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 In many ways, the story of Atlanta, Georgia's Skillet Lickers, is the story of early country music. When the South's first commercial radio station, WSB, began broadcasting live hillbilly music in 1922, it was members of the Skillet Lickers who played before their microphones. When Columbia Records decided to make its first hillbilly group recordings in 1924, it was members of the Skillet Lickers who committed that sound to wax. Their stage show, featuring music and comedy skits presided over by their gregarious leader, Gideon "Gid" Tanner, became the blueprint for live string band entertaining. And their catalogue, spanning the first decade of recorded country music, served as primary source material for nearly every popular string band that followed them.
The Skillet Lickers grew out of Tanner's periodic sojourns to New York that began in 1924 when Columbia Records invited the by-trade chicken farmer and celebrated local fiddle contest champion to make some recordings. For support at his debut session, Tanner brought along Riley Puckett, a blind guitarist and singer who was a mainstay on Atlanta's streets and radio waves. Between Puckett's smooth vocals and Tanner's exuberant fiddling, the duo was an immediate success, and by 1926, several members of Puckett's Atlanta radio group, the Home Town Boys-fiddler Clayton McMichen and banjoist Fate Norris-had become part of Tanner's session team. It was McMichen who dubbed them the Skillet Lickers, and for the next five years, this session-bred "supergroup" was country music's biggest-selling string band. Tanner's Skillet Lickers made their last records at a 1934 session where Tanner recorded a tune called "On Tanner's Farm"-which, three decades later, a budding folksinger named Bob Dylan re-worked into "Hard Times In New York Town."
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