Forever a Hillbilly is an impressive photographic collection of family, performers, performing venues, theater posters, and more. The photographs are combined with an interpretive account of the photos and the career of Charlie Bowman, an acclaimed performer of old-time music and a member of the North American Fiddlers' Hall of Fame. The book is by Bob L. Cox, great-nephew of Bowman.

Bowman grew up in the hill country of Upper East Tennessee but did not go to Nashville. Instead, he twice joined string bands that played the more northeastern vaudeville circuits.  I found Cox's discussion of these vaudeville phases to be an exceptionally appealing feature of the book. To a lesser degree, the book is an account of the other performing members of “Fiddlin' Charlie's” family, especially his  two elder daughters, who were known as “The Bowman Sisters.”         

Charlie Bowman excelled at fiddling but could play many instruments and engaged liberally in comedy. He joined or formed a series of string bands, beginning with “The Hill Billies” in 1925, and performed in numerous venues including movie theaters and radio stations. Among his compositions were “The Nine Pound Hammer” (with Al Hopkins) and the lesser-known “Governor Alf Taylor's Fox Chase,” about one of my own fiddler ancestors.  

The book provides an engaging slice of performing history at the local level. The posters particularly invoke an atmosphere of times past. A suitcase containing many of the objects or copies of the photographs in this collection was found in a former Charlie Bowman home and given to his daughter.  She and other family members provided these and other source materials to  Cox, the author of the valuable companion biography, Fiddlin' Charlie Bowman (University of Tennessee Press, 2007). Cox is a history columnist for the Johnson City Press. He has displayed the materials with visible skill and supplied the instructive accompanying narration.  

Bob Taylor 

If you are not among the folks who were fortunate to have had the opportunity to grow up in a time when (what came to be identified as) country music was in its infancy, rest assured that seniority is not a prerequisite for anyone to enjoy the early string band music of the 1920s and '30s.

For me, what makes this music so much more thrilling and exciting to listen to is to explore the lives and times of the musicians who composed and performed the songs they shared with an eager audience. Because they wrote of what they knew, the lives they lived, their music was immediately identifiable with the masses. The hard-working populace who gave rise to the Industrial Age, farmed the land and struggled to raise their families needed an escape...some relief from the adversity of a day's work. Following supper, those who played a musical instrument would invariably push away from the kitchen table, fetch their instruments and repair to the front porch where they could sing, play and forget the cares of the day.

One of the earliest of these self-taught musicians was a young man from East Tennessee, Charles T. Bowman, whose musical talent, stage presence and songwriting skills would inspire and influence entertainers who followed in his path for decades, attributes that resonate to this day.

Bob Cox's enlightening, long-overdue biography of his great-uncle, Fiddlin' Charlie Bowman, was published in 2007. While it serves as an introduction to a world and period of time few of us can claim witness to, Mr. Cox's description of Charlie's life during that era transports the reader back to the literal, recognized birth of country music and is a joy to read. However, it also leaves us with a desire to know more of the man, Charlie Bowman, and of the struggles and hardships he and his family came to endure as he pursued his musical calling.

His most recent book, Forever A Hillbilly, provides that and more; it is a welcome follow-up, a pictorial trip to a time long-past that complements and enhances that initial publication seamlessly. In addition to the expanded text, it contains more than 300 vintage photographs, entertainment- related handbills, newspaper, and magazine articles to augment the earlier book.

Much of the photographs and text of Forever A Hillbilly concerns the travels of Charlie and two of his daughters, Pauline and Jennie, on the vaudeville circuit during the 1920s and '30s. The photos alone provide a treasure-trove of many of the entertainers with whom they worked, and the accompanying narrative serves as a primer to the by-gone days of vaudeville.

Charlie Bowman was born and reared in rural East Tennessee at the turn of the last century, and throughout his life spoke and sang about his Tennessee roots and his desire to be buried there. One of the more poignant chapters of this book chronicles the journey of Charlie's remains from his 1962 burial in Atlanta GA to the return to his beloved East Tennessee hills in the fall of 2014. In 2010, his youngest daughter, Mary Lou (Bowman) Weibel, was inspired to grant her father's wishes and provided the resources and means to achieve his goal in coming home.

Because you are reading this review, I can assume that you have a keen interest in old-time string bands and country music. Please give this book your thoughtful consideration - you will not be disappointed. 

"West Side Boy"