By most accounts Lowe was born in Georgoa in May 28, 1898. Lowe was the sixth of seven children born to Jacob Stokes, who was a farm laborer, born in 1848.
On Christmas Day in 1930, Stokes was involved in a shooting incident near Cartersville, Georgia. He never cared to talk about it. One friend thought Stoled had intervened in a fight between one of his brothers and another man and was shot while trying to grab the latter's gun. His right hand was so badly damaged that it had to be amputated. Within a year he was playing again, using a prosthetic attachment devised for him by a friend.
Stokes quit fiddling sometime in the '60s though his fans were still visiting him at his home in Chouteau, Oklahoma.
