The following year (1955) Charlie decided to become a full-time member of Buzz's band, The Bayou Boys. The Washington area at the time had several other popular bands - The Stoneman Family, Bill Harrell, and Bennie & Vallie Cain -- and there was just a handful of clubs in which to play. Buzz decided to relocate in Louisiana, where the group remained for two years.

Charlie recalls one of the highlights of his career was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, A Grand Ol' Opry style showcase of country music. He remembers playing on the same shows with many other aspiring young singers, among them George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley.

By the time the band returned to Washington in 1957, Charlie had spent two years working for Buzz and he grew impatient to try something else. "He had given me notice," Buzz recalls. "He said he'd never get anywhere working as a sideman, and I agreed with that."

Charlie began to fill in for other bands while continuing to play for the Bayou Boys, part-time. Buzz, in turn, would find substitutes for Charlie.

In an ironic twist of fate, Charie was not with Buzz on a night in early 1957 when the carload of happy-go-lucky pickers were speeding home from a show at a North Beach, MD. club. That night Buzz had hired as a guitar player a young banjo player named Eddie Adcock. Eddie's friend Sonny Presley was driving. Buzz sat next to him, bass player Vance Truell and Eddie were in the back seat.

Suddenly the car swerved off the road. "We hit a pole going about 90 miles per hour," remembers Buzz, whose career - and life - nearly came to a halt then. He was pronouced dead at the scene, but signs of life flickered upon arrival at the hospital.

Buzz was in a coma for two days with a damaged kidney, crushed rib cage and his right leg shattered in three places. Eddie Adcock suffered internal injuries. The two other men were also hurt.

Bill Emerson, the band's banjo player, was riding in another car. Buzz would be hospitalized for two months. Eddie was in for several days, but his stay was extended for bad behavior.

"I tried to escape one time," laughs Eddie. "I made it to the bottom of the hill from the hospital. I was surely a redneck back then if there ever was one. It caused me to stay a few more days."

At the time of the accident, the Bayou Boys had a regular job at a club in Bailey's Cross Roads, Va., the Admiral Grill. Not wanting to lose the job, Bill Emerson sought to put together a pick-up band until Buzz returned. Charlie Waller agreed to play and bass player Larry Lahey was hired. But who would play mandolin and sing tenor?

Bill knew of a lanky, 23-year-old name John Duffey who at the time was driving almost 50 miles to Frederick, Md., to play with a local band, Lucky Chatman and the Ozark Mountain Boys. John accepted Bill's invitation to sit in.

Says Charlie: "We just got together and I said, "Okay, you play mandolin, I'll play guitar and let's get up and sing."

And sing they did. Charlie's powerful lead voice was a perfect match for John's forceful tenor. They immediately realized they had stumbled upon a rare combination that could not be ignored, and made the decision to break away from Buzz completely and start a new band centered around Charlie and John.

Buzz got the news the week he was leaving the hospital. "Charlie came and told me like a man," Buzz recalls. He was obviously disappointed that he had lost his band during the hospital stay, but after a two-month vacation to recuperate, Buzz reformed the Bayou Boys. "After it was all said and done, it didn't really bother me," Buzz says about losing the band.

So on July 4th, 1957, The Country Gentlemen became a reality. Bluegrass would never be the same again. The original version of the band consisted of Charlie Waller (guitar), John Duffey (mandolin), Bill Emerson (banjo), and Larry Lahey (bass).

From the beginning, Charlie learned that personnel changes were to become a fact of life. Larry Lahey was soon replaced by Tom Morgan, was replaced by Jim Cox, before Tom Gray became the bassist in 1960, other bass players included Pete Kuykendall, Roy Self, Sonny Johnson, and Stoney Edwards.

In the banjo department, Bill Emerson left the band in the fall of 1958. He was replaced by Pete Kuykendall (now publisher of Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine). Pete perfomed under the name of Pete Roberts. Not only was he proficient on the instrument (he won the national banjo championship in 1956). He also contributed excellent baritone singing, and later technical assistance in the band's recordings.

Pete left the group in June of 1959 because it interfered with his day job in the recording laborator at the Library of Congress. Porter Church replaced him briefly. Porter's replacement would prove to be the missing link in what was to become one of the most significant vocal and instrumental trios in bluegrass history.

Enter Eddie Adcock. Only 20 years old at the time, Eddie already had a wealth of experience playing professionally. He started with Smokey Graves and the Blue Star Boys in Crewe, Va. in 1953. Then he went with Mac Wiseman's band, and then with Bill Harrell and the Rocky Mountain Boys. During this time he met banjo great Don Reno, who gave Eddie some helpful hints that improved his style.

When Bill Harrell went into the service, Eddie found work at a TV station in Norfolk, Va., as the emcee for a musical program. He later worked for the Virginia Playboys, and also played guitar in a rock 'n' roll band.

Following the 1957 accident with Buzz Buzby, Eddie joined Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, with whom he remained until joining the Gentlemen in 1958.

Jimmy Gaudreau, Eddie Adcock, and Charlie Waller

At first, Eddie wasn't interested in the offer. He had a regular day job and wanted to stay out of music for awhile, but Charlie, John, and Jim Cox persisted, and Eddie agreed to give it a try. His contributions to the band would later prove to be immeasurable. "It wasn't until we got Eddie that we got that certain kind of magic sound," says Charlie. "Duffey and Eddie just worked well together. That was the combination that sold."

When Eddie joined, the band had recorded very little: a 45 rpm on their own label - Dixie - and a 45 on the Starday label. The first Country Gentlemen songs ever recorded are contained on the rare Dixie record: "Heavenward Bound" and "Goin' to the Races," later recorded by the Stanley Brothers as "Paint the Town."

When Eddie came aboard, The Country Gentlemen hadn't found a sound of their own yet. Instead, they were copying a couple of the top acts of the day. In a 1976 interview in Muleskinner News, Eddie described the band's music at the time he joined:

"At that point, The Country Gentlemen were extrememly affected by The Osborne Brothers. And pretty soon we realized - I guess John realized before anybody - that I wasn't happy singing Osborne Brothers-type stuff. I liked it, but not for us. John was the first one in the Library of Congress looking for songs. Our minds were in "Knoxville Girl" and hit-her-in-the-head and stuff like that; the old traditional stuff that nobody had heard, so we dug it up out of the Library of Congress."

The Country Gentlemen were performing and recording old folk songs just at the time of the folk music groundswell. They did such songs as "Copper Kettle," "Long Blacke Veil" and "Handsome Molly," which enhanced their acceptance by the younger, college-aged audiences who were listening to folk music on campuses and coffee houses all over the country then.

Several songs are credited with setting the Gentlemen apart from the rest of the pack. The most talked about then was "Hills and Home," which featured an inventive banjo break that resembled a steel guitar lick.

Says Eddie: "It was different from the rest of what everybody had heard, and it set aside the Country Gentlemen sound right off then and there. I believe people started listening to the banjo more as part of the Country Genelemen sound."

Eddie says the band was receptive to his suggestions to move away from copying other band, and also in letting him experiment on the banjo. "I was interested in doing things a little bit different, and I was allowed the freedom to do what I wanted to."

John Duffey, too was experimenting. For him, the turning point came on the tune, "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise," says John: "It came from the realization that you cannot play like somebody else and expect to create anything that's your own." Since then, John has made it a point to avoid playing straight melody lines and instead improvise around the chord paterns.

Vocally, the band was doing some amazing things, too. Eddie's smooth, letter perfect baritone was the icing on the cake in rounding out the trio sound. Eddie credits Pete Kuykendall as his major influence in learning the baritone part.

Just when it seemed as though the band had reached its musical zenith, another bass player came along who took the Gentlemen another step toward bluegrass perfection. Tom Gray replaced Jim Cox in 1960.

With Tom's arrival, his innovative, walking-style playing gave the band a fuller sound and further set them apart from the other groups of the day.

Tom, who was influenced by George Shuffler of the Stanley Brothers, says the Gentlemen gave him plenty of room to experiment.

"I was lucky back in 1960 when I joined The Country Gentlemen, because they were an ideal group to improvise in just as freely as I liked. As a matter of fact, I was encouraged to do moer all the time. The thing that made it good for walking style I played was that the lead instrument players were singing in the trios, and that left noboby with a lead instrument to play back-up. That left a clear path for me to use the bass as a back-up instrument, playing a bit of counter melody along with the usual rhythm functions."

After four years as a full-time musician, Tom made the decision to return to his former day job as a cartographer with National Geographic. His departure ended an era of the famed Waller-Duffey-Adcock-Gray quartet, widely heralded as one of the most significant bands in bluegrass. That version of th eband is also considered to be the orginial Country Gentlemen because their sound and style had fully developed, and they were blazing new trails in bluegrass during that period.