Wilmer Watts
Wilmer Watts (c. 1897 – August 21, 1943) was an American old time singer, banjo player and bandleader who recorded a series of records for Paramount Records in the 1920s. Biography. Watts was born in Mount Tabor (now Tabor City) a market town in Columbus County, North Carolina, United States, between 1896 and 1898. After World War I he moved to the city of Belmont, North Carolina where he worked as a weaver in textile factories. Having learned several instruments including banjo, fiddle, guitar, dobro, autoharp, harmonica, musical saw and drums he became a semi-professional musician around 1921  and made his first recordings in January or February 1927 as a duo with local guitarist Charlie Wilson (1900–?) with a single entitled "The Sporting Cowboy" which was not released at the time. With a new trio under the name of Wilmer Watts and His Lonely Eagles they recorded six sides for Paramount Records in 1927 using a line-up that included Charles Freshour (1900–1959) on guitar and the then unusual steel guitar which was played by Wilson. In 1929 he returned to Paramount's New York studios. This time Wilson was replaced on steel guitar by Palmer Rhyne (1904–1967 ), a fellow factory worker friend of Watts. These sessions resulted in fourteen sides. Recordings and musical style. Wilmer's banjo playing was quite simple and repetitive, staying to mid-tempo songs and quite different from the more complex ragtime influenced picking of Charlie Poole or blues singer Papa Charlie Jackson or the fast choppy style of Uncle Dave Macon. Unlike most of his contemporaries Watts' musical influences seem to be based mostly on traditional Anglo-Celtic sources along with blues, ragtime, or minstrelsy and his songs have a distinctive droning modal quality compared to those of his North Carolina contemporary  Charlie Poole. In his lyrical themes (at least in his recorded works) Watts largely avoided traditional folk songs and focused on more modern themes ranging from blues to a few political protest songs usually in a mocking vein similar to those of songwriter Joe Hill collected in the "Little Red Songbook" of the I.W.W.. Among Watts' best known recordings are: Later career. After the 1927 sessions Wilson left the group and was replaced by Palmer Rayne for the 1929 sessions. The Great Depression ended the recordings of many rural artists with Paramount Records going out of business in 1935 and  Watts making no further recordings. He returned to Belmont where he continued working as a textile worker, tenant farmer and gas station owner as well as a part-time musician albeit without the Lonely Eagles who broke up. Watts often gigged as a one-man-band playing as many as five instruments at once. In 1931 Watts won a talent contest for his act awarded by Uncle Dave Macon. Later from the mid nineteen-thirties he formed a Southern Gospel group with his daughters as the Watts Singers who performed two regular shows on the radio but did not record . He was diagnosed with stomach cancer and retired in 1939 dying in 1944 at the age of approximately 47. His daughters continued as the Watts Singers with one of their husbands replacing Wilmer into the 1960s but did not record. Other media. The only photo of Watts commonly known (showing him holding a fiddle rather than his usual banjo) was reproduced by the artist R. Crumb for a collection of trading cards of old time country musicians.