Jesse Stevens on Bluegrass

Jesse Stevens and Big Sandy Boys - Mama, Mama (Bluegrass #45-712), 1958
From the hilly, coal mining community of West Van Lear, western Kentucky, came Jesse Stevens, who brought us two of the most rural, primitive, rockabilly records that ever existed.

Stevens was born on January 4, 1932, to William and Bertha (Ball) Stevens. He had a twin sister, Georgia, and came from a big family with a total of nine children. The small community of Van Lear is only a few miles a way from Butcher Hollow, where, a few months after Stevens' birth, a future country music super star would be born: Loretta Lynn.

Jesse Stevens in the 1970s
Picture from the back of White Label LP 8812

Stevens was musically inclined and by the 1950s, was playing guitar, singing and composing. Although Stevens was more fond of bluegrass, when rock'n'roll came along in the mid 1950s, he was converted - at least for some time. With the Big Sandy Boys, a local bluegrass group, he recorded a couple of songs in a living room, hence the primitive sound. The group included Gene Walden on lead guitar, Harold Burton on mandolin, Charlie Shermin on guitar, and Charlie Moore on bass, though probably not all of them participated in the actual recording session(s).

From the songs recorded, Stevens released "Mama, Mama" and "No Bluebirds in the Sea" on his own Bluegrass label (#712). To manufacture the record, he sent in the tapes to Starday, which custom pressed an amount of a few hundred copies for Stevens in mid 1958 at Rite pressing plant in Cincinnati.

Another two songs, recorded with the Big Sandy Boys, appeared in late 1959 on Stevens' label (this time spelled "Blue Grass") with "Go Boy Go" b/w "I'm In No Mood for Your Love" (#209-1) - although Cees Klop stated on the back on one of his White Label LPs that they had remained unissued.

These recordings remained Stevens' only cuts, though he kept on playing music locally. There were a couple of other records on different labels throughout the 1960s and 1970s that featured a group known as the "Big Sandy Boys", though it seems to be unrelated to Stevens' group.

In the 1970s, Stevens was tracked down by Dutch rock'n'roll collector Cees Klop, who released recordings he found during his trips to the United States on his own White Label and Collector labels to European fans. Such was the case with Stevens' recordings, which appeared on White Label LP 8812 "Unknown Rock and Roll" in 1979. Since then, Stevens' songs have appeared on several reissue compilations.

Jesse Stevens died on March 12, 2013, at Manchester Memorial Hospital in Manchester, Kentucky. He was 81 years old. He is buried at Adams Cemetery in Manchester. His wife Shirley passed away in 2023.

Sources

• Rockin' Country Style entry

• Big Sandy Boys 45cat entry

• Find a grave entry

• Discogs

• Anonymous/Cees Klop: "Unknown Rock and Roll" liner notes, (White Label LP 8812), 1979