Perhaps Stella Wagoner Holliday Kimble is one of the best representatives of a definite trend among clawhammer masters.  Although many of the masters represented on this map were great players in their younger lives, it was much later, after raising a family and honing their banjo skills quietly for years that they came to be masters of their art.

            Born into a family of nine children in Sparta, NC, Stella, like all of her siblings, was encouraged to play music from a very early age. As young teens, she and a brother and a sister would “broadcast” tunes over their telephone to intent listeners who would request their music on the party line.  Stella learned the banjo from a neighbor, picking it “finger style” at first.  In 1913, her father took a job in New York and the family was uprooted.  There Stella and her Wagoner family were in demand to play for the local dances which she reported were much more subdued compared to the frantic southern dances they had played.  After five years, the family moved to Maryland.

            As Stella and her siblings grew older, got married and moved off, music in the Wagoner household stopped and Stella, whose first husband didn’t make music, raised her family and quit playing banjo.  Around 1950, Stella’s daughter bought her a new banjo in hopes that her mother would renew her interest in playing. 

            Stella’s niece, Betsey  Rutherford, began to encourage Stella to play again and after 25 years of not playing, Stella began to focus on her clawhammer playing.  Soon the two women began to play out at YMCA dances, women’s clubs and festivals.  Stella’s playing became strong and precise and soon she was winning at Galax and other festivals.

            Taylor Kimble had been a well-known fiddler in the Laurel Fork area for many years.  Like Stella, however, he, like Stella, had quit playing.  He had a bad experience playing at a drunken wild party and put his fiddle up for nearly 30 years.  It wasn’t until a young Masters student in folklore, Alan Jabbour, visited him in 1966 and asked him to play some fiddle tunes that Taylor started playing again regularly.

            One day, shortly thereafter, he read a newspaper account of a concert by Stella and her niece.  Taylor had a notion based on the article and decided he wanted to get his fiddle out and hear how it sounded with Stella’s playing. He arranged for Stella to play with him and craftily recorded the session.  At the end of the event, he asked everyone to state their name and their address.  Now knowing where Stella lived, he started writing her, and within months they became both a duet and a couple.  In 1968, they were married and Stella joined him in Laurel Fork.  Now 76, Stella’s playing was as sharp and precise as ever and the couple found that they shared a vast repertoire of tunes. They played regularly together at Galax and, with Stella’s sister Pearl, recorded three albums.

            Young people from around the country began to seek out the couple to learn their tunes and their unique versions of many standard fiddle tunes.  One of those young people was Ray Alden, from New York, who became a regular visitor and would often record them.  When he founded “The Field Recorder’s Collective” a recording project dedicated to preserving old time music and the folks who played it, the Kimble and Waggoner Family’s recordings were released to much enthusiasm among old time players.