Frank Hovington born 9 January 1919

Franklin Hovington (January 9, 1919 – June 21, 1982), also known as Guitar Frank, was an American blues musician. He played the guitar and banjo and sang in the Piedmont blues style. He lived in the vicinity of Frederica, Delaware. 

Hovington was born in Reading, Pennsylvania to a working class family in an industrial area although he spent much of his childhood in the Frederica area of Delaware, where his family owned a farm. Little is known about his parents or any siblings, though the family faced the economic hardships common to many in the post-World War I era, including limited opportunities for African American residents. 

Music was present in his family background, with his grandfather belonging to a fife and drum corps and his paternal uncle playing piano and organ, providing early exposure to musical traditions within the household. Hovington's childhood in Delaware's African American community, including attendance at local house parties with his father, shaped his worldview amid the social conditions of the time. Hovington's introduction to music occurred during his childhood, shaped by the oral storytelling traditions in his family. His father played a significant role in fostering this interest, passing down stories and songs that would later influence Hovington's repertoire. 

At around age seven, Hovington received his first instrument, a ukulele, marking the beginning of his musical exploration. Inspired by the sound of a local banjo player named William Walter Stanley. Hovington persistently asked his father for one until he acquired a banjo. He was also influenced early on by neighbor Adam Greenfield, a former Pullman porter and guitarist, whom he watched play at age five or six during Saturday night gatherings. This progression from ukulele to banjo highlighted his early fascination with stringed instruments and self-directed learning through observation of community musicians. 

                                  

By early adulthood, Hovington had expanded to the guitar, adapting his banjo-picking technique—known as the "banjo roll"—to the new instrument. He absorbed songs informally from traveling migrants and elders in his community, including tales like that of Railroad Bill, which he encountered through locals such as Steamboat Charlie. These formative experiences in family and neighborhood settings, without formal training, laid the groundwork for his distinctive Piedmont blues style, rooted in the folk and blues traditions of his surroundings. 

In the late 1930s and 1940s, Frank Hovington partnered with fellow musician William Walker to perform blues and related music at house parties and local dances in the Frederica area of Delaware. These informal venues provided key opportunities for Hovington to develop his Piedmont blues style amid the vibrant but undocumented regional scene.

Following his move to Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s, Hovington contributed guitar work to several ensembles, including backing Stewart Dixon's Golden Stars and Ernest Ewin's Jubilee Four, as well as collaborating with Billy Stewart's early band. This era, spanning the post-World War II years through the 1960s, saw Hovington maintain a low-profile presence in music circles, with performances largely confined to local and supporting roles before his relocation to Delaware in 1967. 

In the years that followed Hovington participated in the 1972 Festival of American Folklife, performing blues on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and was interviewed in December 1971 as part of related fieldwork. He was rediscovered in the mid-1970s during the folk-blues revival, when musicologists Bruce Bastin and Dick Spottswood sought out traditional Piedmont blues performers in the Delaware region. Their fieldwork led to intimate recording sessions at Hovington's home near Felton, in Frederica, Delaware, capturing his raw, expressive style unadorned by studio production. 

The album “Lonesome Road Blues” was released on Flyright Records in the UK in 1975 and on Rounder Records in the US. His LP was a masterpiece, and alerted many in the blues community to his abilities. Hovington disliked travel and did not play away from his Delaware home, afraid that he would lose his welfare support payments, and so did not get the publicity from music festival appearances alone that his talent deserved. In his final years, Frank Hovington resided near Frederica, Delaware, where he had lived for much of his adult life, and he performed infrequently, occasionally playing guitar for church programs in the local community and working sporadically as a truck and bus driver while supporting his family on a small plot of land he owned. 

He died from heart failure at Milford Memorial Hospital in Milford, Delaware in June 1982, at the age of 63 and was buried at Gibbs Memorial Gardens, Woodside, Delaware

(Edited from Grokipedia, AllMusic & Wirz’s American Music)