Appalachian Figures
In the spring of 2014, a small crowd of musicians and local historians gathered at Somerset Cemetery in Pulaski County, Kentucky. They were there to unveil a grave marker for a fiddler who had lain in an unmarked plot since 1951: Leonard Rutherford. Regional news coverage and musician forums described the ceremony as a long overdue tribute to a man many old time players rank among the finest fiddlers ever captured on record.
On paper, Rutherford’s career looks modest. He spent most of his life in south central Kentucky, working courthouse squares, coal camps, and radio shows with his blind partner Richard “Dick” Burnett. Between 1926 and 1928 the duo cut a handful of 78 rpm records for Columbia and Gennett that sold well in their day and later became prized by collectors. Those sides include murder ballads, sentimental songs, and blazing fiddle tunes such as “Lost John,” “Little Stream of Whiskey,” and “Billy in the Low Ground.”
Yet the grooves of those records carry something larger than a short discography. Burnett and Rutherford helped define the sound of south central Kentucky string band music for later generations. Their 1927 recording of “Willie Moore” would eventually surface on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the six LP set that shaped the postwar folk revival, putting Rutherford’s fiddle in the ears of urban listeners who had never heard of Monticello or Somerset.
This article follows Leonard Rutherford from his beginnings in Pulaski and Wayne counties to the Atlanta and Richmond studios where he and Burnett recorded, and finally to the grave that remained anonymous for more than sixty years. Along the way, it leans on the primary record: original 78s and their modern reissues, recording ledgers and advertising, field interviews with musicians who heard him firsthand, and the official documents that trace his life and death.
Somerset Birth and Monticello Roots
Modern reference works agree that Leonard Rutherford was born on March 22, 1898 in Somerset, the seat of Pulaski County, Kentucky. Genealogical indexes such as Find A Grave list his parents as Henry Rutherford and Margaret Pyles and note that the family had ties in both Pulaski and neighboring Wayne County.
By the 1910s the Rutherford family was part of the musical world around Monticello, the Wayne County seat. Local histories and Wayne County studies describe a courthouse square where string bands and solo songsters gathered on market days, playing for coins, selling song sheets, and trading tunes. William Lynwood Montell’s Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland portrays Monticello as a small but bustling musical crossroads, with players like Dick Burnett, the Arthur brothers, and young Leonard Rutherford sharing the same streets.
Those streets sat within a wider Upper Cumberland region that straddled the Kentucky–Tennessee border. It was a landscape of farm communities, courthouse towns, and mining camps where itinerant musicians could make a living moving from square to square and camp to camp. Later National Park Service work on the Big South Fork area notes that Burnett and Rutherford were among the best known professional musicians working that circuit in the 1920s, playing everything from court days to coal company events.
The Blind Minstrel and the Teenaged Fiddler
The crucial turn in Rutherford’s life came when he met Richard Daniel “Dick” Burnett, an older musician from Elk Spring Valley outside Monticello. Burnett lost his sight after being shot during a robbery around 1907 and turned to music to make a living, mastering banjo, fiddle, guitar, and dulcimer and selling printed song sheets on the street.
In 1913 Burnett printed a small songbook in Monticello titled Songs Sung by R. D. Burnett, The Blind Man. The booklet included pieces such as “The Reckless Hobo,” “Song of the Orphan Boy,” and “Farewell Song,” the last of which opened with the line that would later evolve into “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Rutherford is not named in that booklet. Even so, the print volume gives a snapshot of the repertoire Burnett carried into his later partnership: sentimental ballads, topical songs, and hybrid pieces that blurred the line between traditional material and original composition.
Accounts drawn from Charles Wolfe’s interviews with Burnett and summarized by later writers describe how the older musician took a teenage Rutherford under his wing sometime around 1914. Burnett had known the boy’s family and remembered taking him on as a paid companion who could lead a blind man across unfamiliar towns and roads. Somewhere along the way, the young guide became a fiddler, and the two settled into a long partnership that would last, on and off, for about thirty five years.
Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s Burnett and Rutherford traveled widely. Wolfe and Montell describe them working courthouse squares across Kentucky, east Tennessee, and the Big South Fork region, playing for tips, selling song sheets, and appearing at small theaters and traveling shows. Burnett would sing and play banjo or guitar while Rutherford handled the fiddle, adding harmonies and instrumental breaks. Some witnesses remembered Burnett’s patter and comic asides, while Rutherford focused on tone and timing.
For local listeners in Wayne and Pulaski counties, this partnership was more than passing entertainment. It modeled a professional path for younger musicians. Emry Arthur, the Wayne County singer profiled elsewhere on this site, later recalled Burnett as a neighbor who shared songs and whose printed “Farewell Song” booklet provided the text that Arthur would turn into his own “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
From Courthouse Squares to Columbia Records
By the mid 1920s, record companies had begun scouting the South for what they called “old familiar tunes.” Columbia Records, under the direction of A&R man Frank Walker, made a series of field trips to Atlanta with portable recording equipment. A Wayne County–focused narrative on The Notorious Meddler blog, drawing on Wolfe and Tony Russell, describes how Walker invited Burnett and Rutherford to Atlanta in November 1926 to try their hand at recording.
At that first session the duo cut six sides that Columbia released in its 15000 D “Old Familiar Tunes” series. Discographies and label catalogs show that the records included:
“Lost John” backed with “I’ll Be With You When the Roses Bloom Again” on Columbia 15122 D, recorded November 6, 1926 in Atlanta.
“Little Stream of Whiskey” backed with “Short Life of Trouble” on Columbia 15133 D.
“Weeping Willow Tree” backed with “Pearl Bryan” on Columbia 15113 D.
A Columbia catalog from the period lists these pieces under a bold heading for “Old Familiar Tunes,” describing “Lost John” as a vocal duet with violin and guitar accompaniment and proudly advertising the company’s new electrically recorded “Viva tonal” process as “the records without scratch.” That catalog, and a Virginia newspaper advertisement that repeats the wording, show how the label pitched Burnett and Rutherford to early 78 buyers as both traditional and technologically modern.
The sides sold well by the standards of the day. One locality history reports that “Lost John” moved tens of thousands of copies in its first three years, an impressive figure for a hillbilly record from rural Kentucky. Columbia brought the duo back in 1927 to cut more songs, including “My Sweetheart in Tennessee” and “Are You Happy or Lonesome” on 15187 D and an instrumental pairing of “Ladies on the Steamboat” with “Billy in the Low Ground” on 15209 D.
To modern ears, the Columbia discs are the clearest primary window we have onto Rutherford’s style. On “Lost John,” he threads a driving fiddle line around Burnett’s vocal and guitar, pushing the tune forward without ever sounding harsh. On “Weeping Willow Tree” and “Pearl Bryan,” his double stops and slides give familiar ballad melodies a kind of liquid intensity. The broken chords and long bowing patterns that listeners now associate with “smooth” Kentucky fiddling are already in place. Recordings preserved on 78s and gathered today on the Document Records CD Burnett & Rutherford: Complete Recorded Works (1926 1930) let listeners hear those details without needing access to fragile shellac.
Gennett Sessions and New Partners
In 1928 the duo’s recording base shifted from Atlanta to Richmond, Indiana, where Gennett Records maintained a studio that recorded everything from early jazz to old time string bands. Discographies compiled by Tony Russell and specialized works such as The Banjo on Record show Burnett and Rutherford entering the Gennett studios with guitarist Byrd Moore and other sidemen, cutting titles like “She Is a Flower from the Fields of Alabama” and “Under the Pale Moonlight” for release on Gennett 6688.
Another Gennett disc, 6706, paired “Cumberland Gap” with “Grandma’s Rag,” a showcase for Rutherford’s fiddle within a fuller string band sound. These sides circulated not only on the Gennett label but also on its budget imprints Champion and Supertone, which meant that Burnett and Rutherford’s music reached buyers in small town hardware stores and mail order catalogs across the region.
By 1929 Rutherford was also recording with singer and guitarist John D. Foster. German language discographies and the Banjo on Record bio discography list “Six Months in Jail Ain’t Long” and “The Cabin with the Roses at the Door,” issued on Brunswick 490, along with “My Boyhood Happy Days” and “The Faithful Lovers” on Brunswick 581, under Foster’s name with Rutherford on fiddle. At the same time, he revisited some Burnett material under new titles: “All Night Long Blues,” first recorded with Burnett in 1927, reappears as “Richmond Blues” in a 1929 session with Foster.
Contemporary accounts and later reminiscences suggest that studio work never replaced the duo’s bread and butter performances. Articles that draw on Wolfe’s interviews with Burnett describe how the pair kept a busy schedule of courthouse performances, schoolhouse shows, and radio spots, including broadcasts from Cincinnati’s WLW and later from Renfro Valley. The records were advertisements as much as income: when a coal camp or county fair promoter saw that a band had Columbia and Gennett discs, it added prestige to the booking.
Style, Repertoire, and the Sound of South Central Kentucky
From the moment revival listeners began hunting down original 78s, writers have tried to explain what set Rutherford’s fiddling apart. Tony Russell, Jeff Todd Titon, and others describe him as a long bow fiddler who blended the drive of dance music with an almost vocal smoothness, capable of both quick breakdowns and slow, singing lines. On the Columbia and Gennett sides he favors clear, ringing intonation, sliding into notes and sustaining them just long enough to give the tune a lilt without dragging the tempo.
Titon’s Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, which includes Rutherford related settings such as “Billy in the Low Ground,” uses the duo’s recordings as key audio examples for south central Kentucky style. Slippery Hill, an online archive built around Titon’s book, hosts transfers of “Lost John” and “Billy in the Low Ground” that include matrix and catalog information, reminding listeners that what they hear is not a generic tune but a very specific performance made by two Kentuckians in a temporary studio in Atlanta.
Repertoire helps explain Rutherford’s reach. The Columbia discs move easily from gospel influenced sentiment in “Are You Happy or Lonesome” to a topical murder ballad like “Pearl Bryan,” which recounts a notorious 1890s Ohio River Valley case, and on to a dance showpiece such as “Ladies on the Steamboat.” John Minton’s study 78 Blues notes how Burnett’s spoken introduction to “Ladies on the Steamboat” invites dancers to “get ready” while Rutherford’s fiddle drives the beat, illustrating how early hillbilly records could double as both listening pieces and dance sets.
The 1927 session that produced “Willie Moore” and “All Night Long Blues” shows yet another side of the partnership. Discographies and Harry Smith’s anthology documentation place the recording in Atlanta on November 3, 1927, issued as Columbia 15314 D. “Willie Moore” is a narrative ballad about a tragic courtship and death, while the flip side leans into a blues influenced groove. When Smith chose “Willie Moore” for the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, he put Rutherford’s fiddle and Burnett’s banjo in front of a new generation of folk revivalists who learned the song from the LP sleeves rather than from Montgomery County neighbors.
Race, Influence, and the Upper Cumberland
Modern scholarship has emphasized that Rutherford did not play in a cultural vacuum. Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje’s Fiddling Is My Joy situates him in a racially mixed fiddling environment in Wayne County, where Black musicians such as Cuje Bertram played for both Black and white audiences. The book quotes fiddler and folklorist Wayne Martin’s view that Rutherford’s smooth, sliding style reflects influence from African American fiddlers he would have heard in the region.
Oral histories from other musicians reinforce that picture. Clyde Davenport, a National Heritage Fellowship recipient who grew up near Monticello, repeatedly cited Rutherford as one of his chief models. In interviews summarized by the Tennessee Arts Commission and in old time community essays, Davenport recalled hearing Burnett and Rutherford on the Monticello courthouse steps and trying to copy Leonard’s bowing as closely as possible. Later fieldwork in the Big South Fork area found other musicians in Wayne and McCreary counties carrying pieces like “Cumberland Gap” and “Billy in the Low Ground” in versions that clearly trace back to the Burnett and Rutherford records.
In that sense, the duo’s discs acted as both snapshots and seeds. They documented tunes that were already circulating locally and, at the same time, helped standardize certain melodies and fiddle settings across counties. When a younger player in Wayne County learned “Lost John” or “Short Life of Trouble” from a neighbor who owned a Columbia 78, Rutherford’s bowing and Burnett’s phrasing entered the local oral tradition through shellac.
Illness, Death, and an Unmarked Grave
Behind the records lies a more fragile personal story. Genealogical compilations and a Find A Grave entry agree that Rutherford died on June 30, 1951, with his death registered in Monticello in Wayne County but his burial in Somerset Cemetery in Pulaski County. Modern newspaper features based on his Kentucky death certificate report that he was listed as a divorced musician with no surviving children and that epilepsy is mentioned as a chronic condition.
By all accounts, the last years were not easy. Burnett is said to have ended their formal partnership around 1950, telling later interviewers that Rutherford, worn down by illness, no longer felt able to keep up the travel schedule. Local memory, as preserved in Wayne County historical pieces and in online musician forums, pictures Rutherford continuing to play closer to home, sometimes with younger guitarists, while wrestling with seizures that made life unpredictable.
When he died at fifty three, Rutherford was buried in Somerset Cemetery without a permanent stone. Only in the early 2010s did local advocates and musicians begin a successful effort to fund a marker. A 2014 article from WKU Public Radio notes that the project drew support from the Wayne County Historical Museum and from old time music fans across the region. Photos from the dedication day show fiddlers gathered at the grave, bowing in tribute to a musician whose name had almost slipped out of public view.
Revival, Reissues, and Modern Ears
Rutherford’s posthumous reputation rests heavily on three clusters of sources: Harry Smith’s anthology, 1970s reissue LPs, and the later CD era. When Smith assembled the Anthology of American Folk Music in the early 1950s, his choice of “Willie Moore” placed Burnett and Rutherford alongside artists like Mississippi John Hurt, the Carter Family, and Blind Willie McTell. Critics later credited the anthology with jump starting the folk revival, which meant that countless young listeners encountered Rutherford’s fiddle there before ever seeing his name in a discography.
In 1975 Rounder Records issued A Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo: The Songs of Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford, a compilation LP that pulled together key Columbia and Gennett sides and added detailed liner notes by Charles Wolfe. Discographic information for the LP notes that the package included a twelve page booklet with lyrics and a session discography, drawing heavily on Wolfe’s earlier field interviews and on label files. For many serious students of old time music, Wolfe’s notes became the main narrative account of the duo’s lives.
In the 1990s the Austrian label Document Records gathered nearly all of the Burnett and Rutherford commercial sides into a single CD, Burnett & Rutherford: Complete Recorded Works (1926 1930), produced by Johnny Parth. Streaming versions of that collection now circulate under titles such as Burnett & Rutherford (1926 1930), allowing listeners to call up “Lost John,” “Ladies on the Steamboat,” or “All Night Long Blues” on a phone as easily as previous generations dropped a needle on a 78 or an LP.
Meanwhile, scholarly work has continued to deepen the picture. Tony Russell’s Country Music Records and Country Music Originals provide the most detailed discographical and biographical accounts of Rutherford’s sessions and travels. Jeff Todd Titon’s Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes uses Rutherford’s playing to illustrate regional styles, while DjeDje’s Fiddling Is My Joy situates him within a broader Black and white fiddling ecology in Kentucky. Regional studies such as Montell’s Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland and R. B. Tincher’s The Old Time Music of the Big South Fork underline his importance on the Wayne County and Big South Fork circuits.
Why Leonard Rutherford Matters for Appalachian History
Seen from Somerset and Monticello, Leonard Rutherford’s life is both ordinary and remarkable. A boy from a working family learns to fiddle, falls in with an older blind musician, and spends decades traveling rough roads to play music wherever people will pay to hear it. There are no deluxe tour buses or urban bohemian circles in the surviving record, only courthouse steps, coal camps, radio studios, and small town theaters.
Yet through a combination of timing, talent, and technology, his bow strokes resonate far beyond that local circuit. The Columbia and Gennett 78s capture a south central Kentucky string band sound at the moment when record companies first turned their microphones toward rural musicians. Those discs carried the tunes of Wayne and Pulaski counties into northern cities and, eventually, into the collections of archivists and reissue producers. When Harry Smith lifted “Willie Moore” from a stack of old shellac and placed it alongside other prewar sides in the Anthology, he transformed a regional courtship ballad into a touchstone of the national folk revival.
For Appalachian history, Rutherford matters in at least three ways.
First, he anchors the story of Wayne and Pulaski counties in the broader history of early commercial country music. Alongside figures like Dick Burnett and Emry Arthur, he shows how a small Upper Cumberland courthouse town could feed talent into the new recording industry and, in the process, shape what urban listeners thought “hillbilly music” sounded like.
Second, his recordings offer a richly documented example of how repertoire flowed between print, performance, and record. Burnett’s 1913 songbook, courthouse square performances, and Columbia discs all feed into one another. Tunes like “Short Life of Trouble,” “Pearl Bryan,” and “Cumberland Gap” move back and forth between stage and studio, demonstrating how a working partnership reused and reshaped material for different audiences.
Third, his influence on later musicians reminds us how fragile and yet persistent musical memory can be. Without Clyde Davenport’s recollections, Tincher’s Big South Fork study, and the efforts of local museums and fans to mark his grave, Rutherford might survive only as a name in discographies. Instead, he lives on in the bowing of Kentucky fiddlers who still chase his smooth tone, in the playlists of listeners who stream “Lost John” and “Willie Moore,” and in the gravestone at Somerset that finally bears his name.
For those who care about Appalachian history, listening closely to Leonard Rutherford means hearing south central Kentucky in the wobble and hiss of an old 78. It means recognizing that the region’s story runs through small town courthouse squares and traveling blind minstrels as surely as through coal camps and union halls.
Sources & Further Reading
Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) entry for “Rutherford, Leonard,” which compiles Columbia and Gennett session dates, matrix numbers, and personnel for his recordings with Burnett, Byrd Moore, and John D. Foster. Appalachianhistorian.org+2UCSB Library+2
Document Records, Burnett & Rutherford: Complete Recorded Works (1926 1930), DOCD 8025, with transfers of all known commercial sides and basic discographic notes. The Document Records Store+2The Document Records Store+2
Rounder Records LP A Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo: The Songs of Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford (Rounder 1004, 1975), whose booklet by Charles Wolfe combines biography, lyrics, and discography based on his interviews with Burnett. Discogs+2recordsale.de+2
Harry Smith, Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952; Smithsonian Folkways reissue, 1997), which reissues “Willie Moore” from Columbia 15314 D and helped introduce Burnett and Rutherford to the folk revival and later scholars. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2Wikipedia+2
Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921 1942 (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (Oxford University Press, 2007), which provide the most detailed session data and narrative overview of Rutherford’s life and work. Vdoc+2Scribd+2
Jeff Todd Titon, Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (University Press of Kentucky, 2001), with transcriptions and commentary on Rutherford related tunes such as “Billy in the Low Ground,” supplemented by audio examples on Slippery Hill. legacy.rogue-scholar.org+2Slippery Hill+2
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Fiddling Is My Joy: The Fiddle in African American Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2025), especially the Kentucky section that discusses Cuje Bertram, Wayne Martin, and the ways Black fiddlers shaped regional styles that included Rutherford’s smooth bowing. Wikipedia+1
William Lynwood Montell, Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), and R. B. Tincher, The Old Time Music of the Big South Fork (National Park Service, c. 1980), for regional context on courthouse square musicians and the performance circuits that carried Burnett and Rutherford across Kentucky and Tennessee. NPS History+2NPS History+2
Clyde Davenport interviews and profiles in Tennessee Arts Commission and Field Recorders’ Collective materials, documenting his admiration for Leonard Rutherford and the transmission of Burnett and Rutherford’s repertoire into later Kentucky fiddle traditions. National Endowment for the Arts+2DrDosido+2
Wayne County–centered narratives such as “Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford” on The Notorious Meddler blog and KnoxvilleOldTime.org’s artist page, which synthesize Wolfe, Russell, and local memories of the duo’s travels, radio work, and community presence. Randy’s Spectacular+2KnoxvilleOldTime.org+2
Kentucky vital records as collated in FamilySearch and Find A Grave, along with modern news coverage of the 2014 effort to place a marker on Rutherford’s grave in Somerset Cemetery, for biographical details about his family, epilepsy, death in 1951, and late recognition. Facebook+2Find A Grave+2