Blind for most of his life, Richard Burnett (b. October 8, 1883 in Elk Spring Valley, KY, d. January 23, 1977) was a folk musician and songwriter from Kentucky, he was a full-time travelling entertainer. With fiddler Leonard Rutherford (b. 1900 in Somerset, KY, d. 1954) he formed a long touring partnership, and a brief recording career in which they cut a number of popular and influential sides with Burnett on banjo or guitar. Both men also sang.
In around 1914, Burnett proposed to solve the problem of travelling as a blind man by employing teenaged Leonard Rutherford as sighted companion. Their first trip together was to the nearby Lauren County Fair, then young Leonard spent more and more time with the older man, becoming a permanent companion when his parents died. Burnett was not his only music teacher; he learned from other South Kentucky fiddlers, including the African American Cuje Bertram. But playing with Dick made him a professional musician, and from him he learned the old style of playing in unison with the banjo. As his fiddling improved, it became profitable to range further afield by horse bus and railroad. Eventually Burnett bought a car, which Rutherford learned to drive, thus allowing them to travel in Burnett's words "from Cincinnati to Chattanooga" playing "every town this side of Nashville". They traveled by bus, Model A, and on foot to any place they could and sing. From about 1914 until 1950, the pair became so popular that they found themselves in the company of most all the popular mountain musicians of the time. They were "at home" in the presence of the Carter Family, Charlie Oaks, Arthur Smith and many others. They appeared at the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, on radio stations in Cincinnati, and finally, they would be some of the first old-time musicians to enter the recording studios. One particularly profitable area for them was the coal fields of Virginia. It was in In Bonny Blue Coal Camp, Virginia in 1926 that they encountered a general store owner specialising in phonograph records, who recommended them to Columbia records.
In 1926 the country music sector of the recording industry was on the point of expansion. Columbia Records had started its dedicated 3500-D series 1924 for the "Old Familiar Tunes" country market, without many authentic southern performers. But Columbia had some success with groups such as the north Georgia Skillet Lickers, the Virginia Blue Ridge Highballers and the band of North Carolina Charlie Poole. Columbia's A&R manager Frank Walker was prepared to record more southern musicians, and invited Burnett and Rutherford to a November "field recording" session in November at a temporary studio in Atlanta. At this first session Burnett and Rutherford recorded six sides, which were issued in 1927 as three 78 rpm records and sold very well. Country Music historian Charles Wolfe considers that the success of these records encouraged Frank Walker to shift Columbia's emphasis from stuudio singers such as Vernon Dalhart to authentic southern artists. The best seller of the three with Lost John A-side sold 37,600 copies in three years, an astonishing figure for that market at the time. Profitable as the records were for Columbia, Dick and Leonard received only sixty dollars per side and their expenses. Dick Burnett did find a way to profit from their records. He bought many copies wholesale from Columbia and sold them at his performances, just as he had previously sold his ballets and songbooks. Burnett and Rutherford were invited to the Columbia's next Atlanta sessions in April and November 1927. The ten numbers included Dicks' autobiographical Song Of The Orphan Boy, which was not issued, a record with two sides of dance tunes without a vocal (enlivened by Dick's "monkey business" in the form of kazoo and jew's harp imitations), and a version of Hesitation Blues backed by Dick's adaptation of the well-known Danville Girl. Another blues, All Night Long was backed by the ballad Wilie Moore, which was reissued on the influential 1952 Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, thus introducing Burnett and Rutherford to the new market of the American folk music revival. The next year, dissatisfied with their payment they broke from Columbia and recorded with Gennett Records. This involved travel to the Northern recording studio, but Gennett's base in Richmond, Indiana was more accessible from Kentucky than those of other Northern record companies. Newly partnered with guitarist Byrd Moore, they recorded five sides in October 1928. One of these was rejected, so Cumberland Gap was issued with a reverse recorded by Burnett and Moore with another fiddler, Charles Taylor.
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by Steve Leggett
Richard Burnett (vocals, guitar, banjo) and Leonard Rutherford (fiddle) were a well-known string band duo in south central Kentucky in the 1920s and 1930s, and they stayed active as performers into the 1950s. They are best known for the archaic-sounding ballad "Willie Moore," which was included on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.