Carl Story

Dubbed “The Father of Bluegrass Gospel Music,” Carl Story was born on May 29, 1916 in Lenoir, North Carolina. With a father who played the fiddle and a mother who played the guitar, Story became adept at the fiddle, guitar and banjo at a young age.

At the age of 18, Story assembled his own band The Rambling Mountaineers. He stayed busy during this time performing with others and producing recordings with his group which unfortunately didn’t see release at the time. In 1942, Story joined Bill Monroe’s band as a fiddler and played with him for almost a year until he was drafted to join the Navy. When he returned in 1945 he reunited his band and spent the next several decades performing regularly on radio shows and making records of his own.

Over the course of his career he recorded countless albums of his own and made even more appearances on the records of others. Between 1976 and 1977 he released three albums with CMH alongside the Rambling Mountaineers, Mountain Music (1976), The Bluegrass Gospel Collection (1976), and A Lonesome Wail from the Hills (1977). Each features Story’s signature blend of bluegrass, gospel and country music with top-level performances revisiting many classics and hits.

In the last few decades of his life, Story continued performing with the Rambling Mountaineers while DJ-ing his own radio show in South Carolina. Story passed away in 1995 and was inducted posthumously into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2007.