“Bloody War: Songs 1924-1939″

from www.tompkinssquare.com:

Soldier’s laments, heart-songs, and patriotic tunes have been an essential part of the American soundscape for many generations.  Most of these compositions, however, have been identified with the Vietnam war or with World War II.  This newly minted collection presents performances captured between 1924 and 1939 of songs originating from the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the “war to end all wars,” the First World War.  These recordings were the folk foundation both of the common soldier’s perspective of the battlefield and of the family and loved ones that were left behind.

‘Bloody War’ recreates the musical panorama of the early 20th century with songs of warfare that are humorous and tragic, sardonic and vivid.  Many of these songs have not been heard since they were originally issued in the 1920s and 1930s and are as relevant today as they were when they were first composed.

Highlights of this collection include the masterpiece “Dixie Division” by Fiddlin’ John Carson, the legendary Atlanta, GA entertainer that was among the first rural performers to wax country music.  His idiosyncratic fiddling meshes together a paean for Southern soldiers that have fought in the American Civil War to the First World War, held together with a medley of “Dixie,” “Swanee River,” and “Yankee Doodle.” Contemporary banjoist and singer, Wade Mainer, contributes the poignant “Not A Word Of That Be Said” a mere two years before the outbreak of World War II.

A deep diversity of artists & performances are to be found in this anthology: from the inspired street-singing of William & Versey Smith to the plaintive balladry of Buell Kazee and from the red hot breakdown of Earl Johnson to the mesmerizing guitar blues of Darby & Tarlton.  Produced by Christopher King and Josh Rosenthal, with art-design by Susan Archie and liner-notes by country music historian Tony Russell.

A portion of all proceeds from the sale of this album will be donated to Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA.org).

Available from http://www.tompkinssquare.com

Field Recorders’ Collective

Ray Alden

by David Gura (from NPR.org)

January 22, 2009 – Judy Hyman plays fiddle in a band called The Horse Flies. In her living room in Ithaca, N.Y., there’s a pine-wood dresser right next to the couch. It’s not for shirts and sweaters — this used dresser holds hundreds of precious cassette tapes, an archive of rare recordings that spans more than three decades. She recorded many of them herself; the rest were gifts from other musicians and collectors.

Hyman’s treasures include recordings of Jim Bowles and Harold Hausenfluck — both fiddlers, from Kentucky and Virginia, respectively. Their music is called “old-timey.” It’s what came before bluegrass.

This music has been passed down from generation to generation, and from musician to musician. There are versions of songs particular to different regions, and even to different families. Recordings of these very particular performances — made in living rooms, kitchens and on front porches and called “field recordings” — are essential tools for anyone who wants to play this type of music.

“When you go down South and try to study with someone, they don’t say, ‘Well, you know, the first measure you play such and such,’ ” field recorder Ray Alden says. “They just play the tune.”

Alden is a banjo player, a friend of Hyman’s and a retired math teacher. One of the people he studied with was Fred Cockerham, a musician from Surry County, N.C. During his summer vacations, Alden scoured the South, looking for musicians.

“Unless you’ve got photographic memory,” he says, “you have to record it, take it home, try to play, and then try again and just keep trying and trying until finally, hopefully, you get it.”

A Grand Archive

A few years ago, Alden began to wonder what he was going to do with his collection of field recordings. He considered giving his collection to the Library of Congress, or to a university. However, Alden says he worried that they’d be hard for musicians like him to access, and that they’d gather dust lying on a metal shelf. Besides, what librarian in his or her right mind would let someone into the stacks with a banjo or a fiddle to learn a rare ballad or breakdown?

“If the people who are really interested and want to play it or hear it, have difficulty assessing it, what good is that?” Alden asks.

Alden talked to a few of his friends, like Hyman, and together they came up with an idea: Why not preserve their old recordings themselves? They call their ad hoc group The Field Recorders’ Collective. They decided to use the Internet to bring this little-heard music to a new audience. Every year, they remaster and release 10 to 15 old recordings. Using their home computers to edit audio, the collective then packages every CD in a simple cardboard sleeve. Liner notes are available online, with photos.

Tapes come from backyard jam sessions, house concerts and music festivals from all over the country. The majority of the music probably wouldn’t interest most commercial labels.

Collecting History

A few years after he dropped out of Harvard in the 1950s, Field Recorders’ Collective member Peter Hoover made a tape of musicians Wade Ward, Uncle Charlie Higgins and Dale Poe. Doing his best to make them feel comfortable, Hoover shared meals with them. He listened to them play music in their living rooms, and refrained from dragging out his suitcase-sized reel-to-reel recorder until the wee hours of morning.

“You have to sit, and you have to visit, and you have to explain yourself and say, well, ‘You know, I want to learn this music, and I hear you play it. Could you play me a few tunes?’ ” Hoover says. “And after we got through that, I said, ‘Well, you know, could I record some of this stuff?’ “

Today, Hoover, Alden and the other members of the Field Recorders’ Collective — almost two dozen of them — do everything as inexpensively as they can. After they cover their costs, they send the rest of the money to the families of the musicians they recorded. The Field Recorders say they hope other musicians can learn from the men and women whose sounds are preserved on the CD’s — many of them gone — who played the music of their grandparents and whose children still carry on that folk tradition.

http://www.fieldrecorder.com/

East Texas Serenaders

by Eugene Chadbourne (www. CMT.com)

With one foot in the early history of bluegrass and the other in Western swing, this historic Texas recording group of the ’20s and ’30s has earned a place in American musical history every bit as heroic as the epic last stand at the Alamo. Among many distinctions, the East Texas Serenaders were one of the few early Western groups to feature cello, played by Henry Bogan. Note the use of the word “early” in the previous sentence, because by the end of the ’30s, the cello had became a complete no-show in country music. The group also featured tenor banjo as well as the expected guitar and fiddle. The main recorded document of this group is the Complete Recorded Works issued by Document; but most listeners come into contact via a fleeting glimpse offered on any number of compilations, ranging from the narrow focus of old-time Texas string bands, in which the group certainly has historic presence, to massive multi-disc overviews of the entire history of American pop music, in which the East Texas Serenaders occupy a valuable niche as well.

The East Texas Serenaders posed for publicity pictures alternately as hillbilly rubes and smooth city-slicker types. Examining the music itself can help rectify the contradiction in images: the group was sophisticated and played without the sandpaper edge of other string bands from the region. The fiddler was of course something of the captain of the ship in any string band, and in this group it was the long-bow Texas fiddling style of Daniel Huggins Williams that was part of the ensemble’s personality, but inevitably not as much as the group’s choice of material. While most string bands of the time stuffed their repertoire faces on square dance tunes, the East Texas Serenaders avoided this part of the action like a crusty tuna salad at a buffet table. Rags, numbers that sounded like rags, and waltzes made up most of the group’s repertoire, with the latter type of number becoming some of the most frequently requested material. And the keys the group played in are also part of its unique sound; like the black Dallas String Band, the East Texas Serenaders would whip out tunes in the key of F, rather than sticking to easier square dance keys such as A and G.

Oh, My Little Darling

From the liner notes to “Oh, My Little Darling,” (New World Records 80245):

However insulting we may find the blacked faces and parodied diction of the minstrel show, the minstrel stage was a locus of creative American art and the source of innovations that shaped the popular art of our own century. Beginning in the 1820s, the minstrel show introduced a new and distinctively American song, dance, comedy, and performing style. Through the minstrel show syncopated music, both from black folk sources and from white composers such as Stephen Foster, became the dominant form of American popular music.

About the turn of the century, the minstrel show, which had entertained rural and urban Americans alike, yielded the city stage to vaudeville, but minstrel elements lingered in the rural South in the traveling medicine show. This often consisted of the “doctor” who peddled “Indianherb” cure-alls from a wagon or auto, and one or more musician-comedians who drew and entertained the crowd. Some of the white medicineshow musicians, such as Tom Ashley, continued the black-face tradition of the minstrel stage; some shows featured black talent of the caliber of Willie McTell or Pink Anderson.

Arthur Tanner, of Georgia, a member of the Gid Tanner-Clayton McMichen Skillet Licker string bands centered in Atlanta, likely had such medicine-show experience. In 1929 members of the Skillet Lickers recorded an authentic-sounding skit of blackface comedy and music,“The Kickapoo Medicine Show” (Columbia 15482). Tanner’s “Dr. Ginger Blue” descends from an actual minstrel recitation, one version of which was published in 1854. The performance here provides a microcosm of American humorous entertainment: the antic nonsense of the first two spoken stanzas looks forward to the surrealistic action of the Walt Disney animated cartoon; the elevated metaphors of the fourth hark back to the poetry of Mark Twain’s tall tales; and the fifth stanza anticipates the verbal non sequitur insults of Groucho Marx. The minstrel recitation to a musical accompaniment may also be the source of the “talking blues” popularized by Woody Guthrie.

Available here.

“No Next Step”: Quotes of the Day

“For those on the path to discovering American roots music, Roscoe Holcomb’s sound seems to be the end of the line.  Listeners may start with bluegrass, folk songs, old-time string bands, or Appalachian ballads, but once they get ot his music, there is no next step.”   John Cohen, (From the liner notes to “An Untamed Sense of Control.”)

 

 

“Almost any line you could draw through the whole field of popular musical culture would have Alan Lomax somewhere on it – probably in several places. Without Lomax, it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles, no Stones, and no Velvet Undergound’.”    Brian Eno, (Quoted in the CD booklet of “The Alan Lomax Popular Songbook.”)

 

“The first CD I got after The Harry Smith Anthology was the Folkways stuff  with Dock Boggs in the 1960′s. I put it on the stereo for the first time, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I just burst into tears. I sobbed openly for a while. And then I collected myself and thought … “My musical tastes have CHANGED.”  Mike Seeger, (Quoted in “The Young Musicologist,” in The Celestial Monochord: Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues

Georgia Yellow Hammers

from www.myspace.com/georgiayellowhammers/blog/440029199

By 1926, the success of The Skillet Lickers (another string band from Georgia in the 20′s) was proving to America’s record companies that the hard-driving North Georgia fiddle band sound could be a commercial commodity. All kinds of string bands paraded through the studios in the late 1920′s, each seeking a piece of The Skillet Lickers’ action, and many bearing wild, extravagant names such as Dr. Smith’s Champion Hoss Hair Pullers, Seven Foot Dilly & his Dill Pickles, and the West Virginia Snake Hunters. Many of these groups made a handful of records and then faded away.

One that did not, though, was an outfit from Gordon County, Georgia, called The Georgia Yellow Hammers. Unlike many other bands, the Yellow Hammers generated a distinct style of music that was uniquely their own, and they recorded extensively & successfully. To a casual observer, the Yellow Hammers may seem merely another imitation of The Skillet Lickers.

After all, both bands were from  North Georgia, and both were built around a preexisting fiddle & banjo team. Both presented images of hard drinking, carefree rustics, and in both cases these images were the products of records company executives. both recorded comedy skits, as well as vocal & fiddle tunes. Both contained musicians who wanted to transcend the narrow confines of the old time string band. Both were in a sense studio groups, with personnel shifting from session to session, and both shared a common repertoire of north Georgia fiddle tunes.

Yet there were some important difference too. The Yellow Hammers were based not in Atlanta, but in rural Gordon County, some sixty miles to the northwest. The Yellow Hammers stressed singing more than the Skillet Lickers (their records are full of fine quartet work), and boasted among their ranks two formally trained musicians who were adept at reading and composing all sorts of music. Yellow Hammers members were more ecumenical in their music, recording gospel quartets, sentimental songs, blues, pop, fiddle breakdowns, and even a couple of sacred harp tunes.

At one session they recorded with the fine Afro-Cherokee fiddler Andrew Baxter, in one of the first integrated sessions of old-time music. While the Yellow Hammers “covered” several Skillet Lickers hits during their first year as a band (1927), they soon moved out of this shadow and established their own identity. Indeed, by November 1927 the Skillet Lickers were themselves having to record cover versions of the Yellow Hammers hit “Johnson’s Old Gray Mule.”

John Dilleshaw’s “Spanish Fandango”: Southern Marvel #4

John Dilleshaw (left)

John Dilleshaw and The String Marvel play “Spanish Fandango.”

Recorded March 22, 1929, Atlanta, GA.

Thanks to Jas Obrecht for permission to share his research on “Spanish Fandango,” excerpted below from his wonderful site http://jasobrecht.com

In times before radio, records, and electric lights, people often played music to amuse themselves after dinner and at social gatherings. “Parlor guitar,” a favorite European musical fare during the late 1700s, caught on in America. Played with bare fingers on small-bodied instruments, parlor guitar became immensely popular, as evidenced by the stacks of musical scores published during the 1800s.

Many of these compositions called for the guitar strings to be tuned to an open chord. The most common of these tunings, open C (with the strings tuned C, G, C, G, C, and E, low to high) and open D (D, A, D, F#, A, D), clearly had European origins. The origins of open G, a favorite banjo tuning, are more difficult to trace. Two parlor compositions in particular would play a crucial role in the development of the blues.

Our journey begins with Henry Worrall. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1825, Worrall moved to the United States in 1835 and eventually settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a while he worked as a glasscutter’s apprentice, but his passion was guitar music. A skilled performer and composer, he became a music professor at the Ohio Female College. One of his prize guitar students, Mary Elizabeth Harvey, became his playing partner and wife. In 1856, he completed Worrall’s Guitar School, or The Eclectic Guitar Instructor, which remained in print through the 1880s.

On June 29, 1860, Worrall walked into the Clerk’s Office of the Southern District Court of Ohio and filed copyrights for two instrumental guitar songs. “Worrall’s Original Spanish Fandango” called for the guitar strings to be tuned to an open-G chord (D, G, D, G, B, D, from low to high), with the explanation that the music was to be read as if the guitar were in standard tuning. Some of the song’s flourishes sounded like watered-down versions of earlier nineteenth-century European music. Its little alle vivace finale, for instance, could have worked as a Rossini opera coda. But with its lilting melody and easy chord changes, this song is clearly the direct ancestor of one of the most common blues strains.

Two words stand out in Worrall’s title. “Fandango,” thought to be of African origin, first appeared in the English language in the 1760s, used to describe a “native ball,” or dance. Then the term was applied to a lively 3/4 time dance that originated among Spanish-speaking people. An April 1796 playbill for New York’s John Street Theatre, for instance, advertised a “Spanish Fandango” between the play and the afterpiece, listing four dancers and five singers who did not appear in the play. Eventually the word was used to describe the music itself.

A prime example of an early recording of “Spanish Fandango” is John Dilleshaw & The String Marvel’s 1929 version  Dilleshaw, a 6’7” giant of a man, had learned the song while growing up in north Georgia’s rural hill country. On the recording, one guitarist fingerpicks leads in open G while the other flatpicks basic accompaniment. The musicians have changed Worrall’s sedate 6/8 to a more swinging 2/4 and added alternating bass and bluesy bends, but the final chorus’ droning bass recalls the feel of older parlor guitar pieces.

John Durang’s Hornpipe

John Durang (1768–1822) was the first U.S.-born professional dancer of note, best known for his hornpipe dance.  The son of Jacob and Catherine Durang, he was born on January 6, 1768, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but grew up mostly in York, Pennsylvania.  He went on to spend much of the rest of his life as a dancer, acrobat, actor, mime, rope dancer, and blackface comic. He was a part of a group called Ricketts’s Circus, which traveled throughout the northeastern United States and into Canada.

For much of his career his hornpipe dancing was both his and his audience’s favorite.  He boasted in his memoirs that, around 1790, he danced “a Hornpipe on thirteen eggs blindfolded without breaking one.” Durang is also credited with popularizing the nautical-style hornpipe dance that is still thought of as the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’.  It is the hornpipe that bears his name for which fiddlers remember him, however, and, according to his memoirs it was composed specifically for him by one “Mr. Hoffmaster, a German Dwarf, in New York, 1785.”

Durang had taken violin lessons from Hoffmaster, who was all of three feet in height and who was married to a wife of similar stature.  Hoffmaster had “a large head, hands and feet,” yet must have been an accomplished musician. The hornpipe became famous in his own time, for Durang noted (again, in his memoirs) that it was written “expressly for me, which is become well known in America, for I have since heard it play’d the other side of (Pennsylvania’s) Blue Mountains as well as in the cities.”

Bruce Greene and Don Pedi play “Durang’s Hornpipe”:

“Mississippi String Bands”

Mississippi String Bands, Volume One and Two: Traditional Fiddle Music of Mississippi (County Records)

reviewed by Kerry Blech (Old Time Herald, volume 6, number 7)

One of the benchmark events in my lifetime of acquiring old-time records was the issue in the 1975 of the two LPs on the County label of Mississippi string bands. Up until that time, I had only heard a smattering of music from Mississippi here and there, and I had heard some of the artists included in the set, but had not known at the time that they were from Mississippi. Now we are ready to roll again with such excitement, for County Records has released a new and improved version with these two CDs.

All of the selections, save one (The Leake County Revelers’ “Been to the East, Been to the West”) that were on the LP are found here, as well as numerous additional cuts from the same artists that were issued on vinyl, and a couple of new artists to the CD medium at least Clardy & Clements and the Newton County Hill Billies. There was a wide variety in fiddling styles to be found in the Magnolia State at the time these recordings were made (1927-1935) and most of them can be savored between these two discs.

Let me stray from the music itself for a moment. Commendations must be given to the County production staff, Chris King in particular, for its selection of the music, as not one piece is a clinker – all are superb. Richard Nevins must also be commended for his excellence in walking the tightrope of 78 rpm record remastering. He has suppressed noise just enough to clarify a great deal of the music, without being heavy-handed and destroying some of the subtle music signal that is necessary to fully enjoy this material. Dave Freeman has written enjoyable and informative notes. The cover art, by graphic artist David Lynch, is stunning and attractive (and color-coded so you know which disc goes with what package – what a concept!) and the photographic reproduction of band photos in the booklet is stellar.

Volume One kicks off with the Mississippi Possum Hunters, who had two distinct sounds because they had two different fiddlers playing in different styles. Lonnie Ellis starts off this series on “Mississippi Breakdown” (a variant to the Leake County Revelers’ “Saturday Night Breakdown” and The Newton County Hill Billies’ “Nine O’Clock Breakdown”) with his breakdown bowing style (also heard on “Possum on a Rail”) that contrasts with the more raggy playing of John Holloway on “Rufus Rastus” (done here as an instrumental version of the Tin-Pan Alley ragtime song by Sterling and Von Tilzer, “Whatcha Gonna Do When The Rent Comes ‘Round?”) and “The Last Shot Got Him” (which is an instrumental rendering of a song John Hurt, who lived near them, recorded as “The First Shot Missed Him”).

Sam and Joe Herrman in Montague, MA 1/27/12

Sam and Joe Herrmann of Critton Hollow String Band

Concerts:

Jan 27, 7:30 -
Montague Grange, Montague Center, Ma
contact: michael@mullertech.com, timve@rcn.com

Jan 29, 5:30 -
Libbet Downs and Bruce McCumbers Home, Reading, VT
contact: Shiretown Books, tel-457-2996, or libbet_downs@yahoo.com

Info – samjoe@juno.com
www.crittonhollow.com

Since 1975, Sam and Joe have brought traditional American music to audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Scotland. With fiddle, hammer dulcimer, banjo, and guitar, they tend a stable of songs from the first settlements of Appalachia to the best of contemporary American folk music.  They combine precise instrumentation, melodic interplay, and vocals to create a warm and engaging sound.   Sam and Joe have played at numerous folk music venues, festivals, and concerts including the Birchmere,  the Kennedy Center, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Carter Family Fold, the Vancouver Folk Festival, Clearwater’s Hudson River Revival, and the Upper Potomac Dulcimer Festival.  They have appeared on radio shows such as Mountain Stage, Voices from the Mountains, and Live at the Birchmere, and on television shows such as Live at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Music from Home, and the Today Show.  They have 7 CDs:
Gather ’round (2008), The Dulcimer Collection (2000), Cowboys and Indians (1995), Great Dreams (1988), By and By (1985), Sweet Home (1983), and Poor Boy (1979).

The Ballad of Tom Dooley

From www.appalachianhistory.net/

Award-winning author Sharyn McCrumb has just released her latest historical fiction, “The Ballad of Tom Dooley,” (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins Press), which tells the true story behind the celebrated folk song.

McCrumb is best known for her Appalachian ‘ballad’ novels, including the New York Times best sellers ‘The Ballad of Frankie Silver’ and ‘She Walks These Hills,’ and for ‘St. Dale,’ winner of a Library of Virginia Award and featured at the National Festival of the Book. In 2008 Sharyn McCrumb was named a Virginia Woman of History for Achievement in Literature.

View previous “Tom Dula” post here.

Uncle Dave Macon (#2)

by Bill Dillof (excerpt from The Old Time Herald, Volume 9, Number 7 • Spring 2005)

Norman Cohen, who evaluated Macon’s repertoire in 1970 (“Uncle Dave Macon, A Bio-Discography”), observed that “more than any of the other great hillbilly artists of the 1920s and 30s, Uncle Dave Macon’s vast repertoire frequently reflected the professional minstrel show and vaudeville stage tradition.” That repertoire included, too,  “coon” songs, sentimental, or “heart” songs, comic pieces, pre-blues black and white folk tunes, gospel and “jubilee” songs, blues and 20^th century compositions, often topical and likely as not of his own composition or re-working. Full forty per cent of the commercial recordings derive from the 19^th century. If you toss in traditional songs and ballads, spirituals and older folk tunes with incidental lyrics, it is clear that well over half of Macon’s repertoire was of a 19^th century pedigree.

While that, of itself, is not terribly unusual  among the earliest country record-makers (Carter Family, Ernest Stoneman, Vernon Dalhart), what is most striking is the degree to which Macon’s older material drew upon black, or black-inspired, sources. Counting “jubilee” and black folk tunes, minstrel and coon songs (it is sometimes hard to tell the difference), roughly half of Macon’s 19^th century sources are “black”. You won’t find this in the Carters or Stoneman – not even close.

Even many of Macon’s self-composed and “Maconized” songs have an unmistakable minstrel feel about them. Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta (HarperCollins, 2004), puts it nicely: “The ghost of Daniel Decatur Emmett walks. And like all ghosts, its face is white. Uncle Dave [could] sing coon songs until the hams got smoked, and all he’d be doing is playing, as they were billed at the time, ‘old familiar tunes’. Country music. American music.” Wald relates the wonderful response of first-generation bluesman John Jackson upon being told that DeFord Bailey had been the only black star of the Grand Ole Opry: “What about Uncle Dave Macon?”

The remainder of Macon’s 19^th century repertoire consists of “heart” songs, sacred numbers and a significant number (about thirty) of humorous songs (another factor distinguishing him from Stoneman or the Carters). In one of many telling anecdotes that so defined the man, Macon is reputed to have told Earl Scruggs, “You’re a pretty good banjo picker … but you ain’t one bit funny.”

While most of Macon’s musical collaborations employed back-up guitar and vocal harmony, there are two especially worth noting: the six duets with Sam McGee on his new Gibson guitar-banjo, and the session with The Fruit Jar Drinkers, alone worth the price of admission. The 1928 duets with McGee are masterpieces of banjodom, with McGee, a superb guitar-picker in his own right, plunking a driving counterpoint to Macon’s rolling fingerpick such that the two are nearly inseparable. The Fruit Jar Drinkers’ eighteen sides, recorded in 1927 (and conveniently comprising nearly all of Disc 4), are among the finest string band sides on record. Charles Wolfe speaks of the “tricks and balances that had to be worked out” in preparation for the session. Well, they worked them out, all right, begetting breathtakingly gymnastic virtuosities of exquisite balance, with Macon calling, shouting, his lively fingerpicking dancing around McGee’s bounding guitar and the soaring, elegant fiddling of Kirk McGee and Mazy Todd, reining all that raw country energy into a knot of controlled spontaneity. The band plays, sings, with one mind, Macon’s, the ringmaster.

Read part 1 of this article here.

“Been to the Nation, and I Just Got Back”

Edited excerpt from “The Red Man and the Blues,” by Max Haymes at www.earlyblues.com

The eastern territory in Oklahoma, the ‘Indian Nation’, was admitted to the United States in 1907, along with Oklahoma Territory. But because of lack of law and order and relative freedom from white oppression, which attracted working-class blacks, Blues singers up to thirty-five ^years later still referred to the “Territo” or “Nation”.

Andrew and Jim Baxter’s “Bamalong Blues” includes this verse:

“Bin to the Nation, an’ I jus’ got back,
Bin to the Nation, an’ I jus’ got back.
Didn’t git no money but I brought the sack.”

The guitar player employing some sarcasm in the third line, which would not be lost on his black listeners. The ‘sack’ referred to was a Nation sack used to store any money which the Blues singer, or his lover, could hustle, cheat or otherwise cajole, ‘from those in employment around him, in order to survive.

Erstwhile leader of the great Memphis Jug Band (1927-34), Will Shade, recalled to Paul Oliver how the women (c.1900) used to follow the famous steamboat, the ‘Katy Adams’ as she plied her trade between Memphis and the Delta town of Rosedale in Mississippi. They made so much money from the roustabouts on the boat, who made “…a hundred and fifty dollars a trip totin’ all that cotton…”, that the women “…they used to wear ‘Nation’ sacks in them days – and they used to wear their money twixt their legs, hung on (sic) a sack tied round their waists.”  This custom seemed to continue into the mid-1930′s when youthful, Delta Blues man, Robert Johnson sang:

“Aaah! she’s gone, I know she won’t come back,
I taken her last nickel out of her Nation sack.”

probably advertising one of the reasons why his woman left him, having got tired of Johnson draining her financial resources.

Blues singers regarded the Nation as some sort of haven, safe from white interference. So Sam Collins, an older singer with a similar pitch and timbre to the young Jim Baxter, would have no doubt where he was headed in 1931:

“Went to the Nation, new Territo’,
Gonna catch me the first train, I got to go.”

Read the entire article here.

Fremeaux’s Banjo Anthology

Fremeaux and Associates, from France, has an outstanding catalogue of music from the southern U.S.  It’s refreshing to see southern old time music presented from the European perspective as one of the planet’s many fascinating ethnic music genres.  See also their “FOLKSONGS:  OLD TIME COUNTRY MUSIC 1926 – 1944

Check out the recordings their musicologists have selected for the banjo anthology below.

The view from France:

For over a century, the Banjo has always been a vital part of the musical history of North America. Its early history is represented in this 40 tracks boxset by banjo specialist Gérard de Smaele. These titles reflect the adventure of the United States of America in an outstanding anthropological topic, detailed in a 36 pages booklet with both French and English notes. From its African and European origins until the roots of the “Folk Revival”, a decisive entry into American culture and identity.
–Patrick Frémeaux

“Banjo: An American Five String History 1901-1956,” Fremeaux FA5179   Available here.

CD 1 : 1. PIDOUX JOHN : DARKEY’S DREAM (THOMAS J. ARMSTRONG) 2’38 • 2. FARLAND ALFRED A. : CARNIVAL IN VENICE (ZANI DE FARRANTI) 4’00 • 3. BACON FRED : OLD BLACK JOE (STEPHEN FOSTER) 3’16 • 4. VAN EPS FRED : COCOANUT DANCE (HERMAN, TOBANI) 3’04 • 5. OSSMAN SYLVESTER L “VESS” : RUSTY RAGS MEDLEY (UNKNOWN) 2’23 • 6. CAMMEYER ALFRED DAVIES & SHEAFF BERNARD : DANSE BIZARRE (CAMMEYER) 2’48 • 7. OAKLEY OLLY : ROMPING ROSSIE (MADELINE ROSSITER) 2’54 • 8. RESER HARRY : HEEBE JEEBES (HARRY RESER) 3’10 • 9. BURNETT RICHARD “DICK” : LADIES ON THE STREAMBOAT (UNKNOWN) 3’11 • 10. JENKINS FRANK : BABTIST SHOUT “SPANISH FANDANGO” (TRAD.) 2’47 • 11. MACON DAVID HARRISON “UNCLE DAVE” : TENNESSEE RED FOX CHASE (UNKNOWN) 3’17 • 12. MACON DAVID HARRISON “UNCLE DAVE” : RUN (UNKNOWN) 3’03 • 13. MCGEE BROTHERS (SAM, KIRK) : MILK COW BLUES (KOKOMO ARNOLD) 2’23 • 14. ASHLEY CLARENCE “TOM” : NAOMI WISE (TRAD.) 2’57 • 15. BEGLEY JUSTIS : THE GOLDEN WILLOW TREE (TRAD.) 4’17 • 16. BOGGS DOCK (MORLAN L.) : DANVILLE GIRL (TRAD.) 3’08 • 17. BOGGS DOCK (MORLAN L.) : OLD RUB ALCOHOL BLUES (TRAD.) 3’19 • 18. WILLIAMS WALTER : MUD FENCE (TRAD.) 1’50 • 19. SMITH HOBART : THE CUCKOO BIRD (TRAD.) 2’38 • 20. WILLINGHAM THADDEUS C. : ROLL ON THE GROUND (TRAD.) 3’14.
CD2 : 1. CRISP RUFUS : BALL AND CHAIN (TRAD.) 3’07 • 2. FRAZIER NATHAN : PO BLACK SHEEP (TRAD.) 3’12 • 3. LOWE CHARLIE : TATER PATCH (UNKNOWN) 1’54 • 4. SLAYDEN WILL : JOHN HENRY (TRAD.) 2’31 • 5. SMITH LUCIOUS : NEW RAILROAD (UNKNOWN) 3’14 • 6. STEELE PETE : COAL CREEK MARCH (PETER STEELE) 1’32 • 7. LUNSFORD BASCOM LAMAR : SWANNANOA TUNNEL (TRAD.) 3’42 • 8. KAZEE BUELL : OLD WHISKER, THE MOONSHINER (TRAD.) 3’18 • 9. WALSH DOCK : COME BATH IN THAT BEAUTIFULL POOL (UNKNOWN) 3’04 • 10. POOLE CHARLES CLEVELAND “CHARLIE” : DON’T LET YOUR DEAL GO DOWN (TRAD.) 2’54 • 11. POOLE CHARLES CLEVELAND “CHARLIE” (PIANO : LUCY TERRY) : DON’T LET YOUR DEAL GO DOWN MEDLEY (TRAD.) 3’19 • 12. CLARK BOB “BOSSIE” : ITALIAN MULAZICCI (UNKNOWN) 1’50 • 13. MONROE WILLIAM SMITH “ BILL” (BANJO : EARL SCRUGGS) : BLUEGRASS BREAKDOWN (BILL MONROE) 2’16 • 14. LYLE RUDY (THE BLUEGRASS BOYS) : WHITE HOUSE BLUES (WILBUR JONES) 2’17 • 15. STANLEY RALPH (THE STANLEY BROTHERS) : PRETTY POLLY (TRAD.) 2’53 • 16. SCRUGGS EARL (FLATT & SCRUGGS) : FLINT HILL SPECIAL (EARL SCRUGGS) 2’50 • 17. SEEGER PETER “PETE” : BABE O’MINE (SARAH OGAN GUNNING) 2’44 • 18. SEEGER PETER “PETE” : BLUE SKIES (IRVIN BERLIN) 2’23 • 19. SEEGER PETER “PETE” : LISTEN MR BILBO (BOB ET ADRIENNE CLAIBORNE) 2’0420. WARD WADE : OLD JOE CLARK (TRAD.) 0’53

Man of Constant Sorrow: Southern Marvel #3

Ed Haley

edited from www.bluegrassmessengers.com and www.oldtimemusic.com

Richard Burnett, of the duo Burnett and Rutherford, is sometimes credited as the composer of the “Man of Constant Sorrow,” which he called “Farewell Song.”   He was born in 1883, married in 1905, and blinded in 1907. The second stanza of  his “Farewell Song” mentions the singer has been blind six years, which would date it at 1913. In later years, Richard Burnett was asked about the song. He himself could not remember, at that time, if he had composed it, or copied it, or — perhaps most likely — adapted it from something traditional.

Charles Wolfe:  What about this “Farewell Song” — “I am a man of constant sorrow” — did you write it?’

Richard Burnett:  No, I think I got the ballet [sic] from somebody — I dunno. It may be my song…”

According to Charles Wolfe, the melody of  “Man Of Constant Sorrow” was based on an old Baptist hymn, “The Wandering Boy.”

Another recording artist Emry Arthur, who was friends with Burnett, also claimed to have written, “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Emry was the first to record the song in 1928 for Vocalion.

Ed Haley recorded a sublime fiddle version of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Haley was born in 1883 on Hart’s Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. He was a blind professional fiddler, and never recorded commercially during his lifetime; he was afraid that the record companies would take advantage of a blind man. However, there were recordings made by Haley’s son Ralph on a home disc-cutting machine. When Ralph died, the recordings were evenly divided among the five remaining children. It is believed that the 106 sides which remain are only about one third of those recorded.

Ed Haley’s solo fiddle version of the tune can be heard here:

Montague, MA Square Dance: 2/4/12

Will Mentor will call a southern square dance at the Montague Grange, 34 Main St. in Montague Center, MA, on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2012, from 7-10 pm.

Music by The New Apocalypsonians.

Admission is $5.  Directions here.

Georgia String Band Festival: May 11-12, 2012

Save This Date! May 11th and 12th…The Georgia String Band Festival and Gordon County Fiddler’s Convention (Est. 1925)…Honoring our great early recording artists from here and adjacent counties, such as Andrew and Jim Baxter, The Georgia Yellow Hammers, The Skillet Lickers, Earl Johnson, Fiddlin’ John Carson, A.A. Gray, Bluesman Will Bennett, Seven Foot Dilly, and so many others that so influenced what we now enjoy as American music. We are working on some historical presentations to further honor these great musicians and welcome any and all contributions to this end.

In the NW Georgia burg of Calhoun, in Gordon county. We are 1/2 way between Atlanta and Chattanooga, right off of I-75.

We are currently scrambling to get this together, as it seems nothing gets done during the Holidays,  and we welcome any suggestions, tips, comments, contacts or whatever might make this Festival the proper homage to this great music that it should properly be.

Last year’s celebration was small but absolutely phenomenal. I actually had two different longtime veterans of Clifftop and other large Old Time gatherings come up and tell me that our fiddle competition was one of the best and most intense that he had ever seen.

Everyone that participated indicated they would be back, and would both recommend to and bring others.  The playing in camp was at times bordering on out-of-body-experience, especially when Mick Kinney broke out Andrew Baxter’s fiddle and sawed-our a particularly stunning “Forty Drops”…

From Paul Shoffner

The Stripling Brothers

From “With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow,” by Joyce Cauthen (University of Alabama Press, 1989, 282 pages)

View entire article at http://www.1001tunes.com/

In Chicago, on August 19, 1929, the Stripling Brothers recorded sixteen tunes, all of which were released on the Vocalion label. Some also were released on Australian and Canadian labels. The tunes included traditional breakdowns like “Wolves Howling” and “Dance All Night with a Bottle in Your Hand”; four waltzes; and the only two vocals the brothers ever recorded, “Weeping Willow” and “Railroad Bum.”

Before the recording session Kapp informed the brothers that they should not play anything that had already been recorded. “You know, the old-timey pieces like ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and ‘Hen Cackle’ and ‘Leather Breeches’ and all like that had been recorded,” said Stripling. Thus he played several tunes of his own composition, among them the “Kennedy Rag,” named after his hometown, and “The Coal Mine Blues.” The latter was composed when Stripling, a cotton farmer who had never been near coal mines, began playing for dances in the mining camps of Walker County. The tune was very popular among the miners who inspired it. Stripling’s “compositions” were committed to memory and to the recording machine, but not to paper, as he had never learned to read or write music.

The records made in Chicago were well received. Charlie Stripling recalled: “The records come out and made a hit and was selling like hotcake. Every where I went they had ‘em and was selling ‘em. We could have got on, then, with the Victor Company. That agent come through there. He told us, said, ‘I could take one of these records down there and play it. My company would give you a job, right now.’ “

However, the brothers had a contract with Brunswick-Balke-Collender. Upon its expiration, Dave Kapp, brother of the Brunswick agent, invited them to record for Decca in New York. There, on September 10, 1934, they played fourteen tunes, ten of which were issued. Except for the traditional tune “Chinese Breakdown,” most were waltzes, fox trots, and “ragtime breakdowns,” such as “Down on the L & N,” that Stripling had composed for round dancing. Kapp was not difficult to please, recalled Stripling: “He’d tell me to play over one, and I’d play over it, and I’d think to myself, ‘Well, he won’t take that,’ but he wouldn’t grumble about it. He’d just say, ‘Okay,’ and then he’d ask me what was the name of it and ask me how come it’s the name it is, and make a record of it then.”

Harry Smith’s Volume 4

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four

Released: 2000
Contents: 2 CD’s, 96 pg. hardbound book
Revenant No. 211

From an interview by John Cohen, discussing why Volume 4 of The Anthology of American Folk Music wasn’t released (then):

Montpelier, VT Square Dance, 2/2/12

Join us each month for food, drinks, friends, good old time music, and foot stomping fun!
We’ll be bringing in some of the finest Old-Time Stringbands in the region.
1st Thursday of every month through April!   Schedule may vary in the summer, keep posted…  View 2012 schedule here.
Contact Jennifer with questions 802-276-3839 jennifer@twinpondretreat.com

Jamaica Ginger

Thanks to Bill Boslaugh at http://vernacularshellac.com for this edited excerpt:

In 1928 two Boston brothers-in-law, Max Reisman and Harry Gross, petty criminals and bootleggers, set up a full-time business producing and wholesaling Jamaica Ginger extract; and almost from the beginning they sought ways to cut corners and maximize their profits.  By mid-summer 1929 they were looking to replace the castor oil adulterant in their product, and after a good deal of trial and error … and black-market research, they settled on Lindol (or TCOP), a fuel additive and plasticizer used in paints.  Lindol met their needs for being non-detectable, and was thought to be harmless, having been tested on monkeys and dogs with no ill effects to either of those species.

In January, 1930 Gross and Reisman bought enough Lindol to produce six hundred and forty thousand bottles of contaminated Jamaica Ginger.  They shipped the tainted product within a month and the untoward effects of their crime became evident almost immediately.

In late February, 1930, patients began showing up in doctors offices and hospitals with an odd set of symptoms…  they were initially seen in Oklahoma – but soon in scattered areas throughout the entire nation east of the Mississippi: Johnson City, Tennessee; Wichita, Cincinnati, Topeka, Mississippi, New England, Rhode Island.

The primary complaints included a numbness below the knees and foot-drop, or inability to use their feet.  Dan Baum, in his 2003 article in The New Yorker describes it well:  “The patient’s feet dangled like a marionette’s, so that walking involved swinging them forward and slapping them onto the floor.”  This produced an exaggerated “zombie-like” shuffle and led to descriptions of the malady such as “jake walk,” and “jake leg.  Some patients could not walk at all, others were similarly effected in their upper extremities.  The other devastating symptom of jake poisoning  was impotence… this symptom was almost universally termed “limber leg.”

The jake-poisoning symptoms, once acquired, were for the most part, life-long and improved only rarely, in a very few cases.  The number of impacted individuals is thought to be roughly 50,000 to 100,000, with many tens of thousands of cases of permanent paralysis.

Although Jake had been mentioned as an intoxicant in song prior to the epidemic, the first post-poisoning 78 rpm jake leg song to hit a Victrola was Ishman Bracey’s “Jake Liquor Blues” on Paramount 12941, recorded in March or April of 1930, some sixty to ninety days after the first documented case of Jamaica Ginger extract poisoning.

That was quickly followed by the Allen Brothers Victor 40303 recording of “Jake Leg Blues” on the 5th of June, 1930 and Narmour & Smith’s recording of “Jake Leg Rag” and “Limber Neck Blues” on June 6th, 1930.  The Mississippi Sheiks great  “Jake Leg Blues” on Okeh followed on June 10th, 1930. Byrd Moore’s Gennett 17091 recording of “Jake Leg Blues” on September 7th, rounded out the first wave of 1930 recordings.

• Ishman Bracey: “Jake Liquor Blues” (Mar/Apr. 1930, Paramount 12941)
• Ray Brothers: “Jake Leg Wobble” (May 28, 1930, Victor 40291)
• Allen Brothers: “Jake Walk Blues” (June 5, 1930, Victor 40303)
• Narmour & Smith: “Jake Leg Rag” (June 6, 1930, Okeh 45469). Instrumental.
• Narmour & Smith: “Limber Neck Blues” (June 6, 1930, Okeh 45548). Instrumental.
• Mississippi Sheiks: “The Jake Leg Blues” (June 10,1930, Okeh 8939)
• Byrd Moore: “Jake Leg Blues” (Sept. 27, 1930, Gennett 17091)
• Ray Brothers: “Got That Jake Leg Too” (Nov. 21, 1930, Victor 23508)
• Gene Autry: “Bear Cat Papa Blues” (April 16, 1931, Conqueror 7838 – and many other labels)
• Dave McCarn & Howard Long: “Bay Rum Blues” (May 19, 1931, Victor 23566).
• Mississippi Sarah & Daddy Stovepipe: “Jake Leg Blues” (October 21,1931, Vocalion 1676)
• Asa Martin: “Jake Walk Papa” (April 5, 1933, Champion 16627)
• Willie Lofton: “Jake Leg Blues” (August 24, 1934, Decca 7076)
• Maynard Britton: “Jake Walk Blues” (1937, Library of Congress 1522)
• Maynard Britton: “Jake Leg Blues” (1937, Library of Congress 1524) [Britton is the only recording artist on this list to have been a victim of jake poisoning.]
• Lightning Hopkins: “Jake Head Boogie” (September, 1951, RPM 346)
• Black Ace: “Beer Drinkin’ Woman” (August 14, 1960, Arhoolie LP 1017).  [this is on an LP and was not issued on 78 rpm]

Mama’s Angel Child: The Little Brothers

Mama’s Angel Child – The Little Brothers
Penny Records

Available here.

from http://weeniecampbell.com:

I’ve been listening, off and on, to Mama’s Angel Child by the Little Brothers for two or three weeks now and each time I find something new — something I hadn’t heard before — in the music. This is a very good thing. Depth and subtlety are qualities all too uncommon today when so many “acoustic” bands hit you over the head with wild-eyed energy but little else. I’ll resist naming names, but you know who they are.

But back to Frankie and Kim Basile and the 3rd Brother, mandolinist Mike Hoffmann — or is he the second brother, Kim being of the female persuasion? (They really need to straighten this out for the perplexed among us.) Anyway, the three have done a very difficult and pleasing thing with this CD: Using voices (Frankie and Kim) and string instruments (all three), the LBs have recorded a variety of American foundational (I hate the term “roots,” don’t you?) music in a surprisingly creative manner.

Let me give an example. The first track, “Loose Like That” (one of the numerous offspring of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s single-entendre hit of a similar name) sounds here like the Skillet-Lickers-play-Dixieland. The mandolin plays the melodic cornet part while Kim’s fiddle is the New Orleans clarinet. The Hokum/Jug Band style these Tampa-Georgia tunes usually get, and deserve, would usually be a ho-hum way to start a record. If you’re going to include a song like this, you’d best have something fresh in the arrangement. And a good strong singer. The LBs have both.

And speaking of voices, Kim is very affecting singer. In contrast to her husband, she tends to hold back with a world-weariness reminiscent of some Mississippi women. Those falling notes at the end of the lines are subtle and captivating. Listen to her sing “New Bumblebee” blues. And again the LBs, rather than copying a classic, rearrange the tune by using a low-tuned guitar, 12 string I think, and what sounds like a cross-tuned fiddle. Memphis Minnie meets W.M. Stepp. Very effective.

I could go through the CD track-by-track with more examples of this sort of thing, but that would just spoil the discoveries you’ll make on your own. Let me just say that the title song, a beautifully melodic waltz as sung by Frankie has a most interesting instrumental arrangement with the fiddle and mandolin giving the song an Eastern European village orchestra flavor; and Kim’s readings of “What Fault You Find of Me” and “Wayward Girl” are sublime — both accompanied by Frankie’s sympathetic instrumental backing on old-time banjo (deep-toned with that loose-head, low-tuned sound) and guitar respectively. The musical interaction of this couple is so agreeable on the wordless refrain of this last song (as it is throughout the whole CD) that one is led to suspect they just might have a good marriage.

I haven’t said much about the 3rd Brother (or is it 2nd, etc.). Mike lurks in the background a lot. Though he’s not on all the tracks, when present his contribution is a subtle force of texture — a tremolo here, a rhythmic punch there, and especially the rollicking orchestral duets with the fiddle. He does get a few solos; the one in the Roll & Tumble child “The Girl I Love Got Long Curly Hair” is particularly nice. He seems content to be the guy who quietly adds the little touches that mean so much. Except when he plays his banjo-mandolin; then he loudly adds those touches.

Though one of the Little Brothers’ signatures is rearranging and recomposing traditional material — something Mike Seeger did so very well; who can forget Mike singing Roll & Tumble and accompanying himself on fretless gourd-banjo and rack-harmonica? — there are several direct musical tributes scattered over the CD’s sixteen tracks including “Crow Jane,” Bad Luck Blues” and “Mother’s Prayer.” The last deserves special mention since it is both a tribute and a personal artistic creation. Frankie sings and plays a solo version of A.C. and Mamie Forehand’s “Mother’s Prayer” that is emotionally profound. Frankie’s voice is sweeter and quieter. And the accompaniment (sounds like a fingerpicked mandola to me) echoes the zither-like patent instruments of an earlier time. Washington Phillips would love this. So do I.

One final topic. This CD shows the good side of the DIY democratization of music. It sounds like real people in a real space who can really play their instruments and sing their songs. The recording quality and mix is mostly very good (I could have stood a little more of Kim’s voice front-and-center on “What Fault,” Frankie) and I suspect there’s an overdub or two (second fiddle part now and then? banjo in the background?).

But when songs, franchise-like, can be built one note at a time, it’s worth keeping in mind that these folks are for real and being real isn’t always easy.

Good work Brothers.

bruce nemerov
murfreesboro, TN
May 2011

Uncle Bunt Stephens

Uncle Bunt Stephens’ “Sail Away Lady” became popular in England during the skiffle craze of the 1950s when it was recorded by Lonnie Donegan under the title “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O.” Under this title, the song was included in the set list of the Quarrymen, the group that eventually became the Beatles.

“UNCLE BUNT STEPHENS: Champion Fiddler,”
by Don Roberson, as printed in “Old Time Music” Magazine, Summer 1992

“Uncle Bunt” (John L.) Stephens was born in Bedford County, Tennessee on February 2, 1879, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Eli Stephens. We was left an orphan at an early age and was reared by Aunt Winnie Bearden, who lived in Flatcreek, a small community in southern Bedford County.

A 1926 newspaper article quoted “Uncle Bunt” as saying that he had played the mouth organ (harmonica) since the age of six and he bought his first fiddle from a tramp for $25 when he was 11 years old. The fiddle had been made in Germany in 1699. “Uncle Bunt’s” son, Haskell, once said, “He never took a lesson on the fiddle; he just took it up.”

“Uncle Bunt” was married twice. His first wife, whom he divorced after they had reared five children, was the former Miss Pearl Pack of Shelbyville, TN. She survives “Uncle Bunt” and currently lives in Shelbyville. At the age of 46, he married his second wife, Mrs. Lizzie Stephens, now deceased, and they lived on his farm in Moore County, TN, about six miles from Tullahoma.

If it had not been for Henry Ford, the famous automobile genius, very few people would have ever heard of a fiddler named “Uncle Bunt” Stephens. Mr. Ford was the main catalyst in the revival of old time music in America in 1926. A January 2, 1926 “Literary Digest” article describes Henry’s activities as “aspiring to revive the dances of our granddaddies, with all their innocent neighborly cavorting.”

Mr. Ford loved the music of the “devil’s box” and desired to hear it played by the best and most authentic old time fiddlers available. In order to attain this desire, he requested all his Ford dealers throughout the East and Midwest to hold local, state and regional contests to determine who should come to Detroit and fiddle for the championship.

Queen of the Earth, Child of the Skies: Southern Marvel #2

Queen of the Earth and Child of the Skies

Edden Hammons plays “Queen of the Earth and Child of the Skies”:

by Andrew Kuntz (www.ibiblio.org)

The melody was recorded by West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons (1874-1955) for visiting folklore professor Louis Watson Chappell in 1947.   Hammons was a member of a family of back-woodsmen, who, in addition to being adept at living off the land (their pursuits included poaching and moonshining), were also musically talented. Edden learned to play on a home-made gourd fiddle and, still a boy, acquired a manufactured instrument as a gift from a musician. He became an accomplished fiddler, and according to local lore, did little else. His first marriage failed because of this, but his second, to a more compatible (and tolerant) spouse, lasted over fifty years.

“Queen of the Earth and Child of the Skies” is one of the few slower, crosstuned and slightly ‘crooked’ pieces of the 51 that Hammons recorded for Chappell, over three recording sessions. Alan Jabbour (in his 1984 notes to the Edden Hammons Collection, vol. 1) identifies the melody as a piece called “The Blackbird,” one of the most famous and enduring airs in the British Isles. Several versions were collected in south-western Pennsylvania, but with the generally agreed upon function was that the tune was a “dead march,” i.e. one to be played at funerals.

The Irish versions of the “Blackbird” are Jacobite in nature whose lyrics indicate loyalty to the cause of the Stewarts, and Bayard says the song, referencing Bonnie Prince Charlie, was still being sung in south-western Pennsylvania in the early 1930’s. Although most Pennsylvania fiddlers seemed to know the melody by the “Blackbird” title, other titles existed: Bayard himself heard it called the “Lady’s Lamentation” by an Indiana County (Pa.) fifer in 1951—the title of the original broadside printed in London in 1651.

How it came to be known by Hammons, and how it acquired the title he knew it by, is a mystery.  The line “Queen of the Earth and Child of the Skies,” however, is known to be from American shape-note singing (popularized so recently in the film “Cold Mountain”). It is similar to a line from a shape-note hymn called “Star of Columbia” (also called simply “Columbia”), found in the Social Harp (1855) and other hymnodies, which begins:

Columbia! Columbia! to glory arise,

The queen of the world and the child of the skies;

Thy genius commands thee with raptures behold,

While ages on ages thy splendors unfold:

Thy reign is the last and the noblest of time,

Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;

Let crimes of the east ne’re encrimson they name,

Be freedom and science and virtue thy fame.

Words are credited to “Dr. Dwight” and music to “Miss M.T. Durham” (although the melody employed is a traditional fiddle tune called “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine”). Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was one of the “Hartford Wits,” a group of Connecticut men associated with literary work during and after the American Revolution. Dwight would go on to become president of Yale College, but he was a young man when he wrote his lyric “Columbia” in 1778, when he was a chaplain in for George Washington’s Continental Army. Dwight’s song suggests that America would be the seat of God’s kingdom and Americans its saints, and it was popular for a long time. So popular, in fact that some of the lines were incorporated into another shape-note hymn, “Murillo’s Lesson,” which can be found in the 1844 Sacred Harp and the 1848 Sacred Melodeon. It begins:

As down a lone valley with cedars o’erspread,
From war’s dread confusion I pensively strayed,
The gloom from the face of fair heaven retired,
The winds hushed their murmurs, the thunders expired.
Perfumes as of Eden flowed sweetly along,
A voice as of angels enchantingly sung,
Columbia, Columbia to glory arise,
The queen of the world and the child of the skies.

Later generations of the Hammons family played the tune somewhat differently, with Burl Hammons calling the piece “Old Man in the Woods” (which is also the name of an edible mushroom in the eastern US pinelands, one of the names for a Green Man or Jack-in-the-Woods, and the Native American term for a black bear). Sherman Hammons called it “Star of Bethlehem,” echoing the shape-note origins of the older title.

Songs of Love, Lust, and Contempt

“BABY HOW CAN IT BE? SONGS OF LOVE, LUST AND CONTEMPT FROM THE 1920s AND 1930s,” Dust To Digital (DTD16 (3CD Set))

Bo Carter, Mississippi Maulers, Norridge Mayhams & His Barbecue Boys, Dock Walsh, Joe Falcon, Davey Miller, Oscar Ford, Taylor’s Kentucky Boys, Dick Reinhardt, Eddie South, Kid Smith & Family, George Shortbuckle Roark, Eddie Peabody, Frank Quinn, Burnett & Rutherford, Fess Williams, Frank Stokes, Asa Martin, Robert Hill, State Street Boys, Doc Cook & His Fourteen Doctors  Of Syncopation, Broadway Bell-Hops, Lowe Stokes & His North Georgians, Mississippi Matilda, Crowder Brothers, Chippie Hill, Alphonse Trent  and His Orchestra, Hartman’s Heart Breakers, Harry Roy & His Bat Club Boys and many more.

There are some record labels that are loved and trusted by collectors because they always deliver the most exciting material with scrupulous attention to detail and quality. I’m talking about labels like Yazoo, Folkways, County, Revenant and Arhoolie, which all aim to deliver the musical past of America in the best possible way and when you look at the back-catalogue of Dust To Digital, there’s no doubt that they belong with these labels.

Over the past few years, they have issued a dozen stunning award winning releases ranging from the blockbuster gospel box set Goodbye Babylon and the stunningly rare sacred harp recordings I Belong To This Band to the history of the double bass in early jazz How Low Can You Go. Then there’s my favourite: Fonotone Records – the 130 track bumper-bundle of mountain music recorded by legendary record collector Joe Bussard for his own label in the 1960s. Every release is the kind of gem that gets collectors drooling for more.

Baby How Can It Be explores the things that go on between ladies and gentlemen in 66 diverse tracks with rural blues and mountain songs jostling alongside urban jazz pieces, hokey Hawaiian items, big band boogie woogie, jugband music, some madcap Irish tiddledelumptydum and groovy quartet harmonies.

County Records 701: Original Liner Notes to Clawhammer Banjo Volume 1

Thanks to Paul Mitchel for posting this on his site.  Read the extensive and informative liner notes to this groundbreaking 1964 LP there.

Read an interview with co-producer  Charles Faurot here.

DeFord Bailey

(Thanks to Maz at http://vintage-harmonica.blogspot.com
and Andrew and David Morton at http://defordbailey.info for this)

DeFord Bailey ’73 Recordings

In December 1973, David Morton recorded the late DeFord Bailey as a Christmas present for his father.
At http://defordbailey.info/audio there are 21 free tracks downloadable
- a must-have for every harp fan!

DeFord Bailey (December 14, 1899 – July 2, 1982) was a harmonica virtuoso, a blues singer, a guitarist, a banjoist, a composer and a founding member of the WSM Grand Ole Opry.

Bailey performed on WDAD, the first significant Nashville radio station, in 1925. Soon afterwards Dr. Humphrey Bate took him to play his harmonica on the new and much more powerful WSM station. At his first appearance on the “Barn Dance” DeFord immediately impressed the announcer, “the Solemn Old Judge” George Hay, who threw his steamboat whistle high in the air and declared that he was henceforth going to be a regular part of the show.

According to Judge Hay, DeFord was both the inspiration for the naming of the Opry, and the very first performer to play on the newly named show. This occurred in 1927 following a network program with a classical rendition of a locomotive by composer Dr. Walter Damrosch. After hearing the classical version of the train, Hay opened the program by telling the audience that they had been listening to “Grand Opera,” but would now hear “Grand Ole Opry” and introduced DeFord Bailey to play his harmonica version of the Pan American train.

Hay called Bailey the “Harmonica Wizard” and arranged for him to be in the very first recording session in the city that later became Music City USA. That was in the fall of 1928 when Victor came to Nashville at Judge Hay’s request. DeFord recorded eight tunes in this session that was held in the YMCA building. He had previously recorded tunes in Atlanta and New York City sessions arranged by Hay.

The “Harmonica Wizard” performed virtually every Saturday night on the Opry from 1926 until 1941, a record none of the other performers could match, and he was clearly one of the most popular performers on the show. During this time he also traveled extensively over the South and Mid-West with various Opry performers. These included Uncle Dave Macon, Alton and Rabon Delmore, Arthur Smith, Sam and Kirk McGee, Sarie and Sally, Lasses White and Honey Wilds, Paul Warmack and the Gully Jumpers, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, Curt Poulton and the Vagabonds, Clayton McMichen, Ken Hackley, and later Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe.

DeFord was always well received by the audiences when he performed out on the road; but traveling in the 1920 and 1930s, the hey day of Jim Crow, with the all white groups was exceedingly difficult. In the winter he always carried a wool blanket with him in case he had to sleep in the car when the other performers could not find a place for him to stay. Virtually none of the hotels or restaurants would knowlingly allow him to eat or sleep inside as a guest. Uncle Dave Macon would claim that DeFord was his valet in order to get him inside his room and then bring in a seat from the car for DeFord to sleep on. Some restaurants would let him eat in the kitchen, but usually he would eat outside or in the car.

Read entire article here.

The Cofer Brothers

Paul and Leon Cofer

By David Wondrich, (Village Voice, Tuesday, Mar 21 2000)

Imagine if Iggy and the Stooges kicked off their first album with a nice, sincere version of “Get Together”—you know, “C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . ” That’s what the Cofer Brothers are up to on Georgia Stringbands, Vol. 1. But before the search and destroy, a little defoliation: five bands total, all recording between 1927 and 1930 in Atlanta. Four of ‘em—the Spooney Five, the Watkins Band, Theo & Gus Clark, and the Carroll County Revelers—are the kind of thing you might find on volume two of Harry Smith‘s Anthology of American Folk Music. The ancestral music of the American cracker, dance division. Fiddles and banjos, spoons, square-dance calls, like that. Ten tracks of good, honest music. But then there are the other 14. The Cofer Brothers.

Going by the picture on the cover of the CD, they weren’t much to look at—two skinny-headed peckerwoods with cheap suits and Christopher Walken hair. In 1927, Paul Cofer was a 26-year-old sheet-metal worker from Hancock County, Georgia (a patch of trees and hills a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta; 1996 population: 9,023; average income: $12,879). He played the fiddle, more or less (it didn’t help that he wrecked his arm the year before when he ran his new Ford head-on into a streetcar). Leon—known as L.J.—was a couple of years older. He was an alumnus of the Georgia Academy for the Blind, same as bluesman Blind Willie McTell, who was about his age (they didn’t share a classroom). He was a piano tuner by trade, but here he sticks to banjo and guitar.

Their first recording session betrays barely a hint of the horrors to follow. On Saturday, March 19, 1927, they cut four sides for Okeh Records, in Atlanta. The boys led off with a sentimental number all about “drifting back to childhood” and wandering “down the lane to yesterday.” No harm in that. There’s a song about the Titanic (rural America loved the thought of all those Vanderbilts splashing around in the north Atlantic) and a couple of mildly impolite hobo numbers. They sing okay and play pretty well, although they’re nothing in comparison to some of the other Atlanta bands getting recorded around then. Earl Johnson & His Dixie Entertainers, for example—with Earl making like Jimmy Page on the fiddle—would’ve ground them into library paste. So: just another hillbilly combo, not incompetent but certainly not remarkable.

Can Kickers

Our old albums, Dead Music and Dead Music Volume II have been out of print and unavailable for a long time now, but we’ve finally remedied this by putting them up on Bandcamp.  And just in time for Christmas.. well, not really.  So for all of you who have bugged us for them or who are interested in listening to or downloading these, our original albums- here you go:

www.cankickers.bandcamp.com

You can also get to them through our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Can-Kickers/105572152805943

Our newer records, Mountain Dudes and Dying Not Dead are also available on Bandcamp (or through the mail if you email us!)

Hope you like.

Love,

The Can Kickers

www.cankickers.com

Henry Gilliland

Thanks to Steve Green for this research.  Edited from http://traildriver.com   Full article here.

The Victor Record Co. session in New York in June 1922 at which Eck Robertson made his landmark recording of “Sally Goodin” has become a legendary part of country music history. Robertson may claim some responsibility for getting oldtime fiddling in the record company catalogs and helping foster today’s country music industry, but he was just a youngster at the time compared to his fiddling partner Henry Gilliland, a Confederate veteran and ex-Indian fighter from the Texas frontier. Today, most people who have heard of Gilliland know of him because his name appeared on  the record label for two tunes recorded with Eck Robertson, “Arkansas Traveller,” and “Turkey in the Straw.” But regionally, in his native Texas and in his adopted state of Oklahoma, Henry Gilliland was a renowned fiddler even in the 19th century.

Born March 11, 1845 near Granby in Newton County, Missouri, Henry Clay Gilliland was only eight years old when his family began the long westward trek bound for the California gold fields. The family reached Sherman, Texas and spent the winter, continuing to Weatherford in Parker County in the fall of 1854. Henry’s father died in 1855 which left his mother to cope alone with the hardships and perils of life on the unsettled frontier. The communities around the small settlement of Weatherford at that time were situated in hostile Comanche territory (Parker County was not officially incorporated until 1856), and Indian raids were a continual threat facing the white settlers in the area. In protecting his family and friends the young Henry Gilliland found himself involved in a number of skirmishes and narrow escapes that he later recounted in writing.  He educated himself by studying books by firelight after cutting brush all day.

During the Civil War, Gilliland enlisted in the 2nd Texas Cavalry and later transferred to the 21st Infantry. The exact term of his service is unclear since he gave conflicting reports in two different pension applications. Most of his duties probably were related to guarding strategic posts along the Gulf Coast of Texas. During this time he suffered considerable exposure to the elements and hard conditions that left him crippled for the rest of his life.  Before enlisting however, Gilliland took advantage of having charge of his brother’s fiddle while the younger Gilliland was away serving the Confederacy, and thus began his lifelong association with oldtime music.

In June, 1922, Gilliland and the much younger Eck Robertson, who were probably already well-acquainted, were both in attendance at the Confederate Reunion in Richmond, Virginia. The story of their legendary visit to the Victor Recording studios and their pioneering first recording is recounted elsewhere. It has been surmised by some historians that Gilliland played second fiddle to Eck’s lead on “Arkansas Traveler” and “Turkey in the Straw,” but given Gilliland’s role in enabling the pair to visit New York (he had an acquaintance who hosted them during their stay), his seniority, his expertise on those tunes in particular, and the fact that his name appears first on the record labels all suggest that he was probably the lead fiddler.

While Eck Robertson began to actively pursue a career as a stage fiddler and recording artist, aging and crippled Henry Gilliland returned to his quiet life in Altus, Oklahoma. He died there in April, 1924 at the age of 79, and his funeral at the Altus Baptist church was reportedly one of the largest ever held in that community.

Henry Gilliland ranks as one of the very earliest-born fiddle players to have left any sound recordings for posterity. It is a real pity that he was not able to record any solo numbers, for by all accounts Gilliland was one of the western South’s foremost oldtime fiddlers and he would have helped us better understand the transition from a dance-oriented frontier tradition to the more stage-oriented tradition that has evolved into today’s “Texas Style” contest fiddling.

Kentucky Country

“Kentucky Country,” by Charles Wolfe (University Press of Kentucky, 1996, 224 pages)

Charles Wolfe on Burnett and Rutherford:

Available here.

Harry Smith On the Selection of Songs for the Anthology

 

Harry Smith, from an interview with John Cohen:

That’s My Rabbit, My Dog Caught It

From the liner notes to “That’s My Rabbit, My Dog Caught It,” (New World Records 80226:

After the Civil War, mail-order firms like Sears, Roebuck began selling inexpensive banjos, guitars, mandolins, and other string exotica on a wide scale. The object of these onslaughts was not the folk but the middle classes, and it became de rigueur for a young person of attainment to perform a tune or two on the guitar or mandolin. (There was a similar boom at this time in pianos and parlor organs.) Sales of sheet music were enormous, and in many communities large banjo and mandolin societies comprising hundreds of members sprang up. (A few still survive, including an orchestra of some thirty elderly citizens in San Diego.) Music of this sort has been aptly dubbed “parlor music,” since it was designed for amateur performance. A charming folk survival of such an ensemble can be heard in the Walter Family selection on this record (Side Two, Band 4).  Not suitable for dancing, it is intended solely for listening enjoyment.

The newly popular string instruments inevitably joined the well-entrenched fiddle-and- banjo ensembles of the mountains. It is surprising that in some areas this amalgamation process took as long as it did. Whereas many bands in the deep South had guitars as early as 1880, many mountain communities did not see the instrument before World War I. In the twenties, however, when the first hillbilly records and radio shows introduced southern musicians to fiddle-banjo and guitar bands from other areas, musical scruples were quickly laid aside and guitars were hastily added to southern string bands. Many older tunes were dropped from the repertory. The advent of records and radio gave local musicians a wider audience to aim toward and a greater motivation to keep a band together.

In the period 1925-32, often called “the golden age of folk-music recording,” the large companies manufactured enormous numbers of excellent string-band records for direct sale to southern audiences. Many of the performers were quite young, and only occasionally was an older fiddler like John Carson or Allen Sisson recorded. The sleek, flashy fiddling of young masters like the Georgians Clayton McMichen and Lowe Stokes made a powerful impression on southern fiddlers everywhere. A fine example of such a streamlined approach can be found in the selection by Dilly and His Dill Pickles (Side Two, Band 9). Although the tune and the fiddling techniques were firmly based in tradition, the enormous drive of the ensemble, propelled by the bass and the guitar, was quite novel in southern music.

Available here.

George Booker

Josh and Henry Reed

edited from www.ibiblio.org and www.totfa.org

Alan Jabbour says the tune is a derivation of a Scottish strathspey called “Marquis of Huntly’s Farewell (The),” composed by the great strathspey composer William Marshall and appearing in his Collection of Strathspey Reels (c. 1781). The high part of this tune “is almost certainly a hornpipe,” states Miles Krassen (1973) in another opinion, “but the low part is not. (West Virginia fiddler) Henry Reed played a version with a low part that is much more characteristic of hornpipes.” Jabbour remarks that “George Booker” is “one of the classics of what Henry Reed called the ‘old East Virginia’ repertory.

The melody first appears under the “Booker” title in George P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels, volume III (Baltimore, 1839), apparently in honor of a Revolutionary War leader and local hero from Virginia (according to Jabbour). Bruce Green thinks this tune may have been brought to the southern Kentucky region by a fiddler named John Gregory, originally from Virginia (in connection with similar Kentucky melodies, see Ed Haley’s “Grey Eagle Jig“).

The tune was recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph in the early 1940′s from Ozark Mountain fiddlers (including Lon Jordan in 1941).  Alan Jabbour believes “George Booker” is similar to “Camp Chase” and speculates that the former may have been the tune originally played in the Civil War prison camp which gave West Virginia fiddler Solly Carpenter his freedom.

Also, there is the story about a fiddler, George Booker, and a tune entitled “George Booker,” that is occasionally performed by Texas fiddlers. George Booker was a well-known fiddler from Nacogdoches who was being held in jail there for murder. On the day before he was to be executed, he talked the sheriff into allowing him to play for a dance the night before with the sheriff as a chaperone. Booker performed well probably knowing this would his last time to play in the area. About three o’clock in the morning, Booker went out on the porch for some air and that was the last anyone had ever seen of him. The last tune he played at the dance was one of his favorites, “Fine Times at Our House,” is now performed as “George Booker.” This is a story that is told by J. B. Cranfill, (1858-1942) originally from Parker County who was a popular fiddler in the Dallas area.

The Highwoods Stringband plays “George Booker”:

“Narmour and Smith: A Carroll County Story,” pt. 2

This is a part 2 of a newspaper article, begun here.

Several tunes bear the root, “Charleston”, referring not to the type of tune, but to a town in neighboring Tallahatchie County, Miss., and “Carroll County Blues” came because Narmour and Smith thought it appropriate to name one of the tunes for where they lived.  To Carroll Countians Narmour and Smith were true, and at home their fame never waned. It would be the connoisseurs and the record collectors in decades to come, however, who would rediscover the old Narmour and Smith recordings and assure their niche in American music history. Among those are Joe Bussard of Frederick, Md., whose 25,000-piece collection includes most of the N & S records as well as early records by the partners’ neighbor, John Hurt, who became internationally known after a blues historian named Tom Hoskins found him in 1963.

Narmour and Smith were responsible for Hurt’s first brush with the record industry, recommending their neighbor when talent scouts asked them if they knew any good black guitarists.  In 1963 it was too late for Narmour’s second chance. He had a minor stroke in the mid-1950s and a massive stroke killed him March 24, 1961. He was born March 22, 1889.

During his exploratory trip into Mississippi in the 1960s Hoskins spoke with Smith, who had been working as custodian at nearby Valley High School, a country school that closed in the late 1960s. It was also too late for Smith, whose “boomchang” guitar underscores his and Narmour’s now-precious recordings. Smith, born Nov. 26, 1895, died Aug. 28, 1968.  Their graves are marked by modest headstones in cemeteries along the road from Valley.

Narmour, whose day to day work included driving a school bus, farming, and in the 1930s, running a mechanic’s garage at Avalon, is buried in the old Pisgah Cemetery alongside his widow, Velma Carroll Narmour, who died in 1978. Smith is buried in Moore’s Memorial Cemetery behind Pisgah Church. His widow, Lillian Kirby, died April 17, 1985 and is buried next to him.

Dare To Be Square Monthly Old Time Night at the Black Door in Montpelier, VT

January 5th – the New Apocalypsonians (Jeff Golay, Eddie Nix, and others)
February 2nd – Her Majesty’s Streak o’ Lean (Jim Burns, Mark Sustic, Brianna and Andrew Hathaway)

March 1- Put Your Hoedown (Rafe Wolman and others)
April 5th – Katie Trautz and others
May 10th – Pete Sutherland, Lee Blackwell and others
June 14th – John Specker and others
July 5th – The New Barnyard Serenaders (Nate Paine, Jon Bekoff, and Jim Burns)
August 9th – Kick off party of the Vermont Old Time Music Gathering (bands to be determined…)
September 13th – Run Mountain (Jim Burns, Paula Bradley, and Bill Dillof)

 

 

“Narmour and Smith: A Carroll County Story,” pt. 1

 

by Robert Crumb

“Narmour & Smith: a Carroll County Story,” written in November 1997, revised in February, 1999

Thanks to Harry Bolick for finding this and making it freely  available.

By SUSIE JAMES CARROLLTON

Coleman Narmour recounts this story his father, fiddler Willie T. Narmour, told him about the origin of his enduring hit tune, “Carroll County Blues”: “He said he was leaving Leflore one fall. He’d taken a wagonload of cotton to the gin that morning. You’d have to wait your turn in line, so between sundown and dark his cotton had been ginned, and he and his mules were heading on back home. A little black boy was sitting on a train depot with a jew’s harp, trying to mock a train. From that he got the tune, and got to fiddling the next day on the “Carroll County Blues.” Willie Narmour and his partner, Shell Smith, recorded the song in 1929 and went on to make a slew of other records before first, the Depression nearly squeezed life out of the recording industry; then, changing times altered the quality and tastes of it.

“Carroll County Blues” became legend and was subsequently recorded by many other musicians. Regionally at least, it’s in live repertoires, a rousing hillbilly, then redneck standard. Yet Narmour’s daughter, Hazel Wiggins of near Holcomb, will say quickly and decisively, “Nobody else can play  “Carroll County Blues”. And there wasn’t a ‘Carroll County Blues’ until they went to the studio and recorded it.” Sounds mysterious, doesn’t it?

Smith and Narmour, buddies, dirt poor farmers, played guitar and fiddled for country dances. They were a county item long before they were discovered by scouts from Okeh Records at a fiddling contest at Winona in 1927. Such contests, Wiggins recalls, “Daddy always won, until they wouldn’t let him enter anymore.” Neither wanted to go on tour. While stories of how they entertained their fellow passengers during train trips to recording sessions regaled their families and friends, the truth is, Narmour and Smith were home boys.

Narmour’s daughter shared memories of her father working out tunes, for which he and Smith had no names, and which they couldn’t commit to paper, because neither could read nor write music. Names of these nostalgic tunes were created simply because there had to be titles for the record labels.  Titles, such as “Captain George Has Your Money Come”, “Who’s Been Giving You Corn?”, “Where the Southern Crosses the Dog”, “Sweet Milk & Peaches Breakdown” and “Winona Echoes Waltz” were products of discussions between the recording people and the artists “on the spot”, Wiggins said.         

TO BE CONTINUED

Breaking Up Christmas

by Dave Tabler (www.appalachianhistory.net)

Breakin’ Up Christmas is both the name for 12 days of partying, dancing, and music making ending up on January 6th, Old Christmas day, and also a song sung during that period. The tradition harks from the area that roughly includes Surry County NC, nearby Grayson and Carroll counties in VA, and the independent city of Galax located between the two.

Hooray Jake, hooray John
Breakin’ up Christmas all night long
Santa Claus come, done and gone
Breaking up Christmas right straight along
Don’t you remember a long time ago
The old folks danced the doesey-doe

The tune itself is not of great antiquity. It may have been composed by Preston ‘Pet’ McKinney, a fiddler and Civil War veteran from Lambsburg, VA. Mt. Airy, NC fiddler Tommy Jarrell, a 1982 NEA National Heritage Fellowship recipient strongly associated with this song, cited McKinney as one of his early influences.

Whether McKinney was the actual author of Breakin’ Up Christmas or not, there’s a reason the song can be distinctly pinpointed to the tri-county area. During rainy periods, that region’s roads, made mostly of red clay with no gravel, historically became so muddy that wagon wheels would sink in up to their axles. This made travel during inclement parts of the year either difficult or impossible.

New tunes only slowly made their way into the area, often by visitors or because a community member made a trip outside of his locality. Even so, as a tune bounced back and forth over the mountains between North Carolina and Virginia, local musicians might give it a different name, speed it up, add a new twist, and come up with a ‘souped-up’ version.

“Through this country here, they’d go from house to house almost – have a dance at one house, then go off to the next one the following night and all such as that. The week before Christmas and the week after, that’s when the big time was. About a two-week period, usually winding up about New Year. I wasn’t into any of this, but used to laugh about it. They’d play a tune called Breakin’ Up Christmas, that was the last dance they’d have on Christmas, they’d have Wallace Spanger play Breakin’ Up Christmas. There’s an old feller by the name of Bozwell, he’d cry every time.”

Lawrence Bolt, fiddler
b. 1894
Galax, VA

Riley Puckett

Norm Cohen writes in “Riley Puckett: King of the Hillbillies,” that John Edwards claimed that Puckett played guitar left-handed.

Art Rosenbaum’s “Black and White”

‘BLACK & WHITE – RECORDED IN THE FIELD BY ART ROSENBAUM,‘ Dixie Frog (DFGCD8697)

Henry Grady Terrell, Chancey Brothers, Mose Parker, Silver Light Gospel Singers, Gordon Tanner & Smokey Joe Miller, Yank Rachel & Shirley Griffith, Lawrence & Vaughn Eller, Golden River Grass, Jake Staggers, Brady Doc & Lucy Barnes, Ben Entreken & Uncle John Patterson, Cecil Barfield, Lawrence McIver & The McIntosh County Shouters, Mary Lomax, Balfa Brothers & Nathan Abshire, The Eller Brothers & Ross Brown, Guitar Pete Franklin, Albert Hash, Eddie Bowles, George Childers, Scrapper Blackwell, Fletta & Reverend Nathaniel Mitchell, Tony Bryant, Juanita & Oscar Shorty Shehan.

Art Rosenbaum is a musician, muralist and writer who searches out and records musicians hidden away in the mountains, hollers, swamps and backwaters of the rural South of America. For over fifty years he’s been capturing on tape some sensational cajun, gospel, country, blues, mountain ballads and rural bluegrass.

I love this kind of CD. Right from the start, it’s a joyous experience to listen to these folks doing what they enjoy best. The tracks are taken from Art Rosenbaum’s two boxed sets The Art Of Field Recording Vols 1 and 2 on Dust To Digital so you could regard it as a sampler from those releases or, like me, you can accept it for what it is – an inspired collection of the best traditional music America has to offer.

The Chancey Brothers are an old-time country band from Georgia who present Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground at a stately pace and some whooping encouragement for the banjo picker. Gordon Tanner (Gid’s son) and Smokey Joe Miller duet in the classic guitar/fiddle style of the Skillet Lickers on their loping Anglo-American Devilish Mary while Golden River Grass really let loose on the old warhorse Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad with tons of reckless banjo, manic fiddle and that marvellous squeaking harmonica. The Balfa Brothers play their classic Cajun song When I Passed By Your Door with fabulous twin fiddle ramblings held down by the strong rhythm guitar and the heartfelt racket of Nathan Abshire’s accordion.

J.D. Harris

Fiddler J. D. (Dedrick) Harris was born around 1868 in Flag Pond, Tennessee. Though a Tennessean, he lived in Asheville and Andrews for part of his life, and is strongly associated with the fiddle traditions of the Western North Carolina/East Tennessee region. Not a great deal is known about Harris’ life, but because of the profound influence he had on some of Western North Carolina’s greatest fiddlers, he is recognized as an important part of this state’s musical history.

Harris was among the region’s earliest recording artists. In late 1924, he and Ashevillian Ernest Helton went to New York City, where they recorded six sides. Though these records were pressed on the Broadway label, and possibly as a vanity pressing rather than a commercial release, some collectors and scholars believe that the masters may have been recorded by Paramount, as was the case with many of Broadway’s releases.

In the summer of 1925, Okeh A&R man Ralph Peer traveled to Asheville, where he set up a recording studio in the George Vanderbilt Hotel. Several of the region’s early recording stars were present for these sessions, including Ernest Stoneman, Kelly Harrell, and Henry Whitter. J. D. Harris pressed at least one recording, for which he is best known, “The Cackling Hen.”

Though his playing was immortalized on records, Harris’ greatest legacy is that of a fiddler who influenced many of the region’s other great fiddlers, some of whom were recorded extensively by later field collectors. Marcus Martin learned tunes from Harris, and was a frequent opponent in fiddle contests. The Helton Brothers were strongly associated with Harris, as an approximate contemporary of older brother Osey, and recording partner of Ernest. Manco Sneed, who spent most of his life in Cherokee, could almost be considered Harris’ protégé. Scholar and musician Blanton Owen estimated that one-quarter of Sneed’s tunes were learned from Harris. The two played as a duo, with Sneed usually on banjo, during a time when both lived in Graham County. Owen wrote in 1979 that “Harris’ reputation as one of western North Carolina’s best fiddlers is still alive today.”

(from www.blueridgeheritage.com)

Carriacou String Band Serenade

“Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the Eastern Caribbean,” by Rebecca S. Miller (Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 312 pages)

Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition.  This book about Carriacou music is the “first ever study of Caribbean string band music,” and it’s by Amherst, MA fiddler and ethnomusicologist Becky Miller .  (edited from www.upne.com)

Available here.

African-American Fiddlers on Early Phonograph Records

Excerpt from “African-American Fiddlers on Early Phonograph Records”
by Marshall Wyatt (www.oldhatrecords.com)

In the antebellum South, slave fiddlers provided music at plantation balls and other entertainments for whites, and were often encouraged by their masters to play for the dancing of fellow slaves as well. Black musicians absorbed the polkas, marches, jigs and reels of the European tradition, but applied syncopated rhythms and minor tonalities derived from Africa. They were often granted privileges denied to field slaves, including a chance to travel when their services were required at other venues. Solomon Northup, a free man from New York who was kidnaped and sold into slavery in Louisiana, later described how his ordeal was mitigated by his ability to play the fiddle. In his book Twelve Years A Slave, published in 1853, Northup wrote:

“Alas! had it not been for my beloved violin, I scarcely can conceive how I could have endured the long years of bondage. It introduced me to great houses- relieved me of many days’ labor in the field- supplied me with conveniences for my cabin- with pipes and tobacco, and extra pairs of shoes, and oftentimes led me away from the presence of a hard master, to witness scenes of jollity and mirth. It was my companion- the friend of my bosom triumphing loudly when I was joyful, and uttering its soft, melodious consolations when I was sad. It heralded my name around the country- made me friends, who, otherwise would not have noticed me- gave me an honored seat at the yearly feasts, and secured the loudest and heartiest welcome of them all at the Christmas dance.”

Many slave fiddlers played European instruments, but others used homemade devices fashioned from gourds, much like the African banjo, only bowed instead of plucked. It is likely that some slaves imported from areas of West Africa took more readily to the European violin because of their experience with native instruments that resembled the fiddle, such as the goge. The goge, common throughout the savannah belt, consists of a calabash resonator covered with reptile skin and a single string made of horsehair, played with an arched bow. Fiddles made from gourds or even from sardine tins or cigar boxes, were current among blacks in America during slavery, and even into the 20th century. As late as 1935, the obscure “Dad” Tracy from Memphis recorded for the Bluebird label playing his homemade fiddle, performances that display the instrument’s remarkable versatility.

Read entire article here.

Another Old Time Lyric Site

Here is another large online old time lyric collection.  This and the Bluegrass Messenger site have it pretty well covered.

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/old-time-music/old-time-songs/old-time-songs-A1.htm

Hoyt Ming

by Eugene Chadbourne                                           www.allmusic.com

The roots of this classic American old-time music band are traced back to a fellow named James Menge who settled in James City County, VA, in 1650. This family spread to North and South Carolina by the next century, and somewhere along the line, somebody got the idea to change the family’s name to Ming. A Charles Ming settled in Mississippi in the 1840s. Charles Ming’s son, Clough, went to live in Choctaw County, where he gave birth to Hoyt Ming on October 6, 1902.

More than half the kids in this family learned instruments. Hoyt Ming was inspired to pick up a fiddle at 15 after his father invited a string band over for a house party. He picked up the instrument by ear with simple tunes such as “Shortnin’ Bread.” The Ming Family Band started playing at parties with their classic lineup of fiddle, guitar, and mandolin.

Early in 1928, a Victor talent scout, Ralph Peer, showed up in Tupelo to audition local musicians, which Hoyt found out about while ogling the Victrolas at a local drug store. At this time, Hoyt was playing mostly with his wife, Rozelle, and sister-in-law. When the latter gal was not available for the audition, brother Troy filled in on mandolin, charming Peer enough to warrant a trip up to Memphis where he had a recording studio.

One of the results of this was a record that may not have changed the history of music, but is memorable nonetheless: “Indian War Whoop.” This, in combination with the family’s name, has led listeners to believe they were an Indian group, expanding the Ming’s mythical international base. Fans of old-time music point to this recording as a great example of hollering as well as real old-time fiddling, as Hoyt shouts along with the high notes at the end of phrases. Apparently, this style of shouting or inserting Indian-style war whoops in the body of a fiddle performance was something a variety of old-time fiddlers would do, although each player had their own trademark whoops.

Wagner

edited from Andrew Kuntz (www.ibiblio.org)

The association with the Louisville race of 1838 (see previous post about Gray Eagle) also helps date the companion tune “Wagoner” (the horse was named ‘Wagner’, but the tune title has numerous spelling variants). This American melody in the key of ‘C’ major is  as well-disseminated in the United States as “Grey Eagle.” “Wagoner” (along with “Wagoner in B‑Flat”) was recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph from the playing of Ozark Mountain fiddlers in the early 1940′s, and is a Mid-west standard.

 

It was in repertoire of Jimmy Thompson 1848‑1931, a fiddler originally Texas and it was supposed to have been the first tune Uncle Jimmy played on Nashville’s WSM in November, 1923, in what was to become the very beginning of the Grand Old Opry (Wolfe, 1997).  Early field recordings of it were made by Herbert Halpert in 1939 from the playing of Lee County, Mississippi, fiddler W.E. Claunch. “Wagoner” was Kentucky fiddler John M. Salyer’s (1882-1952) favorite tune, according to his son Grover.

The title is to be found in a number of variations, usually with a different place name before “Wagoner,” such as “Tennessee Wagoner,” “Georgia Wagoner,” “Texas Wagoner,” etc. However, it also appears under non-Wagoner titles as, for example, “The Hero” in George P. Knauff’s 1839 publication Virginia Reels, volume II (Baltimore), and in some later mid-nineteenth century publications where it can be found as “Miss Brown’s Reel.”

Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner was convinced that it was written “in honor of (Texas cattleman) Dan Wagner years earlier, maybe one hundred years ago,” an assumption that led him to maintain that the “Texas” appellation to the title was the correct one (although he acknowledged that “some call it ‘Tennessee Wagoner,’ reason not known” (Shumway, 1990). Wagner was a race horse, however, and a famous one at that; a long-necked, long-bodied stallion having muscular arms and wide hips and chestnut in color with a white blaze on his face.

He was also called Egbert’s Wagner, and, although of Virginia stock, he stood with some note in Tennessee (if you’re counting, then the “Virginia” or “Tennessee” Wagner title is then best applied to the tune). Grey Eagle set records in 1838, but it was Wagner’s year in 1839, when he won the same Louisville sweepstakes.  The match race between Wagner and Grey Eagle in 1839 a direct precursor to today’s Kentucky Derby, and drew some 10,000 spectators. Not only did Wagner win in Louisville that day, but he beat Grey Eagle in another match a few days later. In all Wagner contested in 20 races, winning 14.

Wagner was ridden by a black jockey name Cato (nicknamed Kate)—a slave. Cato gained his freedom that day, and his master claimed the $14,000 purse (although Cato too was given a “satchel full of the prize money” along with his manumition). Grey Eagle was ridden by a white jockey, Stephen Welch.  The prize money was dwarfed by the betting action stretching from New York to New Orleans, and the race became notorious because “more money, Negroes and horses were wagered and lost” than in any other race in the country.

Both animals became sires of other thoroughbreds in the course of time. Grey Eagle was put to stud at the farm of J.B. Poyntz, near Maysvile. Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, the most famous horse of the Civil War, was the son of Grey Eagle and was born in Mason County, Kentucky, in 1856. Today, nearly all modern American Saddlebreds trace their ancestry to Grey Eagle.

GASTONIA GALLOP

“GASTONIA GALLOP – COTTON MILL SONGS AND HILLBILLY BLUES FROM GASTON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA,” Old Hat (OHCD1007)

David McCarn, Three ‘Baccer Tags, Carolina Twins, Wilmer Watts & Lonely Eagles, George Wade & Francum Braswell, Dave & Howard, Watts & Wilson, Fletcher & Foster.

Look at the map of North Carolina and you’ll find Gastonia nestling in the hills of Gaston County encircled by small towns like Bessemer City and Bowling Green and to the east, the city of Charlotte. During the first part of the 20^th century, Gastonia and the surrounding villages were bustling with textile mills manned by thousands of workers from all across the Carolina Piedmont and the Blue Ridge Mountains; the very people who loved country music so it could be heard at every dance and barbecue in the region, performed by bands of talented banjo, guitar and fiddle players who had burning ambitions.

Musicians like Gwin Foster, David McCarn and Wilmer Watts would travel hundreds of miles to audition for record company field sessions in Atlanta, Memphis, New York and Chicago. Between 1927 and 1942 they recorded truckloads of guitar ragtime instrumentals, traditional folk ballads, parlour songs, blues, pop tunes and fiddle breakdowns for labels like Columbia, Victor and Paramount – about 240 selections in all issued on more than 350 commercial records during the 15 year period and it’s not well broadcast but Gastonia’s enterprising musicians made a contribution to the recorded legacy of hillbilly music that was just as important as that of Galax and Danville, Virginia and the Spray-Leaksville-Draper hotspot in North Carolina.

Ernest Stoneman #1

The Stonemans is an eye-opening slice of Americana—a trip through nearly twenty years of country music history following a single family from their native Blue Ridge Mountains to the slums of Washington, D.C., and the glitter of Nashville. As early as 1924 Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman realized the potential of what is now known as country music, and he tried to carve a career from it. Successful as a recording artist from 1925 through 1929, Stoneman foundered during the Great Depression. He, his wife, and their nine children went to Washington in 1932, struggling through a decade of hardship and working to revive the musical career Pop still believed in. (from www.press.uillinois.edu)

Book available here.

Ernest Stoneman was the King.  Here is “The Pretty Mohea,” a two hour Hollywood epic distilled to  3:31.

“When You Go A-Courtin,’ ” part 2

by Robert Crumb (from “The Rose and the Briar,” edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus, W.W. Norton, 2006)