the Fiddlers decided to move to Detroit, Ray left them and worked a short stint with Bill Monroe before returning home. In August of 1953, Melvin and Ray joined with Bernard Dillon and Joe Meadows to form the Shenandoah Playboys. They had a daily radio show on WHIS in Bluefield and played dances on Saturday nights. Times were lean, and the bandmembers all stayed in one hotel room. They brought food from home in a suitcase and Melvin would cook their meals on a hotplate in the room. Melvin also began to try his hand at booking shows for the band.

Then, in November of 1953, Ezra Cline called and asked Melvin and Ray to work with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers. They joined the band at WLSI in Pikeville, Ky. The Fiddlers were playing five nights a week at movie theaters in the area. Work was steady, crowds were big, and the band did several recording sessions for RCA Victor and Starday over the next couple of years. Melvin continued to hone his domestic skills, doing all of the cooking and laundry for the group. He was also learning about the business from observing Ezra Cline, and he was meeting other musicians and forming beneficial relationships that would continue throughout his career.

It was while at WLSI that Melvin first met the Stanley Brothers. “We was working a daily radio show in Pikeville, Kentucky, and the Stanleys came by one day,” he remembers. “And they stopped at our radio station and said, ‘Would you plug our show tonight?’ They was playing the Sandy Theater in Sandy Hook, Kentucky. I remember that car real well. It was a green Packard, and they had all four hats laying across the back seat of the car. It was Carter and Ralph, and I believe Joe Meadows was playing fiddle and Henry Dockery was playing bass.”

In July of 1955, Ray left the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers and went to work at an auto factory in Michigan for a short time. When he returned, he and Melvin reunited and moved to WPRT in Prestonsburg, Ky., for a few months. After taking the winter off from music, the brothers made their first foray into television. They went to WHIS-TV in Bluefield, working with Cecil Surratt on a daily one-hour show on weekday afternoons and the RFD Jamboree on Saturday nights. In addition, Melvin and Ray worked on the Friday Night Barn Dance on WOAY-TV in Oak Hill, had their own early morning radio show on Saturdays, and even managed to play a square dance on Saturday nights after the Jamboree.

For musicians, television brought increased exposure, but also new challenges and adjustments. The TV shows were performed live, with one large boom microphone hung from above, which was moved around depending on which bandmember was being featured at the time. The band had to be well organized, well dressed, and generally more professional. “There was great change there when they switched from radio to TV,” Melvin notes. “You had to use a little makeup so there wouldn’t be a glare, and you had to dress different. Everybody was looking at you. They were looking from the shoelaces of your shoes to the top of your head to see if your hair was in place, see if you’d shaved. It brought all of your appearance out on TV, where they couldn’t see you on radio. Back in the old days of radio, I think that’s the reason why so many people came out to see you [at concerts], because they wondered what you looked like. When you got on TV, they knowed exactly what you looked like, how you sung, and how you acted.”

With the advent of rock-and-roll, the late 1950s were difficult for bluegrass musicians. Ray Goins sought work in the coalmines and at a furniture factory, while Melvin played with various groups locally. Then, in 1961, they rejoined the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, appearing on a weekly Monday night TV show at WCYB-TV in Bristol for the next year and a half. During this period, the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers recorded three albums for Starday Records and a fourth with Hylo Brown. After that, Ray once again turned to work as a miner, a carpenter, and a grocer. Melvin worked with a band composed of Billy Edwards, Norman Blake, Bill Lowe, and Louie Proffitt. The group would often open for Hylo Brown and then perform with him as his backing band.

By this time, Melvin had become adept at booking shows for the various groups he had been playing with. In January of 1966, he received a call from the Stanley Brothers, who had returned to southwest Virginia after several years based in Florida. “They’d come back and were staying with their mother at Smith Ridge,” Melvin relates. “Ralph called me and wanted me to set up just two weeks of work to begin with, then I wound up staying four years. January the 18th, I joined the Stanley Brothers. We played three schools that day in Pike County—me and Ralph, Carter, and George Shuffler. And that’s when I started doing comedian work and trying to play bass and wore the polka dot suits, and Carter hung the name on me, Big Wilbur.”

Melvin had learned about booking programs in the schools from Ezra Cline. It was a good way to create steady work for a band. “Back then, you figured, well, I’ll pick up a weekend’s work somewhere, and we’ll play schools three and four days a week during the day,” he explains. “It took up the slack of not having night shows to play. The children paid their admission—back then it was 25 cents. The school took half, and you got half. Sometimes you’d play 80 or 90 schools in the fall of the year, play two or three schools a day, depending how far apart they was.

“You opened up and sang songs the children knew: ‘Coming Around The Mountain,’ ‘Froggy Went A-Courtin.’ And then, you’d come out with some kind of little scary act or a little comedy routine in the last part of the show. Children either like to be funny or they like to be scared. Sometimes you’d get them up to have a little contest, let them guess about this and that. Of course, you didn’t make a lot, but you taught the children about bluegrass music, and the schools got funds out of it to help them.”

Melvin clearly cherishes the time that he spent working with Carter Stanley. “I worked with Carter the last year he lived, and I’m so glad, because I learned a lot about the business,” he attests. “He was one of the best emcees in the world—great songwriter. He could sing a song on stage, he could make people laugh, or he could make them cry. It was a tone he had in his voice. He had that mountain tone, that lonesome sound. I call it the graveyard sound.”
Though Melvin would never say so, he was a godsend to the Stanleys during that last year of Carter’s life, and to Ralph after Carter’s passing. The Stanley Brothers’ career had stalled, the work had dried up in Florida, and Carter’s health was failing fast. As John Wright so eloquently wrote it in his book, Traveling The High Way Home: “Goins put his indomitable energy and spirit to work in patching the Stanley Brothers’ career back together again in the Appalachian area in which it had first begun. Ostensibly the Brothers’ rhythm guitar player and comedian, he was in reality their personal manager, booking agent, cheerleader, conscience, and whipping boy, as well as nurse and general caretaker to the ailing Carter Stanley.”

After Carter’s death in December of 1966, Melvin supported Ralph through the difficult transition period and stayed on in the band until 1969. In May of that year, Melvin and Ray got back together and formed the Goins Brothers band with Paul Mullins on fiddle and Eddie Branham on bass. Melvin parted on good terms with Ralph Stanley and, that first year, the Goins Brothers often appeared on a double bill with Ralph. Melvin also booked some package shows with other artists, including Bill Monroe. He was doing all the booking for the Goins Brothers, handling all the band business, and serving as the band’s emcee.

The Goins Brothers became a mainstay on the festival circuit and recorded about twenty albums over the next thirty years. Their band was often a training ground for sidemen who went on to higher profile groups or to be stars in their own right—Dave Evans, Glen Duncan, Charlie Sizemore, Jason Carter, and Hunter Berry. Other bandmembers over the years have included Art Stamper, Joe Meadows, Harley Gabbard, Curly Lambert, Buddy Griffin, Scotty Sparks, John Rigsby, Billy Rose, John McNeely, James Price, Gerald Evans, Dale Vanderpool, and Jack Hicks.

In 1971, continuing to follow in the footsteps of Ezra Cline, Melvin took on the additional role of event promoter. For five years, he ran a festival in Lake Stephens, W.Va. He then moved to a location near Pikestem, W.Va., for a couple of years. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, he helped to promote festivals in Prestonsburg, Ky., and Scioto Furnace, Ohio. Most recently, he has run festivals in Painters Creek, Ohio, and Clay City, Ky. He’s also worked frequently as a festival emcee at various parks in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.

The Goins Brothers returned to television in December of 1975 with a weekly Saturday morning show on WKYH-TV in Hazard, Ky. By this time, they no longer had to do the TV shows live, but would record two shows at a time for later broadcast. This lasted until 1994 when the TV station was sold. In 1982, Melvin added the title of disc jockey to his resumé. To this day, he continues to tape Saturday morning shows for WSIP in Paintsville, Ky., and WSKV in Stanton. Every other Tuesday, he makes the hour-long drive from his home near Ashland to the studios of 100,000-watt WSIP where he tapes two weeks worth of shows with the engineering help of CJ the deejay. The shows are sponsored by local businesses, and Melvin does all of the commercials live during the shows. A natural salesman, he renders them with down-home neighborly conviction in the great tradition of his mentors, Carter Stanley and Lester Flatt.

In 1994, Ray Goins began to have health issues—first a heart attack and then cancer, which eventually forced him to give up touring. The brothers discussed what to do, and Ray encouraged Melvin to continue performing. Melvin decided he needed to change the band name, so he came up with Melvin Goins and Windy Mountain, after one of the most popular songs he recorded with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers and continued to perform over the years.

Over the next decade, Ray made occasional guest appearances with the group when he felt up to it. In 2005, Melvin and Ray were captured in a two-part documentary as part of the International Bluegrass Music Museum’s oral history project. The brothers performed several songs, reminisced about their careers, and Melvin told many colorful stories in his inimitable oratory style. The documentary is available for viewing at the museum by appointment.

In the summer of 2006, after the departure of Wes Vanderpool, Melvin needed a banjo player, and he called Ray. “I just said, ‘Will you go out and help me until I find somebody?’ He wanted to work a while and he said he felt pretty good, so he worked up until October of that year.”

Unfortunately, Ray’s cancer worsened over the next several months, and he passed away on July 2, 2007. Melvin was heartbroken, but he has continued to soldier on. In the fall of 2008, he released his latest CD on the Blue Circle label. “I wanted to record some stuff different from anything I’d ever recorded,” Melvin states. “I’d done the research on a lot of old songs. ‘The Deck Of Cards’ that Tex Ritter recorded in ’48, a recitation, and ‘The Haunted House.’ I done an old Hank Williams tune, ‘Hey Good Lookin’.’ I used keyboard, electric guitar. It’s different, but I just wanted to do one song like that. Tom T. Hall wrote a brand new song that’s the title of the CD, ‘Dancing In The Dirt.’ I did some gospel songs, and there’s a little western swing.”

At age 75, Melvin has slowed down just a bit, but he’s as enthusiastic and outspoken as ever. When asked what advice he would give to a young band just starting out, he responds, “If I was starting a band today, I would try to come up with a sound—I don’t care if it’s howling, barking like a dog, crowing like a rooster. I would come up with some kind of style that people would recognize. Everybody needs a style, a trademark. [Bill Monroe] didn’t want to be like nobody else. And Flatt & Scruggs, they were different. The Stanleys were different. Didn’t none of them sound alike. You recognized them when you heard them. You knew exactly who it was. I want people to recognize me when they hear me.”

As he reflects on his career, Melvin’s thoughts are with his brother, Ray. “I just wish he could be around to see some of the things that’s going on today,” Melvin laments. “But, we spent 56 years together, and I will always remember him, because without him, I couldn’t have made it, and probably without me, he couldn’t have made it. Ray was a great brother. He was my right arm in bluegrass.”

Penny Parsons has worked in sales, public relations, production, and management in the bluegrass industry for over 25 years. She is co-author of The Bluegrass Music Cookbook.

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