Kasper "Stranger" Malone

Born in McCracken County, Kentucky, Kasper “Stranger” Malone (1909 – 2005) set out on his own at the age of fifteen and soon landed in Rome, Georgia, where he connected with some of the pioneers of old-time country string-band music. In 1926, Malone’s clarinet provided an opening bit of ambiance on Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers’ comic skit record, “A Day at the Country Fair”; the same year, Malone made his first recordings with Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men. By the close of the 1920s, Malone had relocated to Yankton, South Dakota, where he became a fixture—in a multitude of roles, musical and otherwise—on radio station WNAX.

Malone’s musical activities were wide-ranging: in addition to his work with the early country pioneers, he performed in jazz bands, symphony orchestras, and a Maritime Service band; created musical accompaniment to the silent movies; and provided entertainment on a luxury ocean liner. In the 1950s, Malone played double bass and flute in jazz bandleader Jack Teagarden’s All Stars; in 1998, the Arbors Record label released on compact disc two 1954 broadcasts of the Teagarden band, including Malone, performing live at San Francisco’s Club Hangover. Always a wanderer, Malone would spend more than a decade in Tucson, Arizona, teaching bass at the University of Arizona and performing in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. From 1973-1993, he settled in Germany; finally, back in the states, he returned to Rome, spending his last years active in the local music community and appearing regularly at festivals in Georgia and North Carolina. In addition to clarinet, flute, guitar, and bass, he entertained children (as well as adults) by playing a pair of percussive “rattlebones” made from Venetian blind slates.

Soon after his death in 2005, the Guinness Book of World Records acknowledged Malone for the longest working career as a recording artist, one which stretched from his first 1926 recordings to a 2003 recording with Georgia musician Elise Witt. Malone died in his sleep at home in May 2005; he had been scheduled to play a recording session that week with friends, and when he did not make the date Russel McClanahan, one of his close musical partners, checked in on him. “I went over this morning,” McClanahan wrote in an email to friends, “and found him in his apartment, surrounded by his books, guitars, flutes, and clarinets. He was lying on his bed with a smile on his face. Next to his right hand was a book called ‘Life is Worth Living.’”

Stranger Malone was the subject of a documentary film, Who’s That Stranger?, directed in 2007 by George King. Malone’s memoir, My Best to You: Eighty Years as a Sideman, appeared posthumously in 2011. The following 2002 interview was edited into an article, “Kasper ‘Stranger’ Malone: In His Own Words” by Burgin Mathews, published in the Old-Time Herald magazine in 2009 (Vol. 11, No. 12).

A transcript of the conversation is included.