Kilby Snow

Appalachian autoharp virtuoso John Kilby Snow was born May 28, 1905, in Grayson County, VA, but his family moved across the border into North Carolina when Snow was still a toddler. A precocious musician, he won the title of Autoharp Champion of North Carolina before he was even six years old. A left-handed player, Snow technically did everything wrong on the autoharp, but his upside-down and backwards approach and his unconventional methods (he would strum with his left hand below the chord bars, for instance) ended up completely reinventing the possibilities of the instrumen...