Born in Kentucky, Billy Thomas came to Cincinnati after he got out of the Army and played the fiddle at various bars around Cincinnati and northern Kentucky in the early 1950s. He worked with a group called the Echo Valley Boys, who had a TV show on WKRC-TV in 1951. The band also made some recordings for Carl Burkhardt’s Kentucky Records, and Billy worked in the staff band at Kentucky, backing other artists and recording fiddle tunes backed by Buffalo Johnson’s country band. He fronted the house band at Thurston Moore’s Verona Lake Ranch near Walton, Kentucky. Thomas worked and recorded with Jimmie Skinner and recorded with Joe “Cannonball” Lewis. After being out of professional music for twenty years, he came back and played fiddle with the Boys From Indiana in the late 1970s and part of the 1980s.
THOMAS, BILLY