Eddie Adcock

Edward Windsor Adcock (June 21, 1938 – March 19, 2025) was an American banjoist and guitarist. His professional career as a five-string banjoist began in 1953 when he joined Smokey Graves & His Blue Star Boys, who had a regular show at a radio station in Crewe, Virginia. Between 1953 and 1957, he founded or played with different bands in Virginia and Washington, D.C., such as his Virginia Playboys, Smokey Graves and the Blue Star Boys, Bill Harrell, and Mac Wiseman's Country Boys. Bill Monroe offered a job to Adcock in 1958, and he played with the Blue Grass Boys until he could no longer survive on bluegrass' declining pay due to the onslaught of Elvis Presley who cornered all music markets. Adcock continued in music and also returned to working a variety of day jobs including auto mechanic, dump truck driver, and sheet metal mechanic. Then Charlie Waller and John Duffey asked Adcock to join their struggling new band, The Country Gentlemen, whereupon their vocal and instrumental synergy prompted a reinvention and elevation of their sound, soon revitalizing bluegrass music itself. They are the first group to be inducted, in 1996, into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Fame as a band entity. Adcock performed with his wife Martha since 1973 in bands II Generation - the first definitively newgrass group - then as Eddie & Martha Adcock, country rock band Adcock, bluegrass' Talk of the Town, The Masters, the Country Gentlemen Reunion Band, and the Eddie Adcock Band, as well as with country outlaw David Allan Coe. Most recently he toured almost exclusively with wife Martha and called Lebanon, Tennessee his home. Adcock belonged to a number of business organizations, including IBMA and the Folk Alliance. He has served on the board of directors of the IBMA, Tennessee Banjo Institute and others. Eddie and Martha also founded and ran Adcock Audio, a large, state-of-the-art sound company, serving bluegrass-related festivals from the early 1970s until 2006, and from that time have also recorded and produced themselves and others both outside and in-house at their own SunFall Studio.