Siler City native Tommy Edwards was raised in a musical family. His mom was a piano player and his father played harmonica and ukulele and sang in choirs and quartets. Even though he is "as old as bluegrass" (born in 1945, the year Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys), Edwards listened to rock and roll and R&B as a child and doesn't remember hearing much country music growing up. But the folk revival hit when he was a teenager, and he followed sounds of the banjo from Kingston Trio to Earl Scruggs and finally discovered Bill Monroe, a life-changing experience that also had important implications for Piedmont music history. He pulled a 1930s Gibson banjo out of his neighbor's trashcan, cleaned it up, and began emulating the styles of his heroes, focusing on banjo while at East Carolina University. Then he came home and found that the only bluegrass band in town already had a banjo player, so he switched to guitar. Edwards formed the The Bluegrass Experience in 1971 with the Beane brothers and friends Snuffy Smith, Charles Lee Conard, and "Fiddlin' Al" McCanless, carving a place in the traditional music scene as accomplished players and singers.
