10/20/2026
☞With my Banjo on my Knee…
☞Today in Music History -- In a curiously-strange coincidence on today’s date 112 years ago, famous American banjo player Polk Miller died & on the very same day another famous American banjo player, Grandpa Jones, was born.
☞On today’s date 113 years ago, Monday, October 20, 1913, famous American banjo player Polk Miller (1844 -1913) met his earthly demise at the age of 69 when he died from the effects of heart failure at his home in the town of Bon Air in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
☞Requiéscat in Pace, Polk Miller.
☞According to Country Music Television, Polk Miller is “one of the oldest Old-Time” performers on record.” Miller was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia, & whilst he was growing up, he learned to play the banjo from slaves on his father’s plantation. He later became a druggist in Richmond in 1860. During the War Between the States, Miller served as a Confederate artilleryman.
☞After the War whilst working at his drug store in Richmond, Miller began making remedies for Sergeant, his favorite hunting dog. His friends soon found that these remedies worked for their dogs as well. In 1868, Miller began selling his canine remedies at his drug store. This was the beginning of Sergeant’s Pet Care Products, which in 2012 was purchased by the Irish pharmaceutical company Perrigo for 285 million dollars.
☞In 1892, Miller turned the operation of his drug store over to his son, after which he began performing Old-Time music professionally. Polk Miller & his “Old South Quartette” had a variety show of “Stories, Sketches & Songs” depicting “Negro life before the Civil War.” Miller was white, & the four members of the quartet were black.
☞Although he did not perform in black-face, Polk Miller often billed himself as “The Old Virginia Plantation Negro,” performing Negro Spirituals along with other Popular Music of the day & Folk tunes such as noted African-American composer James A. Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”
☞Polk Miller’s & the “Old South Quartette” were featured on some of Thomas A. Edison’s earliest phonograph recordings.
☞One of Miller’s friends, famous American author & humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), once wrote “I think that Polk Miller & his wonderful four, is about the only thing the country can furnish that is originally & utterly American.”
☞Polk Miller’s scrapbook is now in the archives of the Valentine Museum at Richmond, Virginia. It is noteworthy that his scrapbook records the problems with racial discrimination that he & his quartette faced in both the Northern & Southern portions of the United States as his integrated group traveled & toured.
☞Also on October 20, 1913 -- the very same day that Polk Miller died -- another famous American banjo player, Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones (1913-1998) was born in the community of Niagara in Henderson County, Kentucky. Grandpa Jones was noted as a banjo player, a yodeler, & an Old-Time, Country, & Gospel-Music singer.
☞Jones spent his teenage years in Akron, Ohio, where he began singing on radio station WJW. In 1931, Jones joined the Pine Ridge String Band, which provided the musical accompaniment for the very popular “Lum & Abner” radio program. By 1935, Jones was performing on radio station WBZ in Boston, where he met noted American Folk singer William Bradley Kincaid (1895-1989), who gave Jones the nickname “Grandpa” because of his off-stage grumpiness during early-morning broadcasts. Jones liked the name & decided to create a stage persona based around it.
☞After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Grandpa Jones moved to Nashville, Tennessee & began performing on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969, Jones became a charter cast member on the long-running television show “Hee Haw.”
☞In 1978, Grandpa Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
☞The photographs depict (left-to-right) Polk Miller & Grandpa Jones.
