Skillet Lickers

When Gid Tanner teamed up with blind guitarist Riley Puckett and signed to Columbia in 1924,[1] they created the label's earliest so-called "hillbilly" recording.

[1] Later members were Lowe Stokes, Bert Layne, Hoke Rice, Arthur Tanner and Hoyt "Slim" Bryant.

The Skillet Lickers, together with fellow North Georgians Fiddlin' John Carson and the Georgia Yellow Hammers, made Atlanta and North Georgia an early center of old-time string band music, especially the hard-driving fiddle-based style employed by each of these performers.

Two years later, in 1913, his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia where Mac made his living as an automobile mechanic.

By the time the folk revival was under way in the late 1950s, his irritation with being asked to play old-fashioned material was unconcealed.

He had previously performed as a one-man band and had made a device with strings and levers which he played with his feet.

Stokes lost his right hand to a shotgun blast in the late 1920s, in the midst of the Skillet Lickers' popularity.

He eventually began fiddling again using a prosthetic attachment to hold his bow, and he can be heard playing on some later Skillet Licker records in this manner (for example, on "Broken Down Gambler").

On the group's later records, the three-fiddle lineup was usually composed of McMichen, Layne, and Lowe Stokes, playing tightly in unison or in harmony, while Gid Tanner switched to banjo.

After 1931 the group occasionally consisted of Riley Puckett on guitar, Gordon Tanner on fiddle, Edward "Ted" Hawkins on mandolin and record producer Dan Hornsby on vocals.

They played many instrumentals, ballads, pop songs and comedy sketches, such as "A Corn Licker Still in Georgia".

The New Lost City Ramblers, a revival old-time group from the early 1960s, were fans of the Skillet Lickers.