Gene Dalton | Roanoke Times

Throughout her life Marie Gallimore performed with several groups in the area, such as the Sunny Mountain Boys, the Carroll Country Seniors, the Mountain Ivy Band and the Mabry Mill Band.

For Marie Gallimore, life was a series of passages -- from one town to the next, from one radio station to the next and from one band to the next. She was always chasing the sound of music.

She died Jan. 31.

The youngest of five children, Gallimore was born into a musical family in Floyd County in 1928.

In an autobiography transcribed by friends Melvin and Dea Felts last year, Gallimore wrote, "I remember that we used to go to the Fiddlers' Convention after it got started [in 1935], as well as to the Galax Fair, on the back of an old flat lumber truck. We'd get a load of young people, have a big time, and it was a special outing for us to do that."

She also recalled listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the battery radio that her family purchased in the early 1940s, and tinkering with the guitar and organ her parents owned.

According to her son, Tony Gallimore, Marie Gallimore went to Buffalo Mountain School, but graduated from Willis High School.

After graduation, she worked at a garment factory in Galax, where she met Dale Gallimore. They married and moved to Danville so he could attend technical school there. He wanted to get into the radio business.

While in Danville, Dale Gallimore worked at radio station WDVA, and he and his wife played guitar and sang at their home. According to Gerald Gallimore, the couple was in Danville for six years before moving to Pulaski. Gerald Gallimore was born in 1947, around the time of the move. His younger brother, Tony, was born in 1951.

Dale Gallimore went to work at WPUV in Pulaski, and started his "Farmer Dale" show in the 1950s.

"And that's when I became 'Dixie Lee' on stage shows," Marie Gallimore wrote. "I would just sing. Usually we had a pretty good size band, had different groups that played with us. Dale came in one day with a bass fiddle and said 'Why don't you learn to play this.' So I started picking on the bass fiddle, and he'd play along with me and sing."

Marie Gallimore wrote that she would play and perform with several different groups in the area, including the Sunny Mountain Boys, on the weekend. The Dalton Theater in Pulaski, a musical hot spot, was on the Grand Ole Opry circuit in those days, and Marie Gallimore got to meet a lot of famous names there.

In 1955, the big competition day came.

It was the day of the Galax Fiddler's Convention, and Dale and Marie Gallimore were playing in competing bands, with Dale having the upper hand in experience.

Marie Gallimore's band, The Dixie Ramblers, ended up winning first place, and it became a family joke from then on, said their sons.

In 1961, the Gallimores started WHHV in Hillsville and asked their sons, now teenagers, to help them operate it. During this time, they also started another band called Roy Vass and the Farm Hands, made up of the Gallimores, Conley and Betty Horton, and fiddle player Roy Vass.

"We would go down to the studio at night, one night a week, and play music and record it, and then the next day play it back over the radio station," Gallimore wrote.

The band also played at Harmon's Auction House in Carroll County on Friday and Saturday nights, broadcasting live. At the radio station, Gallimore kept the "station log" and wrote copy for commercials, among other things. Her sons had their own licenses, and were disc jockeys in the afternoon, playing music for younger people. The radio station was right next to their house.

The Gallimores sold that station in 1968, and moved to a farm in Floyd County, Gerald Gallimore said.

"She [Marie Gallimore] was pretty much just a housewife and kept up the farm," Gerald Gallimore said. "We kept sheep when we first went down there. She did that for several years. Music was just a side then -- just getting together and playing and enjoying it."

In the mid-1970s, the family opened an electronics repair shop in Willis.

In 1985, they started WGFC in Floyd.

"We decided to see if there was a station available in the area," Gerald Gallimore said. "Dad always had radio on the brain. We found an AM slot that would work in the daytime hours and decided to file for it. That was strictly a family operation. We all did everything -- announced, sold, kept books. I was still working at an outside job, and the rest of the family was doing the same thing."

While founding the new radio station, the Gallimores also indirectly founded what is still one of Floyd's most popular nighttime events.

"After we got the radio station going down there, Freeman Cockerham and Glenn Wilson and their band used to come down and play on the station a lot," Marie Gallimore wrote. "Freeman asked us to help him start what we called the Friday Night Jamboree at the Floyd Country Store. ... The local people supported it. It was something for them to come and do, and musicians will go anywhere to play."

Dale Gallimore died in 1996, and Marie Gallimore and her sons operated the radio station until 2000.

"After Dale died, I just stuck my bass back and wasn't doing much musician work at all," wrote Marie Gallimore. "Then friends began to call me to come over to their house and play music, Friday Night or Saturday night, you know, get together. Finally I would go out with some of them and play music."

In her later years, Marie Gallimore played bass with the Carroll County Seniors. Up until her death, she also played with the Mountain Ivy Band, and with the Mabry Mill Band on Sundays.