The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History

The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History, by Joe Gioia (SUNY Press)

from http://www.sunypress.edu and http://www.cuke.com:

The primary thesis of the book, sure to be controversial, is that the Blues is mostly derived from Native American roots, rather than African.

The book includes a wide range of intriguing meanderings, book-ended by the hidden background of the author’s Sicilian and Napolitano ancestors, one of whom was an early guitar maker.  Along with the history of the guitar in Europe and 19th and early 20th century America, interesting histories of Western New York State and a presidential assassination appear.  But the book’s true subject is the fugitive nature of history itself.

Gioia’s investigation stretches from the ancient world to the fateful events of the 1901 Buffalo Pan American Exposition, across Sioux Ghost Dancers and circus Indians, to the lives and works of such celebrated American musicians as Jimmy Rodgers, Charlie Patton, Eddie Lang, and the Carter Family.

At the heart of the book’s portrait of wanderings and legacies is the proposition that America’s idiomatic harmonic forms—mountain music and the blues—share a single root, and that the source of the sad and lonesome sounds central to both is neither Celtic nor African, but truly indigenous—Native American. The case is presented through a wide examination of cultural histories, academic works, and government documents, as well as a close appreciation of recordings made by key rural musicians, black and white, in the 1920s and ’30s.

Joe documents in some detail the fascinating history of how through the whole southeast including Appalachia but more, from the Florida Seminoles, West to Oklahoma, and up through the Northeast and upstate New York, there was not only large-scale inter-marriage but cultural interaction, especially musical.

Many Blues idioms, vocal and musical, go back to Native Americans, including “Hey Hey”. Howling Wolf claimed his Choctaw ancestry, but Muddy Waters is also an obviously Native American name.  Joe Gioia provides plenty of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, all that is possible after the erasures of official history, including insight into the realities of slavery.  One repellent but riveting example is how the term “Blues” derives from the toxic and nauseating indigo production.  But after fifty years of extensive searching in Africa, nobody from musicologists to Buddy Guy have found anything like Blues musical patterns in Africa.

Discussions include Jimmy Rodgers, Charlie Patton, Eddie Lang, the Carter Family, Leadbelly, and many more, and Native American echoes appear in both Rock and Country music.   Fascinating and highly readable, this is an important book, revealing a major contribution of Native Americans to mainstream American culture

County 701

from “Making Round Peak Music,” by James Randolph Ruchala:

“Clawhammer Banjo,” County 701, opened with Wade Ward’s “June Apple” and “John Lover’s Gone,” two Virginia favorites. Then, a bold contrast, comes Kyle Creed’s “Darlin’ Nellie Grey,” a banjo solo based on a popular song written by one Benjamin Hanby in 1856. Wade Ward’s banjo performances are driving, rhythmic powerhouses, with a twangy, echoing timbre.  Ward plays the main notes of his melody, and brushes across multiple strings to play chords in between the melodic phrases.

Creed’s performance displayed all the hallmarks of his style—melodic more than rhythmic, with a frequent use of the fifth string as both a drone and a melody string, many slides and open strings, very few chords. Creed brushes across multiple strings, too, but does so more slowly than Ward, creating the effect not of a chord, but of a melodic grace note.

But what really stands out after Wade Ward is Kyle Creed’s mellow timbre, reminiscent, perhaps of a xylophone or some other percussion instrument. This full and round timbre was what he called “plunky” and it would come to be an influence on players and builders of banjos, as will be shown in chapter six.

“Darlin’ Nellie Gray” is followed by “Ducks on the Millpond,” an old dance tune popular in Virginia and North Carolina, and Kyle uses it to demonstrate the lick that would come to be known, inaccurately, as the “Galax lick.” This move involves brushing across the long strings of the banjo before plucking the fifth string squarely on the beat to play a melody note, usually the high A.

Three tracks of Fred Cockerham’s wild fretless banjo playing follow Kyle. “Pretty Little Miss,” “Long Steel Rail,” and “Little Maggie” show Fred’s bag of inventive tricks: bluesy slides, wild intonation, very low drone strings for some tunings, strange noises and “clucks” that defy notation, and Fred’s low-pitched and expressive singing. If Kyle was the precise and
plunky side of what would come to be called Round Peak banjo, Fred was the bluesy and inventive side.

Jeb Puryear and Mark Olitsky

Prater and Hayes

from http://weeniecampbell.com and http://www.allmusic.com:

In February of 1928, guitarist Napoleon “Nap” Hayes and mandolinist Matthew Prater, two black musicians from Vicksburg, MSi, recorded four instrumental tunes in Memphis. The tunes — “Somethin’ Doin’,” “Easy Winner,” “Nothin’ Doin’,” and “Prater Blues” — showcase the clean musicianship of both players, with Hayes’ guitar providing a steady rhythmic accompaniment for the skillful mandolin lead.

The performances, while comprising only a small body of recorded work, reveal a unique and carefully stylized repertoire, fusing elements of string band, ragtime, and blues forms: the first two sides directly borrow themes and phrasings from Scott Joplin rags, “Something Doing” and “The Entertainer,” respectively.

Little biographical information is known regarding Hayes and Prater, who recorded as the Johnson Boys and the Blue Boys. The duo also recorded two numbers with popular bluesman Lonnie Johnson on violin, but those sides were not issued (they have only become available in recent years). The four duet recordings of Nap Hayes and Matthew Prater are collected on Document’s String Bands (1926-1929).

 
Bob Eagle has dug into Prater a little with no concrete results. He found records that could have been for Prater but not at all certain. He found a record for someone named Matt Prater, black, born 1886, who was boarding with one Sam Harris in Beat 2 of Leflore County, MS in 1900. Matt and parents were born in MS.

He also found a record for a Nap Hayes. “The most likely Hayes is Nap Hayes, black, born 1885, residing in Lee County, MS in 1918. He was working for one Ben Whitehead and his nearest relative was Lucinda Taylor, of Tupelo.”

Easy Winner and Somethin’ Doin’, like the recordings of Evans and McClain, used the mandolin guitar duet form widely popular among white musicians, such as the Callahan, Shelton and Monroe Brothers. Hayes was probably exposed to ragtime when working with the pianist Cooney Vaughn, and he ably supported Prater’s fluent mandolin runs.

Both The Easy Winners and Something Doing (to give them their exact names) are by Scott Joplin; and this version of the latter composition was the only one to appear on record between the piano-roll era and the Second World War. The same would be true of Easy Winner, were it not that Hayes and Prater do not play this tune at all, but assemble under its name two strains from Joplin’s The Entertainer and one from J. Bodewalt Lampe’s Creole Belles.

As it happens, this is the only record of The Entertainer from the cited period, too. Creole Belles was recorded by Mississippi John Hurt, soon after his reappearance in the musical world in I963; his guitar treatment may be compared with a 1902 version, by banjoist Vess L. Ossman .

Prater and Hayes play “Somethin’ Doing”:

As I Roved Out

Song starts at 0:40 seconds.

edited from http://www.npr.org and http://amidonmusic.com:

Sam Amidon, from Brattleboro, VT, approaches old time music from a northern perpective.

Shape-note singing is a communal form of music that began in New England 200 years ago, mostly from townsfolk without any musical training. It’s music that surrounded Amidon during his childhood in Vermont.

“These are some of the melodies that are the deepest-seated for me,” Amidon says. “That was the world I was born into. And in terms of the shape-note music being a social tradition, it was something that happened, yeah, once a month in our town. You know, it would move to different people’s houses, sometimes ours. It was a potluck on a Saturday afternoon.”

Now, in a new album titled Bright Sunny South, Amidon reimagines the songs his parents sang. Amidon says he takes an old tune that gets stuck in his head and ends up adding something new.

Amidon: I learned “As I Roved Out”  from Bruce Greene, and his wife Loy McWhirter. Bruce is a fiddle player who lives in North Carolina, and he went around eastern Kentucky in the early ’70s learning fiddle from guys who were 80 and 90 years old, who had learned their tunes from Confederate veterans and ex-slaves. He found — almost by accident — this whole swath of fiddle players that other folklorists had missed. Bruce and Loy are very deep musicians, and they have an album of a cappella ballads called Come Near My Love. It’s somewhere between Alan Lomax, John and Yoko, and Albert Ayler. It’s only their two voices, but the harmonies are really weird and beautiful, and they sing these seven or 10 verse ballads — really dark, long, strange murder ballads.

Dick Spottswood’s Desert Island Discs

Richard K. “Dick” Spottswood  is a musicologist and author who has catalogued and been responsible for the reissue of many thousands of recordings of vernacular music in the United States.  His masterwork, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893-1942 (University of Illinois Press, 1990), is a nine-volume listing of sound recordings by minority groups issued in the U.S. until 1942. He also edited and annotated the 15-volume LP series Folk Music in America for the Library of Congress, and contributed to books including Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music LCCN 2002-22360 and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919.  The following is a list of his desert island discs.

from http://www.bluesworld.com:

SKIP JAMES Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues (any version)
Best of all the hard times songs, and the compelling peak of a great perfomer’s art

STANLEY BROTHERS Will He Wait a Little Longer Mercury, 1955
Ralph’s composition for bluegrass quartet, with unexpected harmonies that make it glow

LOUIS ARMSTRONG King of the Zulus OKeh, 1926
After some inept comedy, LA plays one of the most memorably thoughtful solos of his career.

DENNIS McGEE Mon Chère Bébé Créole (My Creole Sweet Mama) Vocalion, 1929
Singing in Cajun French with twin fiddles–it’s a waltz drenched in the blues. Dennis McGee sang and played it for most of his long life.

DUKE ELLINGTON The Giddybug Gallop/Bakiff Victor, 1941
Two forgotten favorites back to back. “Giddybug Gallop” was a tour-de-force that served as overture to the short-lived musical Jump for Joy. “Bakiff” (like “Caravan”) was a piece of atmospheric orientalia that featured Ray Nance’s sweet, sweet violin.

SILVER LEAF QUARTET OF NORFOLK Lord I’m Troubled OKeh, 1930
My favorite acapella performance. William Thatch’s falsetto lead resonates with me in a deep place. I don’t have this and wish I did.

CLARENCE WILLIAMS BLUE FIVE New Orleans Hop Scop Blues OKeh, 1923
Hard core blues from composer George W. Thomas with an early boogie bass and Sidney Bechet playing his heart out on the soprano saxophone.

CARTER FAMILY In the Valley of the Shenandoah Bluebird, 1941
One of their least remembered and very best performances, with aggressive dissonances in the vocal hamonies.

WADE MAINER Look On and Cry Bluebird, 1938
Clyde Moody sings lead on another tragic favorite. One verse duplicates the epitaph:

Remember, friends, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so you will be
So get prepared to follow me

GEORGE TOREY Married Woman Blues/Lonesome Man Blues ARC, 1937
Another twofer, and my favorite voice & guitar blues record. Nothing we do is perfect, but either side of this disc comes close.

BOB WILLS Crippled Turkey ARC, 1936
Bob’s guitarist plays major chords to his minor key melody, and the tension builds. Some of my friends think this record is amateurishly bumbling, but others get it just fine.

This an arbitrary list, without any classical music or postwar country, r&b or jazz. Ask me again in a month and I might not make the same choices, but I’d make others like them.

Rough Carpenters

Rough Carpenters (CD)  by The Black Twig Pickers

The Black Twig Pickers will appear at the Rendezvous, in Turners Falls, MA on Sunday, June 16. Please look here.

review of “Rough Carpenters” from http://www.tinymixtapes.com:

Two voices trace a melody through the air in unison, sparking miniature harmonies in their moments of divergence. They synchronize into a close lead — a Melody Plus, now with double the impact. This telepathic duet is known as a jugalbandi (literally “twins entwined”) in the Indian classical tradition. Fall deep into a skilled jugalbandi and you’ll come to perceive only one voice, nuanced to death, split across the room into two bodies.

On “I’ll Play The High Card, You Play The Ace,” our second taste of The Black Twig Pickers’ forthcoming Rough Carpenters, fiddlers Mike Gangloff and Sally Anne Morgan treat us to an Appalachian jugalbandi. The string duo winds through the traditional folk melody as one voice, their conjoined runs and double stops rising over a backbone of banjo and fingerpicked guitar.

Assertions of East meeting West aren’t so far-fetched here, given that the BTPs share half their personnel with drone/raga/psych explorers Pelt. If that ensemble overtly bridges cultures by deriving song structures and instrumentation from the carnatic tradition, the BTPs keep things closer to home, achieving a back-porch liveness gilded with a few jewels of the Baroda Palace.

The Black Twig Pickers have blurred the line between the modern and the Lomax for eight albums and counting, channeling traditional tunes through their experience with more “out”-minded musics. In the case of “I’ll Play the High Card, You Play the Ace,” considerations of the music’s lineage or geographical origin pale in the light of that Melody Plus: twin fiddles entwined for three wholly pleasurable minutes.

Snake Chapman

from “The North American Traditions Series: Its Rationale,” by Mark Wilson (General Editor):

One of the most intriguing musicians in our series is Owen “Snake” Chapman, a fiddler in his late ‘seventies from Canada, Kentucky. Snake knows as many melodies as any fiddler I have ever met, ranging from very old tunes learned from his father to modern “bluegrass” fare. Growing up in an isolated mountain hollow, Owen developed an astonishingly accurate ear for the nuances of a fiddle tune and can diagnose very sharply the manner in which the playing of certain popular fiddle tunes have evolved over his own lifetime.

Among all of the melodies Snake plays, the most astonishing are the tunes he learned as a boy from his elderly father, “Doc” Chapman, who had been born in 1850 (“Doc”‘s own father, according to family tradition, split logs with Abraham Lincoln before the family resettled in Kentucky). Snake can still picture his father’s playing in his mind’s eye and reproduce it, pointing out its many special features.

To hear Owen play an melancholy old melody like “Rock Andy” gives one the eerie sense of having a little window open before one directly onto the nineteenth century.  And the lyrics that have been passed along with “Rock Andy” only increase ones sense of historical penetration:

 
“Ole Massa sol’ me, Speculator bought me, took me to Raleigh to learn how to rock candy.”

 

“Rocking Candy” was an old slave dance; in Snake’s family, it has become transmogrified to “Rock Andy.” Verses like this were reported in antebellum reports of slave “corn huskings” (see Roger Abrahams’ “Singing the Master” for contemporaneous reports of these activities).

Musically, “Rock Andy”–and almost all the other tunes that “Doc” Chapman played–seem sui generis to nineteenth century America: they represent musical forms that unlike anything familiar in either Scots-Irish tradition or contemporary Southern fiddling. Rather we seem in “Rock Andy” to witness the emergence of a new transitional strain in music, born on American soil through the cooperation of black and white musicians.

The Legends and the Lost

edited excerpt of review of  Tony Russell’s “Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost,” by Keith Chandler (http://www.mustrad.org.uk):

“Country Music Originals” takes the form of a chronologically-arranged series of brief biographies to which are attached even briefer playlists indicating where to hear tracks in the CD format by each of the chosen artists.  Practically every entry features at least one photograph of the named performer, and in addition we get the bonus of further contextual images such as 78 rpm record labels, song folio covers, advertising copy, and facsimilies of newspaper articles (regrettably at times, as that on page 127, lacking details of provenance).

Mr. Russell appends a postscript  to the biography of Ed Haley, a blind fiddler born in West Virginia in 1884 whose stylistic influence was widespread among many younger players throughout both that and adjoining states in which Haley travelled widely. He never recorded for any of the commercial companies, and his aural legacy lies in a series of home recordings (more than a hundred of which are extant) produced, it has always been assumed, simply for personal satisfaction.

Russell reveals (pages 79-80) that ‘recent research in West Virginia newspapers provides grounds for questioning’ that assumption, and offers an extract of an advertisement discovered in The Charleston Gazette of 27 September 1930 : ‘if interested, either as a seller or user, in 10-inch double-faced Phonograph Records, made by him, price 35 cents each, write Ed Haley Co., Huntington, W. Va.’  This would have involved a labour-intensive process, seated before a recording machine and playing through each selection as many times as were required to fill any outstanding orders.

Russell generally shows a nice turn of phrase which may be at odds with that demanded by strict academic publications, but which sits well in a volume that needs to exhibit the broadest possible appeal.  The instruments of Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, for instance, ‘pierce the murk of surface noise like a lighthouse beam on a dark night’ (page 24); while of Hoyt Ming’s group he writes (on page 122), ‘The hour or so they spent making records in the Memphis Auditorium would buy them a time-share at Immortality Court …’

Each individual entry in the book is made up from sundry component parts.  Among these might be basic details of recording and other performance experiences, quotes from either the musicians themselves or those who knew them, partial transcriptions of a song or skit, the whole overlaid with Russell’s perceptive and insightful analysis.  One excellent example of this may be found when he discusses (on page 107) the vocal interjections to be heard on many of the items recorded by G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter:

The effect of these homely devices is to relocate the mythlike narratives of half-forgotten seductions and murders in the known present: to ground them in the familiar geographical, social, and ethical landscape of ’20s Appalachia.  That this terrain was itself shifting uneasily beneath the pressures of modern life was all to the point: their tales, Grayson and Whitter might have argued, were, in their essence, for all time.

Sam Amidon: Putney, VT 6/18/13

Sam Amidon is celebrating the release of his newest album “Bright Sunny South” with a concert at the Next Stage in Putney, Vermont on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, starting at 7:00 pm.  Sam will be accompanied by multi-instrumentalist wizard Chris Valataro.  Alessi’s Ark will open. Tickets, $18/16, are available online at Brown Paper Tickets and in person at Everyone’s Bookstore, Elliot Street, Brattleboro
NEXT STAGE – 15 Kimball Hill, Putney VT

For more information please contact Peter Amidon at 802-257-1006 or amidonpeter@gmail.com.

Sam Amidon was born and raised in Brattleboro, Vermont by folk musicians Peter and Mary Alice Amidon. He has released three albums of radically re-worked folksongs: “But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted,” recorded at his then-home of Harlem in 2006 with Thomas Bartlett; followed by “All Is Well” in 2008 and “I See The Sign” in 2010, both recorded in Iceland with producer Valgeir Sigursson.  His upcoming “Bright Sunny South” his first album with the prestigious Nonesuch record label.

Sam started on fiddle at the age of three and by eleven had formed a band called Popcorn Behavior, with childhood friend Thomas Bartlett and younger brother Stefan, to play New England fiddle tunes. They toured internationally, gathering attention from NPR, CNN and The Boston Globe and releasing five albums by the time they graduated from pretend high school which they did not really go to (at the time it was called “homeschooling”).

By 17, Sam had taken up the banjo and fallen in love with free jazz, Miles Davis, early indie rock, drone minimalism, mountain ballads and Buster Keaton films. But it wasn’t until he moved to New York City in 2002 that he began to play and experience first-hand all of these other kinds of things.

“I moved to New York to get away from folk music and to start playing the music that I was listening to. To try improvising, to play in rock bands, whatever and now what I do largely is these folk tunes. I guess, partly, that singing these songs was just comforting. You’re new to New York, you’re singing these lonesome tunes, it feels good. But, at the same time, you have to pay attention to what people respond to. You have to find what’s meaningful to you, and you find out what that is by being with friends. I found that this is what I could bring to the table, to other musicians, to Nico, to Thomas, to Bill Frisell, all these collaborations. The element I can bring that is meaningful for a musical dialogue has been folk songs.”

Amidon’s particular gift is not to compose new songs, but to rework and repurpose traditional melodies into a striking new form that makes them feel very much his own. He delivers these songs in a hauntingly plainspoken voice, one that encompasses sadness and stoicism, vulnerability and wisdom. As Pitchfork has said, “his interpretations are so singular that it stops mattering how (or if) they existed before.”

Sam has toured throughout the United States, the UK, Europe and Australia, performing solo and collaborating with a myriad of artists including Nico Muhly, Thomas Bartlett, Beth Orton, Shahzad Ismaily, Glen Hansard, and Bill Frisell.

Sam’s NPR Morning Edition interview (broadcast last Friday)

Sam’s new music video (with Chris Vatalaro)

Review of Sam’s May 24, 2013 Bush Hall concert (in London)

Great Sam Amidon interview with Tiny Mix Tapes

Sam and Chris live in Australia

Reviews of Bright Sunny South

Honest Jon’s/EMI Archive

from http://www.guardian.co.uk:

EMI starting building factories in Middlesex, England in 1906, when it was still called The Gramophone and Typewriter Company. In the 60s, its factories covered 150 acres and it employed 14,000 people. Today, however, the factories and recording studios are gone or in the process of being demolished. EMI’s Hayes workforce is in single figures, all of them employed in the company’s last remaining building, a vast archive.

From the outside, the archive looks as melancholy as the rest of Hayes. Inside, it’s just bizarre, an apparently endless steel vault containing not just records and master tapes, but aged recording equipment, gramophones, memorabilia and files of press clippings. “They’ve kept everything,” notes Mark Ainley, co-founder of Honest Jon’s, the acclaimed record label born out of the legendary Notting Hill record shop.

Ainley estimates he has spent around 20 months working in the archive’s temperature-controlled environs, sorting through shelf after shelf of forgotten 78s, recorded across the world in the early years of the 20th century. Honest Jon’s has become famous in recent years  for digging up and releasing impossibly recherché music. However, even Ainley seems slightly overwhelmed by what was lurking on the Hayes archive shelves.

He has found recordings of Tamils impersonating motorised transport in 1906, Bengali beggars singing and utterly chilling records from the first world war, intended to inform the British public of the different bells that would be rung in the event of a poison gas attack. “It’s basically a load of records on a shelf without very much other information. They’ve never been inventoried, they’re not even stored by artist or country, but catalogue prefix, so there’s nothing for it but to just go through all of them, just listen to everything.” He sighs. “It’s daft.”

 

Massachusetts Walking Music Tour: 6/15-6/29/13

from http://masswalkingtour.org:

Since 2010, co-founders Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards have organized a non-profit bipedal (walking) concert tour of Massachusetts in support of arts and culture in towns throughout the state. Each free community concert collaborates with local artists, musicians, educational programs, trail managers and land trust groups to highlight both artistic diversity and recreational land use. With each visit, a community has pulled together and taken part in a dialogue which serves to strengthen local investment in the arts.

 by David Rainville (from http://www.recorder.com):

Some musical groups take private jets from show to show. Others ride in posh tour buses, with all the comforts of home. Some fledgling acts travel in minivans packed like sardine tins.

Then there’s Mark Mandeville and Raianne Richards. They travel in comfortable shoes.

“We carry our instruments, our gear, food, everything, on our backs,” said Mandeville. “We don’t have a support vehicle or anything; we’re really roughing it.”

When they’re not beating feet on the path, they’re tapping them in time to the tunes they play.

What kind of tunes?

 “It’s a bluegrassy, peach-eating kind of vibe,” said Richards. “We play fiddles and guitars, banjos, ukuleles, tin-whistles and harmonicas.”

Richards, 27, and Mandeville, 32, have made music together for about 10 years, cutting albums as a folk duo, as solo artists, and as part of the group The Accident That Led Me to the World.

In 2010, they founded the Massachusetts Walking Tour. Each year, they tackle a new trail, joined by different musicians. Some nights, they pitch tents right outside their venue, others, they camp out trail-side.

From June 15 to 29, the tour will wind its way down the New England National Scenic Trail from Royalston to Longmeadow, playing free shows at small venues along the way, and they might just be cutting through your neighborhood.

Black Twig Pickers: Turners Falls, MA 6/16/13

On Sunday, June 16th at The Rendezvous in Turners Falls The Black Twig Pickers will be joined by Aaron Rosenblum, Matt Krefting and Byron Coley for an interesting mix of old time and new music. The Black Twig Pickers took 4th place  yesterday at the Mount Airy Bluegrass & Old-Time Fiddlers Convention yesterday, with their banjoist Nathan Bowles taking 2nd.

Details of the event may be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/145479612303189/

Robert Crumb Reminisces

from http://www.crumbproducts.com:

Robert Crumb: One of the bits of foolishness that I became involved in was the music business. After that brief interlude living in the ecstatic now of the late sixties, I returned once again to my maudlin nostalgia for the dear dead past — especially the music of the twenties.

I began again to collect old 78 rpm records in earnest. Collecting had always been my addiction of choice, and I became hooked again. I started spending a lot of time, energy and money hunting for those old jazz, blues and country records from the twenties. So while I had to force myself to keep drawing comics, what I truly enjoyed was going for adventures into uncharted territories and pawing through piles of junk and dank, dark second-hand stores.

The good records were few and far between, finding a stack of good ones all in one place was a euphoric, thrilling experience, but rare, of course. Mostly you found them one by one, through days and weeks of searching and asking around.

This love of old music led to friendships with other young musical idealists. There was the old time music scene; a lot of hippie types who played old American country fiddle tunes, blues, ragtime, and Irish music. I could plinkety-plink along on my little toy instrument, a quaint little 1920s banjo-uke I found at the Alameda Flee Market.

My music skills were very limited, but playing music with other people was very relaxing, generally, than just sitting around getting stoned, and every once in a while the music would sort of come together and sound almost like one a’those old records. That was always kind of exciting.

Over the next several years, this band developed a bit, took in a few more musicians, made three LPs for Yazoo in New York, played a lot of clubs, bars, folk festivals, weddings and parties and even went on a national “tour” of sorts in 1976. We settled on the name, “R.Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders,” and of course I was the front man. I had the name that would bring people to see us (Yeah, they stared at us more than they listened, I do believe.)

The clubs were the worst… it was excruciating for me… the only advantage was every now and then there’d be some friendly female who would let me maul her. Weddings and parties were better. The people all knew each other, and our music helped create a convivial social atmosphere, something you don’t get with loud rock music.

Another one of our “venues” in the early days was the street. Jeeziz that was a grim scene… Fisherman’s Warf, Union Square in San Francisco. Armstrong played the musical saw, and whenever the crowds of passerby were ignoring us too much, somebody’d say, “okay, Armstrong, get out the saw…” it never failed… it stopped them cold… they’d crowd around and gape with wonder at a guy playing a saw… they took snapshots, asked questions… they were highly fascinated… It was enough to make you very cynical… Armstrong could be playing the most beautiful ragtime or blues masterpiece with great feeling and they’d just walk on by… we were just so much shrubbery… but then he’d take out that saw, and you’d get fifty people tossing money. “Okay, Armstrong, get out the saw!” I mean, you had to get their attention somehow!

Ephemeral String Band: 6/9/13, 7/13/13

This is a note to say if you’re free TOMORROW NIGHT (!) we will be playing out at the wonderful Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA.  The Dream Away Lodge has been a Berkshire mountains legend for more than 90 years; rumored to have been a speakeasy during the Great Depression, this two hundred year old farmhouse at the edge of October Mountain State Forest is renowned for its larger-than-life founder, Mama Maria Frasca and her three musical daughters, and a colorful history, rich in music and local mythology.

The 1975 visitation by Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Allen Ginsberg led to the Dream Away’s prominent role in part of Dylan’s epic film Renaldo and Clara – enhancing an already unmatched reputation as one of Berkshire County’s best loved and most closely held hilltown secrets.  So come on out!  Have some dinner and enjoy some fine, free old time music and country song.  We’ll be joined by a special bass player, mister Max Wareham, complete with plaid shirt and beard.

The show is at 8 p.m.  It’s free!  Bring friends!  The Dream Away Lodge is located at 1342 County Rd, Becket, MA 01223. For more information check out the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/350423485079566/?ref=3

We’d also like to announce an upcoming July show.  We will be having a double-bill with our friends the Ivy Leaf from Boston!  They are a lovely acoustic band that brings you sweet Irish traditional music and song.  The show will be at the beloved Montague Bookmill, 440 Greenfield Road, Montague, MA, July 13th, 7-9 p.m.  Check out the Ivy Leaf at: http://www.ivyleafmusic.com/

Third Man Records

Charlie Poole with the Highlanders

new from Tompkins Square Records, reviewed at http://www.countysales.com:

Ernest Stoneman (#5)

from Reed Martin:

The Stoneman brood was so huge that when each kid got old enough to hold a stringed instrument, they were encouraged to sit and play string music with their parents.   When they moved to Maryland, most all of them played music.  Pop didn’t have any skills except music and carpentry, when he could find work,  so when there was a chance to make a little money, he and the oldest kids would go play music jobs.

 
Pretty soon the younger kids got to be good musicians, too.  Pretty soon the Stonemans had three bands all within their family.  The “A” band featured Pop with Scotty on fiddle.  If the job did not pay enough to interest the “A” band, then you  got the next oldest musicians, known as the “B” band.   If you had hardly any money at all, you got the kids who were able to play, but not top notch…..the “C” band.

In the history of old time music how many other families had THREE working bands within their own family?

Evidently they got a job to play at some big “do” in Laurel, Maryland.  The “A” band was to sit on a hay wagon and play into microphones.  Somewhere during the evening they took a break, and Pop introduced the band members…….”This is ______, my son on bass, this is my daughter ________on mandolin, this is my daughter________playin’ the banjo…..”

And some guy yells out  “You sure got a lot of kids!”

And Pop yells back, “Hell — hundreds of times we never got nothin’.”

The Johnson City Sessions

“The Johnson City Sessions: “Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music?” (Bear Family 4 CD and booklet)

edited from http://www.johnsoncitypress.com:

In 1928, just as their fellow musicians had a year before in Bristol, men and women came in from the farms and down from the mountains to Johnson City. The lure was money, a chance at fame, or, at the very least, an opportunity to have their voices recorded on a 78 rpm record for posterity. The Johnson City sessions of 1928-29 that resulted may not have been the big bang of country music, but they were a major aftershock.

 
In 1928, Frank Walker of Columbia Records was hoping lightning would strike twice in the Tri-Cities area. The Bristol Sessions recorded by Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company were tremendously successful, making stars of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.

 
Walker put an ad in the Johnson City Chronicle asking “Can you sing or play Old-Time music?” “Musicians of unusual ability” were invited to “call upon Mr. Walker or Mr. Brown of the Columbia Phonograph Company at 334 East Main Street.” That address was the location of a defunct lumber company at what is now Colonial Way near WJHL.

 
“The Johnson City Sessions were better organized,” Ted Olson, professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, said.

 

 

“There was more advertising, more scouting, more capital put into promotions up front.”
The ad ran three times in late September and early October. Olson said that more singers and musicians participated in the Johnson City Sessions than in the Bristol Sessions.

 

 
“They saw the ads and made it to the tryouts on Oct. 13, 1928, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The recording sessions were held over four days, Monday, Oct. 15 to Thursday, Oct. 18. A few of the musicians who saw the ad and heard it was happening had already recorded for Ralph Peer,” he said, “but most of those who recorded in Johnson City were not part of the Bristol Sessions.”

 
Among them were the Roane County Ramblers from the Kingston-Harriman area outside of Knoxville, who became one of the biggest bands to emerge from the Johnson City Sessions of 1928. Charlie Bowman of Gray — who recorded for Walker along with his brothers and sisters — was “a real success story,” Olson said.  While many of the musicians who recorded in Johnson City lived in East Tennessee, he pointed out, some of the musicians probably traveled from the Greensboro-Burlington area of North Carolina or from the Corbin, Ky., area.

“Africa and the Blues”

from http://www.upress.state.ms.us:

Africa and the Blues, by Gerhard Kubik

A study of the geneology of blues music encompassing forty years of fieldwork done in Africa, the U.S., and elsewhere

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues.

Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt.

Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were “European” in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik’s insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions.

With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world.

Gerhard Kubik is a professor in the department of ethnology and African studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Since 1983 he has been affiliated with the Center for Social Research of Malawi, Zomba. He is a permanent member of the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London.

H. Wylie: “Come By Here”

from http://www.nytimes.com and http://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197406:

Regional Song Sampler: The Southeast

Alabama, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Nearing 40 and nearly broke, ousted from his last job as an English professor, a folklore buff named Robert Winslow Gordon set out in the spring of 1926 from his temporary home on the Georgia seacoast, lugging a hand-cranked cylinder recorder and searching for songs in the nearby black hamlets.

One particular day, Mr. Gordon captured the sound of someone identified only as H. Wylie, singing a lilting, swaying spiritual in the key of A. The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble, calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, “Come by here.”

With that wax cylinder, the oldest known recording of a spiritual titled for its recurring plea, Mr. Gordon set into motion a strange and revealing process of cultural appropriation, popularization and desecration. “Come By Here,” a song deeply rooted in black Christianity’s vision of a God who intercedes to deliver both solace and justice, by the 1960s became the pallid pop-folk sing-along “Kumbaya.” Click below to listen.

• “Come by Here,” sung in Sea Islands Dialect (Gullah) by H. Wylie. Recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1926. This is the earliest known recording of the song that came to be known as “Kumbayah.” Noise on the wax cylinder recording obscures the song in the middle. No location given, but Wylie was probably from coastal South Carolina or Georgia. (audio)
• “The Southern Soldier,” a Civil War song sung by Minta Morgan. Recorded by John A. Lomax, 1937. (audio)
• “I Ain’t Got Nobody Much,” composed by Spencer Williams, sung by Marion Harris. Victor, 1916. Spencer Williams was a performer and composer born and educated in New Orleans, Louisiana. Like a number of African American artists of his era, he moved to Chicago to pursue his career. Better known today as “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” this was one of his most popular songs. (audio)
• “Are You from Dixie?” performed by Buster Ezell. Recorded by John Wesley Work, III, 1941. This song by New York composer George L. Cobb with lyrics by Polish-born Jack Yellen is one of many popular songs about “Dixie” written primarily for Northern and Midwestern stages in the early twentieth century (1916). Here, blues artist Buster Ezell, from Georgia gives his southern take on the song. (audio)
• “What a Time,” performed by the Golden Gate Quartet. Recorded by Willis James, Fort Valley Georgia, 1943. The singers were from the tidewater of Virginia. This song about World War II was performed during the war at the Fort Valley African American music festival. At this time during the war, German U boats were sinking vessels off of the United States coast, so the song ends with a verse about Hitler trying to rule the seas. Singers Willie Johnson and Orlandus Wilson both served in the Navy in the war in the Pacific. (audio)
• “Carrie,” performed by Vera Hall. Adell Hall Ward, known as Vera Hall, worked as a cook and laundress in Livingston, Alabama, but was sought after by folklorists because of her singing ability and repertoire of sacred and secular songs. This recording was made by John A. and Ruby Lomax in 1939. (audio)
• “Carolina,” by A.E. Blackmar, (no date, ca. 1865). A.E. Blackmar was a composer of patriotic music for the Confederacy during the Civil War. This song is about the destruction in South Carolina, and hope for a better future. (sheet music)
• “Hesitation Blues,” sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925. This blues song has many variations and was both published and performed by many artists. Folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford of North Carolina learned and documented folksongs throughout the Southeast. This song includes a verse about the boll weevil, which was causing widespread devastation to cotton crops in the early 1920s. (audio)
• “The Old Ninty Seven,” sung by Fred J. Lewey. Recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in Concord, North Carolina, 1925. The Southern Fast Mail train number 97 derailed near Danville, Virginia in 1903, falling from a trestle bridge. The song, with several people claiming authorship, became the first song copyright suit to be appealed before the Supreme Court. Folklorist Gordon testified during the initial litigation. (audio)
• Dale Jett and the Carter Singers perform a Carter Family Tribute, performed at the Library of Congress, 2005. Dale Jett is the son of Janette Carter and the grandson of A.P and Sara Carter of the Carter Family performers. (webcast)
• “Little David,” performed by the Halloway High School Quartet of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Recorded by John Wesley Work, III, 1940. (audio)
• “Roll on Buddy,” performed by Aunt Molly Jackson. The singer is from Clay County, Kentucky. Recorded by Alan Lomax, 1939. (audio)
• Gandydancer: String Band Music from West Virginia, performance at the Library of Congress, 2007. (webcast)
• “Sprinkle Coal Dust on my Grave,” performed by Orville J. Jenks. Recorded by George Korson in in Welch, West Virginia, 1940. (audio)(this is the audio link. Use the montage if it is available).
• “Hunting Song,” sung by John Josh, Richard Osceola, Robert Osceola, and Barfield Johns. Seminole song recorded by Corita Doggett Corse and Robert Cornwall, July 25, 1940. (audio)
• “First Time I Come Into This Countree,” sung by an unidentified Bahamian American quartet. Recorded by Stetson Kennedy, in Key West, Florida, January 23, 1940. Bahamian American settlers of southern Florida formed the largest population of free African Americans in the United States before emancipation. (audio)
• “Duermate mi niño,” a Cuban lullaby sung by Zenaida Beuron. Recorded by Stetson Kennedy in Tampa, Florida, August 23, 1939. (audio)
• “Merce,” sung in Spanish by Adela Martinez with band. A Cuban dance song. Recorded by Herbert Halpert in Tampa, Florida, June 21, 1939. (audio)
• “Misirlou,” a traditional love song sung in Greek by Jennie Castrounis. Recorded by Alton Morris and Carita Doggett Corse in Tarpon Springs, Florida, October 4,1939. (audio)
• “Halimuhfack,” sung by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. She describes to folklorist Herbert Halpert how she learned the song and how she collected songs. Hurston was born in Alabama and grew up in Florida. She documented African American songs, stories, and lore throughout the south and in the Caribbean. Recorded by Herbert Halpert and Stetson Kennedy in Florida, June 18, 1939.
• “My Old Kentucky Home,” sung by Edward Favor. E. Berliner’s Gramophone recording, 1897. This song by Stephen Foster is the state song of Kentucky, famously sung at the opening of the Kentucky Derby. In 1986 the Kentucky Legislature officially changed the offensive word “darkies” to “people.”

Little Sadie

by Lyle Lofgren

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, January 2002)

Outlaw as Folk Hero is an old theme in the Anglo-American tradition, probably dating from before the Robin Hood stories. America developed a second idea, that of Outlaw as Psychopath, a truly Bad Man. Stagolee and John Hardy come to mind, as well as Lee Brown, the narrator of today’s story.

Versions of this song were found throughout the south, particularly in Appalachia and the Ozarks. The tunes vary, but the story is remarkably stable. Lee Brown shoots his woman, runs away, is caught, tried, and gets a long sentence. He has no remorse, other than that he is jailed. One writer says this song was very popular as early as 1885, but I couldn’t find the source of that claim.

There are lots of towns in America with the names given in the song, but Thomasville and Jericho, North Carolina are only 60 miles apart, which make them prime candidates for locale. There’s no reason to believe this song is literal history, though. A cursory search shows no information on a real Lee Brown, or any evidence that the song describes an actual murder.

Clarence Ashley, from East Tennessee, recorded his version in 1928, but a later recording is on Smithsonian/Folkways CD SF40029/30, Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962. Ashley tuned his banjo to gDGCD (5^th to 1^st), sometimes called “mountain modal” tuning. He called it “sawmill tuning,” perhaps because the unfinished sound of the resulting open-string chord sounds like a large circular saw cutting through a log.

Classical European music concentrated on major and minor scales, because they were amenable to easy harmonies when used with orchestral instruments. Other scales, generically called “modal,” which were on an equal footing with the classical scales in early music (such as Gregorian chants), survived in the remote mountains of America.

Bobby Patterson Reminisces

In 1972, Bobby Patterson built his first recording studio, created a record label and started recording and producing albums in Galax, VA, first as Mountain Records and later as Heritage Records. He recorded Tommy Jarrell’s “June Apple” LP.  Here are some of his memories from “Traditional Musicians of the Central Blue Ridge.”

SQUARE DANCE: MONTAGUE, MA 6/1/13

Jennifer Steckler will call a square dance on Saturday, June 1, 2013, from 7 – 10 pm at the Montague Grange, 34 Main St., Montague Center, MA.

Music by Phil Watson, Jen Smith, and Zac Johnson.  Admission: $5.

“Turn Me Loose”

“Turn Me Loose: Outsiders of Old Time Music,” edited by Frank Fairfield (Pawn/Tompkins Square CD)

from http://www.tompkinssquare.com and http://www.dustygroove.com:

Frank Fairfield curates another reissue of 78 rpm records – this time with the help of a few of his collector friends. The collection focuses on some of the most seldom acknowledged varieties of Anglo-American vernacular music. You’ll hear unusual performers, uncommon instrumentation and great fiddlers from California to Ohio, New Mexico to West Virginia. Forget “Americana”, this collection shows Anglo-American down-home music as it actually was and in many cases (although largely unrecognized) still is. With painstaking audio restoration by the great Michael Kieffer (Origin Jazz Library).

A great little set that really lives up to the promise of its title – and it’s claim to offer up “commercial recordings of Anglo-European American vernacular music that challenges the stereotypes”! The set’s a wealth of obscure 78rpm recordings that really defy genre convention – and which show that the 20s was easily one of the most experimental times in American music – a point when later common styles were really quite new, and still very fluid – bits of later blues, folk, or country intermingling equally – often from sources that you wouldn’t expect a decade or two later.

These tracks are all acoustic, but feature really inventive instrumentation – especially when modes of a generation or two before are pushed into new phrasings with decidedly (then) modern flavors. As usual with these Tompkins Square reissues, the sound quality is great – and the package offers up some good notes to help situate the music too.

1. Wagoner – Bob Skiles Four Old Timers
2. Don’t Get One Woman On Your Mind – Willard Hodgin
3. Bacon And Cabbage – Blind Joe Mangrum and Fred Shriver
4. The Whale Did, I Know He Did – Mustard and Gravy
5. Chicken Reel – Tweedy Brothers
6. Ladies’ Quadrille
7. Way Down Yonder Blues – Lemuel Turner
8. Money Musk Medley – John Batzell
9. Down In Tennessee Blues – Homer Davenport
10. Caliope – Lewis Brothers
11. Mythological Blues – Ernest Rogers
12. Dill Pickles Rag – McLaughlin’s Old Time Melody Makers
13. Arkansas Traveller / Turkey In The Staw – Alphus McFadyen
14. Mister Johnson Turn Me Aloose – Southern Georgia Highballers

SQUARE DANCE: Jamaica Plain, MA 6/9/13

It’s square dance time again on Sunday, June 9th at Spontaneous Celebrations. (45 Danforth St., Jamaica Plain, MA) and this’ll be the last one for the summer!  (No Dance in July or August!)

Will Mentor’s going to call, just as he did at our very first dance, one year ago. Old time music will be provided by Hoot and Holler, a local four-piece band, and I’m anticipating some lemonade.

This dance is starting at 7:30, not 7, due to the light, the weather and people’s dinners.

$5.

Country Music Humorists and Comedians

Country Music Humorists and Comedians, by Loyal Jones (University of Illinois Press)

from http://press.illinois.edu:

An exhaustive reference detailing the mirth and music of country music humorists and comedians

This volume is an encyclopedia of country music performers who have used comedy as a central component of their presentation. Loyal Jones offers a conversational and informative biographical sketch of each performer, often including a sample of the musician’s humor, a recording history, and amusing anecdotal tidbits. In an entertaining style, Jones covers performers throughout the twentieth century, from such early stars of vaudeville and radio barn dances as the Skillet Lickers and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, to regulars on Hee Haw and the Grand Old Opry, continuing to current comedians such as the Austin Lounge Lizards, Ray Stevens, and Jeff Foxworthy.

This comprehensive, readable reference opens with a broad introductory essay on country humor, discussing such topics as stock comic figures, venues for comedic performance, and benchmark performers. Throughout the volume, Jones places each performer squarely in the context of the country music community and its performing traditions. Readers will learn a good deal about musical instruments, yodeling, life on the road, the cultural milieu of these performers, and the roots of country music humor.

“If Cratis Williams is the father of Appalachian Studies and Helen Lewis its mother, than I reckon Loyal Jones would have to be considered the midwife of it all. . . . This book reflects not only his disarming sense of humor, but also his meticulous attention to voluminous details, his considerable scholarship, and his substantial wisdom.”–Appalachian Heritage

“Southern humor, rural comedy and its practitioners are brilliantly showcased.”–The Nashville Musician

“A treasure trove of information. . . . Will make a wonderful reference book for years to come.”–Bluegrass Unlimited

“The importance of the subject emphasized by Jones is unquestionable. Humor has been an indispensable ingredient of country music entertainment and is in fact a major force in its worldwide success. This volume is insightful, informative, and entertaining.”–Bill C. Malone, author of Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class

“This stimulating book is a significant contribution to several fields. Students of country music, American history, performing arts, minstrel heritage, and the roots of comedy as it related to various subcultures of the American panorama will all want the detailed information only this author can provide. This book is one of a kind.”–Ron Thomason, founder of the bluegrass band Dry Branch Fire Squad

Loyal Jones is the author of nine books and dozens of articles on Appalachian culture, including Laughter in Appalachia: A Festival of Southern Mountain Humor. For twenty-three years he was director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College.

Short Film of Gid Tanner

Gid Tanner performing at his home, 1955. Original film and audio recorded (seperately) by Joe Young, 1955. Video/Audio sync by Matt Downer, 2013. Only known footage of this legendary entertainer.

We are extremely grateful to musician, scholar, and archivist Matt Downer of Chattanooga, TN for tracking down this footage and doing the work to make it widely available for the first time in history.

by Matt Downer:

I was working on the “Great Southern Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention” documentary and contacted Russ Tanner to see if their family might have any photos of Gid I could use. We talked several times and I asked him about if there were any home recordings that existed of Gid fiddling. He told me there were…… and there was also a video.

This blew me away – video of Gid Tanner fiddling sounded too good to be true. He said it was originally filmed on 8mm and had no audio. No matter, I say, I’d love to have a look at it.

A couple of weeks later, the dvd is delivered. Like a child on Christmas morning, I tore into the package and sat transfixed as one of the finest entertainers ever in the business silently sawed, laughed and clowned around in his living room one afternoon back in 1955. Earl Johnson was on there as well, with his sons beside him on guitar and banjo. Earl (Johnson) even backs Gid up on banjo on one tune.

The speed of the video was an issue – it played very fast. I had nothing to go on and originally just estimated what I thought looked right for the playing speed. I called Russ again when I thought I might have it pretty close to real-time speed. He had some more news for me – there was a seperate audio recording from that same day. He said some folks had tried to match it up with the video in the past, but had no luck. I asked him to send me the audio and I would do my best to sync it up.

The song “Tanner’s Boarding House” (labeled on the disc as “Birmingham Special” and featuring a healthy dose of “G-Rag”) was a logical place to start. I’ve played that one a bunch and knew the words, so knew what singing to look for on the video. When I found the video segment where I could tell he was singing the chorus, I knew I was in business.

Once I got the video speed altered and audio matched up it was truly special to sit there and watch and listen to Gid perform. It was honestly something I never thought existed, something I never expected to see. It was a very special experience to be the first person in more than 50 years to watch and listen to Gid perform live. It is an honor to share the video with friends, fiddlers and fans of old time music everywhere.

Thanks to Russ Tanner and the Tanner family for the materials and inspiration. Thanks to Gid Tanner for keeping the right energy in his music right up to the last time around.

Moonshine Holler

FRIDAY 5/31, 3-6PM:  Berkshire Organics 5th Anniv. Celebration -  Lettuce entertain you!  813 Dalton Division Rd., Pittsfield MA (formerly Burgner Farms) http://www.berkshireorganics.com.  Tasty treats & music – a big ole party!  Free.

WED. 6/12, 8-11PM:  The Lion’s Den, 30 Main St., Stockbridge MA. A great listening room with wonderful pub food and drink.
http://www.redlioninn.com/rli/lions_den.html.  No cover.

THURS. 6/20, 3-7PM:  The West Stockbridge MA Farmers’ Market, Harris St. http://www.weststockbridgefarmersmarket.org.

FRIDAY 6/21, 12-1PM:  Run Mountain (Fiddler Jim Burns + Moonshine Holler),Burlington VT City Hall Park on the BCA Plaza.  FREE!

SUN. 6/23, 8:30PM: The Dream Away Lodge, 1342 County Rd, Becket MA.  An atmosphere long-remembered. Dinner reservations suggested, but AOK to just come for the music!  Terrific room for live music.  http://www.thedreamawaylodge.com

SAT. 6/29, 6PM:  Tolland MA Town Green (Rt. 57) – Free outdoor picnic show!  Rain moves it to the Fire Station across from Town Hall.

J.P. Harris

First memory of J.P. Harris is of him singing and playing the banjo on “Let Me Fall,”  around a bonfire in turn-of-the-century West Townshend, VT.  In a few short years he left his mountainside cabin in Halifax, VT for the honky-tonk life in Nashville, TN, and the road.  We miss you, J.P.

excerpts from www.tinymixtapes.com interview with J.P. Harris:

Where are you from originally?

I’m from Montgomery, Ala. That’s where I was born. I grew up between there and a little town called Dadeville, Ala., which is where my family had been from for probably 200 or 300 years. They’ve been there since before the Revolutionary War… We moved away right before I turned seven and there was kind of a big economic downturn in Alabama; a lot of jobs lost and a bunch of big companies shut down.

My dad was in heavy construction and my mom was a teacher, and we ended up moving out to the middle of nowhere, this little town called Apple Valley in California, which I assure you had no apples whatever.

We moved out there, and my dad worked for a dirt-moving company, and then, in the summers and Christmastime and stuff when we were kids, for a couple of years, my folks would ship us back home. We kind of had this funny reality… We got transplanted abruptly out to the middle of nowhere in California, and then kind of chucked back and forth as kids.

Back to this teeny little town of Alabama and then back out to this weird little town in California and eventually we moved from there out to Las Vegas. My dad got a new job and [sighs] we were there until I was about 14 and then I decided it was time to split and I stuck a couple of T-shirts and I think, about $42, in ones, in my backpack and jumped on a Greyhound and took off and that was sort of the end of where I grew up officially.  [many years pass--ed.]

Eventually, deciding that I had never been to New England before, and an old girlfriend of mine had grown up there, and said, “Hey, let’s go. Let’s get ourselves up to New England for the summer and go check it out; Vermont is really nice.” “All right. Cool. Sounds like a plan.”

We rode trains and I worked my way through Texas and then rode straight up and over to Minnesota and over through Milwaukee, Chicago, whole bunch of other stuff, and got thrown off a train in New York by a couple of rail cops and hitch-hiked through the night the rest of the way and finally got to Vermont. We split about half a year later and then I just stuck around there until just recently, when I moved down to Nashville. I was there about 11 years.

Where was that in Vermont?

Down in southern Vermont. I lived in this little town called Halifax, which has a post office and a little elementary school and about 10 houses and that’s about it. It’s about 20 miles from the nearest city, which is a town called Brattleboro, about 20,000 people in it.

What did you do for a job down there?

Oh God, I did everything. I did all sorts of stuff in the first couple of years, just picking up work wherever I could. I was scrapping sheet metal, or I worked harvesting apples in a couple of different orchards, and running equipment, and I went from there. I eventually started getting into carpentry work when I was out in the Navajo reservation.

I just kind of worked my way up to that, working on old churches and barns and just got really obsessed with the old-fashioned way of building and doing all this. I was living in cabins that were way up on the logging roads… From the time that I moved to the Navajo reservation when I was about 16, until just this past September when I moved to Nashville, I hadn’t had any power or running water that entire time, so I was basically living in hunting camps the whole time.

But I made it work pretty good and I managed to get a business off the ground doing carpentry and restoration work. Did a lot of logging in the wintertime, running heavy equipment; basically anything people would pay me to do… I did pretty good for myself.

“Out of the Rock”

by Alan Lomax, from http://www.culturalequity.org:

When are we going to realize that the world’s richest resource is mankind itself, and that of all his creations, his culture is the most valuable? And by this I do not mean culture with a capital “C”- that body of art which the critics have selected out of the literate traditions of Western Europe –but rather the total accumulation of man’s fantasy and wisdom, taking form as it does in images, tunes, rhythms, figures of speech, recipes, dances, religious beliefs and ways of making love that still persist in full vitality in the folk and primitive places of our planet.

Every smallest branch of the human family at one time or another has carved its dreams out of the rock on which it has lived- true and sometimes pain- filled dreams, but still wholly appropriate to their particular bit of earth. Each of these ways of expressing emotion has been the handiwork of generations of unknown poets, musicians and human hearts.

Now, we of the jets, the wireless and the atom blast are on the verge of sweeping completely off the globe what unspoiled folklore is left, at least wherever it cannot quickly conform to the success-­motivated standards of our urban- conditioned consumer economy. What was once an ancient tropical garden of immense color and variety is in danger of being replaced by a comfortable but sterile and sleep- inducing system of cultural super-highways- with just one type of diet and one available kind of music.

La Musique de la Maison

La Musique De La Maison - Women And Home Music In South Louisiana (Origin Jazz Library CD)

from http://www.venerablemusic.com:

“La Musique de la Maison” is a rich and historic collection of rare French ballads sung by Cajun and Creole women. Many people are now familiar with the French dance music of Southwest Louisiana, but in there exists a parallel, more private side of French Louisiana music: the a cappella songs (solo unaccompanied voice).

Because of where they were usually performed, these songs are sometimes referred to as “home music”: A mother and daughter sit on the front porch at dusk; friends take a mid-afternoon respite around the fireplace or kitchen table; extended family gathers at a wedding, and the songs flow as freely as the libations.

Traditionally, women have been expected to present what was considered an upstanding example of social behavior. Public musical performance, especially in the context of the bar or dance hall, was considered unseemly. So, with the public arena essentially off-limits, private or home music was left wide open for feminine exploration.

Old ballads or epic songs, drinking songs, game songs, and lullabies were sung at bals de maisons (home parties), veillées (evening visits) and family gatherings. Men and women sat out on the front porch or around the fireplace and traded songs for entertainment. The younger generation learned from their elders, either directly or by eavesdropping on the adults singing at the top of their lungs. Some of these songs also functioned at dances as reels à bouche, or dances rondes during Lent when voices were used as substitutes for forbidden instruments.

The home music songs of French Louisiana are a wondrous collection of tales with images more vivid than any modern film. They are timeless, beautiful songs filled with intrigue, sex, grisly murder, drinking, lessons in morality, and a heaping portion of humor. While some date back to medieval France and others contain more modern influences of the New World, all these songs touch upon themes that are universal and as relevant today as yesteryear.

The singers are young and old and as varied as their songs. The recordings in La musique de la maison were made from the late 1940s to the 1970s by many renowned folklorists, including Harry Oster and Ralph Rinzler, who visited these singers at their homes, schools and parties.

The advent of radio and television in the 1950s opened other entertainment options for the families of this rural area, so unfortunately the home music tradition began to pass away with its practitioners. In recent years, though, there has been renewed interest in these wonderful old songs from young Louisiana singers and bands. This makes “La musique” all the more important in providing support to continue this magnificent tradition.

Includes liner notes by Lisa Richardson, Marce Lacouture, and Carolyn Dural

Traditional Musicians of the Central Blue Ridge

“Traditional Musicians of the Central Blue Ridge,” by Marty McGee (McFarland)

from http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com:

The Central Blue Ridge, taking in the mountainous regions of northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia, is well known for its musical traditions. Long recognized as one of the richest repositories of folksong in the United States, the Central Blue Ridge has also been a prolific source of commercial recording, starting in 1923 with Henry Whitter’s “hillbilly” music and continuing into the 21st century with such chart-topping acts as James King, Ronnie Bowman and Doc Watson.

Unrivaled in tradition, unequaled in acclaim and unprecedented in influence, the Central Blue Ridge can claim to have contributed to the musical landscape of Americana as much as or more than any other region in the United States.

This reference work–part of McFarland’s continuing series of Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies–provides complete biographical and discographical information on more than 75 traditional recording (major commercial label) artists who are natives of or lived mostly in the northwestern North Carolina counties of Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Surry, Watauga and Wilkes, and the southwestern Virginia counties of Carroll and Grayson.

Primary recordings as well as appearances on anthologies are included in the discographies. A chronological overview of the music is provided in the Introduction, and the Foreword is by the celebrated musician Bobby Patterson, founder of the Mountain and Heritage record labels.

Downhill Strugglers: Harry Smith Birthday Party 5/29/13, NYC

from http://blog.acehotel.com:

Ace Hotel New York City: MAY 29, 7 PM, FREE

20W 29th Street
New York City, NY 10001
TEL: 212.679.2222

We’re celebrating the ninetieth year since the American Magus and curator of the old, weird America, Harry Smith, was born in Portland, Oregon, his amazing body of work and the impact of his vision — on those who knew him and the many more influenced by the legacy he left behind as revolutionary filmmaker, archivist, painter and alchemist.

Harry Smith was a one-time resident of our predecessor, the Breslin Hotel, and his spirit still speaks to us, within these walls and everywhere we go.

On May 29 in the lobby, the Down Hill Strugglers keep alive the original underground sound made famous by his Anthology of American Folk Music.

DJ Ian Johnson of the Academy Records Radio show on East Village Radio plays roots, folk, country and blues.

We’ll have poetry readings and reflections by special guests and more.

“Country Fiddle: Fine Early String Band Music” on JSP

New 4 CD JSP release available here.

DISC 1:

EARL JOHNSON & HIS CLODHOPPERS:

• I’VE GOT A WOMAN ON SOURWOOD MOUNTAIN
• LEATHER BREECHES
• THE LITTLE GRAVE IN GEORGIA
• RED HOT BREAKDOWN
• I GET MY WHISKY FROM ROCKINGHAM
• EARL JOHNSON’S ARKANSAS TRAVELLER
• POOR LITTLE JOE
• OLD GREY MARE KICKING OUT OF THE WILDNERESS
• ALL NIGHT LONG
• MISSISSIPPI JUBILEE
• JOHNNIE GET YOUR GUN
• LAUGHIN’ RUFUS
• TWINKLE LITTLE STAR
• IN THE SHADOW OF THE PINE
• WIRE GRASS DRAG

EARL JOHNSON & HIS DIXIE ENTERTAINERS:

• THREE NIGHTS EXPERIENCE
• DIXIE
• AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS
• JOHN HENRY BLUES
• I DON’T LOVE NOBODY
• I’M SATISFIED
• JOHNSON’ OLD GREY MULE
• SHORTENIN’ BREAD
• HEN CACKLE
• MISSISSIPPI SAWYER

DISC 2:

LEAKE COUNTY REVELERS:

• SATURDAY NIGHT BREAKDOWN
• GEORGIA CAMP MEETING
• JOHNSON GAL
• LEATHER BREECHES
• THE OLD HAT
• MONKEY IN THE DOG CART
• WEDNESDAY NIGHT WALTZ
• I’M GWINE BACK TO DIXIE
• UNCLE NED
• LONESOME BLUES
• GOOD FELLOW
• DRY TOWN BLUES
• MISSISSIPPI BREAKDOWN
• SWEET ROSE OF HEAVEN
• LAKE COUNTY BLUES
• BEEN TO THE EAST – BEEN TO THE WEST
• MOLLY PUT THE KETTLE ON
• THIRTY FIRST STREET BLUES
• JULIA WALTZ
• IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME
• ROCKIN’ YODEL
• BIRDS IN THE BROOK
• THEY GO WILD, SIMPLY WILD OVER ME
• CROW BLACK CHICKEN
• LAZY KATE

DISC 3:

EAST TEXAS SERENADERS:

• ACORN STOMP
• COMBINATION RAG
• SWEETEST FLOWER
• BABE
• THREE IN ONE TWO-STEP
• DREAM SHADOWS
• BEAUMONT RAG
• ARIZONA STOMP
• SHANNON WALTZ
• DEL RIO WALTZ
• SAY A LITTLE PRAYER FOR ME
• EAST TEXAS DRAG
• GULF BREEZE WALTZ
• ALDELINE WALTZ
• OZARK RAG
• BEFORE I GREW UP TO LOVE YOU
• SHANNON WALTZ
• MINEOLA RAG
• SERENADER’S WALTZ
• DEACON JONES
• MEADOW BROOK WALTZ

FREENY HARMONISERS:

• PRODUNK TODDLE

WALKERS CORBIN RAMBLERS:

• STONE MOUNTAIN TODDLE

GRINNEL GIGGERS:

• DUCK SHOES RAG
• PLOW BOY HOP

DISC 4:

AIKEN COUNTY STRING BAND:

• CHARLESTON RAG
• SAVANNAH RIVER STRIDE
• HARRISBURG ITCH
• HARD TIMES BREAKDOWN

DR. SMITH’S CHAMPION HOSS HAIR PULLERS:

• GOING DOWN THE RIVER
• JUST GIMME THE LEAVINGS
• UP IN GLORY
• SAVE MY MOTHER’S PICTURE FROM THE SALE
• IN THE GARDEN WHERE THE IRISH POTATOES GROW

DR. HUMPHREY’S BATE & HIS POSSUM HUNTERS:

• GOIN’ UP TOWN
• MY WIFE DIED SATURDAY NIGHT
• BILLY IN THE LOW GROUND
• EIGHTH OF JANUARY
• THROW THE OLD COW OVER THE FENCE
• TAKE YOUR FOOT OUT OF THE MUD AND PUT IT IN THE SAND

CHENOWETH’S CORNFIELD SYMPHONY ORCH:

• THE LAST SHOT GOT HIM

CHEROKEE RAMBLERS:

• GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD FEELIN’ BAD
• MAGNOLIA WALTZ

FLOYD MING & HIS PEP-STEPPERS:

• INDIAN WAR WHOOP
• TUPELO BLUES
• WHITE MULE

MOATSVILLE STRING TICKLERS:

• WEST VIRGINIA HILLS
• MOATSVILLE BLUES

DYKES MAGIC CITY TRIO:

• FRANKIE
• POOR ELLEN SMITH

Jalopy Radio

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

from Eli Smith:

JalopyRadio.com is a brand new internet radio station featuring 24/7 free music streamed from the “archive of recorded sound” at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

The internet station features old time, blues, folk, Gospel, spirituals, contemporary song writers, bluegrass, jug band music, and international folk music from Mexico, the Balkans, the Mid-East, Indonesia, various parts of Africa, etc.

The content is very diverse and is drawn from old commercial recordings on 78rpm records, as well as field recordings old and new and from contemporary artists, many of whom play a the Jalopy Theatre.  There are radio shows featuring curated playlists, as well as live “radio shows” with interviews and commentary, as well as ongoing live shows, streamed “live” from the theatre itself.

CURRENTLY, JALOPYRADIO ONLY STREAMS WHEN USING SAFARI AS YOUR BROWSER.

Pete Seeger

edited from “The Incompleat Folksinger” by Pete Seeger:

In 1935 I was sixteen years old, playing tenor banjo in the school jazz band.  A good deal of song collecting was being done under the auspices of different government agencies such as the Resettlement Administration.  Such work was called boondoggling at the time, but through the work of these agencies, the famous Library of Congress collection was first built up.

My father, Charles Seeger, as an expert in several branches of musical scholarship, was involved in these projects.  And I accompanied him on one field trip to North Carolina.  We wound down through the narrow valleys with so many turns in the road that I got seasick.

We passed wretched little cabins with half-naked children peering out the door; we passed exhibits of patchwork quilts and other handicrafts which were often were the main source of income.  I first became acquainted with a side of America that I had never known before.

At the Asheville square dance and ballad festival I fell in love with the old-fashioned five-string banjo, rippling out a rhythm to one fascinating song after another.  I liked the rhythms.  I like the melodies, time-tested by generations of singers.  I liked the words.

 

 

“Strings of Life”

“Strings of Life — Conversations with Old-Time Musicians from Virginia and North Carolina,” by Kevin Donleavy (Pocahontas Press)

from http://dianasbooks.blogspot.com:

Kevin Donleavy, graduate of University of Virginia, independent historian, musicologist, and educator has combined his talents to create a “historical-musical census-of-sorts” identifying more than 1300 banjo and fiddle players of traditional music in a span of over 250 years.

Donleavy spent seven years traveling, living, playing music and most importantly, listening to the residents of Carroll, Grayson, Patrick and Wythe counties in Virginia and Alleghany, Caswell, Forsyth, Rockingham, Stokes, Surry, and Wilkes counties in North Carolina. He has now complied a collection of oral histories not found anywhere else.

Strings of Life is well organized and Mr. Donleavy’s research is thoroughly documented complete with a annotated Discography and Bibliography, as well as three separate indexes: Persons Mentioned; Tunes; and Bands and Musical Groups. In addition, of the 1300 some musicians mentioned in this volume, Donleavy has been able to identify the burial sites of about 660 in 170 graveyards scatted throughout the 11 counties.

Some of the families documented are Hawks, Jarrell, Lowe, Martin, McKinney, Sutphin and Tate, along with many others. It would have been nice if a list of the nearly one hundred wonderful photos had been included in the table of contents, but truly, the pictures are enough.

“A Cloven Hoof Beating Time”

edited from liner notes to “American Primitive, Volume I” by John Fahey, August 1997

In our commentary to the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music (HFSM) collection we noted that in the history of American Folk scholarship, scholars and non-academic collectors as early as Cecil Sharp noted affinity, affection and syncretism between three ethnic groups: (1) people from the British Isles and Brittany, i.e. Celtic France, (2) Blacks, and (3) Acadian French descendents of the Huegnots—Protestants—who immigrated to Louisiana from Nova Scotia in the 18th century.

We should now like to note that the largest repository by far (99%) of recordings of American Folk Music (AFM)(1) has not been established by academic institutions or folk music associations, but by the combined efforts of the American commercial recording industry. This phenomenon is as evident today as it was in the past. What institutions have stuffed their vaults with bluegrass, rap and the other last gasps of the American volkselle? Commercial recording companies.

In the 1931 RCA-Victor numerical catalogue, recordings are listed for almost every single ethnic group resident in the USA. Recordings by Filipinos, Serbo-Croatians, Yiddish, Japanese, Swiss-German, Lithuanian and on and on. Having read the entire catalogue we find specifically religious “instructional” and/or preaching records only among these few groups: Jews, Negroes and American Whites of primarily British descent who speak English i.e., WASPS. There are no religious recordings of French or Acadian performers.

While I was a member of the UCLA Folklore and Mythology Dept. several of us participated in an exhaustive but abortive search for AFM recording artists who were Jewish. We only found two. One was Eck Robertson’s wife who played guitar in Eck’s band, along with Verd, his brother (banjo).

Jews, Orientals, Finno-Ugarics, the autochthonous of Easter Island, Italians etc., played no significant role in the development of AFM. They continued to play the same music which they played in “the old country.” Meanwhile, the members of the AFM Big Three—Cajuns, Negroes, and WASPs—looked for and found new concepts, new rhythms, new harmonies and new structures. Blacks learned 8-bar pentatonic reels of the people from the British Isles, and Whites learned the tripartite, call-and-response 12 bar blues from Blacks.

I submit that these recordings, along with others of Sanctified Singers, Sacred Harp, large Negro Churches with horns etc. demonstrate that we have here in the USA, both now and then, one very large side of a continuum of an ecstatic as opposed to contemplative religion, which calls itself “Christian.” There are other ecstatic religions in the world, or religions with the same continuum (Hinduism), but is Christianity really intrinsically ecstatic in this manner of hot enthusiasm? Are these tambourine players and guitar screamers inhabited by Christ? Do they know him?

I have to say that, Flannery O’Connor notwithstanding, underneath it all I hear pan pipes tooting and a cloven hoof beating time.

Sweet Thing

Henry Thomas

from http://record-fiend.blogspot.com via http://blog.dinosaurdiscs.com:

Listening to Henry Thomas is like taking a journey in a musical time machine. With a probable birth year of 1874, this makes him one of the earliest-born African American musicians to release 78s in the 1920s. It is fortunate that the songster recorded so prolifically for Vocalion during this time for it is by listening to these performances that we are able to have something of an idea of what rural black music sounded like before the turn of the last century.

Assuming that Thomas developed much of his repertory during his teens and early 20s, it stands to reason that many of the tunes in his songbook dated from the 1880s and 1890s, if not earlier. Thus, with the singer-guitarist being approximately 53 years old during his first recording session in 1927, most of his material was already a representation of the folkways of a bygone era, when the steam locomotive was still opening up previously isolated corners of the North American continent.

This last detail is extremely significant because, according to Mack McCormick, Thomas was as notable a hobo as he was a musician and allegedly traveled on freight lines to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where he performed outside of these events as a street singer. Furthermore, “Ragtime Texas” was apparently the nickname by which he was known by other transients who rode the rails. McCormick explains,

“It’s a hobo moniker. It isn’t so much a musical designation as it is an assumed title of the same order as “Chicago Red” and “T-Bone Slim” and other such celebrities. It’s a name to be written on water towers and box cars. Moreover it’s a moniker remembered in parts of Oklahoma and Louisiana and Texas, but known best along a 150-mile strip of East Texas. This is the area he came from and it’s here that fragments of his story have turned up.”

The High and Lonesome Sound

The High and Lonesome Sound (new book by John Cohen)

• Text by John Cohen
  with a DVD with two films about Roscoe Holcomb
  and a CD with music of Roscoe Holcomb
  Book design by Gerhard Steidl
  and Katharina Staal
• 216 pages
• 28 cm x 24 cm
• Clothbound hardcover with a dustjacket
• 158 photographs
• ISBN: 978-3-86930-254-6

“The music of Roscoe Holcomb transcended daily life. Although it was grounded in Appalachia, in East Kentucky, in his little town of Dais, his music traveled like it was on a path towards a distant star.”   

John Cohen

 

from publisher steidlville.com:

In 1959 John Cohen traveled to East Kentucky looking for what he calls “old music”. Cohen asked for names at local gas stations but soon ran out of leads, and drove off the highway onto the next dirt road. Here he stumbled across Roscoe Holcomb playing the banjo and singing on his front porch in a way says Cohen, “that made the hairs on my neck stand up on end”. And so by pure chance began the life-long friendship that is the background for The High and Lonesome Sound.

Cohen visited Holcomb frequently over the next three decades, and made many photographs, films and records of his music. In time Holcomb, a poor coal miner by trade, became a regular feature on the American concert and festival circuits. The “strange beauty and discomfort” of his music – a mixture of blues, ballads and Baptist hymns, and unique through his high strained voice – was exposed to a larger audience. Nevertheless Holcomb died alone in a nursing home in 1981.

The High and Lonesome Sound combines Cohen’s vintage photos, film and musical recordings as well as an anecdotal text into a multimedia tribute to this underappreciated legend of American music whose every performance was in Cohen’s words “not just a rendition of music, but a test of something to be overcome”.

Charles Seeger

from http://www.culturalequity.org:

Pete’s father Charles Seeger and his wife composer Ruth Crawford Seeger were both musicologists, and she wrote musical notations for many of the songs that the Lomaxes published. Charles Seeger explains how he met Alan Lomax and his father John was when he and the composer Henry Cowell were asked by MacMillan Publishers “to advise them on a manuscript that had come in from a man named Lomax….Well they came in,…John and Alan, and the manuscript was there, and Alan was just like ready to punch either Henry or me in the face. ‘These God damned expert musicians, they don’t know anything about folk music. They don’t know anything about music, anyway!’

“Well, Henry and I opened the things and said, ‘My God, these are marvelous songs.’ This was about 1933 or ’34. ‘These are perfectly marvelous songs, and the notations are terrible. There’s practically nothing there that doesn’t have mistakes, wrong clefs, wrong accidentals, and everything else.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to have these notations made over, and the book is going to be very successful.’ Well, it was American Ballads and Folk Songs, and it was published. Alan softened up a little bit towards the end, and we presently became very good friends. In fact he became a member of the family.”

Charles Seeger continued, “So when Peter became interested in playing the banjo and singing songs that were accompanied by the banjo, I sent him to study the recordings in the Library of Congress, which is about the best school that there is. In fact, it’s the only ‘school’ that I know of. You just go in there and listen to recordings and after you get sufficiently saturated with them, you know something.”

Mister Charlie’s Blues

Review of “Mister Charlie’s Blues 1926-1938″ (Yazoo, 1970) from http://record-fiend.blogspot.com:

In case you were wondering, “Mister Charlie” is an obsolete African-American slang term for Caucasian male that is in the same vein as “whitey,” “honky,” “cracker,” and “buckra.” These 14 tracks are not simply hillbilly recordings. More specifically, they are examples of Southern white musicians performing material that was either blues in a technical sense or had been strongly influenced by their black counterparts. As the Yazoo brain trust discusses in the liner notes,

While the bluesman’s imitations of white and pop music always rank as his most banal work, the hillbilly’s encroachments upon a genre that has always been held as the province of blacks make for fascinating music. They also make a mockery of the old notion that no white can play country blues, and even expose the deficiencies of many contemporary whites who work the blues idiom. The usual failing of the hillbilly blues guitarist is the same that nearly always inheres in white guitar-playing of the 1920′s: a preference for limiting picking patterns that the best musicians of either race always surmounted. In general, the sensitivity of the white blues musician is remarkable when one considers the race prejudices of his class.

Even though I’m not a musician, I think what they are getting at is that the typically white obsession with rigidity and structure has often stood in the way of artistic innovation, whereas the more improvisatory approach of black instrumentalists from the 1800s and early 1900s generally led to the development of new and uniquely American styles of musical expression.

The sides presented here for the most part focus on the hillbilly anomalies (i.e. those among “the best musicians of either race” mentioned above), and what wonderful exceptions to the rule they are. Indeed, certain labels in the 1920s and 1930s felt some of these performances sounded so authentically black that they were marketed as race records.

Ralph Rinzler

Woody Guthrie and Ralph Rinzler

excerpt from “The Music That Matters Part One: Bill Monroe and Ralph Rinzler,” by Juli Thanki:

Ralph Rinzler was born in 1934 in Passaic, New Jersey. His father was a doctor and of Russian-Jewish descent, perhaps making Rinzler’s foray into folklore and traditional American string band music as an adult a little unexpected. However, as a boy he was fascinated with the family’s phonograph; thus he learned at an early age to appreciate traditional and folk music thanks in part to his uncle Samuel Joseph, a lawyer who at one time was a student of folk studies pioneer George L. Kittredge.

This burgeoning interest in folk music led the young Rinzler to the Lomax Library of Congress field recordings as well as to other forms of traditional music when he was a preteen; this hobby would eventually become his career. Of Rinzler’s folk music leanings, Monroe biographer Richard D. Smith writes, “like many of his generation, Rinzler was entranced by The Anthology of American Folk Music.  While some folk revivalists began seeking out Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and other African-American blues players represented in Harry Smith’s collection, Ralph was among those who sought its southern white string band musicians.”

Before “finding” and remaking the faded legend of Monroe, Rinzler “discovered” two other string band musicians who would also prove essential to the American folk music canon: Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson. Ashley, a clawhammer banjo player, was a medicine show performer whose early recordings were featured on Harry Smith’s The Anthology of Folk Music under the name Tom Ashley. This is almost certainly how Rinzler became aware of the musician before stumbling across him in the hills of North Carolina.

When Rinzler first discovered Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson, also in rural North Carolina, the musician was at the time supporting his family as a rockabilly electric guitarist. It was with “the utmost difficulty” according to Bluegrass Breakdown author Robert Cantwell, that Rinzler persuaded Watson, a blind musician who played with a unique flatpicking style that would soon be known to aspiring guitarists nationwide, to revert to playing the old style folk music with an acoustic guitar. 

“Minstrel of the Appalachians”

from http://www.kentuckypress.com:

“Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford,” by Loyal Jones

” It is said that Bascom Lamar Lunsford would “cross hell on a rotten rail to get a folk song”—his Southern highlands folk-song compilations now constitute one of the largest collections of its kind in the Library of Congress—but he did much more than acquire songs. He preserved and promoted the Appalachian mountain tradition for generations of people, founding in 1928 the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, an annual event that has shaped America’s festival movement. Loyal Jones pens a lively biography of a man considered to be Appalachian music royalty. He also includes a “Lunsford Sampler” of ballads, songs, hymns, tales, and anecdotes, plus a discography of his recordings.

While towns and cities were burgeoning musically, trying to promote classical and art-forms over the simple songs of their ancestors, Bascom was desperately throwing his net to catch and hold onto these old time treasures. Loyal Jones has given much insight into the life and times of this amazing man. — Jean Ritchie

This is both a biography and an examination of Lunsford’s career dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Appalachian traditional culture. Jones’s study offers a significant contribution to our ‘new’ culture in the context of folk music. Loyal is an excellent storyteller, and his genial North Carolina manner is perfectly suited to the subject—there is a real affinity between Jones’s authorial voice and Lunsford’s personality. — Ron Pen

Art Satherley

from JEMF Quarterly VOL VIII, PART 1, SPRING, 1972, NO. 25:

Gene Earle and Norm Cohen interviewed A&R man Uncle Art Satherley twice (December 1970 and June 1971)
to tape some of his reminiscences of his long career in the early country music 
industry. The following is drawn from those interviews.

When recording black artists, 

"... I didn't just say, 'Sing this and go out and 
have a drink somewhere. ' I spent my time in that studio 
getting them ready for the people of the world. . . 

When I spoke to those Negroes, I would talk to them, I would 
tell them something about my background as an immigrant. 
I would tell them what we had to expect. 

Then when I found that I had these Negroes in a feeling, I would ask, 
'Before we sing this spiritual . . which one of you have 
lost a loved one in the last year or so?' 

And one would step forward. Then I would say to the fellow that had 
some preaching experience, 'Just say a little short 
prayer before we start preaching. ' 

This was not an act on my part. It was the simplicity of a simplicity to be 
an honest man, to give them what they wanted back. And 
the only way to get it back was to get what they felt in 
their souls. 

How many recording men know that? . . . It's 
all a study. You just don't go in like animals and talk to 
people, whether they're white, black, pink, or any color. 
You just have to know their life a little bit, and they 
have to know that you're not going to hurt them, too."

“Black Mirror”

• 

  Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Music 1918-1955 (Dust-to-Digital)

  edited from Mike McGonigal (http://pitchfork.com):

  Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Music (1918-1955) is an enthused, superbly-curated collection of rare 78s. The set was compiled by Ian Nagoski.  Nagoski’s been collecting 78s since he was in high school, intrepidly and often blindly looking for stuff that sounds cool, even if the labels were all in Russian and he had no idea what it was going to sound like. As you can guess from the title, this assemblage of material comes from long ago and far away, all over the globe: Syria, Thailand, Laos, Yugoslavia, Scotland, Cameroon, China, Vietnam, England, Turkey, and a dozen more.

It’s always a treat to be reminded of how much amazing music there is in the world that you’ve never heard. Seventy-five percent of this material has never been issued on CD, so both bushy-eyed world music newcomers and intrepid crate-combers will find an awful lot to dig in these 24 songs. In fact, only one track’s ever been released on a CD in the States before. Black Mirror stacks performers of great renown (at the time) next to uncredited musicians performing folk musics that stretch back for centuries. All of them are obscure today, of course.

When a thing is done with absolute love, it tends to show. I’m not a huge fan of CDs myself; I have a lot of vinyl and more mp3s than I can count. But it’s awfully hard to imagine these songs without the lovely 24-page booklet that comes with the set. The liner notes are lush with information about each track, as much as Nagoski could find anyway. He also brings the listener back to the very dawn of recorded sound by reproducing some of the earliest reactions to Edison’s great invention, the phonograph. Nagoski writes with awe himself about finding a special, strange record in a dusty corner, and about how amazing it is that these round, brittle discs can transfer such absolute magic from one generation to another.

There are indeed magical possibilities when it comes to assembling and editing a collection such as this; it’s no accident that alchemical symbols dot Harry Smith’s liner notes to his celebrated urtext, the three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music. Nagoski also quotes from his own translation of the spiritual-minded, avant-garde poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, even borrowing the album’s title from one of his works. All that places the material in a different context than one usually finds in globetrotting collections of ye olde records, which often suffer the post-colonial hangover of exoticism. Here’s to hoping that Nagoski compiles at least a dozen more records like it. Black Mirror just might be the most remarkable collection of its sort since Pat Conte ceased his CD reissue series Secret Museum of Mankind in 1998.

Harry Smith’s 90th Birthday Party

Harry Smith’s Hometown Celebrates His 90th Birthday, May 16 – 19, 2013: At The Hollywood Theatre, Mission Theater, And The Cleaners@Ace Hotel In Portland, OR.

 

April 19th, 2013 by Anne Richardson:

Harry Smith fans know he was born on May 29, 1923, in Portland Oregon.

If they didn’t, they do now. Harry Smith love reaches a fevered pitch next month in Portland, with four events devoted to the artist-who-escapes-all-description.

The first two events are presented by Oregon Cartoon Institute in partnership with Northwest Animation Festival, Hollywood Theatre and KBOO, and take place at the Hollywood Theatre.

The Harry Smith Seance, at 7:00 PM, is preceded by the Harry Smith In The Pacific Northwest panel discussion at 3:00 PM.

Then on Saturday, May 18, Joe McMurrian presents a live Harry Smith tribute concert, Harry Smith’s Last Kind Favor,

Finishing up the weekend (with some singing and cake) will be Oregon Cartoon Institute’s Harry Smith Free For All, at The Cleaners downtown. Presented in partnership with Ace Hotel, Stumptown Coffee, KBOO, and The Late Now. Hosted by Leo Daedalus.

So the run down is: you have two free events to attend, and two for which you have to buy tickets. In other words, no excuses, for all you undernourished Harry heads! If you want more Harry in your life, come to Portland on May 16 -19, and we can fix you up!