Rufus Kasey was born in 1918 in Huddleston, VA (Bedford County), where his family had lived for several generations. He began playing banjo when he was eight, developing a drop-thumb clawhammer style on his old resonator-backed Kay, which he used on the unique version of Coo Coo Bird that appears on Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia, a collection of field recordings issued by Smithsonian/Folkways in 1998. ~ Steve Leggett, Rovi