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.”

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. 

Clayton McMichen (#2)

from JEMF Quarterly Vol. 11, Part 3 Autumn 1975 Number 39:

CLAYTON McMICHEN: HIS LIFE AND MUSIC 
By Norm Cohen 

In the fifteen or so years of intensive rekin- 
dled interest in old time hillbilly and blues music, 
dozens of elderly musicians who made recordings 
in their youth during the 1920s and 1930s have been 
traced down, visited, interviewed, recorded, and 
then, perhaps, forgotten again. 

Our appetite for such rediscoveries seems to be insatiable; yet what 
of the many ethical questions posed by such acti- 
vity? Sometimes, indeed, an old timer such as 
Clark Kessinger or Mississippi John Hurt is found 
who can slide back into the musical limelight grace - 
fully and happily, enjoying a second career as a 
popular and successful performer. 

Other times a performer is encountered whose musical skills 
have diminished considerably with the passage in 
time; nevertheless, in a confusion of historical 
values with esthetic ones, he is urged to take to 
the college /festival circuit, perhaps frustrating 
himself as much as he disappoints his audiences.

But more often we find a singer or musician who 
never was quite the success that he had wanted to 
be (indeed, most are not); to be sought out thirty 
or forty years later may suggest to him that at 
long last someone has recognized his long -hidden 
talents; that now, fortune will be his if only he 
manages himself a little more carefully and is not 
taken advantage of. 

Other times we find a performer whose musical career was a brief fling of his 
youth; perhaps an embarrassment to him now, and 
certainly nothing to rehash in dreary detail, picking 
out names and dates and facts from the cast-off 
detritus of an aging memory. 

Or, another possibility, the rediscovered artist turns out to be 
intensely hostile to the music business and his for- 
mer associates, never able to forget the fact that 
the success he sought eluded him, and hardly in 
a mood to sentimentalize over old scars and wounds 
that time had failed to heal. Clayton "Pappy" 
McMichen fell into this last category.  

Guthrie Meade

from http://www.lib.unc.edu:

Guthrie “Gus” Turner Meade, Jr., was born in Louisville, Ky., on 17 May 1932. He worked at the Indiana University Folk Music Archives and, later, as an assistant at the Indiana University Press. He avidly collected 78 rpm country music records, partly to help him learn fiddle tunes. Meade’s correspondents included record collectors, discographers, and music scholars around the world, including folklorist John Edwards in Australia, Archie Green, Eugene Earle, D. K. Wilgus, Fred Hoeptner, Willard Johnson, and Dan Mahoney.

In 1965, Meade began working at the Library of Congress Folk Music Archives as a programmer/analyst, automating the vast collections. Each summer, Meade went to Kentucky to research Kentucky fiddlers, who had recorded on some of the early 78 records. At this time, he worked with John Harrod and Bruce Greene, who were also researching Kentucky fiddlers. Meade became close friends with Charlie and Noah Kinney, fiddling brothers from Lewis, Ky., and recorded their music on many occasions. He also spent a great deal of time conducting personal interviews with traditional fiddlers.

He recorded Kentucky fiddler Buddy Thomas and arranged for Mississippi fiddler Hoyt Ming to record and play at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. During the 1970s, Meade and Mark Wilson produced three albums of Kentucky fiddle music on the Rounder label: J. P. and Annadeene Fraley’s “Wild Rose of the Mountain” (Rounder 0037), Buddy Thomas’s “Kitty Puss” (Rounder 0032), and Ed Haley’s “Parkersburg Landing” (Rounder 1010). The Buddy Thomas recording became particularly important given the young fiddler’s sudden death only months after the project’s completion.

In 1980, Meade and discographer Richard Nevins compiled an important three-record set of rare Gennett recordings of early Kentucky fiddle music. The Morning Star releases (45003, 45004, and 45005) include biographical information on the musicians and represent an important contribution to traditional music scholarship.

Meade’s most significant achievement may have been his annotated discography of early traditional country music, begun in 1956. This comprehensive work includes some 14,500 recordings of 3,500 songs organized into four categories: ballads, religious songs, instrumentals, and novelty songs. In 1986, Meade received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to prepare the discography for publication. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Kentucky, where Meade worked long hours on the project. He was working on the introduction to the discography at the time of his death. His wife Mary has indicated that she will work toward the project’s publication, with the help of her son Doug and discographer Richard Spottswood.

On 8 February 1991, Meade suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage at his Franklin County, Ky., home. He died the next day at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington at the age of 58.

John V. Walker: Corbin’s Finest

 from JEMF Quarterly Vol. 8, Part 3 Autumn 1972 No. 27:

excerpt from JOHN V. WALKER: CORBIN'S FINEST by Donald Lee Nelson 

In 1930, in the company of four other musicians, John Walker went to Knoxville 
to become a part of a rather strange incident. The four others included Alex Hood, 
Clyde Whittaker, Emory Mills, and another guitarist named Bert Earls. 

Under the sponsorship of a Middlesboro piano company, the group, called Alec 
Hood's Railroad Boys (since all were employed by the L § N) were to record ten 
numbers for the Vocalion Company. 

When they arrived at the recording studio they were told that a group which 
included Lowe Stokes and Slim Miller were working on a skit called "The Hatfield-
McCoy Feud." The Hood musicians were pressed into service as actors in the skit, 
which was practiced all day before satisfactory takes were made. 

Mr. Walker recalls them sending out for yards and yards of calico to tear for 
simulated fighting, and using pads and paddles for sounds as gunfire and running. 
His own line was "Stand back boys, I'll shoot." 

It was not until late evening that the "Feud" session was completed, and the 
Railroad Boys were told to cut two numbers, and then there would be a supper break, 
after which they were to return and do the other eight pieces. 

Since they had a train to catch they were unable to work on the after-dinner 
session. Hence, only two sides were put on wax. "L § N Rag" was a popular fiddle 
tune of the area which was usually called "Sleeping Lulu." It was recorded under 
this title by fellow Kentuckians Richard D. Burnett and Oscar Ruttledge. 

The other side of the disc was "Corbin Slide." Originally titled "The Last 
Old Dollar" it was frequently heard around Corbin as the mainstay of another 
good local fiddler named Tom Grugg. Grugg was very jealous of the tune, however, 
and 
would immediately stop playing it if he saw another musician trying to learn 
it. 

The record had some impromptu talking on it, and this was done by Mr. 
Brown, the man in charge of the recording studio--probably the talking itself 
was to break up the straight instrumentalism of the number. The band returned 
to Corbin that night, and was never recorded again. Their namesake. Alec Hood, 
a yard foreman, died in 1954. 

The best known group to which John V. Walker belonged, however, was the 
one which bears his name. Walker's Corbin Ramblers was formed about 1930, 
and consisted of local musicians and railroaders Mack Taylor, guitar and vocal; 
Johnny Hampton, fiddle; Charley Ellison, fiddle; Mr. Walker, fiddle; and his 
brother Albert, tenor guitar and vocal. 

In January of 1934 Walker's Corbin Ramblers journeyed to New York City 
to record. According to W. R. Calaway, Vocalion's A & R man, the total outlay 
for the group, which included Taylor, the Walker Brothers, and Larry Hensley, 
a mandolinist who was brought along for the session, was between four and 
five hundred dollars. This included train fare, hotel bills, and food. 

Hensley was a miner from Wallin's Creek, in Harlan County, Kentucky, and 
brought along several of the numbers that were recorded by the band: "Stone 
Mountain Toddle," "E Rag," "Scottdale Stomp," "Mandolin Rag," and of course 
"Wallin's Creek Blues." 

After a four day session, the Corbin Ramblers returned to their home town 
and railroading, and never recorded again.

Tennessee Fiddlers

Allen Sisson

from http://www.hearthmusic.com/blog:

Joseph Decosimo: Tennessee can lay claim to some pretty amazing and diverse fiddle styles. Arthur Smith’s slicker, notey fiddling influenced a whole generation of fiddlers throughout the South and beyond. Down where I grew up, around Chattanooga, it seems like a lot of the older fiddlers were influenced by the wild and wooly North Georgia sounds. Gid Tanner, Lowe Stokes, and Clayton McMichen spent some time hanging out in Chattanooga back in the 20s.

Maybe a lot of what gets labeled a North Georgia sound could also be called a Southeast Tennessee sound. At the same time, I hear a lot of influence from African American musicians in the music that was played around Chattanooga. One of my favorites fiddlers from around Chattanooga, Bob Douglas, played an incredible raggy piece called the “Maybell Rag.” It came to him from a black guitar player who was working on barges on the Tennessee River.

One of my other favorite fiddlers from down there is Blaine Smith. His playing swoops and slides in a way that reminds me of the syncopated and swooping rhythms from African American fiddler John Lusk. They also shared several tunes in common.

Allen Sisson lived further east, up in the mountains along the North Carolina and Georgia lines. His playing sounds totally different from the others. It’s filled with triplets and complicated melodic lines. It sounds really old to me. JD Harris who was from further north in Flag Pond Tennessee had a similar sound. Their music has an austere and composed beauty.

Then there’s Charlie Acuff [second cousin to the famed Roy Acuff], who plays with an incredibly sweet touch, employing vibrato and playing stately tunes that he learned from his grandfather.

One of my favorites lately has been Jimmy McCarroll from the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. He recorded his driving and totally sophisticated and blues-inflected fiddling in the late 20s. So I guess there’s no way for me to describe a Tennessee style. Each of these fiddlers had their own sound, and I’ve only scratched the surface. I guess there are some similarities. Folks in Tennessee tend to play a lot of tunes in the key of G, but they play in plenty of other keys too.

Read more here.

Earl Johnson (#2)

Earl Johnson, Gid Tanner, J.T. Wright (late 1950s)

from JEMF Quarterly, vol. 10, part 3, #35, autumn 1974:

EARL JOHNSON: PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN 
By Donald Lee Nelson 

[Note: The author wishes to thank Mrs. Earl 
Johnson of Lawrenceville, Georgia for her co- 
operation in the preparation of this article. ] 

Perhaps nowhere was the tragic aftermath of 
the Civil War more fully experienced during the 
quarter-century following Appomattox than in 
the state of Georgia. Inexhaustable volumes have 
been compiled that deal with virtually every facet 
of that portion of the Southern panorama. Yet, 
out of this dismal setting emerged many of the 
South's leading musicians, most of them from the 
northwestern part of the state. 

Into that environment and era were born to 
Gwinnett County farmers William and Mary (Davis 
Johnson six children. Two did not survive in- 
facy but the remaining four, Albert, Robert Earl, 
Ester (son) and Alma, grew to adulthood deter- 
mined to remain on their beloved native soil. 

Named for a signer of the Declaration Of 
Independence, the axe-head shaped Gwinnett 
County is just south of the Chattahoochie River, 
and its cotinty seat, Lawrenceville, reposes se- 
dately within a half-hour's drive of Atlanta. 

Robert Earl, the second son, who came into 
the world on 24 August 1886, was to grow from a 
family and neighborhood musician in the mould of 
his contemporaries into a lifelong professional 
performer. His father, William, was a renowned 
old-time fiddler whose infectious playing style 
permeated the boy.  

The Stripling Bros. (#3)

excerpt from JEMF Quarterly Vol. IV, Part 1 — March 1968 — No. 9:

On September 2, 1963, collector Bob Pinson interviewed Charles and Ira Stripling at Charlie’s farm just north of Kennedy, Alabama. Pinson had been informed by blues collector Gayle Dean Wardlow that the Striplings lived near Gordo, Alabama. A service station attendant at Gordo told Pinson that they lived in Kennedy in Lamar County, some twenty-five miles north of Gordo.

That first contest was in January of 1913, and Charlie Stripling had just begun fiddling in the spring of 1912.    Ira had been playing the guitar only since the previous November.  Their father, Thomas Newton Stripling, owned a local Pickens Co. store and ordered Ira’s first guitar. The guitar, bought wholesale, cost Ira $6.00.

“Six dollars didn’t grow on bushes like they seem to now!” Their mother was Sarah Stripling and both parents were born in Pickens County. Neither played any instruments; the brothers assert that they were the only musicians in the entire family.

After the Kennedy contest, they received invitations from fiddlers’ contests in Millport (Lamar County), Fayette (Fayette County) and places even further away.  The further they went from Pickens County, the less they felt they could win, but soon changed their minds.

Charlie recalled, “the further off away from home I got, the easier it was to get the prize.”

“At this time, Uncle Bunt made an appearance at Millport and Charlie went up to hear him. (During the mid-1920′ s the industrialist Henry Ford had been sponsoring fiddle contests in the North and South. His hand-picked champion was a Tennessee fiddler, Uncle Bunt Stephens.)

A man was there who was representing a big fiddle contest to be held in Memphis, Tenn., the weekend of June 2, and he asked if Bunt would enter. Bunt explained that he was tied up for that weekend, at which point a friend of Charlie’s suggested that Charlie, who had gained quite a local reputation, might take his place.

The man accepted and Charlie traveled up without Ira, as no accompaniment was allowed. The contest lasted three days and there were very large crowds each day. The final night, on which the prizes were given, was a Saturday and 600 fiddlers were present.

“I realized I had competition,” Charlie recalled. Bunt finally showed up and Charlie learned later that the contest was probably fixed in favor of Bunt. Charlie still received second prize, which consisted of twenty dollars in gold.

When they recorded, they were told by the A and R man in Chicago, that many of the old-time tunes had been recorded and that they didn’t need any more versions, so the brothers were forced to search for new material. “Big Footed Nigger” they had learned from a local fiddler, Henry Ludlow, at a contest. Charlie, after hearing it, only remembered the first half. After going to sleep that night he awoke very late, remembering the second part, which he proceeded to immediately try on the fiddle.

Charlie recalled a contest in Fayette that he had won year after year. One time, the man who ran it gave him twenty dollars not to enter the contest because Charlie was discouraging the other fiddlers. Though he was popular and played many dances and contests it was never enough to make a living.

Ernest Stoneman (#3)

Ernest and Hattie Stoneman

from JEMF Quarterly, Vol. Ill, Part 1 — September, 1967 — No. 7:

Notes from an interview with Ernest (Pop) Stoneman on March 27, 1964 at UCLA by Eugene Earle.

In 1924 Pop was working as a carpenter in Bluefield, West Virginia. He went down to the Warwick Furniture Company one day, and heard Henry Whitter’s first recording, Okeh 40015 {“The Wreck of the Old 97″ and “Lonesome Road Blues”). Pop felt that Whitter sang “through his nose so bad” that he could do at least as well, if not better, than Whitter.

Pop claims that everybody thought a hillbilly sang through his nose as a result of Whitter’s vocal style.    (Pop makes it clear that he grew up with Whitter and worked in the textile mills with him and that his criticisms were not personal remarks.)

 
After deciding he wanted to record, Pop wrote both Columbia and Okeh in New York. He continued working in Bluefield, saving money for the trip while waiting for the companies’ replies. Early in the summer he received those replies, Columbia setting up a September first appointment, and Okeh telling him to “come up any time.” From July 4 through the rest of the summer he worked at Bluefield to sup- port himself, his wife, and two children. He built a rack for his harmonicas and practiced several songs using autoharp accompaniment.

Pop told Okeh’s Ralph Peer that “any song with a story will go to the people’s hearts, because they love stories. They love stories of tragedy, a wreck or something. And if it ain’t all there, it ain’t no good.”

In September, 1926, he made his first recordings for Victor.  Peer, who had left Okeh and was working for Victor, asked Stoneman to rerecord the songs that had been recorded acoustically by the Powers Family.    (By September, 1S26, Victor had shifted from Acoustic to electric recording.)

Peer gave Pop copies of the Powers’ records and a portable phonograph which Pop took back to the Camden Hotel in Camden, H.J. After listening a short while, Pop realized that they would need a banjo player for these sides. He sent home for his wife’s brother, fifteen-year-old Bolen Frost, and had him placed in the railroad conductor’s care. However, Bolen forgot to bring his banjo, and Peer had to borrow a vl50 Keystone Special banjo for him. Pop noticed that it had gut strings, so he had to go downtown to buy steel strings for it.

After recording for Edsion in 1926, the band went to a bank in New York to cash their check. They carried their instruments into the bank with them along with their luggage, and Pop went up to the teller while the rest of the members waited. At this moment, the police walked up to them and demanded identification. When the police realized that they were really musicians, they explained that they had been suspicious because, earlier in the week, a nearby bank had been robbed by a gang that carried their firearms in instrument cases.

Bahamian Blind Blake

excerpt from Elijah Wald (www.elijahwald.com):

Blake Alphonso Higgs was the other Blind Blake–I assume his nom de guerre was in emulation of the blues guitarist, but it may just be coincidence. For many years he fronted the house band at the Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau. His music was a unique mix of old island favorites, more recent calypso compositions and a quirky grab-bag of minstrel songs and ballads from the United States.

Minstrelsy was an especially important element of Blake’s work, evident both in his choice of the banjo and songs like “Watermelon Spoilin’ On the Vine,” “You Shall Be Free,” and “J.P. Morgan” (“My Name Is Morgan, But it Ain’t J.P.”).

Blake has none of the self-conscious dialect and overdone comedy that was typical of the minstrel genre, though, and his sidemen combined the jazzy guitar licks and harmonies of groups like the Ink Spots with West Indian rhythms, with the result that his recordings have an easy humor and swing that few musicians from any continent can match.

Of course, Blake also played lots of island songs, which he performs in a style that falls somewhere between the string-band calypso of Wilmouth Houdini and Jamaican mento, the slicker sound of tourist bands like the Bermuda Strollers, and the vocal group jive of American combos like the Cats and the Fiddle.

They range from folk ballads like “Run, Come See” to upbeat tourist favorites like “Conch Ain’t Got No Bone” and calypsos like “Love, Love Alone,” the comic saga of King Edward’s abdication to marry an American divorcee.

There is also a Joseph Spence connection: Blake knew Spence and provided his contact information to Fritz Richmond when Richmond went to Nassau to record what became the Happy All the Time album, and there are several overlapping numbers in their repertoires–which means that people who want to know what Spence was singing can often find out by listening to the Blake versions.

Moonshine Kate Reminisces

from JEMF Quarterly Vol II, Part 1—Novenber, 1966:

(On August 27, 1963, Archie Green and Ed Kahn interviewed Rosa Lee Carson Johnson, better known to record fans as Moonshine Kate, in her home in Decatur, Georgia. Here is an excerpt from their tapescript.)

Kate was not with her father at his first recording and it was not until later that she recorded with him. They had a group called the Virginia Reelers: Earl Johnson, fiddler; another Earl Johnson, blackface comedian, played the 1-string fiddle; she played banjo and sometimes guitar. Gid Tanner was with their band at one time and so was Puckett. Other guitarists with them were Peanut Erown and Bully Brewer. Brewer, Peanut Brown, Earl Johnson and Earl Johnson travelled with them. She doesn’t know how they got to be named after the state of Virginia, but they did a lot of playing there.

Early recordings of John Carson and Moonshine Kate were made on Whitehall Street and Brockman was in charge. She sat in the middle, the others stood on either side of the mike. She goes on to describe her recollections, she never used a horn, but her dad did. The man gave them a green light to start and a red light told them they had just a few more seconds left. They always practiced their selections at home before they recorded and timed it.

John Carson enjoyed hillbilly music most. He wasn’t ashamed of that word. What is hillbilly music? You don’t find any of it now. When she and her dad were making music it was good old mountain music; his favorites were “Old Joe Clark,” “Little Old Log Cabin,” and “Maggie.” He won his prizes playing “Sally Goodin.    Hillbilly is the way they played it years ago; it’s just old-timey music, and anything he would play was a hillbilly song, because he was a hillbilly.

Archie asked her how did her dad feel when the music began to change from the old time style. He used to laugh; said it was silly for those boys to play and call themselves hillbilly. She did hear someone on the Opry on TV play “Sally Goodin” just like her father played it. What makes the style? It must be the way you handle the bow. Like guitar-playing, if it’s electric isn’t hillbilly.    Hillbilly has to be in your bones, that’s all there is to it. When her dad was young, they were called fiddles; now they’re called violins, but a violin is different.

Charlie Poole

from JEMF Quartelry, Vol I, Part 3 — June, 1966:

On August 13, 1962, Eugene W. Earle and Archie Green interviewed Charlie Poole, Jr., son of Charlie Poole, in Mountain Home, Tennessee.  Here is an excerpt from their tapescript.

Peter Stampfel

from http://www.furious.com

Peter Stampfel: I revered Pete Seeger. I liked Flatt and Scruggs and Bill Monroe, who I fetched coffee for in Indiana where he was working. He yelled for a cup of coffee and I ran out, burning and scalding my hand- what a thrill! Super Fan Boy. I still am. I think I enjoy being a fan boy. Fan boys can be completely awful but there’s something about the fan-ish attitude which I enjoy having and which I think is basically good, despite how crazy fans can get.

Then I heard the Lost City Ramblers and I was very much impressed by the fact that there was stuff before bluegrass that was really interesting. When I got to New York in ’59, I heard the Smith anthology. That was the first time that anyone got the 78 RPM records in LP form. Harry Smith was an alcoholic genius, multi-talented sort of a renaissance person who amassed a collection.

He was in Seattle in 1943 and he was walking down the street and he heard an Uncle Dave Macon record. “What’s this, I never heard… what is this?” He followed the music and found this guy using this wind-up victrola and he was playing these records which he was melting down for shellac. The shellac supply was cut off by the Japanese during the war and he was playing the records and melting them down.

So Smith started listening to this stuff and collecting the records. In ’52 or ’53, the same year rock’n'roll got started coincidentally, he talked Folkways records into releasing a six album set. 84 different cuts where I and hundreds of other people first heard country blues, shape note singing, the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Poole, etc..

The records were from 1927 when electronic record recording was developed which made for a quantum leap in fidelty and sound. The records went up until 1933, when the record industry went into total collapse because of the depression. So these records comprised all these genres from this time period.

It devastated me, it totally wiped me out. Hearing all this amazing stuff, enthralled and captivated me and I decided that I had to recreate this music because all of the people who did it were dead or dying. Once there were gone, by God if I didn’t grab that torch, the flame would be extinguished forever! I needn’t have bothered because thousands of other kids had the same identical response. So instead of it dying, there was a huge resurgence.

In Search of Blind Joe Death

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

“As a young man, he was in the Mississippi Delta looking for Skip James and Bukka White, and then, later, people went to Oregon looking for him. And there he was.”

Greil Marcus’s old, weird America had a second generation, one of its children being John Fahey, the “original American primitive,” and an untutored, finger-style adventurer on the steel-stringed acoustic guitar.

He is the subject of In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey, a new documentary by James Cullingham.

As a musicologist, Fahey tracked down folk-blues pioneers Bukka White and Skip James, and helped revive their careers during the great American folk-blues boom in the 1960s. His essays on those sojourns into the Mississippi Delta were thoroughly journalistic, if somewhat fanciful.

In 1964, as one of the inaugural graduates of the University of California’s folklore curriculum, Fahey‘s master’s thesis was on the great country-blues artist Charlie Patton. In his own (mostly instrumental) music, he took the forms of Patton and others and developed his own melodies while introducing resonant syncopation, Eastern meditativeness and, later, found sounds.

What’s fascinating about Fahey is that he himself became the same source of intrigue as his folk-blues heroes. After a successful career of recording and touring, he wound up homeless in the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. “As a young man, he was in the Mississippi Delta looking for James and White,” says Cullingham. “And then, later, people went to Oregon looking for him. And there he was.”

 

Bill Helms

from JEMF Quarterly, Vol. Ill, Part 2—December, 1967—No. 8:

On August 28, 1963 collector Bob Pinson interviewed Bill Helms at his home in Thomaston, Georgia. Helms had recorded for Victor in 1928 as Bill Helms and his Upson County Band. In 1931 he recorded for Columbia with the Hometown Boys.

Bill thinks he first met McMichen and Puckett at Manchester at a convention in 1926. Puckett had heard of Helms and asked him to come to the convention. A lot of people from Thomaston knew Riley, so someone probably told him about Helms. Two weeks after Manchester they went to a convention at Macon.

Fellow named Bud Silvey used to run a lot of conventions—had two sons, Paul and Hoke Rice. Most of the dances Helms played at were with a fellow named Vaughn Green, guitar player—this was in the early ’20′s before he started with the conventions and working with Riley.  He and Vaughn used to play six nights a week for months and months.

Remembers hearing some of Puckett and Tanner early records with Puckett on banjo on a phonograph owned by an old darkey out in the country.    After that Riley got a guitar and started to learn–learned by himself, no one showed him anything.

Then he and Puckett worked together, Helms often worked black-face.  His brother Cliff had a different style, McMichen taught Bill how to use a bow to get better results. Told him to hold it back at the frog so it wouldn’t bounce and squeak, and to take longer strokes. Met McMichen at that convention in Macon.  Bert Layne, Fate Morris Lowe Stokes and Gid were there also.

Recorded for Columbia with Riley and Gid.  Gid used banjo then, capoed down like a mandolin. Frank Walker chose the name Home Town Boys. Because they already had so many bands  “Riley Puckett and the something-or-others, ” didn’t want to use his name this time.

Met Jimmie Rodgers at a convention in Chattanooga, He needed a mike to sing. Sang with his head down—couldn*t face the audience. Helms thought he had stage fright. For the fiddle conventions, they would hire Helms and pay his way (e.g., to Chattanooga) .    Fellow in Columbus named Charlie Lodge hired him and Puckett and six others Fate Norris was there too, had a musical soap box–made out of soap boxes with a pocket knife, and strings from mandolins, guitars, fiddles, and autoharps.  Had pedals and knee pads.   Played two instruments with his feet, played a mouth harp.

Helms, Tanner and Puckett played a route through north Georgia which Gid had booked up for them. Adults payed 25 cents, children 15 cents admission to these shows. In some places they’d make as much as $300 to $400. Helms made his living as a musician for about fifteen years.

Cecil Sharp in America

edited excerpt from “Cecil Sharp in America” (www.mustrad.org.uk):

by Mike Yates

Cecil Sharp, the English folksong collector, made a remarkable collection of songs in the Appalachian mountains during the period 1916-1918.  I decided to seek out Sharp’s original diaries and extant correspondence, so that I could let Sharp himself tell me what had happened during his Appalachian forays.

Cecil Sharp: “The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English.  Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation are obsolete, and have been in England a long time.

Although the people are so English, they have their American quality that they are freer than the English peasant.  They own their own land, and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of the servility which, unhappily, is one of the characteristics of the English peasant. 

With that praise, I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago.  They have been so isolated and protected from outside influence that their own music and song have not only been uncorrupted, but also uninfluenced by art music in any way. 

This is clear enough in the character of the tunes I have collected, nearly all of which are in gapped scales (i.e., scales lacking two or more notes; e.g., the fourth and seventh), which is a more archaic form than that in which they are now being sung in England.”

Sharp noted a number of songs from Dad Blackard, the local ‘banjer-man’, whose family later recorded two 78rpm records in 1927.

When I met Dad Blackard’s daughter, Clarice Shelor, in 1980 she told me how Sharp and Maud Karpeles had arrived at her father’s house during a rainstorm.  They were both soaked through to the skin and so the family took the wet clothes off their guests and wrapped them in blankets while their clothes dried by the fire.

Clarice remembered her amazement at Sharp’s ability to harmonise her father’s tunes on the family piano almost as soon as he had noted them in his tune book.  She also remembers the fact that Sharp had a very prominent nose.  ‘I’ll never forget.  I was a little girl then.  I had a big nose and I’d always thought that with my big nose I’d never be famous, or anything, when I grew up.  And do you know …  Mr Sharp he had such a big nose.  And him being famous.  It just made me feel marvellous.’

Sid Harkreader

by Eugene Chadbourne (www.cmt.com)

Sid Harkreader is mostly known as a sidekick to the old-time music legend Uncle Dave Macon. A latecomer to a music career, Macon chose Harkreader as his sidekick for his first road tour in the early ’20s. After a well-received jaunt through the South, the duo decided to try to lineup recording activities in New York City.

They got in on the first wave of hillbilly recordings being done, cutting more than a dozen sides for Vocalion in 1924. Both performers became associated with the beginning days of the Grand Old Opry and Harkreader was on-stage regularly at the Opry from the ’30s onward, both with Macon and in other combinations. Harkreader was one of the first historic country players to broadcast live over Nashville’s radio stations WDAD and WSM.

The number of musicians in Harkreader’s family was almost nil, a quiet contrast to the usual scenario with old-time players. Here was a great-great grandfather that had apparently been a fine violinist, and Harkreader’s father hoped that somehow this talent might be passed down to his offspring through the bloodline. His hunch turned out to be correct. The boy picked up most of his early musical knowledge from friends and neighbors at square dances and ice cream parties, taking great care not to get the sticky stuff on the fingerboard.

Once he had mastered the fiddle, he was delighted to realize he could make between ten dollars and 20 dollars per night playing at square dances, and this is how he began building his reputation. He first met Macon in 1923 in a barbershop. The afternoon evolved from haircutting to a musical cutting contest, the two players drawing a large crowd of amused bystanders.

Their playing combination was certainly one of the classic duos in country music, producing, among other sides, one of the great recordings of the standard “Soldier’s Joy,” an instrumental about morphine that dates back to at least the Civil War, which was no doubt used as a musical background for injections and amputations.

Following the first recording session with Macon, the fiddler was approached by a talent scout who offered him a cool grand to cut 24 sides for Paramount. He took along banjo player Grady Moore for the first set of sessions, returning the following year with Blythe Poteet because the former player was too sick to travel. Most of these tracks were reissued in the ’70s by County on their Early Nashville String Band series, and some material by Harkreader has also been released by the JEMF label, which also printed the delightful booklet Sid Harkreader’s Memoirs.

Harkreader was one of the white old-time musicians who openly acknowledged a heavy black influence in his playing. Perhaps it wasn’t in the best taste to acknowledge this musical debt by recording a tune entitled “Southern Whistling Coon,” but this track does demonstrate Harkreader’s enjoyable sideline as a skilled musical whistler and tends to show up in lists of great records involving whistling.

 

Dick Spottswood (pt.2)

from http://soundamerican.org:

Dick Spottswood: I became fascinated with early hillbilly music when I heard the famous Harry Smith [An Anthology of American Folk Music] collection in the 1950s.  At the time I though country music was nothing more than honky tonk hits on AM radio, so I was really captivated by  music that sounded prehistoric in comparison.

Then, at a high school party – I think I was a sophomore that year, probably 1953 – I heard Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on a stack of records at a teenage party in Chevy Chase. That music stopped me in my tracks! (laughs) It was “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and even Harry Smith hadn’t prepared me for that!

Lester and Earl were like nothing I’d ever heard. It was on one of those old record players that dropped the 78s down on the turntable one at a time, without breaking any if you were lucky. So I memorized their names and went to see what I could about finding some of their records.

I met Mike Seeger around that time, and he was already paying attention to that style of hillbilly music. It wasn’t called bluegrass then. He recommended a lot of names. I learned of Bill Monroe from him the first time, along with Jim and Jesse and all  those people whose names became household.

A year later I went with Pete Kuykendall, Lamar Grier and a few other people to uncover a huge stash of small label records in Johnson City, Tennessee. It was over Christmas break in 1955. We drove down icy roads in Tennessee and Virginia in a 1948 Buick . I don’t know how it was that we didn’t slide off the road on the ice sometimes. We loaded up that car with as many records as we could without shoving any of us passengers out and drove all the way back to Washington with them.  It was really where I became acquainted with bluegrass and the art of collecting.

It was like I was selling Fuller brushes, except that I was buying old records; knocking on the door and saying, “how are you today? I was wondering if you have any old records hidden back in the closet or in the attic or outdoors in the shed, because I’m looking for whatever I can find.”

I would pay people for records, and most of the time it wasn’t too terribly hard. The hard part was looking through worn out records of no interest…standard popular music, or the beat up rhythm n’ blues records…you know, things that were very commonplace at the time and of no collecting interest. It wasn’t easy to find the records I liked best, even 50 or 60 years ago.

Gordon Tanner

Gordon Tanner

from “Down Yonder: Old Time String Band Music from Georgia (Folkways 31089):

Dick Spottswood (pt.1)

Folk Music in America Series: Edited By Richard Spottswood, 15 Volume LP Set

Folk Music in America Series: LBC3 DANCE MUSIC: BREAKDOWNS & WALTZES, LBC 5 DANCE MUSIC: RAGTIME, JAZZ & MORE, LBC 4 DANCE MUSIC: REELS, POLKAS & MORE, LBC 1 RELIGIOUS MUSIC: CONGREGATIONAL & CEREMONIAL, LBC 15 RELIGIOUS MUSIC: SOLO & PERFORMANCE, LBC 14 SOLO & DISPLAY MUSIC, LBC 13 SONGS OF CHILDHOOD, LBC 7 SONGS OF COMPLAINT & PROTEST, LBC 9 SONGS OF DEATH & TRAGEDY, LBC 11 SONGS OF HUMOR & HILARITY, LBC 8 SONGS OF LABOR & LIVELIHOOD, LBC 12 SONGS OF LOCAL HISTORY & EVENTS, LBC 2 SONGS OF LOVE, COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE, LBC 6 SONGS OF MIGRATION & IMMIGRATION, LBC 10 SONGS OF WAR & HISTORY

by Ian Nagoski (edited excerpt from http://soundamerican.org):

“…there’s exciting music to be found in obscure places, and those are the discoveries I still live for.”

Dick Spottswood has been personally responsible for the continued life of thousands of performances of American music from the first half of the twentieth century.

If you own any reissue collections of vernacular music from that era, there’s a good chance that his name is somewhere in the credits. For more than 40 years, he has been publishing research and producing collections covering an incredibly diverse array of music, including blues, bluegrass, calypso, gospel, the music of immigrants from Ireland, Greece, Poland and the Ukraine, the musics of the Texas-Mexico region, Cuba, India, Portugal, China, and elsewhere.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1937 and raised just outside the district in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Spottswood joined an older generation of music enthusiasts when he was still an adolescent. During the 1950s,he was one of a group of record collectors who went searching for sound recordings that, although they were only two or three decades old at the time, were already forgotten, a process amounting to a pioneering music-salvage mission.

He began to disseminate the fruits of his listening and interests to the public in the 1960s and by the 70s had acquired a vast knowledge of 78rpm era recordings of a broad range of music. His taste ran strongly in the direction of what he calls “down home” music, and he sought out recordings in any language that seemed to fit that label.

He formalized his vision on a series of LPs produced for the Library of Congress (see above) and then produced his seven-volume Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 to 1942, which was published by the University of Indiana press in 1990 and has become an indispensible tool for anyone interested in any of the hundreds of thousands of non-English-language recordings made here during that half-century.

Spottswood highlights the many facets of folk culture in the United States on his two hour radio show. Reaching back to the 1890s and the beginnings of recorded sound, but concentrating on music from the 1920s through 1950s, each of Dick’s programs brings listeners a surprising collection of recordings – from cylinders through 78′s and LP’s.

Find more information about The Dick Spottswood Show.

Kirk McGee

Kirk McGee

by Stephen Wade (edited from “Banjo Diary”):

Rural Southern banjoists translated ragtime-era tunes and techniques into their own idiom. Perhaps the most obvious of these translations lies in banjo player and band leader Charlie Poole’s indebtedness to Fred Van Eps for his “Southern Medley” and “Sunset March”.

Grand Ole Opry patriarch Uncle Dave Macon likewise reworked city-based recordings—from “Eli Green’s Cakewalk” to his several laughing songs to his seemingly autobiographical yet pre-existing “They’re After Me.” The list of hillbilly artists drawing from earlier popular music goes on and on.

 
One of those individuals was Kirk McGee, my source for “Under the Double Eagle.” By the time Kirk played it, the piece had become well established in band shell and parade repertory, along with numerous recorded brass and string renditions. Austrian “March King” Josef Franz Wagner completed the piece in 1902. That year English banjoist Olly Oakley recorded it, and in a few months’ time, John Philip Sousa’s band began to popularize it in the United States via their recordings and personal appearances.

 
In July 1981, I visited Kirk (1899–1983), best known for having accompanied Uncle Dave Macon and having played with his late older brother, Sam McGee. Sam and the Skillet Lickers’ Riley Puckett were the two earliest players to record solo guitar breaks in country music. By then Kirk was the longest continually performing member of the Grand Ole Opry.

During our time together Kirk offered a breathtaking range of music: from his father’s Henry Ford contest fiddle tunes to his mother’s Civil War ballads, from singing-school hymns he learned as a youth to demanding arrangements he made up of “St. Louis Blues” and “Dill Pickles Rag,” from standards like “Old Folks at Home” to “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” from songs he heard black section hands do as they laid rails near his childhood home in Franklin,Tennessee, to pieces he learned from itinerant players “just walking around from house to house”.

 

Interested in a Small Run of Custom LPs?

from http://www.indyweek.com:

by Brian Howe

Wesley Wolfe has catalyzed the lathe-to-turntable movement of local music

There were wax cylinders and cassette tapes, compact discs and (at the very end) MP3s, but the 20th century’s music belonged to the vinyl record. Despite more portable formats and vast technological advancements, that romance continues and grows: Americans bought 4.6 million records last year, up from 3.9 million in 2011, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

At a time when music feels intangible and oversupplied through the Internet, satellite and streaming radio and through the speakers above the grocery store aisle, LPs maintain a tangible link between artists and collectors. The archaic crackle of a stylus dragging dust through a spiral groove supplies a resonance of its own, unlike translucent and pristine digital formats. It’s the difference between a silk purse and a Ziploc bag.

But like any other mass-consumed product, most records are duplicated in remote factories by the thousand, rolling from a large warehouse onto record shelves. But for locavores and similar connoisseurs, area musician Wesley Wolfe has a more rarified option. For the last three years, Wolfe’s one-person business, Tangible Formats, has cut 7-, 10- and 12-inch records in runs as small as one. It’s part of an obscure but evolving culture based around small-batch hand-lathed records, a laborious but potentially viable alternative to mass production in a fragmented music market.

Ed Young

Ed Young (fife)

Untitled fife tune played by Ed Young, cane fife; Bessie Jones and Georgia Sea Islanders, clapping:

from notes to “Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children’s Songs” (New World NW 291):

 
The late Ed Young was born in 1910 into a musical family. The whole family sang religious music together, and two maternal uncles were also banjo players. Though widespread and popular, the banjo was by no means the only musical instrument played in Ed Young’s home country, the Yazoo Delta of northwestern Mississippi. Fife and drum, originally instruments of martial music, were played in the Youngs’ community for dancing at picnics.

Of his first encounter with fife and drum at age eight or ten, Young recalled, “When that drum started playing, I didn’t know what to think of it…. I remember my mother holding me….I was just fixing to run.”

 
He and his brother Lonnie rapidly mastered the instruments and became favored performers at picnics. Other musicians “… didn’t want to see us around… drummers just fall out with us on that account…. …I was a pretty testible little fellow anyhow, and I liked to blow sort of fast pieces that people could get out there and clown some on…. I never tried to run no races or beat no one doing anything, but whatever I was going to do, I just loved to get out there and do whatever I can.”

 
Ed Young made his cane fife with six holes but played only five; the sixth improved the tone quality. He developed a unique style, playing some of the notes by either sliding his fingers on and off the holes or using his tongue to bend the notes and create a tremolo. “I always had a way of making [the sound] go this way this time, and the other way the next….I don’t care who’s playing fife, if I pick it up, everybody will tell you who got it.”

 
On this recording Bessie Jones backs up Ed Young with clapping. Clapping, stamping, and pounding a stick on a resonant floor constituted the basics of a polyrhythmic percussive accompaniment for songs on plantations, where slaves were not allowed to make and play drums . The slave owners feared the potential use of “talking drums” to send messages from plantation to plantation, so the percussion music of Africa was adapted to the mediums at hand – proof that you can deny a people their musical instruments, but you cannot take away their music making.

Tracy Schwarz

from http://articles.latimes.com (1989):

Southern California is not the most likely place to find a passkey into the world of traditional Cajun music, but life-changing discoveries often happen under unlikely circumstances.

Cajun music is rooted in rural Louisiana prairie towns that couldn’t be more remote in setting or spirit from the hubbub of a metropolis or a music business center. But when Tracy Schwarz came through Los Angeles back in the early 1960s as a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, an influential trio of folk music traditionalists, he had his first profound Cajun encounter.

“At the old Ash Grove (the seminal L.A. folk and blues club), I got an album by (Cajun musician) Austin Pitre for a dollar,” said Schwarz, who will play a solo show Saturday night at the Shade Tree in Laguna Niguel. “It was the best dollar I ever spent. It gave me a real good idea of what traditional Cajun music should sound like.”

For Schwarz, who grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, that album was the start of a musical love affair from which he has emerged as one of the few players to have made a mark in Cajun music without having been born into the French-speaking Cajun culture.

“The sound of the music was what got me first,” Schwarz recalled in a recent phone interview from Fresno, where he had stopped during his annual West Coast tour. “The songs were in a language other than English, but there was a lot of country music in there, too. These two things that are almost contradictory were mixed in Cajun music, and that’s what got me.”

For Schwarz, those seeming incongruities held unusual interest: Country and Western was his first musical love, and foreign languages were another leading passion (he has studied five, including French and Russian, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in German).

Schwarz’s next step on the road to being certified as an honorary Cajun (an award he received last year from the Louisiana-based Cajun-French Music Assn.) was encountering the music in the flesh at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The festival marked the first time that traditional Cajun music had ever been played on a prominent, mainstream stage. Schwarz struck up a friendship at the festival with Dewey Balfa, an expert fiddler who would become one of the most effective and engaging ambassadors of Cajun music and culture. He also became Schwarz’s coach in things Cajun.

“Tracy was like a child that sees a toy and he grabs for it and he can’t reach it,” Balfa said over the phone from his home in Basile, La., where he still drives a school bus when he isn’t performing. But with enough patience, Balfa said, concluding the analogy, the child finally gets what he is reaching for.

After a decade of running into Balfa on the folk festival circuit, Schwarz’s involvement in Cajun music deepened in 1975, when, at Balfa’s invitation, he visited Louisiana for the first time. Balfa wanted to record a Cajun fiddle instruction album modeled after the “Learn To Fiddle” instructional LP that Schwarz had released in 1965. He asked Schwarz to produce the record.

“We did it back-porch style,” recording at Balfa’s home on equipment borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution, Schwartz said. Schwarz also took the tape machine out to area dance halls at Mardi Gras, where he captured Balfa and other local players for a second album.

Carl Sprague

from http://www.tshaonline.org:

(1895–1979). Carl T. “Doc” Sprague, one of America’s first singing cowboy stars, the son of William T., Jr., and Libby Sprague, was born on May 10, 1895, near Manvel, Texas, in Brazoria County. As a youth, he worked in the family cattle business and, from his uncles, learned many of the old cowboy songs while sitting around the campfire. Sprague went to College Station to study agriculture at Texas A&M but seems to have languished in the academic field, having only attained the status of sophomore by 1917.

During World War I he served in the United States Army Signal Corps and was stationed in France. He returned to A&M in 1920 and graduated in 1922 with a degree in animal husbandry. He was hired by D. X. Bible as an athletic trainer at A&M. This assignment earned him the sobriquet “Doc,” and he worked there from 1922 to 1937.

In 1925, impressed by the success of Vernon Dalhart^qv‘s hillbilly recordings, Sprague wrote to Victor Records and suggested that they record his cowboy songs. On August 3, 4, and 5, 1925, at the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey, he recorded ten cowboy songs learned from his uncles on those cattle drives in South Texas. One song, “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” about a cowboy killed during a night stampede, became the first cowboy song to achieve hit status.

As a result, the image of the singing cowboy was permanently established in American folk culture. Sprague recorded eighteen more songs at three other Victor sessions in 1926 in Camden and New York, in 1927 in Savannah, Georgia, and in 1929 in Dallas. He was the first artist to market himself in the image of a singing cowboy complete with chaps, hat, and guitar. His experience in ranching and cattle drives also made him among the first actual cowboys to record a cowboy song.

Sprague never opted to pursue a serious musical career but looked upon his singing as a hobby. In 1937 he left the employ of Texas A&M and began operating a filling station and grocery store and also worked as an insurance salesman. He returned to the army during World War II and achieved the rank of major, working as a recruiter in Houston and Dallas. He then returned to the insurance industry until the early 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s he experienced a resurgence in his musical career.

He was honored at several folklife seminars, notably at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Illinois, where he performed in Western outfits and spoke about the life of the American cowboy. Sprague returned to recording in 1972 and 1974 and made two long-playing albums for Bear Family Records of Germany.

Carl Sprague lived in Bryan, Texas, from 1920 until his death. He married Lura Bess Mayo in 1926. They had no children.

Carl Sprague died on February 21, 1979, in Bryan. In 2003 a collection of his twenty-four songs, including “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” “Rounded Up in Glory,” “Last Great Round Up,” and “Utah Carrol,” was released in an anthology titled Cowtrails, Longhorns, and Tight Saddles: Cowboy Songs 1925–1929.

Earl Collins pt.2

from Earl Collins: Hoedown Fiddler Takes The Lead by Barbara LaPan Rahm:

(read part 1 here)

Earl Collins: I used to hold my Daddy’s arm while he fiddled when I was two or three years old. I just kept it loose and tried not to bother him. Oh, he had some of me awfullest bowing you ever heard, he could do licks that no one else could.  “Wrassle With A Wild  Cat”– Miss Buchanan couldn’t even write it he’d make so many notes that she couldn’t get them in there and she’d write it just the best she could. He had quit playing for about 25 or 30 years till that WPA project came along and he needed the money. You know, they paid those fellas, they got a check regular. Roosevelt give them a check. They just played, dances or anything that come up.

And Miss Buchanan taught them every day, this whole class of about 50 or 60 of them. Each of them, she’d tell them what it was going to be and she had her little motions, you know. And each one of them would turn to that page and she’d give– like Spade Cooley– one, two three, and everybody’d start. And they’d all play the same thing. Over and over. She taught them to read music, see. My father was the lead of the whole bunch. I’ll put him up at the top of the world. Not prejudiced because he was my father, but Clayton McMichen or Tanner or Eck Robertson, Georgia Slim—they couldn’t none of them beat him. In fact, I think he had them all topped.

We could have had a family like the Carter Family. There was four girls and five boys, and every one of them musicians. The girls could have played anything they would have tried. They had guitars and sang. Dad used to sing quite a few of those old hoedowns like Wolves A Howling when he’d play. I remember one line:

Don’t you hear those wolves a-howlin,  howlin round my pretty darlin , six on the hillside, seven on the holler, and they’ll get her, I’ll bet you a dollar…

But Max and I is the only two that really teamed up. I set him on an apple box when he was six and showed film G chord, and he never made a bobble. He was my guitar man, and right today. I’ll take him above anybody.

I stopped fiddling in 1950. I tried everything in the world. I tried every little gimmick that come along. I’ve been beat out of so much and cheated. Like I played the first television show that ever come to LA, in the western field—KFI. I played six weeks down there and never got one penny. Rehearsed three or four nights a week and then go down there and play thirty minutes. And a guy collected all the money and run off. And me and my brother, we was both working machine shop six days a week and playing two and three nights a week, sometimes four. We both just quit.

I give both my two boys fiddles—I’ve had fiddles, guitars, banjos mandolins– and I wanted one of them, both of them actually to make a hoedown fiddler, follow in my old Dad’s tracks and in my tracks. But neither one of them was interested. Too busy running around doing something else, see. But in 1965 they come in to me one afternoon when I got home from work, said, ‘”Dad we’re going to learn to play rhythm on the banjo and the guitar: I said, “Aw no you don’t.” They said, “Yes, we do.” So that’s how it come that I take the fiddle back. I got the banjo and the guitar and the fiddle out, tuned then all up and then I’d play a tune. I’d show them the chords on the banjo and then show them the chords on the guitar. Then we’d pick up all three and we’d try.

You know, I love old jam sessions better than I do anything. Just setting around someone’s house, and you play what you want to as long as you want to– this and that. I play awhile and you play awhile, then someone else will play. Then I’II go back and I’II play some and you play some…

Sheet music looks like puppy tracks to me. Scales won’t mean nothing to you in hoedowns won’t mean a doggone thing. You just pick up the fiddle get a tune in your mind, and you work on that tune and you play it. You’ve got it in your mind and you know just exactly how it goes. That’s memory. But if you go to school and they teach you notes you’re not going to play hoedown, you’re going to play violin. It’s hard to get an old hoedown fiddler’s tone. There’s not too many around that has the old fiddler’s tone to me. It’s a touch on the strings and smooth bowing that makes a fiddler. It’s the beauty that you get out of a fiddle. As long as you’re in the chord, making your true notes, running your smooth bow—you’re playing the fiddle.

Fraley on Haley

Ed Haley and family

edited from Brandon Kirk:

J.P. Fraley: “You know, Ed Haley fascinated me. When I was just a kid learning to fiddle, my daddy was a merchant. He’d take me into Ashland and stand me on the street just to listen to this blind fiddler and his boy play. I was about twelve or fourteen. Well, even earlier than that I was listening to him on the street – watching him – and I swear to god, his fingers, when he played the fiddle just looked like they was dancing. It was out of this world. Now, I don’t know which world’s fair it was, but they picked him up – I think it was Mr. Holbrook, the doctor – and took him to the world’s fair and the critics in New York – might have been ’35 or somewhere in there – wrote about him. Said he was a ‘fiddling genius.’ Just what I already knew, and I was just a kid.”

As for Haley’s technique, J.P. said he “leaned” the fiddle against his chest when playing and held the bow at its end. I wondered if he played long or short bow strokes. “He done it both. I know when he played for his own benefit he used more bow. But he played a lot for dances and as they used to say they had to play ‘quick and devilish.’”

I asked J.P. if he remembered Haley playing the eastern Kentucky version of “Blackberry Blossom” and he said yes – that he played it, too. He knew a little bit about the tune’s history: “Well, General Garfield was a fiddler. A lot of people didn’t know it. I guess it had to be in the Civil War. The ‘Blackberry Blossom’ – the old one – was General Garfield’s favorite tune. Ed – I never will forget it – he told me that that was General Garfield’s ‘Blackberry Blossom’.” This “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”, J.P. said, was a different tune entirely than the one made famous by Arthur Smith. J.P. said local fiddler Asa Neal also played the tune. “He was from around the Portsmouth area. He’s dead, and he was quite a fiddler. Now, he knew Ed. Fact of the matter, he learned a lot from Ed, but he was about Ed’s age.”

J.P. said Haley never talked about where he learned to play. “I have an idea that it was probably a lot like I learned. See Catlettsburg was a jumping off place, I call it, for loggers and coal miners and rousters and so forth, and they was always some musicians in them. And Ed had this ability – he couldn’t read – but he had an ear like nobody’s business. If he heard a tune and liked it, he’d play it and he’d just figure out his own way to do it.”

J.P. was on a roll: “See, Ed has become more or less of a legend now…and rightfully so. His range was from, say, Portsmouth, Ohio to Ashland, Catlettsburg, and up to Charleston, West Virginia. I think he was at Columbus, Ohio, and then he went to the world’s fair. He played consistently up and down the river. He made good money on the boats.”

Earl Collins (pt.1)

video excerpt and notes from “The Films of Bess Lomax”:

Earl Collins: Hoedown Fiddler Takes The Lead by Barbara LaPan Rahm

 
Earl Collins was born in Douglass County, Missouri in 1911. In 1917 his family moved to Oklahoma, where they sharecropped and Earl augmented their income by playing fiddle at square dances through the bitter early years of the depression. He married 1931 and he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, California in 1935 where Earl turned his hand to any lob he could get: hod carrier, truck driver, trash hauler, machinist, welder mechanic. He retired in 1969 because of his always fragile health.

For years he tried to convert his skill as a fiddler into a money-making occupation. He never made it, and in 1949, he put his fiddle away and did not play again until 1965, when his sons persuaded him to take it up again. Earl’s extraordinary technique and musicianship made him a star on the old time fiddlers circuit in California, almost every weekend until his death in 1975 he played at one or another local contest or jam session. In the following, Earl tells his story in his own words, which have been excerpted from a series of taped interviews conducted by Barbara LaPan Rahm.

“My grandfather fiddled, and his father fiddled. There’s been fiddling through the Collins’s since… I don t know how far the generation goes back. In the summertime my father always went out on the front porch and sat in a chair. I’ve heard people tell him “We heard you play fiddle last night, and we could tell just exactly what you was playing.” And they lived two miles away. That’s how far a fiddle would carry. Nice clear climate, you know.

Those springs in Missouri that come out of the hills are colder than the ice cubes you get out of that box. That water is so cold that can’t walk in it: Clean pure. You know the waters so clear down there that it can be 25 feet deep, you can throw a nickel in and tell which is up, heads or tails. But it is mostly just hills and rocks. Just rolling hills just up one hill and down, up another and down. You know, Missouri is made put of rocks. I don’t care what kind of rock you want what size, you can find it. Rocks seemed to grow up out of the ground. We’d load them in the wagon and haul them off so that we could farm the land next year and next year there’s the rocks back up there again. It you could find five acres that you could put a little corn on or a little wheat or something, why, you were doing pretty good. They don t farm any more down there.

When was seven, like I said, we moved to Wynnewood Oklahoma, stayed there a year and went to Shawnee. Shawnee’s an awful poor country. If it wasn’t for that Tinker Air Base up there, Shawnee would fold up the sidewalks and quit. See, they just farmed Oklahoma to death. Cotton and corn, cotton and corn, cotton and corn. The first thing you knew there was no fertile ground and you couldn’t make cotton or corn either. I picked cotton, hon. I would drag a sack 20 foot before I could find a boll of cotton: we’d be lucky if we got 1⁄4 of a bale an acre. That was before Roosevelt– ’32. You know how much I got? I got one day a month– $2.40. And that’s all the money I could make outside of this old fiddle. I’d play a square dance- play six or eight hours– and make 50 cents. I’d give Dad every bit of it but a dime and I’d go get me a soda pop and a candy bar.

I started trying to play when I was about three or four. But l couldn’t reach the fiddle you know; my arm was too short. So Dad glued up this little old cigar box fiddle and made the little cut-outs, you know. And I played that for four or five years. I guess I was about seven when I got big enough to reach, make a true note. I was making them sharp all the time. And l had a good ear and I could tell I wasn’t reaching high enough: my arm wasn’t long enough. See, I was a two-pound baby. Clark4 was telling you the other day that you could turn a teacup over my head and put me in a shoebox. That‘s the truth. When I was five years old I only weighed 15 pounds.

Anyway, going back to this fiddle, I had a full sized bow, but I had this little bitty old fiddle. Then I started stealing my father’s fiddle. He kept it under his bed. Boy, he’d spank my butt with a razor strop when he’d catch me playing his fiddle. (It didn’t hurt but it popped, you know, it was double: It had the leather finish on one side and fiber on the other. They always rough it up on one side and strop it the other way.)

Mother always watched for him. She’d say, “I see Daddy coming, and you can put the fiddle up.” So one day I looked up, and Dad’s standing in the door. I was about seven. Oh. I was just fiddling the hell out of Eighth of January or something; I don’t know what it was. Oh boy, sure going to get it now. He said, “You’re playing pretty good: well, come on to dinner.” So I was so scared and shaky I could hardly eat, but he started talking to me at the table said, “You really like the fiddle, don’t you?” I said “Oh I really love that fiddle.” He said, “Well, I’II tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give it to you if you won’t fool it away.” And he said, ‘Why I been spanking you with that razor strop is to get you to play. Usually if you try to make a kid play, he won’t. Just like a hog, if he thinks you want him in the pen he won’t go in.” And that just the way he put it to me. And that’s the way I started playing the fiddle.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dan Gellert (2)

excerpt from http://www.fiddle.com:

Dan Gellert is a legend in the field of old time American music. As a result of the folk music revival of the 1960s and records he heard growing up in New Jersey, he began to master the banjo, guitar, and fiddle, and sing. At an early age he discovered the importance of taking the time to understand the music in a complete and detailed way, as if it were a language. Dan has given a lot of thought to what it takes to make the music sound and feel like the field recordings and old 78 rpm records he has listened to.

While Dan is playing, one gets the sense he has entered another world which combines all his influences, yet it is his playfulness and improvisational sensibilities which make his style powerful and instantly recognizable. Dan’s fiddling is bluesy and rhythmic and without regard for modern standards of pitch and tone. In other words, he follows his muse, which makes his music stand alone in a world of timid imitators. Not for the faint of heart, Dan Gellert is a commanding and uncompromising talent.

After raising a family and playing out mainly in his community (Elkhart, Indiana), Dan is hoping to retire and get out more and share his music. His recordings are few but excellent. Check out A Moment in Time with Brad Leftwich (Marimac cassette). He has cuts on a couple of compilations: A tribute to the Appalachian String Band Music Festival (Chubby Dragon), and The Young Fogies Vol. I (Rounder). He has a segment on the Fiddler Magazine video Carrying on the Traditions: Appalachian Fiddling Today (now out of print), as well as various cuts on the old County Records claw-hammer banjo compilations.

Give us your first experience hearing old time fiddling.

Wow. I don’t know what my first experience hearing old time fiddling was. It was hearing stuff on records. What, I don’t know in particular, although we had records of the folkies around. You know — Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, those people. I don’t know if there was any fiddle on any of that but I know I heard some of that. I grew up with all kinds of stuff. We had classical music, too, and Gypsy music.

Was it the Anthology of American Folk Music?

Yeah, that was there. Some of it was. I remember there was one store in New York where you could pick up unjacketed Folkways discs. I think the price was three for ten dollars, if I recall right, and I used to go there every once in awhile and get a few. But I think my mother got this one long before I started going in there. It was just that first disc I remember. We started going in the early ’60s to these “hootenannies.”

Othar Turner

from http://www.cascadeblues.org:

 Othar Turner lived in the small Mississippi community of Gravel Springs, located not too far from the nearby towns of Senatobia and Como, about an hour south of Memphis. He spent most of his life within these same few miles, working his farm and playing his music. He was born in Rankin County, Mississippi in 1908. His parents had separated prior to his birth and it wasn’t until he was nearly four years old that he met his father. Othar always held an interest in music. As a young child he played the harmonica and would beat on a 50-gallon lard can for a drum.

    He first heard the sound of a fife at age 16 from a neighbor named R.E. Williams and was enchanted from his very first listen. The neighbor gave Othar his first fife and the boy would practice it constantly. His mother disapproved and told him to stop, but Othar continued whenever she was away from home. When she discovered that he had kept up the fife, she broke the instrument. Othar had studied the fife so intently, he was able to remember where the finger-hole positioning was and began to make his own fifes from the cane he found near his home, using a fireplace poker to burn the holes. Othar continued creating his own homemade fifes throughout his entire life.

    He had also heard the sounds of the fife and drum bands played at picnics and other social gatherings and eventually created his own band, known as The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. He performed with Sid Hemphill and later with the younger Napolian Strickland, both of whom considered Turner the patriarch of the style. Still later, Othar’s own family began to take part in his music, in particular, his daughter, Bernice, who played drums alongside her father.

    Othar Turner had been playing his music for many years when music researcher Alan Lomax made his way through Northern Mississippi in the 1950s. While seeking guitarist Fred McDowell, Lomax chanced upon Turner and received directions from him on where to locate the Bluesman, unaware that he had just met one of the most authentic roots performers of the area.

Snake Chapman on Ed Haley

Ed Haley

edited from an article by Brandon Kirk:

Snake Chapman said Haley held the bow “up a little in the middle, not plumb on the end” and usually played with the fiddle at his chest – “just down ordinarily.” He also said Haley “single-noted” most of his bow strokes, played frequently in cross-key, hated vibrato and used a lot of “sliding notes.” He seldom got out of first position, only occasionally “going down and getting some notes” that he wanted to “bring in the tune” and he definitely tried to play words in his music.

“The old fiddlers through the mountains here – and I guess it’s that way everywhere – they tried to make the fiddle say the words of the old tunes,” Snake said.

I asked Snake about Haley’s repertoire and he said, “He played an old tune called ‘Old Sledge’ and it was one of his good ones. He played tunes like ‘Trouble Among the Yearlings’, but when he was gonna play it he called it ‘Fox in the Mud’. He made that up himself. One of the favorite tunes of mine he played was the old-time way of playing ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and he played it in G-minor. Ed could really play it good. They was somebody else that made the tune. Uncle Ed told me who it was – Garfield. He said he was a standing fiddling near a big blackberry patch and it was in bloom at the mouth of the hollow one time and this fella Garfield played this tune and he asked this fella Garfield what the name of the tune was. He said, ‘Well, I ain’t named it, yet,’ and he turned around and spit in that blackberry patch with a big bunch of ambeer and said, ‘We’ll just call it ‘Blackberry Blossom’.”

Snake laughed.

“Yeah, Uncle Ed, he had tales behind every one of them like that, but that’s where he said he got the name of it. He said he named it there…spitting in the blackberry blossom.”

Snake said Haley used to play on the streets of Williamson, West Virginia where he remembered him catching money in a tin cup. In earlier years, he supposedly played on the Ohio River and Big Sandy boats and probably participated in the old fiddlers’ contests, which Snake’s father said was held on boat landings. These impromptu contests were very informal and usually audience-judged, meaning whoever got the most applause was considered the winner. Sometimes, fiddlers would just play and whoever drew the biggest crowd was considered the winner.

I asked Snake if he ever heard Ed talk about Clark Kessinger and he said, “Skeets was telling me Ed didn’t like Clark at all. He said, ‘That damned old son-of-a-gun stands around and tries to pick up everything he can pick up from you.’ And he did. Clark tried to pick up everything from Uncle Ed. He was a good fiddler, too.”

Snake said Clayton McMichen (the famous Skillet Licker) was Haley’s favorite fiddler, although he said he knew just how to beat him. This made me think of the line from Parkersburg Landing, “In regard to his own fiddling, Haley was not particularly vain, although he was aware that he could put ‘slurs and insults’ into a tune in a manner that set him apart from all other fiddlers.”

Moses Bonner

Miriam Amanda Wallace “Ma” Ferguson was the first female Governor of Texas in 1925. She held office until 1927, later winning another term in 1932 and serving until 1935.

from http://www.tshaonline.org:

Moses J. Bonner (1847–1939), fiddle player, recording artist, and Confederate veterans’ advocate, was one of the earliest Texas country musicians to record and one of the first to play a radio “barn dance.” He was born on March 1, 1847, in Franklin County, Alabama, to M. M. and Mary (Nelson) Bonner. His family moved to Texas in 1854 and settled in the Dallas area. As a boy, Bonner reportedly learned to play the fiddle from an old black man. After the death of M. M. Bonner, the family moved farther west to what would be present-day Parker County.

Bonner joined Company E of the Twelfth Texas Cavalry in May 1864 and served as a courier under Gen. William Henry Parsons. After the Civil War, he established the Crowdus Hide and Wool Company in Weatherford. He married Susan Pounders, and in 1878 they  moved to Fort Worth. In the late nineteenth century he became active in the United Confederate Veterans and was a member of the Robert E. Lee Camp in Fort Worth. There in 1901, nineteen fiddlers, including Bonner, Henry Gilliland, James K. P. Harris, Tom Lee, and others, participated in a fiddling contest; Gilliland won. At this event, the group formed the Old Fiddlers Association of Texas.

Bonner participated in local and regional fiddle contests during the early twentieth century. In 1911 he tied with Gilliland and Jesse Roberts for the world’s championship in Midland. In 1916 he won the championship in Midland and beat out Jesse Roberts and J. K. P. Harris. In addition to his reputation as one of the top fiddlers, he was also known as an excellent jig dancer. On January 4, 1923, he broadcast a program of old-time fiddle music over WBAP in Fort Worth, thus becoming one of the earliest radio fiddle players.

His radio popularity led to a recording session with Victor on March 17, 1925, in Houston. Accompanied by Fred Wagoner on harp guitar, Bonner waxed medleys of “Yearlings in the Canebrake”/”The Gal on the Log” and “Dusty Miller”/”Ma Ferguson.” “Ma Ferguson” was a song about Miriam Ferguson, Texas’s first female governor. Bonner’s rendition of “Dusty Miller” has become a classic of old-time fiddling.

Bonner remained active in Confederate veterans’ affairs. He attended many reunions and other events throughout the country and lobbied for pensions for Confederate veterans. The pension bill was eventually approved in 1911. In 1930 he was made Commander of the Texas Division of the United Confederate Veterans and thereby received the rank of major general (though Victor identified him as “Capt. M. J. Bonner” on their records). In 1938 Bonner, at the age of ninety-one, led a Texas delegation to attend the seventy-fifth veterans reunion at Gettysburg. He died in Fort Worth on September 2, 1939.

Daniel Jatta

Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta plays the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo.

from http://www.npr.org (August 23, 2011):

“My father was born with this instrument,” Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. “This is part of our history.”

Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He’s holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it.

Jatta’s father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn’t think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students.

“When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music,” Jatta says. “I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father’s akonting.”

That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo’s connections with the instrument he grew up with.

The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they’re just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region.

Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion.

“Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region,” he says, “the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned.”

For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument’s gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head.

But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting’s short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style.

“What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style,” Jatta says. “This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old.”

Dan Gellert (1)

from http://www.folkworks.org:

DB: How did you learn? Did live one-on-one interaction play a part in the learning process?

DG: There were a few banjo (and mandolin and guitar) players around that I got to watch and sometimes play with. On the fiddle I think it was just me and the old records for maybe the first couple of years.

DB: Which fiddle and banjo players have influenced you the most?

DG: I can say that Pete Seeger was a major influence because he’s the first banjo player I heard and also his GREAT banjo book which I still recommend to students. For most, “why” is just because I like to listen to them. A random selection of my early models, in no particular order: Uncle Bunt, Uncle Dave, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Doc Watson, Tom Ashley, Posey Rorer, Luther Strong, Fred, Kyle, & Tommy, Gid, Lowe, & Pappy, Sam & Kirk, Dock Boggs…

DB: How did you approach bowing when you started learning? Was there any sense of “bow patterns” for you? How do you think about “bowing?”

DG: I didn’t think of it that way when I was learning, but I managed to acquire a few good habits very early on (just plain luck as far as I can tell). I’d been fiddling for maybe 20 years by the time I was hanging around with Brad and heard him talk about “down bowing”. I remember asking him if I played that way, since I’d never paid any attention to which way the bow was going. He said yes. Since then I’ve gotten more and more into teaching, and so I’ve had to learn how to analyze and dissect the way I do things. It still isn’t real easy.

DB: What are the most eccentric tunes/recordings in your mind?

DG: Strange that I felt an instant negative reaction to this question, as I used to think I was real into eccentricity. My first thought was f*** eccentric, music has to be CENTERED. Everyone has their own idea of where the center is, though. Which doesn’t answer the question. I don’t know. Like, Willie Narmour can be crooked as hell, but he very much makes his own kind of sense. What about Edn Hammons, JW Day, (and lots of others, of course)– eccentric, or just real normal for the mid 19th century?

DB: Do you listen to any modern musicians?

DG: Not a lot. I do sometimes hear things I like, but I’m getting old enough that long-term memory carries a lot more weight with me than short-term..

Joseph S. Hall: Smoky Mountain Song Catcher

Joseph S. Hall

Joseph S. Hall: Smoky Mountain Song Catcher by Michael Montgomery (from notes to CD “Old Time Smoky Mountain Music“)
Joseph Sargent Hall, who recorded all the music on this CD in 1939, collected Appalachian cultural materials for four decades and was one of the most devoted students of the region’s lore. Yet oddly, almost no one outside the Smoky Moun- tains ever met this modest Californian who spent nearly his entire career teaching at a junior college in Los Angeles. His passion for documenting and recording speech, music, tales, medicinal cures, beliefs, and recollections was sparked by a chance sum- mer job in 1937 at the newly opened Great Smoky Mountains National Park, taken to pay for his education.

Those three months in the mountains changed his life. In that first stint he had little but his ears, his notepads, and his love for the outdoors. He met a breed of people who adopted him, establishing friendships that Hall nurtured until he died in 1992 in Oceanside, Cali- fornia, at the age of eighty-five.
Commissioned by the National Park Ser- vice to document the speech of a people being dispersed, Hall found a vigorous tradi- tional culture that was changing, but by no means disappearing. Because it defied his expectations in many ways and because its people so attracted him, he became some- thing of a missionary.

Dismayed by negative images of mountain people found so often in the writings of others and by accounts of mountain society as “deprived,” he decided to show these people as they were, idiosyncrasies and all, in the best, most respectful way: by having them present themselves. He com- piled Smoky Mountain Folks and Their Lore (1960) and Yarns and Tales from Old Smoky (1978), two books of photographs and anec- dotes by mountain natives, especially about hunting, woven together by an account of Hall’s fieldwork.

A third volume, Sayings from Old Smoky (1972), was an extensive glossary of words, phrases, and proverbs excerpted from his recordings and notebooks. These three small books were based on research in the Smokies he published through the Cat- aloochee Press in Asheville, North Carolina, which he set up to take advantage of local printers and distributors. Mountaineers could vindicate themselves quite well, Hall thought, to those who had never known them as he had.

Generations to follow are now appreciating what Hall collected and recorded. In recent years people surround- ing the Smokies have discovered that he had made a detailed, permanent record of many parents and grandparents, often long- departed family members whose voices and music they could never have anticipated to hear. These recordings can now be heard at the Archives of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and at the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State Univer- sity (to which Hall’s papers and library were donated).

Excerpts of 15 speakers can be found at the Appalachian Speech website (www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary). His record- ings, notes, and papers were used extensive- ly in Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), a his- torical work compiled and coedited with the present writer.

Ebenezer Calendar

Ebenezer Calendar sings “Nobody’s Business But My Own”:

by Ward Rien (OTP roving correspondent):

“If I drink my palm wine..If I smoke my cigarette…”

Straight from Freetown, Sierra Leone, we find the first man to record a calypso in Africa,

We find an old tune written by Bessie Smith’s old piano player in an old style

Derived from old slaves who were mostly brought across the ocean from the old place, the greater West African coast,

Yeah like in and around a place that would someday be called Free Town.  Sierra Leone.

But still, there as here it is nobody’s business if i dodoodoo.

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

EBENEZER CALENDAR
(1912-1985)

Ebenezer Calendar was a cultural musician, historian and social commentator who used his popular maringa music to entertain and  educate his fellow countrymen.

He was born in Freetown on November 19, 1912 of a Jamaican father and a Sierra Leonean mother.  By 1930, he had become a qualified carpenter, and he was employed by Pa Alimamy Boungie, an undertaker at Kissy Street. Pa Boungie’s undertaker shop used to conduct wake-keeping ceremonies for bereaved families. Thus Calendar would learn coffin-making during the day, and at night he would be among the men Pa Boungie would send to sing at wake-keeping ceremonies.

About this time, Calendar and two of his friends formed a small musical group. They practiced on open grounds, and on-lookers would sometimes give them money. Later, they began getting invitations to perform at weddings, parties and other festive occasions. All this was just part-time, reserved for evenings, as Calendar continued working for Pa Boungie. Before finally embarking on a full-time musical career, Calendar worked for some time with the Sierra Leone Railway, opened and ran an undertaker shop, and then was employed as cabinet-maker for the United African Company Limited (U.A.C.).

A versatile musician, Calendar learnt to play several different musical instruments, including the mandolin, the cornet, rhythm guitar and the trumpet. Calendar’s group in the 1940s and 1950s relied upon a combination of locally-produced instruments like the bata (hand drum) and the triangle, and Western instruments like the guitar and the tambourine to produce his distinctive maringa rhythm.

Calendar’s early songs formed part of the dance music of the fifties and sixties, and most of his compatriots will remember the swinging  rhythm of the hit song “Fire, Fire.” As he grew older, his music became more philosophical, and he began to consider himself more as a teacher with the responsibility of imparting the lessons he gained from life to a younger generation.

When he died in 1985, music groups from all over Freetown converged on his home at the foot of Mt. Aureol and played his songs continuously for twenty-four hours. Thousands gathered  to remember the man they all loved and admired.

African Elegant (Original Music 1995)

Homage to Allan Block

Jack Elliot (in hat) and Allan Block (fiddle)

edited from Gordon Peery, Rory Block, and Ralph Lee Smith:

In 1948  Allan found himself in New York, married and having children to support.  He found that he had a fine coordination between eye and hand. He.could look at a piece of leather, wood or metal, see what needed to be done, and do it. He could see something that was already made and figure out how to make another. In 1950 a Greenwich Village leather shop came up for sale and Allan borrowed the necessary $1,200 to buy it.

Musicians started hanging around the shop. Old timey musicians, folk musicians. Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Pete and Mike Seeger, Lee Hays, Freddie Hellerman and Cisco Huston – the shop became a place for these people and many others to come and jam when they were in town. After a while Allan joined in with guitar, banjo, and sometimes fiddle. John Cohen, Mike Seeger and Tom Paley formed the New Lost City Ramblers, and Allan frequently joined them, absorbing, and waking up to a heritage that went beyond his childhood.

When the New Lost City Ramblers were forming, John Cohen had loaned Allan a tape of the Ramblers’ music.  Allan was soon fiddling, playing the banjo, and singing the material in his shop.  Saturday became folk music time at the shop.  There was no singer-songwriter music and scarcely any bluegrass.  It was old-time mountain music, played in a style that approximated the original.

Bob Dylan dropped by several times during his early days in new York.  He sat on the high work counter, smiling, saying very little, and soaking everything up like a sponge.

Allan eventually became the reigning impresario of the incredibly vital folk revival scene in the West Village, hosting regular Saturday afternoon jam sessions in his sandal shop after music in Washington Square was banned (something about a “no loitering” law). Bursting with enthusiastic musicians and fans, the players and spectators literally spilled out onto the sidewalk while the center of the room steamed up from the intensity of the music as Allan held court and directed.

Everyone knew his thing was “holding down the beat”, and from time to time an excited musician would receive a gruff reprimand as Allan snapped, “Speeding up!” while casting a grave eye at the offender. One then had to pay sharper attention to his stomping foot, which pounded out the beat like Big Ben, seemingly setting the standard for worldwide time.  If Allan was a bit imposing with his fiddle and his watchful eye, he was also a catalyst for those eager to share in a truly historic musical transformation that was to be part of the wider phenomenon of renewed interest in American roots music.

In 1969 Allan moved to New Hampshire, native land of his new wife, Fleur. Allan left his now thriving sandal shop to his children (who ran it until 1979) and set up shop in a barn adjacent to the old Cape that he and Fleur had bought.   Soon Allan was going to dances, and it was in New Hampshire that the fiddle really came out. Allan would sit in with the band, and once Dudley Lauffman found out he could read music  he provided him with the scores for all I the old dances; HulI ‘s Victory, Rory O’More, Ladies Walpole (or Lady Walpole’s) Reel, Chorus Jig, and Petronella. Soon Allan became a regular sight (and sound) at dances.

Fred Cockerham

Fred Cockerham and Kyle Creed

Thanks to Lane Ryan for sharing this recording with oldtimeparty:  Fred Cockerham (fiddle) and Kyle Creed (banjo) play “Sally Ann” at Brandywine (1974) :

by Ray Alden (www.fieldrecorder.com):

Fred Cockerham, one of the seven children of Elias and Betty Jane Cockerham, was born on November 3, 1905. He was the only one from the Round Peak community to attempt the difficult life of a professional rural musician. The way that Fred began playing the fiddle is similar to the way many country musicians began. Basically, this story can be heard on FRC101, but here the story is amplified somewhat so as to compliment the spoken word. Fred remembered this story from the time he was 8 years old:

“My older brother Pate fiddled, but not too well. Just about every time he’d set down to play he’d get disgusted before long and throw the fiddle on the bed and walk out. Well, I thought to myself, I’m going to learn to play that, but he was high tempered and didn’t want me messin’ with it. So I’d sneak his fiddle over into the hog range and go over the bank into the hollow and saw the hell out of it. I didn’t worry cause I knew he couldn’t catch me when I was barefoot like I was when I was caring for the hogs, back then I could outrun a haint.

Before very long I got so I could play a few tunes pretty well, and I just couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. So I asked my mother if she’d like to hear a tune and played “Sally Ann” for her. Now that tickled her the best of anything you ever saw, and that evening when Pate threw the fiddle down as usual, she said to him, “Sit down and let your brother play a tune.” He never touched the fiddle again and I just kept right on playing it.”

Clarence Ashley

from Tom Clarence Ashley: An Appalachian Folk Musician (Masters Thesis: East Tennessee State University)
by Minnie M. Miller, August 1973:

When there was not enough demand for music to make a living in Johnson County, Ashley set out on a career of ‘busting’ (commonly called ‘busking’ in the British Isles), singing in the streets, on the edge of carnivals, outside of the main building of mines on pay days, etc.” During that time, he played a great deal with Banman Grayson, an accomplished fiddler from Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee. Also, he played with the Cook Sisters from Boone, North Carolina, and with the Greer Sisters. In these trios, Ashley played guitar while the sisters played mandolin and fiddle. Ashley formed a band with Dwight and Dewey Bell known as “The West Virginia Hotfoots.”

It was with the band known as “The Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers”, however, that Tom did his first recordings. This band consisted of Tom Ashley, guitar; Clarence Green, fiddle; Gwen Foster, harmonica; Will Abernathy, autoharp and harmonica; and Walter David, lead guitar. Ashley did not record any solo records until he was a member of a group called “Byrd Moore and his Hot Shots.” This group consisted of Byrd Moore, finger style banjo or lead guitar; Clarence Greene, fiddle or guitar; and Clarence T. Ashley, guitar or banjo.

In October, 1929, after the group had finished a recording session with Columbia, Ashley volunteered some “lassy-makin’ tunes,” one of which was “The Coo-Coo Bird.” The recording company was most impressed with Tom and later wired him to come to New York to make further recordings. They offered him a contract but his friends were not included. Ashley rejected the offer because he felt that they should take all of them or none of them. Tom’s son J.D. thinks that his dad might have become a famous recording star if he had accepted the offer of that contract.

In 1925, Ashley met Dock Walsh at a fiddlers’ contest in Boone, North Carolina; and shortly after that, “The Carolina Tar Heels” was formed. The group consisted of Tom Ashley, guitar and usually vocal lead; Dock Walsh, banjo and occasionally vocal lead; and Gwen or Garley Foster, second guitar and harmonica. The entire group recorded eighteen records with Victor in the late twenties and early thirties. In the early thirties, Ashley and Gwen Foster recorded for Vocalion. Gwen Foster was a musical genius in those days; however, he drank too heavily at times. Tom would laugh and tell about sobering him up on cider and moonshine before they went to play.

After 1933, Ashley did not record again until 1960. There are two possible explanations for the abrupt ending of his recording career in the thirties. One explanation is that Ashley was the kind of man who would not take orders from anyone. He did not like the idea of having to follow the orders of the recording companies, therefore he quit. Another possible explanation is the great depression of the thirties. Recording companies, like many other businesses, were operating under grave financial circumstances. Many artists had to turn to other means of making a living.

Anna Roberts-Gevalt

Benton Flippen and Anna Roberts-Gevalt

from http://www.hearthmusic.com:

Hearth Music Interview with Anna Roberts-Gevalt, co-creator of “The New Young Fogies” CD

What inspired you to want to record this younger generation of musicians?

Anna Roberts-Gevalt: I’d been daydreaming about ways to document all that is happening around me, with this music. This is a beautiful tradition of music, stories, and fellowship. I feel really lucky to have stumbled onto it. I guess this project, for me, came out of the desire to celebrate and share what is happening—at festivals, at house parties, in the quiet of people’s homes, too—these young people who, for one reason or another, have decided to pursue a particular vein of music. It’s unusual. It’s out of the ordinary, in this day and age.

It’s not necessarily stage music, it’s music of everyday life. So not everybody knows this is happening, and I guess I wanted to have a CD that, when people asked me—what is this music? —I could hand it to them, in answer. It’s hard to describe traditional music sometimes, hard to explain how deep it reaches. There’s all of these young folks who are spending their time visiting people their grandparent’s age, who are obsessing over recordings and obscure fiddlers from the 20s and 30s, who are proud to be carrying on local or family traditions. And I felt that a CD, and accompanying interviews, would be the perfect introduction for the uninitiated.

There is some acoustic music and folk music out in the mainstream, but much of it is only loosely or tangentially based in the Appalachian tradition. We really wanted to celebrate the young folks who have truly studied the tradition, who are a link in a long chain, who have dug deep and immersed themselves in the stories and songs, and I guess I wanted to create a project that could get their voices out there.

We started this project two years ago—Joe DeJarnette moved to into our little house on the river in southwest Virginia from New York, and I had these ideas, and it turns out he had been talking about similar ideas with Ray Alden, who put together the first volumes [the Young Fogies albums, which documented baby boomer old-time players] for Rounder Records and who worked on the Field Recorders Collective. He passed away a few years back, and this album is dedicated to him. So, we just emailed the folks who we thought should be included, set up the sessions—we travelled to Kentucky a few times, but mostly people came up to Joe’s studio.

Homage to Miles Krassen

Bobbie Thompson and Miles Krassen

edited from “OLD-TIME MUSIC AND DANCE: Community and Folk Revival,” by John Bealle:

Miles Krassen came to Bloomington, Indiana, from New York, in 1967, to study ethnomusicology. Already, Krassen was a serious student of old-time music. Of his association with traditional fiddlers, he would say, “I have always looked upon fiddlers as people who in at least one area of their lives were a type of Western wise man. Their tunes were like incantations, a form of ancient wisdom that induced high feeling”.

Later, Krassen wrote two important old-time music instruction books, Appalachian Fiddle (1973) and Clawhammer Banjo (1974). They were published by Oak Publications and followed the format established by the Oak folk music style instruction books that had proliferated throughout the 1960s. They were also widely popular, even to the extent that they were some- times stocked with band instruction materials in mainstream music stores.

For Krassen, style was a social entity, the common knowledge that formed the basis of community musical tradition. Individual style could have enduring significance only within this social nexus. Consequently, Krassen sought to explore in depth a single banjo tradition—the music of the Galax, Virginia, area and of southeastern West Virginia.

Clawhammer Banjo featured contemporary photographs, most of rural scenes unrelated to the music. None were landscapes; none except the few of musicians were portraits. Instead there was a roadside cabin, a barefoot child crossing a country bridge, a run-down country store, a flock of guineas in a yard, an aging porch swing. All situated the viewer/ photographer up close and within the arena of involvement of the scene. Many reflected an odd sense of composition, with some subjects half in and out of the frame, as if they were composed not by the eye, but by a circumstance from which someone had briefly withdrawn to photo- graph.

On the back cover of Appalachian Fiddle was a considerably more deliberate pose, with Miles Krassen playing his fiddle on a stump beside a farmhouse, flanked on either side by a pig and an uncooperative- looking goat, half out of the frame.

These images reflected a new symbolic currency circulating in the old-time music revival, one from which the revival was positioned not as an observer of tradition but as a part of a return to comprehensive traditional rural living. This movement, which gained considerable strength in the 1970s, provided the ideological underpinning for a variety of “old-time” social enterprises, one of which was old-time music.

Tom Paley

from http://www.frootsmag.com:

“I met John Cohen in New York before going up to Yale. One of the interesting things about the math department at Yale (actually most math departments) is that an awful lot of mathematicians are also musicians, just amateur musicians, and the ones who aren’t actually players of anything tend to be very much caught up in listening to music. We had a department string band there, the only string band on the campus at Yale, and one of our Professors, Professor Beagle, liked to call square dances so we had department square dances. The fiddle player knew the standard fiddle tunes, our mandolin player was from Tennessee and knew the stuff from down there.

John Cohen wasn’t really part of the band but he did sometimes play with us even though he was from the Arts school. But we didn’t mind a non-mathematician come along and do some playing. And I had listened to loads of records (right off 42nd street and 6th Avenue in N.Y. there were a few used record shops I used to prowl around looking for some of the old recordings) and also other people I had met. So I had a large store of tunes that I was familiar with.”

“Interesting thing is how I got interested in old time country string band music as opposed to what most of the people were doing in the so called ‘Folk Revival’ in New York (It wasn’t being called that, back then). I didn’t have a record player at one point but I was already playing guitar. I did have a radio. One time it was on and I was turning it down and suddenly I heard Pete Seeger doing Cindy. It was one of the 78s in the album Folksay which was on Asch records. I was familiar with that album as I had heard it at various friends’ houses. So I listened to that and then they they played another one from that – I think it was Woody Guthrie doing something… and wow!!

So I started listening into the programme a little bit more which was called David Miller’s Hometown Frollick, I may have got his name wrong but it was something like that on W.A.A.P. or W.P.A.T. a Jersey station. I found there were a number of these country music record programmes and began listening to these as much as I could in hopes I’d hear Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie ’cause they were the ones I was familiar with. Then I also began to hear some other people I’d never heard of before; The Carter Family, Wade Mainer, Uncle Dave Macon and some of the more old time country players. There were loads of them, then, more modern country music performers and I’d listen through hours of stuff that I didn’t really care for in order to hear a few of the older things. Gradually it got so I was really more interested in hearing Uncle Dave Macon and the others than in Pete or Woody or Josh White or Leadbelly or those people. I was interested in them too but this old timey country music I was beginning to hear was what really began to excite me.”

“And then somewhere I discovered the Library Of Congress recordings and there were a few things – it wasn’t so much the unaccompanied ballads that interested me right at the beginning – there was one album that had several fiddle tunes at the beginning and then it had some banjo tunes. (At that time I was nearly as interested in fiddle as I was in banjo). It had Pete Steel doing Coal Creek March, it had Wade Ward doing Old Joe Clark and Chilly Winds. And so I listened to that stuff and other singers and players. I really began to go after that stuff and that’s why I started haunting those record shops.”

“There were a number of musicians that were very influential I heard through recordings. Apart from Uncle Dave Macon and The Carter Family (especially Maybelle Carter) there was Clarence Ashley, Sam McGee, Wade Mainer and his group The Mountaineers, and Doc Watson, to some extent. Specifically on the guitar was Roy Harvey and Norman Woodlieff from Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers. They had this interesting syncopated way of playing those runs… and The Ramblers’ whole approach to a string band, the way the fiddle took the melody, the banjo plucking a brittle rhythm, and those runs going off the bass strings of the guitar. It worked together so beautifully. That’s one of the approaches to a string band that I like and the other one is Riley Puckett in the Skillet Lickers. Riley Puckett’s playing was influential on my backup playing – not so much my solo playing – but when I backup other musicians.”

Read entire article here.

Luther Strong (2)

Here are some edited excerpts about fiddler Luther Strong from Stephen Wade’s  new book about the Library of Congress field recordings, “The Beautiful Music All Around Us” (University of Illinois Press):

When Luther Strong (1892-1962) awoke on October 18, 1937, he was in jail.  Arrested on a charge of public drunkenness, he had spent  the night in Hazard, Kentucky, lockup.  He didn’t know it yet, but in a few hours an with a borrowed fiddle, he would record his Library of Congress discs, the most celebrated documents he made in his lifetime.

Earlier that day, a man previously unknown to the family arrived at Luther’s house in Buckhorn, Kentucky.  [Luther's daughter] Faye answered the door, and when the stranger asked for Luther, she hesitated.  Beyond her usual disavowal regarding his whereabouts, she felt embarassed about his confinement.  Recalling that moment sixty-one years later, Faye confessed, “I didn’t want to say that he was in jail.”

The stranger was Alan Lomax, who, along with his wife, Elizabeth, was in the final weeks of a two-month trip to eastern Kentucky collecting songs and tunes for the Library of Congress.

After seeing Fay at the door of Luther’s home, Lomax drove from Buckhorn back into Hazard, where he bailed Luther out of jail.  Luther then sent Lomax out for a pint of whiskey to get the session underway.  As his hangover lessened. Luther played twenty-nine tunes, a virtuoso survey of Southern fiddle repertory, all in the presence of his teacher, fiddler Bev Baker.

“Bev stayed with us a lot,” [Luther's son] Jim Strong related. “He was a good fiddler.  And him and Pap got into a fiddler’s contest in Hazard.  There was a twenty-dollar gold piece for the prize.  Pap won the prize and Bev got kind of teed off.  He said, “Well, I guess I taught you a little too much, didn’t I, Luther?”

Sometimes in the background, near the microphone, Bev Baker’s craggy voice comments while Luther plays.  During “Callahan,” which in Luther’s hands sounds like several instruments at once, with the adjacent strings echoing and amplifying its piping drive, Bev approves, “That’s a good tune.”

Further back from the microphone, cars go by, a door closes, and someone comes into the room.  Then a women, presumably Elizabeth Lomax, utters a syllable before catching herself.  All the while the fiddle plows through uninterrupted.

Right after Luther played “Glory in the Meetinghouse” in that Hazard hotel room, he speaks for the one and only time on the recordings, saying, “I’ve won five hundred dollars on that tune.”

 

View Bruce Greene’s comments on Luther Strong in an earlier post here.

Clayton McMichen

from http://www.artscenterofcc.com:

Clayton McMichen: The Traditional Years, by Charles Wolfe

Between the two of them, Arthur Smith (who died in 1973) and Clayton McMichen (1900-1970) pretty much determined the direction of modern southern folk fiddling styles. A lot of the music of today’s fiddling contests, a lot of the bluegrass fiddling styles, and even notions of back-up fiddling can be traced back to these two men. Both reached their peaks of popularity in the 1930′s, and both lived to see themselves become “living legends” – - whatever that phrase means.

Smith, in his quiet, serious way, was bemused by all the hoopla; McMichen, in his fierce individualism, was on occasion outraged by it. Though the tunes and the styles of these two men are apparent at almost every serious southern fiddling meet today, little of their work has been available on LP. Generations of people know of them only indirectly, through the work of other fiddlers. To partially remedy that, we are proud to pre­sent the first reissue devoted solely to the fiddle music of Clayton McMichen.

McMichen’s career has generally been divided into two major parts: the music he made in the 1920′s and early 1930′s, when he was prob­ably the most frequently recorded old-time fiddler, and when he work­ed on countless records with traditional musicians like Riley Puckett and the skillet Lickers; and the music of the mid-and -late 1930′s, when Mac fronted his own band, the Georgia Wildcats, and moved out of traditional mountain style music into the newer, jazz-influenced west­ern-swing style. There is much rewarding music in each of these two eras of Mac’s career, but generally the music of the 1920′s appeals to a different audience than does the music of the 1930′s. For this reason, we have decided to concentrate on the “traditional” side of Mac’s music in this LP. A later album is projected to document the 1930′s music.

Clayton McMichen was born in Allatonna, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, on January 26, 1900; as a boy Mac learned to fiddle from his father and his uncles, some of whom were formally trained and on occasion played Viennese waltzes as a chaser for their hoedowns. Young McMichen won his first fiddle contest in 1914, the year World War broke out; he was to continue winning contests throughout his life, and in one incredible spell from 1925-1932 he won the National Old-Time Fiddling Championship for eight years in a row. During World War I Mac moved to Atlanta and started working as an automobile mechanic, and then for a time as a railroad fireman.

He met a number of other young local musicians who were interested in old time tunes as well as modern styles; Atlanta in the early 1920′s was a bustling city as interested in the new-fangled jazz styles as old time music. Mac met up with people like Mike and Charles Whitten, Ezra Ted Hawkins (man­dolin player), singer Riley Puckett, and fiddler Lowe Stokes. Stokes was to be a special influence on Mac; they roomed together in Atlanta, and Stokes passed onto Mac some of the fiddle style he had learned from the legendary fiddler from north Georgia, Joe Lee. Lee taught Stokes a form of long bow style, and showed him how to keep his strings run down to standard or lower pitch to give him a mellower tone and allow him to engage in fancy fingering. Stokes passed on much of this to Mac, and Mac eventually developed it into his own “superstyle.” It was a style characterized by adapting the finely-noted, high-precision long bow style to the drive and rhythm of the older southeastern mount­ain fiddling patterns.

By 1922 Mac had formed his first band, The Hometown Boys, and they were among the first acts to perform on Atlanta station WSB. The group made its first records in 1925, but they weren’t successful; they were fiddle standards played with a touch of dixieland jazz, and a bit odd for the day. Mac played in fiddling contests in Atlanta, and at one time helped start a new Fiddlers’ Association devoted to counteracting the predominance of John Carson and Gid Tanner in Georgia fiddling.

But a few years later, Mac joined forces with Gid Tanner to form the Skillet Lickers, the most famous old-time band of the 1920′s. Mac and Lowe Stokes did much of the lead fiddling on the nearly one hundred sides the Skillet Lickers made between 1926-1931. Mac also recorded with his own group, McMichen’s Melody Men, a series of more modern, sentimental numbers, but these seldom sold as well as the hell-for-leather breakdowns of the Skillet Lickers. (The one exception was the Melody Men’s “Sweet Bunch of Daisies.”) In fact, in the late 1920′s Mac was recording with as many as nine or ten “splinter groups” in addition to The Skillet Lickers.

McMichen felt confined by the more traditional music; he wanted to break out, experiment, push his music in the direction of pop. He finally broke with the Skillet Lickers in 1931, and joined forces with a young hot guitarist named Slim Bryant to form the Georgia Wildcats. He also worked with Jimmie Rodgers during this time, and Rodgers re­corded Mac’s “Peach Picking Time in Georgia” as one of his big hits. Mac began playing more and more around the Cincinnati area, and at times led a full-fledged dixieland band. Throughout the 1940′s he play­ed for WAVE in Louisville, and retired in 1955 to run a tavern. He was rediscovered by fans of the folk music revival in the 1960′s, and made several concert appearances before fans who remembered him primarily as a Skillet Licker. But even then Mac would not be confined to the old forms: on one occasion he brought along an accompanist who promptly plugged in a big electric guitar!

Some of the records on this LP were among the most popular old time sides ever recorded; others (such as those from the Depression years of 1930-31) sold so few copies that for all practical purposes they were never released to the public. However, they represent some of Mac’s finest music, and deserve wider exposure. In general, we have tried to present a cross-section of Mac’s music here: the traditional pieces (and make no mistake: in spite of his reservations about tradition­al music, Mac was one of its finest performers); the sweet, sentimental pieces; and the swing-styled pieces.

Love in Vain

Please excuse the mandatory advertisement at the beginning of this video.  It’s worth the wait.

edited from http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org:

As Joseph Campbell described the tale of the mythic hero: 1) “The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to members of his society. 2) This person takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. 3)  It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.”

We can follow Robert Johnson’s life through this cycle in almost perfect coherence.

1)  Johnson almost certainly must have begun his life feeling something was lacking, or that something had been taken away from him. Born an illegitimate child who did not know his father he was, as an infant, ushered from one plantation to another by his mother before finally being deposited with his mother’s ex-husband and his new wife in Memphis. He spent several years living in the big city, adopting his mother’s ex-husband’s last name Spencer. At about age 9 he was taken back by his mother to live with a hostile step-father on a plantation first in Arkansas and then in Mississippi.

It was around this same time that Son House moved to Robinsonville and began playing there with Willie Brown and others. Robert had already been familiar with Robinsonville, sneaking away from the family home at night to go and listen to Charley Patton and others play at jukes and house parties in and around that small town. Robert seemed to have a particular liking for House’s music and had already been trying to play guitar on his own by the time House got there.

2)  Speculation is that Robert went in search of his biological father, but we do know that he wound up in his birthplace of Hazlehurst, MS. Robert may indeed have been searching for “what has been lost” – his father, but he was also in search of the “life-giving elixir” of music. Plantation work was just not in Robert’s plan for the future… he would not become a sharecropper. He wanted to be a musician. And why not? As a young man the idea of spending the rest of his life doing back-breaking work, especially after having experienced city life as a child, must have seemed untenable. Music would be his way out. And so Robert found a way to become a master guitarist.

3)  Robert returned to the Delta and amazed everyone who knew him with his new-found skills. Whether or not Son House actually ever believed the crossroads myth he still was astonished by Robert’s newly-found talent. He couldn’t believe how fast Robert seemed to have learned. A legend was born. Not necessarily the legend of the crossroads, but the legend of a young man who went away a rank amateur and who returned a polished professional.

The cycle of myth was created. The crossroads myth would have its own genesis for its own reasons, but even without placing the idea of the crossroads into Johnson’s life we can see how the few facts we know about him fit into the structure of myth.

Tommy and Fred

---

by Ray Alden (from http://www.fieldrecorder.com)

The fiddle and fretless banjo duets played by Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham distill the music down to its very essence.  For those hearing these two great rural country musicians for the first time, this stark approach to music may be a revelation and yet, at the same time, you may find that it has an unrelenting intensity that takes time to become accustomed to.

As you listen more and more, you will find that layers will unravel revealing the richness of their music and the cunning way in which it was devised.

Much of this old time way of playing music originated from growing up in the South in the early 1900s, when entertainment had to come from within the community .  There was time to savour life’ s great joys and to be keenly aware of its immense difficulties.  Uppermost Surry County, the area of North Carolina where Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham grew up, is located at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the beginning of the Piedmont, a plain which extends far into North Carolina.  On one side you would see Fisher’s Peak looming far above you and, as you turn your head, you would see the land flatten out except for an occasional hill like Round Peak, after which the immediate area is named.  Growing up in the Round Peak area just after the turn of the century, only 36 years after the end of the Civil War, meant isolation from all but the most nearby communities.  During rainy periods, the roads, made mostly of red clay with no gravel, became so muddy that wagon wheels would sink in up to their axles.  This made travel during parts of the year either difficult or impossible.  New tunes only slowly made their way into the area, often by visitors or because a community member made a trip outside of his locality.

Music was used in the community in many ways.  It would be played at house ‘frolics’ where young people would go to someone s s house, roll up the rug, and have a dance.  Or it might be used to conclude a ‘working’, an event in which people came over to help a neighbour with a major chore such as land clearing, with a rousing dance after supper.  During the holidays, people would go from house to house playing music and dancing for days, ‘breaking up Christmas’ as they went along.  Sometimes the music was a distraction at a time when all else was futile.  Tommy remembered such a time when he was 15, recalling this story about his cousin Julie Jarrell in 1916:

She was fourteen years old and just as pretty and nice as she could be.  she was helping her mother cook dinner and the fire in the wood stove went down pretty low.  So she picked up a gallon can of kerosene and began to pour it on the wood and just as soon as she did the fire run right up to the can and exploded it and covered her with burning kerosene.  I was coming from the mill on horseback carrying a sack of cornmeal when I saw the smoke and heard the young-uns crying.  When I reached the door I saw Aunt Susan kneeling above Julie, weeping, her hands all blistered from beating out the fire on her with a quilt.  They put Julie to bed right away, her whole body was burned up to her chin, and at first she cried in pain but after a while she didn’t feel anything at all.  As she was a-laying there she asked me to get my banjo and sing Little Maggie for her.  I expect I played it the best I ever have in my life, with the most feeling anyway.  It seemed to comfort her and pick up her spirits a little, but by the following morning she was dead.

Gwen Foster

from http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com:

Besides being one of the finest early harmonica players Gwen Foster was also an excellent guitarist and singer. He played 2nd guitar or back-up guitar on the Tar Heel recordings. Foster used a “rack” to hold his harmonica so he could play guitar at the same time. His friend David McCarn (composer of “Cotton Mill Colic” and “Everyday Dirt”) recalled that with his dark skin, and an oriental look to him, Gwen acquired the nickname “China” pronounced “Chinee.”  McCarn worked with Foster at the Victory Mill in South Gastonia said Gwen “entertained them when the work slowed down and they thought his French harp (harmonica) was as powerful as a pipe organ. Gwen ruined a flour barrel full of harps by his constant playing” [Archie Green]. Although Gwen Foster was a musical genius, he drank too heavily at times. Tom Ashley would laugh and tell about sobering him up on cider and moonshine before they went to play.

Foster was a mill worker like many musicians (Charlie Poole, Henry Whitter) from the Gastonia, NC area. One of the favorite gathering places for Foster and other local musicians was in front of Lackey’s Hardware Store in Old Fort, North Carolina. Regulars at Lackey’s were Foster on guitar and harmonica, Clarence Greene on fiddle and Roy Neal on three-finger style banjo. Occasionally, musicians from out of town, like Will Abernathy, who played the autoharp, would join the mob assembled on the front porch of the store. The musicians left a hat out front for bystanders to pitch a penny but never made much money from it.

Foster became known for his playing and drinking as well as his antics. At Lackey’s he first met talented guitarist Walter Davis. The two musicians became fast friends and frequently could be found playing on street corners for pennies all across North Carolina. Walter remembers one time in particular when they were together in Morganton, North Carolina:

“Me and Gwen were in Morganton one time broke, and looking for some way to make a little money. Gwen said he knew of a way to make some money fast. He was going to pretend that he was blind while we played on the street corner in front of the courthouse. He put on some sunglasses, and told me to pass the hat around. I told him, ‘no, you attach the tin cup to your guitar strap and people will sympathize with you more. I don’t want any part of this deal.’ So he played for a while and some lady came up and tried to put a fifty cent piece in his cup. But she missed the cup and the coin went rolling down the street. Gwen went right after that coin like a man who could see. That lady said something like ‘That boy don’t look so blind to me.’ At that point me and Gwen took off running, and I believe that was our last engagement in Morganton.”

Afrossippi: Fife and Drum

from http://www.allmusic.com and http://www.cascadeblues.org:

Othar Turner & the Afrossippi Allstars and the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band:  “From Senegal to Senatobia”

Fife and drum bands have their roots firmly planted in African music. Long traditions carried over by captured slaves, brought to American soil where their new owners attempted to quell the sound, especially in the South. They kept the music alive in their memories and passed them down through the generations. Various stringed and wind instruments can have their origins traced directly back to Africa. Drums in particular played a heavy part in tribal gatherings as people would use their polyrhythmic beats to communicate as well as to sing and dance along in a communal spirit.

The use of fifes and drums also have military backgrounds in the United States. They were used by both American and British forces during the Revolutionary War to announce cadence and marching techniques. During this time in American history, most African-Americans were denied the right to serve in conflict carrying arms. But many were permitted to participate in these musical outfits. In fact, even Thomas Jefferson had put together a fife and drum band from his own slave holdings. In other parts of the country, full brass bands were developed as the nation grew older.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, former slaves continued to perform these brands of music for a period, though the fife and drum styles began to dwindle. By the turn of the 20th century, the number of performers had decreased to the point where only a handful remained, working in limited regions of the country. You may be able to travel to Colonial Williamsburg to hear fife and drum music, but this in truth is mostly reenactments of how the music was played in the 18th century. For original, authentic fife and drum sounds, you must head to remote areas of Northern Mississippi, where the tradition has survived even to this day, creating a partial base for the development of the music now known as the Blues.

Just how long that tradition will survive is in question, though. Many of the modern day performers have recently departed this world for the hereafter and younger players are in short supply. Memories of Sid Hemphill and Napolian Strickland are starting to fade. Jessie Mae Hemphill, who carried on her grandfather’s style, has been left incapacitated by a stroke and can no longer perform. And, most recently, African-rooted fife and drum music in America has taken its hardest blow, with the February 27th, 2003  passing of Othar Turner. 

Mississippi fife legend Turner was joined on this outing by a loose union of players billed as the Afrosippi All Stars. This makeshift band is comprised of members of Turner’s family, visiting Senegalese musicians, a university percussion student/organizer, and slide guitarist/producer/North Mississippi All Star Luther Dickinson. Their sympathetic accompaniment on African percussion, kora, and bottleneck guitar give “Shimmy She Wobble,” “Station Blues,” and Bounce Ball — reprised from his recording debut, Everybody Hollerin’ Goat — a depth lacking on his earlier versions.

Traditional African drums exchange rhythms with marching-band snares and bass drums. Staccato kora melodies complement whining slide guitar riffs. And Turner’s shrill, archaic fife floats freely over it all. The title track is the album’s most distinctly African number, and probably the only track here easy on the listener’s ears. The closing “Sunu” is five minutes of nothing but drums. This is hardly good-time music for casual blues listeners or weekend world music fans, but it’s important music all the same, bridging, as it does, great distances between continents and traditions.

Prince Albert Hunt

by Eugene Chadbourne (All Music Guide):

One of the finest musicians to emerge from the sleepy locale of Denton, TX (later the home of the eclectic polka band Brave Combo as well as the place where they jailed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas), historic fiddler Prince Albert Hunt packed a lot of significant events into his short lifetime. Many of these happenings were out of his control. He was shot to death outside a bar, putting him in the category of other innovative musicians that met their fates at the end of a gun barrel, including the exciting jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. Prince Albert’s death happened on the same date as that of guitar inventor Leo Fender, some 60 years later. Prince Albert also is considered an inventor, credited with fiddling up the style of Western swing, and although it is always a mistake to give a solitary individual total credit for a style, the recordings he made for Okeh don’t have a whole lot of company in terms of early sides that predict the Western swing phenomenon.

The Prince Albert style is also called “hot fiddling,” the groups who play it “hot string bands.” It developed in Texas and Oklahoma from the late ’20s onward, a bit like a hungry camper trying to set up a larder in the village grocery, grabbing at blues, ragtime, jazz, and old-time fiddle music as if these traditions were cans of beans, loaves of bread, and packs of wieners pulled off the shelves. It was music meant for dancing, before working up an appetite; it was also music that combined black and white influences to the point where terms such as “racial mongrel” have been used, although some may find this type of language distasteful. “Blues in the Bottle” was one of the great tracks cut by Prince Albert Hunt’s Texas Ramblers, an amalgam of country blues, ragtime, and old-time that was so good that it was no wonder so many later recording artists wanted to take credit for writing it.

“Blues in the Bottle” sounded perfectly fresh when recorded by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a great folk-rock band of the ’60s, so it is safe to say that this artist had a long-range influence on the American music scene. Some of his records were released under the name of Harmon Clem & Prince Albert Hunt. Guitarist Clem was a frequent sidekick of the fiddler’s, and although he is certainly obscure, he also can be said to have done much better in the credit department than the third member of the Texas Ramblers, good ol’ “Unknown.” A survey of sides by this group seems a bit like a conversation with a travel agent. The tunes include “Canada Waltz,” the slippery “Houston Slide,” and a pretty oily “Oklahoma Rag.” “Wake Up Jacob” became a fiddle standard, frequently covered through the years, and sometimes known under other titles such as “Wild Horse” and “Wild Horse of Stoney Point.”

The prince of Texas fiddle was born Archie Albert Hunt in an area just south of Dallas. Besides developing his own group, which featured superb interplay between guitar and fiddle, Prince Alpert also played with his Terrell neighbors Oscar and Doc Harper. A television documentary was done on the fiddler in the ’70s by Houston Public Television, bringing to light many interesting aspects of his life. He was sometimes described as a kind of Texas version of the great North Carolina fiddler Charlie Poole, and like Poole, his real specialty was blues music. [CHARLIE POOLE ACTUALLY PLAYED THE BANJO -ed.] Both fiddlers may have found fame in different genres than pure blues, but their blues specialty is certainly one of the reasons both Western swing and Appalachian old-time music have such a completely solid blues feeling at their core.

Prince Albert sometimes performed in blackface and had a reputation as an ornery character, to the extent of inspiring hyperbole such as the following excerpt from a Texas music website: “The fiddler who was shot to death at the age of 30 for stealing another man’s wife. He growls through dirty teeth, rolls on the floor, punches his fist through his stovepipe hat, passes out, gets up, falls down, and after every verse kicks up a dance-call with a single down-stroke so fat and sweet you’re ready to hire him to clean up your yard.” If the image of the so-called inventor of Western swing raking one’s yard isn’t bad enough, Prince Albert Hunt has also been mistaken for a can of tobacco, in the case of a country music devotee hustling transcriptions of a ’50s Grand Old Opry production, the Red Foley/Prince Albert Show. Despite claims that the Denton fiddler is present, impossible unless he came back from the dead in some sort of weird collaboration with Henry Lee Lucas, the show’s title is surely a reference to its tobacco company sponsor.