Natchee the Indian Born:  December 26, 1913 Died:  December 21, 1970 WLW Boone County Jamboree WAPI Birmingham, AL WCHS Charleston, WV WNOX Knoxville, TN WSAZ Huntington, WV

About The Artist Natchee the Indian was the stage name for Lester Vernon Storer, a native of Adams County, Ohio, who was probably one-eighth Shawnee Indian. From the early thirties, he developed considerable skill as a fiddler and gained a degree of fame as a contest participant, often connected with Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas and a promoter of contests named Larry Sunbrock, many of which were "fixed." As a teenager his family relocated to Clark County and the larger city of Springfield. Somewhere along the way his fiddle skills combined with a gimmick of him and Copas posing as an "Indian" and a "Cowboy." They became especially known in the mid-Ohio Valley and worked on radio in such locales as Cincinnati and Portsmouth in Ohio, Ashland, Kentucky, and Charleston, Huntington, and Fairmont in West Virginia. Sometimes the contests took them to much more distant locales. Natchee developed a serious drinking problem from the mid-1940s and he began a slow drift into obscurity, sometimes encountering musicians who had known him earlier such as Billy Stallard [or Starr), Copas, Billy Cox, or Jimmie Skinner. He had a son in California with whom he had lost contact and who was told that his father was dead. Nonetheless, the son manifested an interest in finding out the full story and learned in June 1970, that his father had recently been jailed for intoxication in the skid-row of Cincinnati. A joyous reunion took place, but it soon developed that Natchee had terminal cancer. He died a few months later and was buried in California. Credits & Sources Hillbilly-Music.com would like to express its thanks to Ivan M. Tribe, author of Mountaineer Jamboree — Country Music in West Virginia and other books that can be found on Amazon.com and numerous articles in other publications for providing us with information about this artist.

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