Home | About Us | Contact | Shopping Cart | Checkout

Year of birth: 1894

City of birth: Alpharetta, Ga.

Music historian Wayne W. Daniel, author of Pickin’ on Peachtree, names George Riley Puckett as one of the four nationally known country music pioneers hailing from Atlanta, along with Fiddlin’ John Carson, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers and Clayton McMichen. Puckett was born on May 7, 1894, in Alpharetta; as a child, a popular treatment for sore eyes, sugar and lead, blinded him. He attended the School for the Blind in Macon, where he learned to read Braille and studied piano. Later, he taught himself to play banjo and developed a unique guitar style Daniel characterizes as “single-string playing, featuring dramatic bass runs.” Puckett’s skills as an instrumentalist and his distinctive singing voice made him an early radio and record star.

Puckett first gained notice as a vocalist and banjo player at the popular fiddlers’ conventions held in Atlanta from 1913 through the early 30s. He had a wide repertoire that included British ballads, religious songs, cowboy songs and popular songs of the era. Daniel notes that one newspaper reporter wrote in 1917 that “no description of a fiddlers’ convention would be complete without reference to Riley Puckett, the blind banjo player, whose flying fingers picked a rhythmic accompaniment to any tune that might be offered, no matter whence it came or how often it changed key.”

WSB radio began broadcasting in Atlanta on March 15, 1922, and on March 23, 1922, Fiddlin’ John Carson became the first old-time country musician to perform on the new radio station. Six months later, on Sept. 28, 1922, Riley Puckett performed on WSB with the Home Town Boys String Band, led by fiddler Clayton McMichen, and the ensemble became a station favorite. Puckett sang regularly, prompting one Atlanta Journal writer to say his “tenor voice carries with a sliver clearness that compels attention and admiration.”

WSB’s signal carried as far west as the Pacific Coast and as far north as Canada and “hillbilly” music quickly earned legions of listeners. In response, Columbia Records invited Riley Puckett and Gid Tanner to New York in March 1924 to record as the first country artists on the label. Among the six solo numbers Puckett recorded, “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep,” featuring Puckett’s yodeling (pre-dating Jimmie Rodgers’ recorded yodeling), became one of the top five hillbilly songs of that year. Puckett was also a member of Gid Tanner’s famed Skillet Lickers when that group first recorded for Columbia in 1926.

In the 20s and 30s, Puckett continued to record, with over 200 solo records on Columbia, Decca and Bluebird. He also performed regularly on WSB and other radio stations and in his own tent show traveling throughout the South. In addition to the Home Town Boys String Band and Skillet Lickers, he played with Bert Layne’s Moutaineers, “Daddy” John Love, Red Jones, the Stone Mountain Boys, the Sand Sifters, the Georgia Red Hots and the Georgia Hot Shots. George Riley Puckett died on July 13, 1946, of blood poisoning.

Source:

Wayne Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

:: View more Georgia country artists.