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Dwight Diller

American musician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 3, 2025
Entity authorityQ5318140
Source-derived summary

Dwight Diller (August 17, 1946 – 14 February 2023) was an American banjo and fiddle player and teacher. He was considered one of the most prominent exponents of the clawhammer banjo tradition.

Diller lived in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and then Marlinton, and was an inheritor of the old-time music tradition of the Hammons Family of West Virginia. He conducted banjo workshops around the United States and in England. He released a number of recordings and instructional videos.

External links

Dwight Diller official site

Dwight Diller interview from Banjo News (and Wayback)

Discography

Hold On! (Yew Pine Music YP-001, 1989)

Say Old Man (with Glen Smith) (Marimac Recordings AHS #3, 1990)

O Death (Yew Pine Music YP-005, 1992)

Red Rooster (Yew Pine Music YP-003, 1992)

Just Banjo (Yew Pine Music YP-002, 1996)

Harvest (Yew Pine Music, 1997)

Just Banjo '99 - WVa Mountain Music (Yew Pine Mountain Music YP-99, 1999)

Jericho Road (Not On Label, 2005)

Trouble On Spring Creek (with Darin Gentry) (Not On Label FR#16, 2007)

Piney Woods (with YewPine Cultural Traditions) (Yew Pine Music YP-007, 2015)

Papa!

Editorial summary

“Dwight Diller” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dwight, Diller and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946, 2023, 1989, 1990—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1946-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Dwight, Diller and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Dwight Diller” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dwight, Diller and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5318140. VIAF identifies the subject as 7004913. The Library of Congress control number is no98024517. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 2023, 1989 and 1990.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Dwight Diller”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Dwight Diller primary sources, Dwight Diller archive and Dwight research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Dwight Diller”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Dwight Diller” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.