Eddie Adcock, a virtuoso banjo and guitar player, died on March 19 in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 86. Adcock’s death was confirmed by Dan Hays, a former executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Association, who said he had a number of chronic health problems.
Adcock brought his improvisatory fretwork to musical settings ranging from the first-generation traditionalism of Bill Monroe to the newgrass, or “new acoustic,” sounds fashioned by forerunners of modern bluegrass like the Country Gentlemen and II Generation.
He was best known for his tenure in the 1960s with the Country Gentlemen, a group based in Arlington, Va., that, through advances in style and repertoire, all but redefined bluegrass music.
Adcock’s contributions were consistently among the quartet’s most daring, notably his dazzling string-bending and his use of the thumb-style guitar technique of Merle Travis to create a unique jazz- and blues-inflected approach to playing the banjo.
“He released all my insides, all my creativity, into the band,” Adcock said of his heady early years with the Country Gentlemen. “I was ready to say something of my own, and that’s where I made my mark.”
The Country Gentlemen predated Adcock, but the iteration that included him, along with Charlie Waller on guitar, John Duffey on mandolin, and Tom Gray on upright bass, was heralded widely as the group’s first “classic” lineup.
Mr. Adcock’s first professional engagement as a banjoist was on local radio when he was 15. Two years later, he took a job with Mac Wiseman and the Country Boys; he joined Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in 1958. Because the pay was insufficient, he also worked a series of day jobs, including auto mechanic and truck driver.
In 1958, Mr. Waller and Mr. Duffey invited Mr. Adcock to enlist in the Country Gentlemen, then a new band. He would go on to play on signature recordings like “Two Little Boys,” “New Freedom Bell” and “This Morning at Nine.”
In 1970, after more than a decade with the quartet, Mr. Adcock moved to California and formed a country-rock band called the Clinton Special. A year later he moved back east and founded the newgrass ensemble II Generation with the mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau.
In 1973, he met Martha Hearon, who would soon join the band as its rhythm guitarist. The couple married three years later and subsequently performed together as a duo, Eddie and Martha Adcock, and in other formats both onstage and in the studio.
In 1989, Mr. Adcock took part in the bluegrass supergroup recording “The Masters,” alongside Jesse McReynolds on mandolin, Uncle Josh Graves on Dobro and Kenny Baker on fiddle. In 1996, he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum as a member of the Country Gentlemen.
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