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Sunday, April 6, 1930
Lowe Stokes & “Heavy” Martin
95
the hit recording group Gid Tanner’s Skillet-
Lickers around 1927/28. He also worked with
fiddler Bert Layne and guitarist Claude Davis,
and made numerous records with them. (On
one of them, a sketch called
The Fiddlin’ Boot-
leggers
, done for Gennett in 1928, he does play
Done Gone
, but only a short piece of it.)
Stokes’s presence in Knoxville in 1930 may
have been at the instigation of Bill Brown, who
had worked with him on C
OLUMBIA
recording
sessions and knew his assets both as a fiddler
and as an actor in comedy sketches of the
Corn
Licker Still In Georgia
type. Also, it could do no
harm to have a recording “name” like Stokes
on hand to impress less experienced musi-
cians.
At the time of the second Knoxville session,
Stokes was living in Chattanooga, where he
had moved in 1929, probably to join his
buddy Bert Layne, who had been based there
for several years. Chattanooga in those days
was a good operational base for musicians, and
Stokes stayed in the city for about a decade,
generally working as a musician, though in
1931-32 he is found running a grocery in the
East Ridge section. The change of occupation
is hardly surprising: on Christmas Day, 1930,
Stokes had wounded his right hand in a shoot-
ing affray, so badly that it had had to be am-
putated. Layne, who was handy with such
things, made him a prosthetic device whereby
he could hold a fiddle bow, and by 1933 he
was declaring himself a musician for hire
again.
Stokes’s movements after he left Chattanooga
are exceedingly hard to follow. He is reported
to have worked as a musical booking agent. At
some point he and his second wife Hazel set-
tled in Chouteau, Oklahoma, where he died on
July 14, 1983.
TR