Fiddler chubby wise

Chubby Wise, a fiddler who backed up some of country music's biggest stars, has died at age Wise, a Lake City native who lived in Glen St. Mary, died Saturday in Bowie, Md. Shortly before his death, he was hospitalized with double pneumonia. Since the late s, he fiddled at bluegrass festivals throughout the United States, including the annual Thanksgiving Bluegrass Festival at the Sertoma Youth Ranch on the Pasco-Hernando county line.

Chubby Wise was one of the great sidemen in country music; a champion fiddler whose work with first Bill Monroe and then Hank Snow established him as a formative influence upon generations of bowmen. He joined the ranks of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys in at a time when Monroe, known as the "Father of Bluegrass Music", was developing the dynamic acoustic sound that has been his musical legacy. By Wise found himself alongside the innovative banjo- picker Earl Scruggs, the guitarist and vocalist Lester Flatt and the bass player Cedric Rainwater, in the classic Bluegrass Boys' line-up. Eight years later, Elvis Presley turned the last of these into a classic piece of rockabilly, the flip- side of "That's All Right Mama". He honed his song-writing talent, co-writing "Shenandoah Waltz" with Clyde Moody, who enjoyed a massive hit with it an estimated 3 million copies in Wise took part in the sessions in which Snow and his band joined the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins in adding new instrumental backing to several classic recordings by the country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers who had died 23 years earlier.

He was 80 and lived in Glen St. Mary, Fla. Wise helped define the sound of bluegrass fiddling: a mixture of the drone double-stops of mountain music, the bent and sliding notes of rural blues and a speedy, swinging, daredevil virtuosity. Wise was born in Lake City, Fla.

Chubby Wise began a long, colorful, and varied career in show business backing his adoptive father, Robert Wise — a fiddler — on banjo and guitar in Lake City, Florida. After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, Chubby took up the fiddle himself at the age of 12 or At 18 he married Geneva Kirby — the daughter of a prominent neighboring farmer, drove taxis in Jacksonville by day, and made music by night.