A master of the drop-thumb banjo style (and not too shabby at two-finger picking, either), Lee Sexton has lived his whole life near his birthplace in Letcher County, KY. Born in 1927, he acquired his first banjo, a homemade wooden fretless model with a groundhog skin head, for a dollar when he was eight years old (he worked to clear a field for a week to earn that dollar), and with instruction from his father and uncles (one of whom was the unique and sublime banjo player Morgan Sexton), Sexton soon mastered the instrument, and the fiddle, as well. As a young man he would work all week in the mines and then play music all weekend at house parties, bean stringings, and corn shuckings. June Appal issued an LP of traditional material, Whoa Mule, in 1988, and an expanded CD version in 2004 with an additional 40 minutes of music. One of the most respected and revered folk musicians in eastern Kentucky, Sexton garnered a brief scene in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter, where he appears playing at a square dance. In 1999 he was presented with the Kentucky Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. ~ Steve Leggett, Rovi