Jimmie Skinner—Country Singer, Bluegrass Composer, Record Retailer
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
March 1977, Volume 11, Number 9
Although Jimmie Skinner has not been a bluegrass artist until recently, his contributions to the music have nonetheless been considerable. His unique style of country singing appeals to both bluegrass lovers and traditionalists. Many of Jimmie’s song compositions have found their way into the bluegrass repertoire. A few of his many recordings are with bluegrass accompaniment. His business enterprise, the Jimmie Skinner Music Center, has long provided a place for bluegrass fans to purchase records. During the “lean” period of the mid-fifties through the early sixties, the Cincinnati store was one of the few places where the buyer of bluegrass could get satisfaction.
Skinner’s own background, like that of many bluegrass artists, is deeply rooted in traditional instrumental and vocal music. Born at Blue Lick, near Berea, in Madison County, Kentucky on April 27, 1909, James Skinner grew up in an area that probably produced more pioneer recording and radio artists than any other part of the United States with the possible exception of the section around Galax, Virginia. For a generation after 1925, Berea and surrounding communities turned out such notables as Marion Underwood, Doc Roberts, Asa Martin, Edgar Boaz, Green Bailey, Welby Toomey, Ted Chestnut, James (Carson) Roberts, Doc Hopkins, Karl Davis, Harty Taylor, Bradley Kincaid, Red Foley, and the Coon Creek Girls as well as Jimmie Skinner. In more recent years, such bluegrass bands as the Bluegrass Drifters, the Van Winkle Brothers and the Russell Brothers, together with many performers at John Lair’s Renfro Valley Barn Dance, have come from this portion of east-central Kentucky.
Jimmie’s particular childhood favorites were fiddler Doc Roberts and banjoist Marion Underwood. He recalls Roberts playing for square dances at his parents’ home and those of other neighbors before he ever entered the recording studios. He remembers hearing Underwood play at such local functions, also being known even then for the banjo tune, “Coal Creek March”, which he later recorded for Gennett. The Skinner family all played a bit of music and Jimmie learned to frail the banjo at age six or seven. Although Jimmie Skinner absorbed much of the music of his native area, his own vocal stylings contained more Jimmie Rodgers influence than any of the locally heard vocalists.
After Jimmie reached the age of sixteen, the Skinner family moved to Hamilton, Ohio, taking their musical heritage with them. He had already learned to play guitar, banjo, and fiddle and his father and three brothers also played a variety of instruments. One brother, Esmer, picked the banjo in a fashion similar to that of Marion Underwood and Jimmie seconded him on guitar. On one occasion in the early thirties, the duo went to Richmond, Indiana and recorded two instrumental number—“Coal Creek March” and “Blue Banjo Rag”—as the Skinner Brothers in the Gennett studios. Unfortunately, neither master was released, the company being in financial straits as a result of the depression. Later a representative of Gennett called Jimmie and asked him to record “99 Years”, but he did not know the song and turned down the opportunity.
For some twenty years after coming to Ohio, Jimmie Skinner played music as an amateur only. He worked square dances and other local entertainments with his brothers and other area musicians. From time to time they also worked on radio stations, occasionally having regular programs. Among the stations on which Jimmie played was one at Mt. Orab, Ohio. This little station operated out of the back of a grocery store and called itself the “hundred watt station that covers the nation”. The station played a lot of Gennett records and occasionally featured live acts including a group of which Jimmie was part. He worked some at WLW and WKRC in Cincinnati, WCKY in Covington (later in Cincinnati), WPFB in Middletown, and WHTN in Huntington, West Virginia. For a decade or so, Jimmie Skinner contented himself with being a part-time performer.
In the mid-forties an incident occurred that led to Jimmie’s becoming a full-time performer. He made a few custom recordings on a label called Red Barn together with Ray Lunsford, an electric mandolin player who worked with Jimmie for years and brother Esmer playing old-time banjo on a song Jimmie wrote called “Doin’ My Time”. To his surprise, another original song called “Will You Be Satisfied That Way” became especially popular in Knoxville and Jimmie was invited to join Cas Walker’s “Dinner Bell” show at WROL with Carl Butler, Carl Smith, and Archie Campbell.
Not too long after the release of “Doin’ My Time”, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs learned the song from Jimmie’s record and waxed it in bluegrass style on Mercury. From Flatt and Scruggs, the song found its way onto recordings by groups ranging from Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys to High Country and Wilma Lee and Stony Cooper. The number has entered the repertoire of most other bluegrass groups as well and even Johnny Cash recorded it during his early years with Sun.
Jimmy actually wrote the number back in the early thirties while visiting a cousin in Grand Rapids, Michigan; One day the relative showed him an article in True Detective magazine called “I’m a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang” by Robert Burns. From this story, in part an expose’ of the chain gang facet of the southern penal system, came the basic ideas for an all-time country classic. At one time, he became disgruntled with the song and “started to throw it away” but a guitar-playing friend named Maeford Cole convinced him to hold on to it. Jimmie sang the song locally for years and somewhat miraculously, it escaped being “picked up” by someone else and stolen.
After working in Knoxville for a while, Jimmie returned to southwestern Ohio and for the next twenty years alternated between personal appearances scattered through the South with a schedule in the Hamilton-Middletown-Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area where he had already become established.
In Cincinnati, Jimmie acquired an astute manager named Lou Epstein and the two soon entered into two notable business enterprises — both involving records. First, they took control of the Radio Artist Records label, a local company that had recorded local country performers such as the Turner Brothers, Ray Lanham, Barefoot Brownie Reynolds and female radio personality, Ruth Lyons. Henceforth, Radio Artist became an exclusive Jimmie Skinner label. Most of his classic original compositions: “Doin’ My Time”, “Will You Be Satisfied That Way”, “Don’t Give Your Heart To A Rambler”, and “You Don’t Know My Mind” as well as many other numbers originally came out on this label in the later 1940s. The musical format of Jimmie’s early records also were the style that would come to be most identified with him—solo vocals and Ray Lunsford’s electric mandolin providing most of the backing. For several years Ray’s mandolin, Jimmie’s rhythm guitar and a bass fiddle provided the only instrumentation heard on Jimmie Skinner records.
The second venture, a record shop first opened in 1950, soon grew into the Jimmie Skinner Music Center. This company, through radio advertising on Cincinnati’s WCKY and Newport, Kentucky’s WNOP, developed into one of the major mail order houses for bluegrass and hard country. The late evening deejay shows on the 50,000 watt WCKY by Nelson King, Marty Roberts, Wayne Raney, Jimmy Logsdon, and sometimes Jimmie Skinner (via pre-taped presentation) attracted a nationwide audience of traditional country music fans (until the station changed its format in the mid-1960s). During the day, Jimmie had daily shows broadcast directly from the center and reached an area containing many southern migrants who were drawn to Jimmie’s down-home style. From the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, the Jimmie Skinner Music Center was the one place where bluegrass records could always be obtained. Although Jimmie is quick to give Lou Epstein (who ran the store until his death in 1963) most of the credit for the store’s success, it cannot be denied that the name of Jimmie Skinner also constituted a definite asset too. Another business venture which gives some idea of Jimmie’s popularity in the Cincinnati area was “Jimmie Skinner’s Vacuum Packed Coffee” which was sold in that section for a time in the late 1950s.
In 1950, Jimmie went with Capitol records and in the next three years had some thirteen single records released. Although none of these songs became a giant hit, they managed to sustain his popularity to the point that he ranked fifth in a 1951 Country Song Roundup poll trailing only Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb respectively. In 1953, he ranked seventeenth in the same poll. In addition to new versions of his older numbers, Jimmie’s Capitol waxings included a popular sacred song “Hem Of His Garment”, “Send Me A Penny Postcard”, “Women Beware” and a tribute song entitled “Hank Williams Is A Singing Teacher In Heaven”.
After three years with Capitol, Jimmie switched to Decca. He had several more notable recordings including “John Henry and the Water Boy”, a re-composition of the old ballad which featured a bluegrass banjo along with electric mandolin and fiddle. A second song with this instrumentation, “Too Hot To Handle”, later received a full bluegrass treatment from the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers.
Beginning in 1956, Jimmie began to record for Mercury. During the late 1950s, he had several chart-makers, the most important of which “Dark Hollow” became the model for many subsequent bluegrass renditions. This song, written by Bill Browning (and partially based on the older “East Virginia Blues”) had originally been recorded on a small label by Luke Gordon. However, the Jimmie Skinner recording reached number seven on the Billboard charts and has entered the repertoire of many bluegrass groups. Another hit of Jimmie’s on Mercury, “I Found My Girl In The U.S.A.” was written as an answer to the many popular tunes of the time about foreign love—“Fraulein”, “Geisha Girl”, et cetera—but in a sense nearly ended the cycle for that type of song. One remaining answer, “I’m the Girl In The U.S.A.”, became a hit for Connie Hall who subsequently recorded four duets with Jimmie on Mercury.
Traditional country fans found the album, “Jimmie Skinner Sings Jimmie Rodgers”, a generally admirable album. Recorded just prior to the death of Mrs. Carrie Rodgers in 1961, the album which featured Rusty York on steel guitar did much to recapture the mood of the original classics. Nonetheless, it was distinctly in the Skinner style and not imitative. In many respects, it could be compared to the Merle Haggard effort that appeared nearly a decade later.
Jimmie’s association with Mercury led to a friendship with executive Don Pierce, who subsequently reinstituted Starday Records as an independent label. It was largely at Skinner’s urging that Pierce recorded so many bluegrass artists in the early 1960s. Jimmie knew that a market for that type of music existed because he and Lou Epstein had sold bluegrass records steadily in their store. After his Mercury contract ended, Skinner also went with Starday and had a couple of albums and several singles including a good original bluegrass song, “Falling Leaves”, on that label.
Since Jimmie’s recording career with Starday ended, he has continued to record largely on the smaller labels. Two of his more interesting albums in recent years have been on Lou Ukelson’s Vetco lable (Ukelson eventually succeeded Lou Epstein as the principal owner of the Jimmie Skinner Music Center). “Jimmie Skinner Sings The Blues” illustrates one side of his talents. “Jimmie Skinner Sings Bluegrass” reflects another. The latter album featured bluegrass instrumentation including Harley Gabbard on Dobro and Vernon McIntyre on banjo and contained a variety of standards and lesser known songs. Jimmie also recorded some material in a more contemporary vein including some singles for the Nashville based Stop label and the albums “Requestfully Yours” and “Jimmie Skinner’s Greatest Hits”. Recently he has started his own label known as Well Done.
During the late sixties and early seventies, Jimmie Skinner continued to play personal appearances in Ohio and adjacent states. He sometimes worked package shows and also did club work, often with a guitar player named Warren Ellison, as Ray Lunsford has not traveled much in recent years. He has also worked on a few bluegrass festivals. Jimmie also did some deejay work on WCNW, the leading country station in the Cincinnati-Hamilton, Ohio area.
As a record spinner, Jimmie exhibited a high degree of independence. He did this because either he or the sponsor bought the time and often did remote broadcasts from the sponsor’s place of business. This permitted him to choose his own material which included considerable bluegrass and such hard country singers as Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and himself. Jimmie contends that he could probably never do deejay work directly for a station since he would lack this freedom to choose his own material. One of his Vetco singles, a song and recitation entitled “I’m Gonna Tell It Like It Happened”, told of a country station disc jockey who played real country music on the air and lost his job. Although the song is not autobiographical, Jimmie thinks that it would become so were he to be a deejay and be restricted to the format prevalent on most of the so-called country radio stations of today.
In 1974, Jimmie decided to move to the Nashville area, mostly because of his interests as a songwriter. He points out that he still works a lot of shows in the same areas he always has. However, being in Music City has given him the opportunity to get more of his songs recorded by other artists. Jimmie has always been interested in songwriting for others—one of his first successes was doing “Let’s Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello” for Ernest Tubb quite some time ago. He was one of the first writers to go with Acuff-Rose Publishing Company nearly thirty years ago although he now has his own company.
Last year Jimmie signed with the Monroe Talent Agency and worked a lot of bluegrass festivals. He has already been booked for several more in 1977. Since he had such a close relationship with it, he has found the move to bluegrass a comfortable one. He has just written a new song entitled “I’m Proud To Be A Bluegrass Loving Man” while his wife, Betty, has contributed “It’s Blowing Away (In A Lonesome Bluegrass Wind)”. According to Jimmie, the latter song “kind of tells the story of what’s happened to country music” in recent years. Jimmie plans to record both of these songs on his next album. In addition to Betty, his family consists of a son, James, who is a talented singer whom Jimmie says “can do justice to the old songs of mine”.
Outside of “Doin’ My Time” which many artists have recorded, Jimmy Martin has probably done more to make Jimmie Skinner an important bluegrass composer than any other artist. “You Don’t Know My Mind” has always been one of Martin’s more requested numbers. His rendition of “Don’t Give Your Heart To A Rambler” has also been noteworthy. The Osborne Brothers have also recorded two of Jimmie’s newer songs—“Little Trouble” and “A Born Ramblin’ Man”—on MCA. These songs together with his own style and the long presence of the Jimmie Skinner Music Center have all endeared the genial gentleman from Blue Lick, Kentucky to the bluegrass music world.
