EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.
The first singer-songwriter to play banjo on a recording and the first woman to be recorded singing country music was Western North Carolina’s Sara Samantha Biddix Bumgarner (1878-1960). A champion of folk ballads, Bumgarner performed for 31 years at Asheville’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the oldest festival of its kind in the United States.
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Folk is the bread and butter of American music, being the first homegrown genre to gain widespread attention throughout the states. But for the first half of the twentieth century, folk was ignored and looked down upon by the recording houses and the kings of radio.
A select few musicians carried on the tradition until the Folk Revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s reintroduced the sound to audiences. One woman from Sylva, known affectionately as “Aunt,” not only kept the folk tradition alive in the interim, but left a legacy as the first recorded female country singer.
Finding her rhythm
Samantha Biddix was born to Haselton “Has” Biddix and Sara Biddix on Oct. 31, 1878, either in Tennessee or North Carolina. The country gal’s father, Has, was locally renowned for his wicked speed with the fiddle. Unwilling to teach his daughter the devil’s instrument, Samantha was forced to learn alone while her father was at work. By age 15, Has could no longer deny his daughter’s talent.
Legend has it Samantha made her own “banjo fashioned from gourd with a cat’s hide stretched over it, fitted with beeswax-coated cotton strings,” according to WNC Magazine. Another version of the tale put forward by the Pickens County Courier explains, “Has eventually broke down and bought Samantha a real banjo, and she and her father together would entertain family and friends.”
Other accounts posit Has made the cat-skin banjo or Samantha only received a real banjo after her home burned down. Whatever got the instrument in her hands, she soon perfected playing it.
Finding her voice
After her first husband, John Lyle, presumably died, The Sylva Herald reported, “In 1902, 23-year-old Samantha Biddix married 40-year-old Carson ‘Carse’ Bumgarner, who was supportive of her musical abilities and bought her the first fiddle she ever owned.”
Around the turn of the century, Samantha Bumgarner had only strummed for amusement. But Carse saw more in his wife’s songs than a parlor trick. He spurred her to start performing in public.
Several years of crowd-pleasing and award-winning performances later, Bumgarner got a message in 1924 from the Colombia Phonograph Company, today known as Columbia Records. Upon their request, she headed to New York to be recorded for the label.
Alongside Bumgarner was a mysterious woman named Eva Davis, whose identity has been questioned for decades. No one has definitively concluded who she was and where she is buried. Some have theorized, including Blue Ridge Music Trails, it could have been Eva Smathers Davis.
When they stepped into Columbia’s studio, the pair made history in several respects. The Current explains, “In two days, Bumgarner and Davis had recorded about a dozen songs. Not only were the recordings notable for capturing some Appalachian standards, they were also the first recordings to capture five-string banjo — and most importantly, the session made Bumgarner and Davis the first women country artists to ever be recorded.”
Of the twelve songs they recorded, Columbia would publish 10 under various brands over the subsequent years. The Library of Congress has preserved some of the tracks in their collection. Bumgarner’s complete discography is listed on Wirz’ American Music.
Over the years, she would feature on various tracks and albums. Bumgarner’s final recording came in 1956, contributing to Riverside Record’s “Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains” album. You can hear the woman, then in her mid-seventies, strumming and singing on the final track titled “Fly Around, My Pretty Little Miss.” Fittingly, this song was included in her first recordings and her last.
Lunsford drafts Bumgarner
Bascom Lamar Lunsford fancied himself a promoter of southern Appalachian sounds, which he saw as the last remnant of old English ballads. Beyond writing books documenting the songs he heard in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lunsford founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 1928 in Asheville. Now the oldest festival of its kind in the country, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival will be returning for its 98th gathering from July 31 – Aug. 2, 2025.
At some unknown point, Lunsford discovered Bumgarner, by then well into middle age. He asked the balladeer to play at his second festival in 1929. Not only did she oblige, Bumgarner continued appearing annually for 31 years straight, only bowing out when her arthritis prevented her from picking up her beloved banjo.
Lunsford apparently thought highly of Bumgarner, supposedly saying she was the “best all-around musician he’d ever met,” according to The Sylva Herald.
Perhaps the greatest honor of Bumgarner’s life came at the request of Lunsford. “In 1939, she traveled to the White House with Lunsford, and met and performed for President Roosevelt and King George VI of England,” explained WNC Magazine.
Bumgarner’s impact on Seeger
Pete Seeger, the singer and banjo player who was largely responsible for folk revival in the 1960’s, is said to have been inspired to pick up his iconic instrument after seeing Bumgarner perform. Evidence for this origin story is scant, but it could have happened.
“At the 1936 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, a young Harvard student by the name of Pete Seeger was in attendance, and on seeing ‘Aunt Samantha’ Bumgarner perform, was inspired to learn to play banjo,” wrote The Current.
Seeger once stated of the mountain lady, as claimed by WPVM 103.7,“I’ll never forget Mrs. Bumgarner, sitting back in her rocking chair with a banjo.” Where this quote and others like it elsewhere online originated from is unclear.
Putting down her banjo
For most of her life, Bumgarner was not a professional musician, only turning to that profession to support herself after the death of her second husband, Carse, in 1941. Before then, she worked as a dressmaker in Dillsboro.
Years of handiwork, both sewing and strumming, took a toll on Bumgarner’s hands. By 1959, she could no longer pick up her banjo to play due to arthritis. Rheumatism and heart disease plagued the rest of her body too.
At the age of 82, Samantha Bumgarner died on Dec. 24, 1960, in her home near Sylva. Blue Grass Today reported she died “of arteriosclerosis of the heart.” She is buried in Franklin Cemetery in Dillsboro.
Bumgarner’s grave has a poem engraved on its face reading, “Folks came from far and near, he vocal renditions and banjo to hear. God called her home one day, where she can never grow old; to sing His eternal praises and play on instruments of pure gold.”
Much of the available information on Bumgarner’s life across the internet seems to have been copied from the prolific Sylva author John Alvis Parris, Jr., who wrote Bumgarner’s obituary in the Christmas Day edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times in 1960.
“She was the last of the old balladeers, and the cry of her fiddle and the twang of her banjo were known whenever music-making folks gathered,” Parris wrote. “She once reckoned her heard was so full of ballads and folk songs that she could keep right on playing forever and never play the same tune twice.”
Solidifying Parris’ claims about her mythical status, Bumgarner was admitted into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame on June 18, 2020.
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