| In the spring of 1936,
while living in West Huntsville, Alabama, my mother, Lillian
Buchanan, her brother Boots and her late husbands nephew Bob
Buchanan, were playing around with makin' music. Boots sang
and played guitar, Bob played guitar, and Mama and her oldest
daughter, Hazel, sang. "Little Hazel" was only five
years old at the time. Mama's brother-in-law, Curtis Bragg,
was acting as their manager/agent and finding places for them
to play.
When they decided they needed a fiddler,
Curtis said he had heard of a young man by the name of Ellis
Chambers, who was a real good fiddler and lived out in the
country east of Athens, in an area they referred to as "the
forks of the river". Curtis, Boots and Bob went to see
if he wanted to join the band and as fate would have it, he
was very interested. By the summer of '36 they were playing
school houses, barn dances and radio shows under the name that
Curtis had suggested,"The Dizzy Ramblers". They continued
to use that name from then all the way up into the 1990's.
In the fall of 1937, the
Dizzy Ramblers and all associated friends and family moved
to Florida. Mother's brother, Ervin, had moved there some time
earlier and on November 27th, Paw and Maw Eubanks, along with
Lillian (Mama) and her two girls (Hazel and Annie), Curtis
and Mae Bragg (Mama's sister and brother-in-law), Boots Eubanks,
Bob Buchanan and Bud (Ellis) Chambers left for Auburndale,
Florida.
After a rather rocky year financially and
a trip back to North Alabama in which Ellis' father tried his
best to convince him not to marry that widow woman and her
two children -- finally in November 5th, 1938, Bud (Daddy)
married Lil (Mama) and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Dizzy Ramblers never played a lot over
the coming forty years but did on occasion make a little music
in living rooms and back yards across Central Florida. By the
mid-eighties Daddy, Uncle Boots, and Uncle Ervin, with Pete
Waters or David Shumate on bass, were playing with some regularity,
mostly at Allen's Historical Cafe in Auburndale and occasionally
at bluegrass festivals and private functions.
Nancy and I both played, off and on, with
the original Dizzy Ramblers until Daddy's death in 1981. Then
along with Joe Spann on the banjo, we played with Uncle Boots,
as the Dizzy Ramblers, until his death in the early 90's. I
have used a variation of that name for many years. We call
it, "The Dizzy Rambler Band".
Photo
Gallery
>>Click Thumbnails for larger view<<
Handbill ca. 1937 |
Dizzy Ramblers '36 |
Bud Chambers '37 |
Dizzy Ramblers '39 |
Bud - Boots '39 |
Bud - Ervin ca. '43 |
Ervin - Boots '78 |
Jam 7-4-1980 |
Boots 1980 |
Hazel "In Memory" |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Back
To Scrapbook Main