West Virginia fiddler Sherman Lawson is chiefly known as the
only musician to ever record with the white country blues
guitarist Frank Hutchison. Lawson was raised in West Virginia
where had one uncle who played a chopping thumb-and-finger banjo
style, and another who made him a gourd fiddle, which Lawson
started to play when he was about 11 years old. In a 1964
interview with Mike Seeger, Lawson recalled that the first tune
he learned to play was "What Will We Do With the Baby-O?" He
became a carpenter when he got older, got married, and continued
playing his fiddle at square dances, much to his new wife's
chagrin. Lawson first ran across Hutchison not too long before
they ended up recording together for the Okeh label. It was
1928, and Hutchison had for several years been influenced by a
black guitarist named Bill Hunt, who reportedly played around
the coal camps starting around 1910. Hutchison picked up both
his style of slide-guitar playing and much of his song
repertoire from Hunt, and it was this materi