Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

A pioneering rockabilly artist, Tarheel Slim was born Allen Bunn in North Carolina on September 24, 1923.

Growing up in rural North Carolina, Bunn sang in church, and at home he enjoyed listening to his mother’s Blind Boy Fuller records, which got him interested in learning to play guitar. When he was a teenager, Bunn started working in the tobacco fields like a lot of his rural North Carolina neighbors, but he starting singing and playing guitar in gospel groups. Eventually, Bunn was invited by the influential musician and producer Thurman Ruth to join the Selah Jubilee Singers.

Ruth moved to New York in the late 1940s, and he brought many of the musicians he worked with, including Allen Bunn, to the Big Apple, where they joined the city’s burgeoning gospel and R&B scene. The Selah Jubilee Singers spun off a secular R&B group called The Larks, who enjoyed some hits, including “Little Side Car,” which features Allen Bunn on lead vocals and guitar.

Allen Bunn would remain in New York for the rest of his life, but in the late 1950s, he called on his North Carolina roots to take on his musical moniker, Tarheel Slim. Together with his wife, Ann Sanford (known artistically as Little Ann), he recorded duets for the Atco and Fury labels in the mid-1950s. The duo also released tracks under the group name, The Lovers. In 1958 as a solo artist, Tarheel Slim recorded two singles for Fury Records, “Wildcat Tamer” and “Number 9 Train.” The resulting 45 proved a modest success, but to this day it stands up as a prime example of rockabilly music and of what was happening in New York’s R&B scene in the late 1950s. We’ll hear Tarheel Slim’s “Number 9 Train” as our classic Americana pick of the week.

Tarheel Slim continued working in music into the 1960s, but eventually he left music and worked as a school bus driver. Folklorist Peter B. Lowry befriended Bunn in 1970, and their friendship helped reinvigorate Tarheel Slim’s career. In addition to recording several tracks with Lowry for his Trix Records label, Tarheel Slim returned to the live circuit, performing solo acoustic guitar in a Piedmont blues style at colleges and, notably, at the 1973 Chapel Hill blues festival and at the 1974 Philadelphia Folk Festival. Tarheel Slim also recorded with blues pianist and singer Big Chief Ellis in sessions also produced by Lowry.

Not long after his career renaissance, Tarheel Slim was diagnosed with throat cancer. He died in 1977 at age 53.

On their 2009 album, Louisa & The Devil, U.K. band The Dodge Brothers recorded a cover of Tarheel Slim’s “No. 9 Train,” which has also been heard on Radio Heartland.

External Link

“Remembering Tarheel Slim” – article by Peter B. Lowry from Blues & Rhythm magazine, 2008