Sidna Monteville Myers was an Appalachian banjo player from Five Forks, Virigina. He was born on September 25, 1890 and died December 18, of 1972. Sidna and his fiddle playing brother Fulton resided in a Virginia world, that was much different than modern VA. Neither of the brothers ever had electricity or running water on their farms. Crop and livestock work was hard, involving battling rocky soil and a host of predators, and, at times we know at least Fulton went to work on and off in the furniture mills of Galax. The neighbors lovingly remember the brothers, from the time they were young men, playing tunes together on into the night on one or the other’s back porches. Over time they learned a local SW Virginia repertoire that included tunes in the style of both Galax and nearby Round Peak, and we know that they traded tunes with the likes of Tommy Jarrell as well as the Ward and Crockett families. That was later. When you really listen, though, what comes through is the Myers brothers, playing their hearts out in a smooth, mystifying old time style that was shaped by the Blue Ridge life they lived. If you listen, you can hear the meanness of their work, the beauty of their surroundings, the tragedies of their lives and the echoes of those who had gone before them. “Now they were old fashioned,” fiddler Wayne Lowe once told folklorist Kevin Donleavy, with his wife, Edna chiming in, “They stayed the old time way.”