A Fresh Look at Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers

The histories of old-time country music are pretty clear on the subject: everything important happened in the southeastern part of the U.S. Except it didn’t. The music was everywhere. In fact, one the most popular and celebrated old-time stringbands of the late 1920s and early 1930s came out of California.  This band toured widely on a national basis—performing in 47 different states—had a weekly radio broadcast that was heard coast to coast and has been called “California’s first country-music stars.” The group consisted of John Crockett and his five sons: George. Clarence, Johnny, Albert and Alan. They were known as Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers. John Harvey Crockett (1877-1972), the patriarch of the family, was born into a fiddling family in West Virginia. He learned to play the banjo and fiddle in his youth and would later travel by horseback or buggy from community to community through the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky, teaching shape-note singing