Joe Val
Country Gentlemen Bluegrass Festival, Indian Ranch, Webster, Massachusetts, 1972

Val was a typewriter repairman in Watertown, Massachusetts, by day, but at night and on weekends he played mandolin and sang bluegrass in his acrobatic high tenor voice. He worked at the Hillbilly Ranch with the Lilly Brothers and at Harvard with the Charles River Valley Boys, with whom he recorded the groundbreaking Beatle Country album in 1966—Beatles music bluegrass style. Val later put together his New England Bluegrass Boys but died of cancer in 1985 at age fifty-nine just as his career started taking off nationally. Pictured on the left playing with Joe is fellow New Englander Jim Rooney, who later moved to Nashville and produced albums by Nancy Griffith, Iris Dement, and others.