Charlie Bowman and His Brothers

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Charles Thomas Bowman (July 30, 1889 – May 20, 1962) was an American old-time fiddle player and string band leader. He was a major influence on the distinctive fiddle sound that helped shape and develop early Country music in the 1920s and 1930s. After delivering a series of performances that won him the first prize in dozens of fiddle contests across Southern Appalachia in the early 1920s, Bowman toured and recorded with several string bands and vaudeville acts before forming his own band, the Blue Ridge Music Makers, in 1935. In his career, he would be associated with country and bluegrass pioneers such as Uncle Dave Macon, Fiddlin' John Carson, Roy Acuff, Charlie Poole, and Bill Monroe. Bowman was born July 30, 1889, in Gray Station, Tennessee, a small community approximately 10 miles (16 km) west of Johnson City. He first learned to play banjo at the age of 12, and purchased his first fiddle for $4.50 shortly thereafter. According to family tradition, Bowman actually made his first recording on a neighbor's Edison cylinder phonograph in 1908. In his teen years, he and his brothers (who had each learned a different instrument) collected pocket change by playing at square dances and other local events around Washington County. Congressman B. Carroll Reece was one of several politicians to hire the Bowmans to play at political rallies in the early 1920s, and Reece remained a lifelong friend of the Bowman family. In the early 1920s, a local businessman sponsored Bowman in t

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