Jim Childress is a fiddle player and composer from Free Union, Virginia, and has been playing traditional Old Time fiddle music for more than 40 years. The band on his recordings is called “Uncle Henry’s Favorites.” They are Pete Vigour, Ellen Vigour, and Mark Beall. 

Uncle Henry’s Favorites recorded a CD of Old Time tunes in 2001, appropriately named “Old Time String Band Favorites.” Band member Pete Vigour had this to say about the origin of the Uncle Henry’s Favorites band: “In the summer of 1976, my wife-to-be, Ellen, and I traveled to several old-time music festivals, including the Fraley family festival in eastern Kentucky, with our friends Arnie and Dona.  We wanted to enter the string band contest, but needed a band name.  We had been playing the tune “Uncle Henry” a lot.  We had learned it from an LP of Tracy and Eloise Schwarz; Tracy had learned it from Violet Hensley from Arkansas, who had learned it from her father.  We named the pickup band “Uncle Henry’s Favorite Chigger Stompers.”  The name, abbreviated to Uncle Henry’s Favorites, became our go-to name for festival contests over the next few years, and then became the official name of our band with Jim Childress and Mark Beall in December 1985.”

Jim Childress is a prolific tune writer. He cites his influences as coming from both contemporary players and recordings of older musicians- especially those from Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

His first CD of originals, “Turkey Sag,” was released in 2004. Most players will immediately recognize several tunes from this CD, especially “Turkey Sag” and “The Road To Malvern”, as these tunes have become jam favorites across the country. 

Jim wrote Turkey Sag in 1978, and said it was the first tune he ever made up. He added, “Somehow it got around, and I heard stories of it being played in far-flung places. Someone recorded a version of it that I could not even recognize as being the same tune, and eventually that made me decide that I wanted to have some say in how the tune actually goes. At that point I had written other tunes and tune fragments and put together enough material to record the Turkey Sag CD, writing The Road to Malvern and Halfway Pond because I needed more material for the project. Turkey Sag is a place in the county where I live where a mountain ridge dips down in a saddle and a small gravel road crosses the ridge there. My wife and I have been going there for bird counts, mushroom hunting, etc. for 50 years.”

Jim says that his wife, Barbara, particularly liked the melody that became “The Road To Malvern,” and she asked him to think about naming it for her. He did, using her birthplace in Malvern, Arkansas as the title. 

Jim’s second album of original fiddle tunes with Uncle Henry’s Favorites came out in 2014, and is called Free Union. In the liner notes, Jim explains that he wants his compositions to be “... respectful of the form and style of Old Time music, but also have something fresh to offer.” In an interesting anecdote regarding songwriting, he tells of remembering the first part of the tune “Shadowdragon” from a dream, and whistling the melody into his cell phone on his way to work so he wouldn’t forget it.

Ed. note: Shadowdragons are a type of dragonfly found in the eastern US and Canada. 

Jim’s latest release, again with Uncle Henry’s Favorites, is “Fly Away,” which came out in 2023. Adam Hurt and Beth Williams Hartness helped with one tune on this recording, and sometime band member Arnie Naiman from Ontario learned the tunes remotely and drove to Virginia for the recording session. Jim said that most of the tunes were written during the first two years of the Covid pandemic, and added, “With less time to get together with people, there was more time to experiment.”

On his website, Jim sums up his experience as a songwriter and the nature of folk music: “I have heard many other people play tunes I have written, both in person and on recordings, and it is fascinating to hear each person interpret a tune in a slightly different way. The folk process is both inexorable and surprisingly fast. This seems good to me. I am happy to launch them and let them go where they will.”