![]() ![]() Dennis Pollock said during the New Year’s Day funeral service. “Roby said he had never played a guitar or sung in public before he met Judy,” the Rev. What he found there was a wife and an untapped talent for singing bluegrass tenor. He moved to the Smithfield area after Hurricane Hazel, in 1954, searching for work in the storm cleanup. Roby Leroy Huffman was born July 15, 1938, in rural Burke County, NC. Roby, in white hat, with his long-time friend & pickin’ partner Keith Glover, at R.A.Fountain Roby Huffman, the premier bluegrass tenor in eastern North Carolina who fronted the Bluegrass Cut-Ups since the late 1950s, died here on Decemafter a brief period of declining health. I was among the hundreds at his funeral and filed the following report with a couple of online bluegrass outlets. He had to cancel his last scheduled show at RAF, and within a couple of months we learned of his passing. A few of those shows were multi-generational Huffman affairs, also, with son Jeff, his usual lead guitarist, and Jeff’s daughter, Casey, on mandolin. ![]() Usually, he closed his shows out with “Ruby,” but one night he gave us an encore, and he also sometimes came over with his wife, Judy, to just to enjoy a concert by Samantha Casey and the Bluegrass Jam, though invariably he’d get up and sing a song or two. We were fortunate to be situated so close to Roby Huffman’s home in Smithfield, and that he enjoyed our venue and crowds enough to keep coming back, over a dozen times fronting his band during his last seven years of performing. ![]()
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