Full name’s Paul D. Smith, and I live at Hardy, Kentucky. That’s over around the Belfry area in Pike County. And really, I’ve been in that area all my life. I got interested in this type of music when I was probably about eight years old. Heard an old fiddler by the name of Owen Chapman—Snake Chapman, everybody calls him. And at that time, he and two other guys had a little band that they played locally around the area, and played on the local radio station in Williamson, West Virginia. And they came—my dad got them to come to our house one night and play music, ‘cause he was good friends with all of ‘em. And I just remember sitting on the floor with my mouth open, looking, just fascinated me. So I decided I wanted to try that. And so I did. I started then with a guitar—got a guitar, learned a few chords, and I’d get over in the corner when they would have jam sessions that I would get to go to, and bump around on that guitar, pick up what I could. And then I got a mandolin somewhere, I don’t remember where—played with it a while. Then, took up the fiddle, I was somewhere in the neighborhood of probably twelve, thirteen years old—played that a while. Then I heard a banjo. I heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo, and that blew my mind, so I decided I wanted to try that. I’m just never satisfied, I want to do it all.

But really, I have since that time in my life, I’ve really been interested in old-time music, and bluegrass music, I like that too. Matter of fact, I like about all kind of music, except a couple that I just cannot understand—rock and heavy metal. But I don’t really consider that music, that’s noise to me. Maybe I’m hurting somebody’s feelings, but that’s the way I feel. But I’ve just continued down through the years, really to play locally in the area. I haven’t played out much until the last probably four, five years. We had a little group that we would get together on Saturday night, I guess what you would call “kitchen pickers”—we’d just sit in the kitchen and play for three or four hours, or until we got tired. That was about it, until the last four or five years, like I said, I’ve been playing with two or three little local bands off and on. Last year, I had the opportunity to go to Port Townsend, Washington, to the American Fiddle Tune Festival, they invited me out there. I hesitated to go, but it was sort of a deal I just couldn’t turn down: they paid all the expenses, took care of me for a week. And I had a ball after I got there.

I think that this music has been a part of a culture in this area for some time, probably since the time when the first white settlers moved in here. Because at that time, you didn’t have television, you didn’t have radio, you didn’t have anything, any form of entertainment like that. And if you had any entertainment, you made it for yourself. And most families did that. There were some that didn’t bother with it, I’m sure. But I think if you go back probably in the early part of the last century, and you wouldn’t gone into most of the homes in this area, that you would have found some type of musical instrument—maybe more than one. Most of the families that I knew, someone in the family at least played the banjo, that seemed to be the popular instrument. And it appeared that if you were a fiddler, you were pretty much in demand if you so desired to go, you could go to square dances and hoedowns and whatever, and have a good time.

I was born and raised on Big Creek, in Pike County. It was just up a hollow, where you knew everybody, and everybody knew you. You couldn’t get into much without having a report sent home. And actually I went to a little one-room school until I went through the eighth grade, at a one-room school. And most of the people there were just farmers, small-scale, they weren’t really into farming for a big profit, but it was for their own subsistence. I remember that we raised a big garden, and we had cows and chickens and pigs, raised a good portion of what we had to eat. ‘Course not too far away in Pike County from where I then lived, the coal industry was real big. That has changed a lot now because at that time the coal industry, like I said, was the biggest employer. A coal mine employed a lot of people to dig out the coal, at that time. Now, you got a machine that does everything. So a mine that used to employ three- or four-hundred people, now maybe they only have five or six operating a bunch of machinery. And that’s been a big change.

I think that the tradition of passing old-time music down through just getting together and playing the music has been a prime factor in carrying this music forward from back in—like I said, in the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, because there weren’t any tape recorders, and CDs that we have today to put this stuff down on and save it for the future. You had to learn to play yourself, or you go out and listen to someone else. And a lot of people were interested in it, in music. I think it’s coming back a little bit. I think it went through a period where a lot of people were sort of ashamed of it. They didn’t want anybody to know that they liked this kind of music, because if you did, you were an ignorant hillbilly. And that stigma, I think, has begun to go away somewhat.
Both my granddad and my dad played the banjo, as I said before—we had a banjo. We didn’t have any other instruments. But both of them played the banjo, and my dad loved the fiddle. He tried to play the fiddle, but it didn’t work for him, sounded like two cats fighting.

I think [traditional music] is becoming more accepted, and more people are becoming interested in it. Like I said, for a while I think there was a point where people just wanted to shy away from it. They felt that it would be more important if they said they liked country music or rock music, or something other than what we used to call hillbilly music.

I can’t really remember where [my first time performing in front of an audience] was. It would have been probably when I was in high school, because I remember that I played with some kids, mostly about my age, and we formed a little group, and we would play occasionally in a school or something other. And we played a few times in high school, at Belfry, Kentucky. And of course, at that time, that made me so nervous that I didn’t hardly know where I was or what I was doing.

There are a lot of wonderful artists today, that are making CDs, tapes, publishing articles, also, in regard to the music. In the last few years, we have lost a good many of the old-time musicians, and, like I said before, if it wasn’t for recordings of those people, of their music, then that would have died and gone with them. So, I don’t know. There are so many artists that I love to listen to. I buy every CD that I can afford. It would be hard for me to even think of someone in particular [to recommend to a traditional music novice].