County 701

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rough Carpenters

Rough Carpenters (CD)  by The Black Twig Pickers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Poole with the Highlanders

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

The Johnson City Sessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

“Turn Me Loose”

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Musique de la Maison

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

from http://www.venerablemusic.com:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New 4 CD JSP release available here.

DISC 1:

EARL JOHNSON & HIS CLODHOPPERS:

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

EARL JOHNSON & HIS DIXIE ENTERTAINERS:

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

DISC 2:

LEAKE COUNTY REVELERS:

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

DISC 3:

EAST TEXAS SERENADERS:

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

FREENY HARMONISERS:

• PRODUNK TODDLE

WALKERS CORBIN RAMBLERS:

• STONE MOUNTAIN TODDLE

GRINNEL GIGGERS:

• DUCK SHOES RAG
• PLOW BOY HOP

DISC 4:

AIKEN COUNTY STRING BAND:

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

DR. SMITH’S CHAMPION HOSS HAIR PULLERS:

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

DR. HUMPHREY’S BATE & HIS POSSUM HUNTERS:

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

CHENOWETH’S CORNFIELD SYMPHONY ORCH:

• THE LAST SHOT GOT HIM

CHEROKEE RAMBLERS:

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

FLOYD MING & HIS PEP-STEPPERS:

• INDIAN WAR WHOOP
• TUPELO BLUES
• WHITE MULE

MOATSVILLE STRING TICKLERS:

• WEST VIRGINIA HILLS
• MOATSVILLE BLUES

DYKES MAGIC CITY TRIO:

• FRANKIE
• POOR ELLEN SMITH

Mister Charlie’s Blues

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

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

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

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

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

“Black Mirror”

• 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountain Blues: Blues, Ballads and String Bands 1927-1938

from http://www.allmusic.com:

Country has been called the white man’s blues, but the phrase has probably only been truly accurate when applied to the so-called hillbilly records from the 1920s and 1930s, the period and genre covered by this four-disc, 100-track anthology from JSP.

Not that everything here is actually blues (the string band selections in particular are really dance reels that happened to have the word “blues” in the title), and a fair portion of these cuts don’t have any real geographical association with the Southern mountains, either, but you have to give a box set a title, so Mountain Blues it is.

With hindsight, a lot of these performances seem a bit generic, but there is a lot here, as well, that is startling in its freshness, even at a 75-year distance. Disc A gives us “Blue Grass Twist” (which isn’t bluegrass, mind you) by the South Georgia Highballers, featuring some amazing guitar work from Vander Everidge and some stylish, almost pop guitar from Riley Puckett (best known for his work in the Skillet Lickers string band) on “I Get the Blues When It Rains.”

Disc B presents Slim Smith’s jaunty “Bread Line Blues,” Clarence Ashley’s spooky modal banjo classic “Dark Hollow Blues,” and Samantha Bumgarner’s fragile singing and strong banjo on “The Worried Blues,” a version of “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.”

Highlights of the third disc include the steel guitar work of Lemuel Turner on “Way Down Yonder Blues” and “Jake Bottle Blues,” and the zither playing of Nonnie Smith (who would enjoy a bit of a musical revival 40 years later in the 1970s) on the Perry County Music Makers’ “I’m Sad and Blue.”

The final disc features the amazing sound of Texas fiddle master Prince Albert Hunt on “Blues in a Bottle” (which the Lovin’ Spoonful — minus the fiddle — would cover successfully in the 1960s) and closes with the venerable guitar-and-fiddle team of Richard Burnett and Leonard Rutherford on “All Night Long Blues.”

Perhaps a bit too extensive for the casual listener, Mountain Blues will certainly please collectors and historians interested in the era covered, and it’s difficult to imagine a more comprehensive set of white blues 78s. The liner notes are a bit on the brief side, but they cover the basics, although the track notes that list the players and instruments aren’t always accurate. Still, there’s so much music here, it’s hard to quibble.

Mirth, Music, and Moonshine

from http://www.venerablemusic.com:

Country Music has always included a generous amount of humor and never more so than during the 1920s and early 30s. After all, Country Music as we know it was born in the days of prohibition and record companies were quick to realize the potential of recording “skits” with their essentially rural artists charting these little adventures of the wily country boy attempting to outwit the revenue men while making illicit “moonshine” back in the hills.

This is a fun collection of rural comedy with some great music thrown in for good measure. It was also a good trailer for the complete versions of songs and tunes, which it was hoped, would wet the appetite of the purchaser to go out and buy the full version.

It is worth noting that, on the Okeh Medicine Show, the Black Brothers are Carson Robison & Frank Luther, and Bud Blue is in fact Fred “Sugar” Hall, one half of the Fields & Hall act. Recordings from 1928-1934.

The Okeh Medicine Show Acts I–VI
The Feller That Looks Like Me – Hillbillies
Over At Tom’s House – Blue Ridge Entertainers
The Fiddlers Contest – Blue Ridge Entertainers
Since She Took My Licker From Me – John Carson & Moonshine Kate
A Serenade In The Mountains Pts. 1 & 2 – E.V. Stoneman & The Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers
It’s Funny What Whiskey Will Do – Louis Bird
The Beer Party – Charlie Wilson & His Hay Loft Boys
Kentucky Bootlegger – Fruit Jar Guzzlers (Stevens & Bolar)
Day At The County Fair Pts. 1 & 2 – Skillet Lickers
I Ain’t A Bit Drunk – George “Shortbuckle” Roark
A Bee Hunt On Hell Fer Sartin Creek Pts. 1 & 2 – Skillet Lickers
Chickens In The Garden – Hugh Roden & Roy Rodgers

“Origins of Guitar Music”

ORIGINS OF GUITAR MUSIC IN SOUTHERN CONGO AND NORTHERN ZAMBIA, recorded by Hugh Tracey (Sharp Wood 15/HT09)

from http://www.muzikifan.com:

Hugh Tracey issued a staggering total 210 recordings in his career so what we know as the received canon is not even the tip of the iceberg. A tobacco farmer in the thirties, Tracey learned work songs alongside his field-hands and was surprised no one else was remotely interested in the music.

A true African explorer, Tracey was the first to devote his life to finding and recording the music, and set off with two sound trucks and a crew of four to operate the recording equipment on his musical safaris from the Cape as far as the border of Sudan in the north. In those days, like today, the roads were non-existent in many places.

He needed 240 volts of power to run the recording machines, so his noisy generator truck had to be parked behind a hut or anthill, and he also had to deal with crowds that would show up to watch him record. He didn’t use mike stands but personally held the microphone rather than leave it to the inexperienced performers to play to the mike.

Four of the songs here were on AFRICAN ACOUSTIC … FROM THE COPPERBELT (the LP) issued by John Storm Roberts, a couple of tracks are on the GUITARS OF AFRICA put out by Kaleidophone in 1972, and a couple more are on the classic 1954 MUSIC OF AFRICA 5: “The Guitars of Africa,” which includes the “Classical Gas” of Africa (“Masanga” by Mwenda Jean Bosco) as well as the “Stairway to Heaven” of African guitar (Bosco’s “Mama na mwana”).

The latter is included on this new compilation; we’ll have to wait for a further issue to collect the other tunes. Six of the songs here have never been released before, so clearly there is a wealth of material in the archives. In addition there are the scholarly notes on each track by Tracey. (On the original albums he would tell you what the song was about and add other comments in his charming British accent. The only remnant of that here is his counting in one intro.)

Many of the original tapes were destroyed in a fire in the late fifties. This is a tragedy, but may have prompted Tracey on a further visit to the same regions to rerecord the musicians he could find. But the music was evolving rapidly as people moved to urban centers, particularly to find work in the copper mines, and became exposed to Western music through the radio.

Tracey points out echoes of Glenn Miller and Chet Atkins in some of the songs. The area covered by these recordings received British rather than French-run radio and, though the Congo was Belgian-controlled at the time, there’s a very different feeling in the music from the rumba sound that was emerging in Kinshasa concurrently.

Two other perennial favorites from the Tracey archives are here: “Elube,” by De Ndirande Pitch Crooners of Malawi and “Gwabi Gwabi” by Zimbabwean George Sibanda.

The recordings have been digitally restored. You can hear the simple percussion clearly (knife on Fanta bottle, or scraper), backing the vocals. This is one of the cornerstones of African popular music. There are 21 volumes in the series.

Jody Stecher and The Real Bahamas

The Real Bahamas (Nonesuch Records), recorded by Pete Siegel and Jody Stecher

by Jody Stecher (from liner notes):

We were strangers, conspicuously white-skinned, suspected of being Beatles (who had just been there filming Help!) or tax collectors. Peter Siegel was 21 years old; I had just turned 19. We had come to the Bahamas to record the spirituals and anthems of the region and, particularly, the distinctive Bahamian vocal style called “rhyming.”

On our first day in Nassau we began our search for the legendary singer and guitarist Joseph Spence. We asked everyone, and the response was uniform and predictable: “Sure mon, I know Spence”—until we arrived in his own neighborhood. Nobody knew of Spence, and a young woman standing in the doorway of a cottage sternly asked us why we were looking for him. When we said that we wanted to record Spence’s music she brightened and offered to take us to his house; gathering several small children from behind her long skirt, she escorted us next door.

Spence’s wife Louise seemed to be expecting us and served us conch fritters. In the corner was a black guitar leaning on a small amplifier bearing a sign: “Joseph Spence—The Voice from Heaven.” Spence himself came home, and after a tour of the banana trees in the back yard we set up a time to record him with his sister Edith and her family. This session was recorded in the yard of the home of Raymond and Edith Pinder, some distance away.

The yard was full of children and lush subtropical trees and plants. We began recording at dusk and, as the night deepened, more and more neighbors showed up. Edith’s husband, Raymond Pinder, sang bass, and their daughter Geneva sang the high parts (treble). With her strong and compelling voice, Edith sang lead most of the time. Joseph Spence would sing a part all his own, along with his unique guitar playing.

One song from that session, “I Bid You Goodnight,” became world-famous not long after Volume I of The Real Bahamas was released in 1966; the Incredible String Band and the Grateful Dead subsequently recorded the song, and it has also been used as the closing theme for several American radio stations.

The Reverend W.G. McPhee was very helpful in locating good singers and we recorded some of them at his home, including the Swain family and the legendary singer from Andros, Frederick McQueen, with his high-pitched, otherworldly voice and uncanny melodic sense. The Swain family—Shelton Swain, his son Ronald, and cousin Stanley—and George McKenzie were all from the island of Abaco. When still a boy, Shelton had learned his musical style in the sponge-fishing days from the great rhyming singer Peter Elliot; he recalled how Elliot took him on his knee after hearing him sing, saying, “Son, I could take you and run a nation.”

The Swains told us about a great singer, Bruce Green from Moores Island, and arranged a meeting with him. Mr. Green had with him two splendid younger singers, Clifton Green and Tweedie Gibson. The atmosphere of our hotel room, where this session was recorded, became elevated by the innate nobility and the pure, dignified presence of these three men.

We set out for Moores Island, hoping to find and record more rhyming singers but managed to get only as far as Marsh Harbor, on the island of Abaco. There we encountered Lyndall Albury, a singer of English ballads and folksongs. Marsh Harbor was founded by her ancestors, Loyalists to the English crown who had left the Carolina colony after their cause was defeated in the American Revolution. The layout of the village, style of the houses, the speech and bearing of the people were so much of another time and place that we felt ourselves bewitched and transported into a dream world far removed from 1965.

“Old Time Black Southern String Band Music”

Butch Cage & Willie B. Thomas: Old Time Black Southern String Band Music (Arhoolie)

from http://www.offbeat.com:

With the  passing of African-American fiddler Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong and the remaining few practitioners like octogenarian Joe Thompson, America is losing its last links to the black string band tradition that dates back to slavery. At least one thread of this rich legacy will be preserved with this 1960s recording of Butch Cage (fiddle) and Willie B. Thomas (guitar) who lived in Zachary, Louisiana when folklorist Dr. Harry Oster recorded them.

Not only were the rural, raw musicians part of the resultant Country Negro Jam Sessions LP (also part of Arhoolie’s catalogue) but through Oster, they had the opportunity of playing the 1960 Newport Folk Festival.

Since Cage and Thomas were born in the late 19th century to sharecropper parents, you couldn’t ask for better pedigrees in time-honored American roots music. Both played suppers and house parties for years, culling songs from a vast repertoire of hillbilly, blues and spirituals, much like they do here.

Cage’s pipes boom over Thomas’ thin, papery voice, and Cage’s scratchy, earthy fiddling and Thomas’ straight, unvaried strumming support them. They warble in and out of unison while still maintaining a terrifically soulful chemistry. Eventually others get in the act and sing, making the tracks feel like a community effort.

The last two tracks are spiritually stirring, especially “You’ve Gotta Move,” where various participants harmonize on the refrain whenever the spirit moves them. Another forgotten piece of American’s music has just been revealed.

Rural Parlor Guitar

 from http://grapewrath.wordpress.com:

  Rural Parlor Guitar – Recordings from 1967-1971 (COUNTY CD-2744)

Artists: E. C. Ball, Earl Blair, Lena Hughes, Lewis Thomasson

RURAL PARLOR GUITAR is the one of the very few commercial recording to focus on this genre, and the only one to include multitude artists from different regions. Each of the four musicians was raised in rural areas in the early 1900s: Lena Hughes in northwest Missouri; Earl Blair in the Arkansas Ozarks; Lewis Thomasson in the open plains of Coryell County, Texas, and E. C. Ball in the southwest mountains of Virginia. They learned to play — without sheet music, radio or recordings – from family and other musicians.

All the defining characteristics of the parlor guitar genre are here: open tunings; the use of three and four fingers, arpeggios, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and harmonics. Many of the tracks have never been available commercially before; each is an excellent representation of parlor guitar. The tuning for each song is included.

“The guitar styles depicted in this CD are all different, yet very representative of what one might have found in the rural south eighty or more years ago. Only a handful of guitarists in the 1920s, such as Roy Harvey and Leonard Copeland, made commercial recordings in this flavor, making this collection an invaluable resource for parlor-style guitar.” – Jeremy Stephens

“19th century parlor guitar was the foundation or an influence for the playing of early rural guitar players as diverse as Elizabeth Cotten and Sam McGee. Probably even the early blues players. This CD presents some of the last players of this rarely recorded style.” – Mike Seeger

All the recordings, save for E. C. Ball’s two self-recordings, were made by Charlie Faurot on his trips to their homes from 1967 to 1971.

Hellbenders

from http://www.brucemolsky.com and http://www.fieldrecorder.com:

FRC700 – The Hellbenders   $15 (available here):
The Hellbenders, Bruce Molsky and James Leva (fiddles), David Winston (banjo), Mary Winston (guitar) and Dave Grant (bass) made these recordings in Charlottesville, VA released on cassette in 1990 and digitally remixed and remastered by Al Tharp from his original recordings for this CD.

Dave Grant, who was the soul of the band, was killed in a work accident in 2002. He was an inspiration in music and in life. This album is dedicated with love and appreciation to Dave Grant.

The Hellbenders was a unique old-time musical feast. Inspired by players heard from all over Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina, and by the classic old recordings of southern mountain music, they went in the studio in 1989 and recorded a cassette, kind of a testament to the music scene and everything that was happening around them at that time. High energy, no holds barred string band music, fiddles blazing.

1. Altamont
2. Train on the Island
3. Chinquapin
4. Tight Old Sally Gal
5. Red Mountain Wine
6. Betty Baker
7. She Took it Off
8. Indian War Whoop
9. Cider
10. Baby Waltz
11. Poor Little Mary (Sittin’ in the Corner)
12. Bravest Cowboy
13. Sambo
14. Woop Reprise

The Hellbenders play “Cider”:

The Devil’s Dream: Sid Hemphill

SID HEMPHILL
The Devil’s Dream
Mississippi Records (LP) $13

review from http://pitchfork.com:

In The Land Where the Blues Began, the folklorist Alan Lomax recalls his epic field-recording voyage through the Mississippi Delta in the early 40s, undertaken at a time when, for Lomax, the stakes felt particularly high. “I knew this was to be my last song-collecting jaunt before the Army got me, maybe the last time I would ever hear the alley blues and the hallelujah spirituals that I believe are the best art our country has produced,” he wrote, and not without discernible yearning.

That urgency would eventually yield the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Honeyboy Edwards, and the first recordings of Son House since his Paramount days, but it’s hard not to feel like Lomax’s desperation– for ferocity, inventiveness, some kind of rapture– was probably best assuaged by his discovery of Sid Hemphill, the so-called “boar-hog musician of the hills,” a fiddler and string band-leader once described to Lomax as “the best musician in the world.”

Lomax found Hemphill in Senatobia, deep in Mississippi’s Hill Country. He’d driven across a crumbling bridge and approached a “sagging, unpainted door on a weathered-gray, warping house.” Before he could knock, Hemphill, then 65, swung it open. “No one had told me that Sid Hemphill was blind, but it was the last thing you’d recall about him,” Lomax explained. “His face blazed with inner light.”

On August 15, 1942, Lomax committed 15 tracks by Hemphill and his backing band (Lucius Smith, Alec “Turpentine” Askew, and Will Head) to acetate disc. Hemphill never recorded commercially, and only Lomax’s field recordings of his work are extant– meaning that unless you knew a guy (shoddy cassette tapes of Hemphill’s songs, sourced from Lomax’s discs, have been spotted in the damp palms of 78 collectors for decades, passed about like contraband), The Devil’s Dream is the first time anyone has been properly able to access or disseminate Hemphill’s brain-scrambling yawp.

The album’s release this month, over 70 years after its creation– as a download through the Alan Lomax Archive’s Global Jukebox imprint, or on LP via Mississippi Records– feels both long overdue and right on time.

Hemphill’s masterwork is “The Carrier Line”, a rambling, six-minute blues ballad about the owner of a local logging railroad and the engineer who ran his train too fast. “You want me to put the whole 21 verses in it?” Hemphill asks Lomax before raising his fiddle and announcing himself. “Sid Hemphill! ‘Carrier Song’ was made and played by him, his band!”

“Imaginational Anthem”

available from Tompkins Square Records next month (from their newsletter):

IMAGINATIONAL ANTHEM VOL. 6 : ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PRIMITIVE GUITAR
Gatefold Vinyl : TSQ 2868 out April 20th (Record Store Day) Ltd 1500
CD : TSQ 2851 out April 30th

If American Primitive Guitar begins with John Fahey and the Takoma School, then the actual origins of this sound is found within this collection of fourteen classic solo guitar performances.  Recorded between 1923 to 1930, this set is the “Rosetta Stone” of style and repertoire tapped into deeply by Fahey, Basho & Rose, among many others.  Sam McGee, Riley Puckett, Bayless Rose, Sylvester Weaver, Lemuel Turner, Frank Hutchison and Davey Miller are the rural artists included in this anthology.

Each one of these showcases a particular technique and sensitivity sourced from the earlier 19th century parlor guitar tradition.  Several of these sides are reissued for their first time including Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Blues” which is the first solo finger picked guitar solo ever recorded.  Stunningly remastered and annotated by Christopher King.

JOE BUSSARD: “Guitar Rag / Screwdriver Slide”: 78 RPM VINYL TSQ 71136 LTD. 700 Units. Out April 20th (Record Store Day)
Famed Fonotone label pioneer and 78 collector Joe Bussard plays two tunes with a screwdriver.

CHARLIE POOLE & THE HIGHLANDERS : THE COMPLETE PARAMOUNT & BRUNSWICK RECORDINGS, 1929
Vinyl w/ Poster inside : TSQ 2882 out April 20th (Record Store Day) Ltd 1500
CD : TSQ 2875 Out April 30th

From 1926 to 1930 one of the most popular rural string bands on record was Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers.  Through their 78 RPM discs and their various performances, Charlie Poole was second only to Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers.  Poole’s uniquely syncopated three finger banjo picking style coupled with his Piedmont vocal inflections eventually colored and defined much of what we consider “old-time” music.  The classic configuration of banjo, fiddle and guitar with vocals was encouraged by the main label that  promoted Poole but he also wanted to record instrumentals featuring twin-fiddle and piano.  As renaming his group The Highlanders, Poole was able to actualize this musical vision.  This collection contains all of the sides that Poole made with Roy Harvey, Lucy Terry, and twin-fiddlers Lonnie Austin & Odell Smith.  Remastered in beautiful sound by Christopher King and with notes written by old-time musician and scholar Kinney Rorrer.

Slowtime Field Recordings

from
http://slowtimerecordings.blogspot.com
:

Slowtime Field Recordings – Volume 1 – Alabama

 In 1998, Matt Downer began conducting informal recording and interview sessions with the elder musicians of the Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia tri-state area. In 2011, the first set of these field recordings was released -  “Slowtime Field Recordings – Volume 1 – Alabama.”

This limited edition set  features a one hour dvd, a 20-track cd and a 16 page booklet in a handmade letterpressed package. The dvd features interview and live performance footage recorded at the homes of the musicians. The cd will feature live performances recorded at the homes of the musicians: Wayne Heard,   Jess Moore,  Willie King, and Cast King.

There Is No Eye

edited from Mike Yates (www.mustrad.org.uk):

Review of There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40091)

 
‘There is no eye: music for photographs’ is a companion CD to John Cohen’s recent book of photographs of musicians There Is No Eye (Powerhouse, 2001).  Many – though not all – of the tracks on this CD are taken from his own recordings.

Bob Dylan’s Roll On John is taken from a 1962 radio broadcast.  Officially issued here for the first time, it has, in fact, appeared on a number of underground tapes.  On first hearing I was quite surprised how well Dylan sang the song.  Subsequent hearings, however, show a shallowness when compared with the source recording of Kentucky singer Rufus Crisp (Folkways 2342).

John Cohen has spent some considerable time documenting the music of eastern Kentucky.  Mountain Music of Kentucky (Smithsonian Folkways 40077) first introduced us to the singing of Roscoe Holcomb, among others.  When Roscoe’s solo album High Lonesome Sound (Smithsonian Folkways 40104) was reissued on CD I was disappointed that his haunting Man of Constant Sorrow had been omitted.

Now we know why.  It’s here!  Thank God!  Hallelujah!  John prints a number of comments about Roscoe Holcomb’s singing from other writers.  I especially like this one: ‘A voice that bypasses the head and shoots straight for the soul’.  I have to say that it came as something of a shock to learn that Roscoe had originally learnt the song from a recording by Ralph Stanley, his delivery sounding as though he had been born with the song already implanted in his mind.

One of John Cohen’s films is of Kentucky musicians.  Also titled The High Lonesome Sound, it focuses primarily on Roscoe Holcomb, although Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys are also seen performing their version of John Henry, which is likewise included here.  It’s a high-powered performance, one which contrasts sharply with the almost sedate performance of the Baptist song Come All You Tender Hearted sung superbly by Carter Stanley.

Other mountain – Appalachian, of course – recordings include Doc Watson and his father-in-law Gaither Carlton singing and playing Hick’s Farewell, Sidna Myers playing the exquisite clawhammer tune Twin Sisters and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard performing a tight bluegrass version of TB Blues.

The 1964 recording of Paloma Blanco, performed by a Peruvian stringband, is exquisite.  It is preceded by the New Lost City Ramblers (John Cohen, Mike Seeger and Tracy Schwartz) playing a version of Buck Creek Girls that John had previously collected from Kentucky banjo player Bill Cornett.

What strikes me is how similar the New Lost City Ramblers sound to their Peruvian musical cousins.  The tunes are, of course, dissimilar, but, the manner of playing – the philosophy behind the playing – is clearly related.

Mississippi Records: 5 LP African Guitar Box

from
http://rootstrata.com
:

The African Guitar Box
Mississippi Records, x5 LP
EJ-003

“5 LP box set of classic African guitar based music recorded between 1951 & 1970. Mostly solo performances with guitar & vocals.

The first disc features classic acoustic guitar music from all over the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Congolese & Kenyan artists. The second disc has all electric guitar performances with minimal accompaniment on percussion – nothing remotely funk based. The third disc features a mix of acoustic & electric performances. Disc four presents more challenging compositional music on acoustic guitar than found on the previous 3 discs – not easy listening by any means, but very rewarding. The final disc is the most sublime & peaceful acoustic guitar & vocal performances you could ever imagine!

Collectors beware – much of this material has been reissued before, albeit not since the early 1980s in very hard to find compilation LPs. The records are housed in a beautiful heavy duty hand made box with a sliding lid on the side. Each box is unique & rugged in it’s own way.

The wood used to manufacture the box is all salvaged from the old Mississippi Record store location. The cover is a 2 color silk screen on high quality textured paper, carefully glued to each box. A real labor of love. One time edition only; pressing of 200 copies!”

American Primitive, Volume 2

edited from Ray Templeton (www.mustrad.org.uk):

American Primitive Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939) (Revenant 214, 2 CDs)

One of the great appeals of listening to older recordings is their capacity to transport you through time and space, in a sense that appears to me to be experientially quite real (and if that’s not mystical, I don’t know what is).  I can almost feel myself standing alongside Elizabeth Johnson in that studio in New York in 1928 as she sings the extraordinary Be My Kid Blues.

On the other hand, some artists seem to be speaking to us from some quite unreachable place.  I would count among these John Hammond, an almost entirely obscure traditional singer and banjo player who recorded a handful of exceptionally beautiful sides in 1927 or Moses Mason, who rails about the Mississippi floods of the same year.

I could wax quite over-the-top, for example, about some of the tracks included on these discs – like Henry Spaulding’s Cairo Blues, whose string-snapping guitar accompaniment and sudden falsetto vocals have enthralled me for many years, or William Harris’s Bullfrog Blues, with its bizarre lyrics: ‘Have you ever woke up with bullfrogs on your mind?’

It would be impossible to deny the sheer weirdness of tracks like Homer Quincy Smith’s Paramount pairing from 1929 – a wild, solo voice against a wheezing organ accompaniment.  Likewise, Cousins and DeMoss’s Poor Mourner, at 106 years old the grand-daddy of all the tracks here, sounds pretty nutty to modern ears (even the note-writers abandon their customary over-awed tones to describe the banjo accompaniment as ‘a wonderfully undifferentiated mass of plonking’), but we can probably assume that these tracks didn’t sound so outlandish when they were new.

Watson Family “Milestones”

See Kickstarter description about the Watson Family’s “Milestones” box set here.

from Jody Stecher:

“Milestones” is the most moving and stirring collection of recorded music I have heard in a decade. I co-wrote the liner notes with Roy. “Milestones” is a book of Watson Family photo collages, assembled with scissors and glue over a 10 year period by Doc Watson’s daughter Nancy. And it’s four CDs of music.

The recordings are extraordinary musically but also historically as they comprise a major document of a local musical tradition that was made from within the tradition itself. Some of the music was recorded by Nancy as a girl. Her familiarity to the musicians she recorded gave her access to a side of the singers and players that a folklorist or “collector” from “outside” would be unlikely to ever see or hear.  This includes gentle loving renditions of beautiful traditional songs and tunes by her grandfather Gaither Carlton, sacred songs recorded at home prayer meetings and at Mount Paran Church, and recordings of her parents, together and separately.

There is no aspect of “performance” in these extraordinary recordings, no embodying of what the collector recordist might be perceived to be expecting. This is the Real Deal. And it’s way better than parodies and self-parodies.  Other recordings were made by Doc Watson on good quality home equipment and some of this is multi-tracked so we get to hear a Band-o-Docs.  These were done mostly in the 1950s and they present a truer picture of Doc Watson as complete musician rather than the recordings that were aimed at the folk revival of the 1960s.

Some of these recordings were done entirely on a Les Paul electric guitar and an electric bass, both played by Doc. Where else will you find “Groundhog” and “Stardust” on the same recording, sung and played by the same artist, and both done entirely credibly to say the least?  Other bands-o-docs are of vocal, banjo and harmonica.  There are also studio recordings by Doc done at Rich-R-Tone studios in Johnson City, Tennessee. That’s where the Stanley Brothers first recorded.

There are some great songs sung by Rosa Lee Watson and some written by her too. And some songs written by Doc. Both are great writers and singers. Other highlights are recordings of other family members. Doc’s mother, his brothers, his cousins, all make memorable music. There is even a banjo duet by Willard Watson and Doc Watson which I have listened to dozens of times and still hear new things each time.

Rural String Bands of Tennessee

by Kerry Blech (from The Old Time Herald):

Various Artists – Rural String Bands of Tennessee
County 3511

Ahhh, here is a very nice set of reissues, but please don’t be scared off by the bland cover art. It’s what’s inside that counts, and here we have some dandy recordings made originally between April 1925 (Davenport and the Young Brothers) and April 1930 (the Ridgel ensemble). Some of the Volunteer State’s finest fiddlers are represented here.

The best-known of the lot probably would be Charlie Bowman, who earned more than a modicum of fame with his stint with Al Hopkins’ Hill Billies. With his brothers, Walter (“that runt”) on banjo and Elbert on guitar, along with friend Frank Wilson on steel guitar, he illustrates why he was so popular among fiddle enthusiasts with Forked Deer and Money in Both Pockets / Boys My Money’s All Gone from the “Moonshiner” skit.

It is sheer pleasure to listen to these folks. Too bad they did not record much in this configuration. Anyone who’s spent time talking with Ralph Blizard knows about Dudley Vance and what an influential fiddler he was in Eastern Tennessee. His Tennessee Breakdown pulls parts from other well-remembered pieces to become a new melody, one that certainly illustrates why he was so popular.

Although it has become a darling number of the old time revival, Tennessee Mountain Fox Chase was never issued commercially. The old LP issue of it (and now this CD reissue) was taken from a test pressing. It’s a brilliant tune, exceedingly well-played. It boggles the mind to wonder why it was not issued on 78. Jimmy McCarroll was yet another gifted regional fiddler.

Banjo Diary

review by Dave Freeman of countysales.com:

STEPHEN WADE “Banjo Diary” (SFW-40208)
There’s a lot going on in this new and attractive issue from the Smithsonian Folkways label, and it’s a record that we think any fan of old-time banjo will want to have. Wade, who has had records out before—includ- ing one on the County label—is a banjo historian as well as a good musician.

 
He cites a bunch of vari- ous sources in a fascinat- ing 40-page booklet of notes that is as informative as the music is good. Cov- ering the songs one by one, he cites and refers to people like Fleming Brown, Charlie Faurot, Woody Wachtel and Tony Ellis (a good friend) in his own career that started in Chicago. Fleming Brown was apparently a great early influence on other banjo pickers there in the 1960s, and he is mentioned often in the notes.

As to the music, Wade has a few other musicians help out, including Danny Knicely, James Leva and Zan McLeod, but the most noticeable is Mike Craver (Red Clay Ramblers) who provides an effec- tive pump organ tastefully in the background. The 18 tunes (Wade sings on about a third of them) are an excellent mixture of common and obscure pieces. Tunes like TRAIN 45, CUCKOO’S NEST, HOME SWEET HOME and LITTLE RABBIT get treatments that are slightly different than popular versions of these pieces.

But the most effective are several slow, moody tunes that are really lovely: ROCKY HILL, LITTLE BETTY ANN and HAND IN HAND. These are very reminiscent of a style played by Tony Ellis, which is not surprising as Wade & Ellis have been friends for many years. There are no weak spots in this superb recording, and it continues to grow on me the more I play it. Highly Recommended for Old-Time banjo fans.    $ 15.00

North Carolina Banjo Collection

by Molly Tennenbaum (from The Old Time Herald):

Disc 1 presents a million older-style players (mostly downstroke, and some up-picking), disc 2 a million more modern-sounding up-picking players. And the collection includes a huge amount of information. In the fat booklet full of notes and photographs, Disc 1 is introduced with brilliant essay by Andy Cahan discussing the player Manly Reece (b. 1830-d. 1864) and speculating about the origins of banjo music in North Carolina, while disc 2 is introduced with an essay by Robert Winans about up-picking banjo.

Though some of the pieces here are well known, have been released before, and are included because without them the collection would not fully represent North Carolina banjo, many of these pieces come from obscure or private recordings, so this is our first chance to hear them. The entire collection offers a wealth of music to return to over and over again.

Disc 1 starts out with those African-American players who, according to Winans, “represent the remnants of this once vital” black string-band tradition. Odell Thompson’s “Georgia Buck” gets the CD off with a deep low-in-the-throat rhythm. I find Libba Cotton’s “Low Baked a Hoecake” extremely beautiful-slow, rhythmic frailing between the single-note melody lines under Libba’s sweet light voice-it’s a dreamy sort of song. Dink Roberts’s “Fox Chase” also stands out, the opposite of dreamy. It’s got random-ish sung-spoken verses, banjo effects typical to “Fox Chase” tunes, and a snappy repeated melody line linking all the random parts. So much variety of approach even within this one tradition suggests that you can’t pin a banjo down, and the rest of the CD continues to make this point.

Some of my favorite cuts here are the ones by women: Samantha Bumgarner’s “Worried Blues” is an example of how good a woman’s high voice can sound with the banjo. So often women in old-time music sing in their lower registers. (Because it sounds more “traditional?” Because the Carter Family women had low voices? Because D & A, the keys of so many old-time tunes, are easier for men to sing in? Because the men in music have historically been more audible?) But Samantha Bumgarner, the first female country performer to record a 78, reminds us to use whatever voice we come with. I also especially love Bertie Dickens’s “Cleveland Marching to the White House.”

Of course the men are nothing to sneer at. Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Mr. Garfield” is wonderful-a loping banjo background to some very humorous verses. Walter Raleigh Babson’s “Hello Coon” is also especially beautiful, melody notes with light arpeggiated accompaniment.

Disc 2, as you may imagine, sounds more modern, even though it includes many recordings from the past, among them Ernest Helton’s 1925 “Royal Clog,” Charlie Poole’s 1926 “There’ll Come A Time,” and George Pegram’s circa 1943 “I Left My Old Home in the Mountains.” Despite the modernity, several of these picked tunes stand out to me as having an “older” sound, for example Dock Walsh’s 1929 “Come Bathe in that Beautiful Pool.”

When I Was A Cowboy

by Bob Bovee:

Various Artists – When I Was A Cowboy Vols. 1 & 2 (Yazoo 2022)

The cowboy has long been our national hero, from the days of the dime novel, through the early film depictions by Bronco Billy Anderson, William S. Hart, and Tom Mix, to the singing cowboys of the ’30s and the TV cowboys of the ’50s and ’60s. Our argonaut, our knight errant, the mythic worldwide representative of our national character, he’s everyman, based in reality and exaggerated to epic proportions. His music, and I’m referring to the genuine article as opposed to the pale imitation fed us by the likes of Hollywood punchers like Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers, provides a revealing and exciting view of this “hired man on horseback,” as cowboy and author Gene Rhodes described him.

Where do I find this music, you might ask? And well you should, because it’s been hard come by lately. A few fine LPs of the old 78 recordings, notably RCA Victor’s Vintage Series Authentic Cowboys and Their Western Folksongs and Morning Star’s When I Was a Cowboy have been out of print for years. Marimac released a tape called Make Me a Cowboy Again for A Day, which is also no longer available. But now Yazoo rides to our rescue! They have given us two volumes on CD called When I Was a Cowboy (just as the above-mentioned LP was titled), described on the covers as “Early American Songs of the West, Classic Recordings From the 1920s and ’30s.”

You might decide two CDs, 46 songs in all, is a larger dose of cowboy music than you need. Cough up the dinero, pardner, for these are dynamite. Any collection of old-time music should include some genuine, and preferably vintage, cowboy recordings and these are not just the best currently available but, I believe, the best collection ever released. At least get one if you feel you can’t afford both, but don’t expect me to tell you which of the two to buy. They’re both too good to miss.

Old-Time Mountain Guitar

review by Jim Nelson:

Old-Time Mountain Guitar: Vintage Recordings 1926-1931 (County CD 512)

Historically, little attention has been paid to the guitar and its important role in the development of country music, at least in comparison to the fiddle or banjo. Recordings like Old-Time Mountain Guitar will hopefully serve to rectify this situation. This is one dandy reissue.

Featured throughout are solo and duet performances by some of the best guitarists of the first generation of commercially recorded country music, many of whom are probably well known, but primarily for their work as accompanists or within ensembles. A lot of musical ground gets covered in this collection. Robert Fleder’s essay in the accompanying booklet (which also has some rare photographs of some the players) examines a few of the historical reasons for this.

As he points out, parlor guitar music of the late 19th century is the direct ancestor of much of the music heard on this CD. There is much aural evidence present in many of these performances to support this claim. The most noticeable stylistic elements of parlor guitar heard here are the use of the thumb as an alternating bass while the other fingers picked out intricate melodies, and the use of a variety of open tunings.

Both black and white musicians adopted these stylistic elements, applying them to whole new musical genres, which emerged in the early part of this century. Readily recognizable in many of the cuts on the CD are the many African-American influences that greatly affected early country music (and all that was to follow). Among the selections we hear in this great mix are blues pieces, rags, and even a little jazz.

There’s not a disappointing selection to be found here, but there are some true standouts. The CD starts with “Lonesome Weary Blues,” a duet from Roy Harvey and Leonard Copeland in which the two guitar parts (one in an open D tuning) are so completely intertwined that it is nearly impossible to discern one guitar from the other. Frank Hutchison and fellow West Virginian, Jess Johnson (with Roy Harvey) are featured playing slide guitar on one cut each.

Johnson and Harvey give us “Guitar Rag,” which closely follows Sylvester Weaver’s influential 1923 recording of the piece, and which probably served as the basis for the Western swing classic, “Steel Guitar Rag.” Hutchison’s piece, “Logan County Blues,” bears no small resemblance to the parlor piece, “Spanish Fandango,” which is also heard here in a classic version played by John Dilleshaw and the String Marvel.

The finger picking on the cuts by David Fletcher and Gwen Foster (the Carolina Twins) bears more than slight resemblance to the ragtime style that dominated the playing of many black guitarists in the Piedmont region. I haven’t mentioned the two cuts by Sam McGee, but it goes without saying that he was one of the all-time great finger-style guitar pickers. This is certainly evident in his renditions of “Buck Dancer’s Choice” and “Franklin Blues.”

Some inventive and exciting flat picking pieces are also included among these recordings. Hoke Rice’s dazzling breaks and fills on “Take Me to that Land of Jazz” are nothing short of amazing and probably represent one of the earliest examples of flat picked lead guitar in country music or jazz.

Flatpicking is also featured on the cuts by Melvin Dupree and the Crockett Brothers, Johnnie and Albert (of Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers). Dupree’s numbers are pretty ragged both in style and execution, while the Crockett’s playing reveals a polish that can only be realized from years of working on the vaudeville stage. Old-Time Mountain Guitar is a great collection from start to finish; it is both historically significant and makes for immediately enjoyable listening.

“Black Europe”

from http://www.bear-family.com:

Black Europe (Bear Family CD)  The first comprehensive documentation of the sounds and images of black people
in Europe pre-1927

Recordings on phonograph cylinders, gramophone discs and films, with both still and moving images, feature people of African descent in Europe from the earliest years of the recording industry and continued after the First World War. The contribution of these pioneering personalities on the modern mass media has not been noticed – recognition is overdue. Music, spoken word and dance, from all styles, categories, languages and natal lands provide a lost but rich resource. Many artefacts may be lost forever, but this project traces the surviving evidence.

Collected in two 12 x 12 inch coffee table book with more than 500 full-colour pages, here is a multitude of documents, artefacts and curiosities, from passport applications, personal memorabilia and letters, to sheet music, newspaper ads and fabulous poster art, complemented by contemporary postcards and images of  wax cylinders and disc records. In more than 100 chapters the life and times of these pioneering entertainers, musicians and linguists comes to life, from early film and sound examples to best-selling 78 rpm records, from ‘human zoos’ and minstrel shows to ethnological documentation and portraits of the (sometimes dubious) movers and shakers in European showbusiness of the time.

From African-Americans comes an aural kaleidoscope of entertainers and music from the last days of minstrelsy through ragtime and music hall artists to string bands, spirituals, and the early days of jazz in Europe, including the earliest examples of stride piano and rhythm scat singing, and some of the first records made anywhere of African-American folk music practices. From Africans come recordings of African languages and folk tales, religious music on both African and European models, and recordings of the popular music of the 1920s. Also documented is the involvement of those born in Europe of African descent in the wider culture of the African diaspora.

Black Europe, a boxed set comprising a slipcase with two hardbound, LP-sized books and a folder with 40 CDs (in paper sleeves) of music and sound documents, will be released in 2013.

Sutphin and Baugus

by Riley  Baugus  (from interview at http://www.hearthmusic.com):

The new album is called Kirk Sutphin and Riley Baugus, Long Time Piedmont Pals. We were approached by Charlie Faurot of Old Blue Records to make the album. He is the collector that recorded Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham and Oscar Jenkins back in the 60s. Those recordings sort of got the ball rolling for the “revival” of Round Peak music, which really means that it spread outside the Surry County area and was discovered by loads of people who fell in love with the sound and the idea of the living tradition.

It is a collection of tunes that we have known since childhood as well as some we learned just for the recording. We included some tunes that we learned from recording of a great musician named Matt Simmons from Stokes County, NC. It is the county just to the North of us here and is often overlooked musically. “Drunkard’s Dream” and part of our version of “Wild Bill Jones” comes from Matt Simmons. It also includes a version of “Paddy On The Turnpike,” which we learned from H.O. Jenkins, the grandson of Frank Jenkins who played with Tommy Jarrell’s dad, Ben Jarrell in DaCosta Woltz’ Southern Broadcasters, in the late 1920s. We did a couple of tunes that we learned from field recordings of Fields Ward from Galax, VA and some tunes from Wade Ward, and tunes we learned from Tommy Jarrell, and others that we learned along the way from several different players.

It was huge fun to make. We recorded it all live. No overdubs, or punching in. We played the tunes and recorded them. Charlie set up in Kirk’s living room in true field recorder fashion, and we did the record. We like to think of it as our field recording. It’s cool to do a record that way without all the bells and whistles that you have at your disposal in a studio. Just the instruments and the voice and the room sound and whatever editing gets done. One of my favorite ways to record.

I played Banjo and Guitar on most of the recording while Kirk played Fiddle and Banjo on most of it, but we did switch around a bit too. I played Fiddle on a couple and he played Guitar and Old Time Fingerstyle Banjo on a couple. Most people tend to think that Clawhammer is “THE” old time way of playing 5 string Banjo, but Fingerstyles were just about as common in the Southern Appalachian region.

As kids we always loved the things that were old, seemed old or stood for the old ways. It was like getting to be kids again to do this record. We played tunes that we actually had to learn, and we spent several days together playing tunes and telling stories and just having fun, just like when we were kids.

Koo Nimo

Koo Nimo: Highlife Roots Revival (World Music Network CD TUG1064)

from http://www.worldmusic.net:

Koo Nimo is one of the last true veterans of highlife roots and palm-wine music, which dominated Ghana’s popular music scene throughout much of the twentieth century. Recorded in his backyard at home in Accra, expect acoustic guitars and rolling percussion all topped off with his gentle story-teller singing style.

Whilst listening to Highlife Roots Revival, you might be surprised to hear the faint crowing of a rooster or the distant murmur of a child’s voice bubbling underneath the guitars. But rest assured: it is no accident that these sounds were left in the mix; they were captured during a series of recording sessions, which took place in Koo Nimo’s courtyard at home in Ghana.

Adding a wonderful sense of intimacy to the album, these interjections underline the ethos of palm-wine music perfectly. This is, after all, a musical style named after the strong alcoholic drink imbibed at outdoor acoustic sessions, where musicians swapped their songs beneath the starlit sky and where palm-wine music was born. Join Koo Nimo in the spirit of palm-wine; kick back, tap your foot and listen to the stories unfold.

Palm-wine music has its roots in the burgeoning krio culture of late nineteenth-century West Africa. Portuguese sailors winding along the coasts of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana introduced the guitar to the region, an instrument itself circuitously related to the various harps and lutes of West Africa. Sea shanties mixed together local styles like gumbé and foreign influences such as Trinidadian calypso. During the early twentienth century, palm-wine gatherings were commonplace, often taking place under the shade of a large tree, with performers happy to play on as long as they were still being bought drinks.

Kentucky Old-Time Banjo

Kentucky Old-Time Banjo (Rounder CD 0394)

Reviewed by Jim Nelson:

This collection, assembled by Mark Wilson and John Harrod, captures a sampling of old-time banjo performances styles found in the eastern Bluegrass and mountain regions of Kentucky.  Although all the musicians here live in a fairly narrowly defined geographical area, there is a great deal of variance in technique and repertoire.  Wilson points out in the liner notes that it would be difficult to isolate any common denominator that clearly defines ‘Kentucky old-time banjo.’

While this is true, the music represented on this CD is quite distinct from that of what one hear in, say, North Carolina.  In general, the feel is gentler, more subdued and less syncopated than Fred Cockerham from North Carolina or Wade Ward from Virginia.  The predominant approach throughout this album is one based upon the style generally referred to today as ‘clawhammer’ or ‘frailing,’ though in Kentucky it is often called ‘rapping’ or ‘knocking.’

When utilizing this style, the player strikes the melody notes downward with the back of a finger (usually the index finger) and uses the thumb to sound a drone on the fifth string.  In a more complex variation of this style, called ‘drop thumbing,’ the thumb will sometimes play some of the melody notes on one of the other strings.  This style is generally agreed upon as being African in origin and has been documented as far back as the early nineteenth century.

Banjo Classics

 

BANJO CLASSICS
FROM THE VAULTS OF COUNTY RECORDS
& OLD BLUE RECORDS    OLD BLUE CD-710
Various Artists

from http://www.oldbluerecords.com:

This is the second release of recordings from County Records and Old Blue Records, which contains – as much as possible – selections that have never been released before.  For the first time, two of the tracks pre-date all of the County and Old Blue recordings. Those two were recorded in 1958.  The 22 County recordings were made in the mid-60s to 1971, about a generation and a half after the first country 78 recording was released.  By chance, the eight Old Blue recordings were made about a generation and a half after the County recordings.

There are 32 tracks, but only 23 different tunes.  The repeated tunes are because of different approaches, techniques or tunings. All the recordings have never been released before.

This anthology has several purposes. One is to document the range of versions that exist in the tradition using side-by-side comparisons of the same and similar tunes. The second is to make the listener aware of some of the many artists working in the old time genre. The third is to reveal how the tradition persists and grows through the years. As with any art, the beauty of these pieces takes on more clarity with continued listening.

For the budding musician there is exposure to a level of performance that sets a bar for future goals of performance. For those who love old time music this is an opportunity to hear more great music from a wide range of musicians. As with all great art, continued listening exposes more of the subtleties of this music, revealing the depth of riches contained in these performances.

Lena Hughes – Queen of the Flat Top Guitar

 

from http://www.tompkinssquare.com:

Liner notes by JOHN RENBOURN.
LP/CD/DL available January 29th, 2013

A musical “amateur” that best exemplified true artistry, Lena Hughes was born in Grape Grove Township, Missouri, in 1904. Though she never recorded any 78s and only one LP, Hughes was most influential through her steady performances at various fiddler conventions and folk festivals throughout the Ozarks. She was an excellent fiddler, banjoist and guitar picker who retained the largely extinct repertoire of parlor pieces and the variety of specialized tunings that were necessary to play them. She lived most of her life in Ludlow, Missouri and passed away in 1998.

Lena Hughes’ repertoire can be divided roughly in half: finger-picked numbers adapted from fiddle tunes and recast parlor guitar pieces gleaned from popular sentimental songs, hymns, and 19th century airs. As a faithful attendee at folk festivals, Hughes was accompanied by her guitar-playing husband, Jake. Her most mesmerizing performances, such as Pearly Dew, Spanish Fandango, and Kentucky Moon Waltz, depend heavily upon the resonance of the open chord as it relates to the picking of the melodic line, primarily on one string.

This tonal reliance is most similar to the “celestial octave” that Washington Phillips employs, with similar effect, on his Train Your Child. This ethereal harmonic technique, which seems so natural in Hughes’ playing, is the holy grail for most finger-picking guitarists. Her lack of pretense and her mastery of this repertoire is what defines her legendary status.

These recordings were made in the early 60’s in Arkansas and released in very limited fashion as a private press LP. Remastered by Chris King. Designed by Susan Archie.

Hear “Pearly Dew”

Stranger on a Mule

“Stranger on a Mule – 31 Traditional Fiddle Tunes from the Southern Appalachians” by Bruce Greene (fiddle) with Don Pedi (mountain dulcimer)

From  http://www.onemanclapping.com

Born in New York City in 1951 and raised in New Jersey, Bruce Greene would seem an unlikely person to become one of the finest old time southern Appalachian fiddlers of his generation. As did many of his peers, he began to learn folk music as a teenager during the folk revival of the fifties and sixties, mastering the guitar and banjo. His interest drifted into the fiddle music he began to hear, and by the time he was twenty years old, he was “hooked” thoroughly enough to move to Kentucky in search of the source of the music he had come to love and identify with.

Bruce attended Western Kentucky University, intending to become a folklorist, but his interest in fiddling was stronger than his scholarly ambitions, and he soon made the transition from learning about traditional fiddling to learning fiddle music in a traditional way. His travels around Kentucky led him to a number of old time fiddlers, and the next several years were taken up with informal apprenticeships with these old timers. In the process of learning from them, Bruce also recorded a great deal of their music, preserving a rich, often previously unknown part of our pioneer musical heritage.

One of Bruce’s greatest discoveries was the family of John Salyer of Magoffin County, Kentucky. Salyer was a true giant of a fiddler whose distrust of the commercial music industry had kept his music a secret from the outside world. However, the Salyers had home recordings of their father, which they let Bruce listen to and learn from. For a number of years, the old time music revival community was treated to these tunes through Bruce’s playing without ever getting to hear the true source. But Bruce’s long term friendship with the family has recently paid off for the rest of us, since the family gave permission to the Appalachian Center of Berea College to issue a cassette album of John Salyer himself. The music of the Salyer Family has been Bruce’s greatest inspiration over the years.

from http://www.worldaroundsongs.com:

This CD is a selection of fiddle tunes, most of which come from fiddlers who were born in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds in Kentucky and Western North Carolina. We have been stubbornly carrying them on for the better part of a lifetime in our rural communities, where we have had the pleasure of playing at local dances, weddings, funerals, birthdays, potlucks, ramp festivals, and sorghum makings – all the places where homemade music has long been a part of everyday life. It is a joy and a privilege to be part of the mule-paced and timeless graciousness of this living memory and to carry it into the twenty-first century.

Tune list
Boogerman - Old Red Rooster – Nancy Dalton – Pretty Little Widow – Roosian Rabbit – Grey Squirrel Eating Up the New Ground Corn – Twine Mid the Ringlets  - Little Boy Working on the Road – Ten Steps – Stranger on a Mule – Christmas Eve – Little Lizee Anne – Laurel Lonesome - John Henry – Hog Eyed Man – Frolic of the Frogs – Sleeping on a Corn Cob Bed – Run Johnny Run – Come Along Terrapin – Three Forks of the Cumberland  - The Old Folks Played and the Young People Danced - Say Old Man I Want Your Daughter  – Betty Baker - John Salyer’s Shady Grove – Shady Lane – Lee Sexton’s Shady Grove – Old Aunt Jenny with Her Night Cap On – McKinley Waltz – Old Beech Leaves – Hello John D – Old Tobacco Hills

Available here.

Early American Rural Love Songs

by Burgin Mathews and Bruce Eder (allmusic)

Despite its subtitle — Early American Rural Love Songs — Yazoo’s The Rose Grew Round the Briar features at least as many falsehearted lovers and broken relationships as requited love affairs and happy romance. Indeed, the emotional power of so many of these recordings stems from entwined themes of love and death, illustrated by the ballad metaphor of the rose and the briar.

The selections by Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs are as stark depictions of forsaken, shaken, and demented lovers as the best pieces in those men’s repertoires. Especially haunting are the eerie harmonies of the lesser-known Shortbuckle Roark & Family on “I Truly Understand That You Love Another Man”; subsequent covers of this song by the New Lost City Ramblers or Jerry Garcia & David Grisman have never been able to recapture the tone of the original.

Another often-imitated recording included here is Grayson & Whitter’s “Little Maggie With a Dram Glass in Her Hand,” later translated into a bluegrass standard by the Stanley Brothers. While this collection delves deeply and unflinchingly into the darkest and lonesomest hollers of human relationships, love here is not exclusively somber or violent; it figures also, with equal emotion, into a smaller handful of breakdown pieces, and emerges with a warm beauty in Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Lula Walls.”

Though white “country” performers dominate the compilation, there are a handful of blues performances by Blind Willie McTell, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, Leroy Carr, and others, which nicely widen the scope and power of the project. In addition to showcasing some of the great talents of the 1920s and ’30s, this collection masterfully presents love in the tradition that 19th century Southern ballads and early-20th century blues characteristically cast it: as harsh, terrifying, deadly, beautiful, and profoundly real. The Rose Grew Round the Briar is consequently one of Yazoo’s most effective collections and belongs in almost any collection.

St. Louis-based bluesman Clifford Gibson deftly picks “Old Time Rider,” followed by  Grayson and Whitter whooping it up on “Handsome Molly,” and a journey with a westward tilt, for Ephraim Woody and the Henpecked Husbands doing “Last Gold Dollar,” and then a coarser, rougher solo blues lament (“Built Right on the Ground”) from Teddy Darby.

Among the major luminaries featured are Canadian cowboy singer Wilf Carter (aka Montana Slim) doing “You Are My Sunshine” and Lonnie Johnson, who turns up twice, playing piano (while his Jelly Roll Anderson plays slide) behind Katherine Baker, the only woman privileged to appear here, whose mournful “My Man Left Me” leaves one asking for more, and then back on guitar with his brother James for the brooding, lusty “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.”

For guitar enthusiasts, the revelation of this album may be the work of Louis Lasky, an almost primordial Chicago bluesman, whose percussive guitar style and topical references make him unique for his era. The sound, except for Dock Boggs’ “Lost Love,” is generally very good, and the notes are nicely detailed.

Lomax’s Recordings Return to Haiti

This video is an except of a longer film showing Anna Lomax Wood returning in 2010 to one of the sites of Alan Lomax’s 1936-37 Haitian recordings, and playing the recordings for the villagers for the first time.

from http://thehaitibox.blogspot.com:

On December 21st, 1936, Alan Lomax sent a report to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian Of Congress, about his first impressions after arriving in Haiti.  This quote is published here…

“I have looked about enough to be sure this is the richest and most virgin field I have ever worked in. I hear fifteen or twenty different street cries from my hotel window each morning while I dress. The men sing satirical ballads as they load coffee on the docks. Among the upper-class families many of the old French ballads have been preserved. The meringue, the popular dance of polite society here, is quite unknown in America and has its roots in the intermingling of the Spanish and French folk-traditions.

The orchestras of the peasants play marches, bals, blues, meringues. Then mama and papa and kata tambours officiate at as many kinds of dances ⎯ the congo, the Vodou, and the mascaron. Then there seem to be innumerable cante-fables [oral tales punctuated by songs or rhymes performed by the audience]. Each of these categories comprise, so I am informed, literally hundreds of melodies ⎯ French, Spanish, African, mixtures of the three.

The radio and the sound movie and the phonograph record have made practically no cultural impression, so far as I can discover, except among the petit-bourgeois of the coastal cities. And American jazz is hardly known here except among the rich who have visited America. Composition, by which I mean folk composition, is still very active. So I think I can say that unless a piece of sky falls on my head, this trip will mean some beautiful records for the Library’s collection.”

10 CD box set of Alan Lomax’s 1936-37 Haitian recordings available here.

Lovey’s Original Trinidad String Band

from http://www.bear-family.com:

Calypso Dawn: 1912 (Trinidad String Band): 1-CD Digipac (4-plated) with 32-page booklet, 24 tracks, playing time approx. 72 mns.

This is the story of an exciting discovery. The very first recorded examples of calypso music.

When researching aspects of the history of the Caribbean, American ethnologist Dick Spottswood unexpectedly uncovered an unknown musical treasure. From the depth of a library he fished out several flat cardboard boxes containing matrixes. The accompanying note said the recordings were made by a 12-piece jazz orchestra from Trinidad in 1912: Lovey’s Trinidad String Band.

          Who were these musicians We do not know much about them, and the internet doesn’t either. It is known, though that in May 1912 the dance band embarked on a tour to the United States of America as reported by the ‘Port-of-Spain Gazette’ a couple of days before their departure. The ensemble had been founded by violinist Lovey (real name: George R. Baillie) during the last decade of the 19th century. So by 1912 they were by no means unknown in their home country.

         We can’t say for certain which cities, festivals and ballrooms the Trinidad instrumentalists visited in the U.S.A. But this is clear: they stayed in New York City from late June into July 1912 where they recorded several songs of South American rhythms, first in the studio of the Victor Talking Machine Company, then at the Columbia Phonograph Company. In doing so, George R. Baillie and his men made musical history; they were the first to bring the sound of Calypso onto records.

        Recording technology back then was in its infancy and scratches and noise were common. So it’s amazing that the sound of these old, uniquely important recordings is actually pretty clear. They sound no worse than recordings from the ’40s or ’50s, says Richard Weize who has restored and issued many Calypso pearls from the early days of shellac records on his Bear Family Records label. For the restoration of these historic recordings he couldn’t have secured the services of a better man than mastering expert Chris Zwarg from True Sound.

          These completely restored masters should be of special relevance for the state of Trinidad and Tobago. Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1962, the islands finally became independent from Great Britain. The people celebrated carnival for a week, remembering and celebrating their own identity. Half a century earlier, Lovey’s Original Trinidad String Band had played a substantial role in developing and promoting the identity of the people of Trinidad and Tobago.

Gu-Achi Fiddlers

Gu-Achi Fiddlers – Old Time O’odham Fiddle Music (Canyon Records CR-8082)

 

by Shlomo Pestcoe (from http://www.shlomomusic.com):

The Tohono O’odham are the largest Amerindian nation in the state of Arizona. Tohono O’odham  means “Desert People” in the Uto-Aztecan language of the O’odham, a reference to their homeland in the Sonoran Desert regions of southern Arizona and the northern Mexican state of Sonora. They were dubbed the Papago (Papahvi-o-otam, literally, “Bean People” in the language of the neighboring Akimel O’odham [Pima] who are closely related to the Tohono O’odham) by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino (1645-1711), the famed Jesuit missionary/cartographer/astronomer/explorer, who established the first missions in the region in 1686. In 1986, the tribal government legally replaced the sobriquet “Papago Indians” — long considered to be derogatory– with the term Tohono O’odham as the official name for this First Nation.

The O’odham fiddle tradition of stretches back to the earliest days of Spanish colonization. Catholic missionaries introduced European string instruments into the region for use in church services.

In the mid-19th century, Tohono O’odham fiddlers picked up the latest “pop” dance music forms to come over from Europe– the waltz, polka, mazurka, etc.– and adapted them to fit their musical culture. The music they created was dubbed “waila,” (pronounced “wy-lah”) which comes from the Spanish word baile (lit. “dance”).

Waila fiddle bands provided the music for religious festivals, community celebrations and social dancing until the 1950s, when the fiddle was overshadowed by the button accordion and saxophone.  This was result of the pervasive influence of norteño music from Northern Mexico, in which the 3-row diatonic button accordion and the alto sax are the main lead instruments. A new O’odham style featuring those instruments emerged called chicken scratch, a reference to a traditional Tohono O’odham dance in which dancers kick their heels high in the air like chickens scratching. Today, the terms waila and chicken scratch are interchangeable and are both synonymous for contemporary O’odham vernacular social dance music.

 

 

Fly Down Little Bird

Mike and Peggy Seeger

“Fly Down Little Bird,” by Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger
Review by Paul Michel (www.hearthmusic.com):

In the months just before his short, losing battle with cancer, Mike and Peggy managed to reprise the sound, and indeed many of the same songs, that sweetened the Seeger home more than a half-century ago. Their newly-released collection, Fly Down Little Bird (Appleseed Recordings, 2011), is a fourteen-cut journey into a distant but resonant chapter in the continuing revival and popularization of rural American, mostly Appalachian, music.

After Peggy’s move to England in 1959 (a victim of McCarthyistic blacklisting) she turned her significant musical talents mostly to political songwriting, for many years in partnership with Scottish actor and folksinger Ewan MacColl. Mike continued to research and champion the “true vine” of American music as a folklorist, performer and tireless proselytizer of all things old-time. They collaborated infrequently over the decades; most notably on a 94-song (!) Rounder Records triple LP in 1977 called American Folksongs for Children, which included some of the “play-party” pieces repeated on the Appleseed release. Peggy’s liner notes to the new album, Fly Down Little Bird, insist that “These are not ‘children’s songs’—they are grown-ups’ songs, and we grew up with them.”

They did indeed, and over the years they left them very much as they’d found them—or rather, as they’d adapted them originally. For although there’s a plantation porch, corn-shucking quality to these recordings, it’s a whimsical illusion. These charming renditions of old ballads, tunes and nonsense rhymes don’t evoke the Lomax field recordings nearly as much as they do Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1950s living room. The evocation is unapologetic and endearing.

Mike and Peggy produced in this project, appropriately and lovingly in Mike’s last days, a tribute not so much to the “authentic” traditional music of the American soundscape as to their younger, pioneering, unforgotten selves. There is virtuosity here to be sure—the driving, haunting claw-hammer banjo entwined with fiddle both ragged and right in the Georgia tune “Big Bee Suck the Pumpkin Stem,” and a tasty sample of Metis fiddling in “The Red River Jig.”

There is the broad Seeger instrumental range, including fiddle, guitar, several different banjos, piano, Hawaiian guitar, harmonica, mandolin and lap dulcimer. Duets are sung as often in octave unison as in country harmony. There is silliness (“Fod!” and “Jennie Jenkins”), fond familiarity (“My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains’) and homespun politics (“The Farmer is the Man”). But mostly there is comfort. This collection is delightful from the first listen and grows on one steadily. It’s a simple, cunning capture of two old sibling souls, up in years at long last, singing and smiling back at a slice of yesterday.

I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces

Description: 184 page hardback book with 2 CDs, 150 sepia photographs reproduced in full-color, the CDs feature 51 vintage recordings from 1925-1955.

from http://www.dust-digital.com:

Compiled by Steve Roden, … i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening.

The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea – “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) – to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures – and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots.

The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.

from http://www.mustrad.org.uk:

One or two tracks from the accompanying CDs have been reissued several times over the years, Kelly Harrell’s Rovin’ Gambler, Sam Jones’s Cripple Creek and Sourwood Mountain or Sylvester Weaver’s Damfino Stomp, for example.  But many tracks appear here for the first time.  Marc Williams’s version of the old Anglo-American ballad William and Mary is new to me, although it could be based on the earlier commercial recording that Sam McGee made of the song and which is available on a Document reissue (DOCD-8036).

It is also good to hear Alf Taylor’s quartet working their way through Brother Noah Built an Ark.  Maybe their version is not as strong as the one recorded a few years later by A A Gray & Seven Foot Dilly (reissued on Document DOCD-8002 as The Old Ark’s A’Moving, but it is good to hear anything that Taylor, a fiddle-player and one-time Governor of Tennessee, made.

Surprisingly, to me at any rate, is the fact that I am quite taken by the raw vitality and sincerity of gospel singer such as the Reverend Edward Clayborn, whose Then We’ll Need that True Religion seems to owe a debt to the work of Blind Willie McTell, and The Reverend Calbert and Sister Billie Holstein, a little-known couple who apparently did most of their preaching and singing on street corners.  Then there is Xango, an arrangement of an African chant made by the Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos, and sung by the black classical singer Roland Hayes.

If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi

by Steve Leggett (All Music Guide):

Released by Smithsonian Folkways in collaboration with the Museum of American Finance in New York, If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi is a fascinating collection of folk and blues songs about money and its powerful, dangerous allure drawn from the vast Smithsonian Folkways catalog. Full of vernacular tunes chronicling fortunes made, lost or not sought at all, these selections, although many of them date from the Great Depression, have a timeless applicability given that cries of hope and frustration and grand wishes for financial solvency will undoubtedly never cease to be contemporary concerns.

Among the gems here are a pair of Woody Guthrie songs, “Do-Re-Mi” from his Dust Bowl cycle, and his classic Oklahoma-outlaw-turned-Robin Hood ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Josh White’s haunting “One Meat Ball” from 1944, Pete Seeger’s stark, banjo-led lesson in international economics titled “Business,” and Derek Lamb’s 1962 version of “The Money Rolls In,” an ode to counterfeiting set to the melody of the old British music hall standard “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”Autoharpist Kilby Snow’s sparkling instrumental take on “Greenback Dollar,” which is structurally based on “East Virginia Blues” and not on the Hoyt Axton song called “Greenback Dollar” from the ’60s folk revival, is a sonic delight.

Then there’s “Ida Mae,” done here in a version by Joe Glazer. Ida Mae was Ida Mae Fuller of Vermont, who in 1940 was the first person to ever receive a Social Security check (the Social Security Act had been passed in 1935 — her first check totalled $22.54). Born in 1874, Ida Mae was over a hundred years old when she died in 1975, having drawn checks from the government for some 35 years amounting to some $20,000 in benefits (not a bad return, since she had only paid in $24.75 before she retired in 1939), making her a folk hero of sorts.

Glazer also performs a rendition here of what is perhaps the most famous song to come out of the Great Depression, Jay Gorney and Yip Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” which was written in 1932. That Harburg also had a hand in writing “Over the Rainbow” shows how much hope and yearning are actually at the heart of most of these old songs, which tend to harbor wishes and dreams more than they do declarations of solvency. Money may not actually make the world go ’round (gravity and physics have a much bigger hand in that), but the lack of money sure makes the world a tough place to hang around in, as these apt and durable old songs clearly show while demonstrating an uncommon grace, sense of humor and dogged determination.

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.

A Barnyard Serenade: 1926-1940

From OLD HAT RECORDS  www.oldhatrecords.com:

Here’s a CD anthology from the Golden Era of recorded sound – 24 tracks of vintage music dedicated to America’s favorite domestic fowl, the chicken! This collection includes breakdowns & frolics, folk songs & blues, parodies & imitations, double-entendres, Jubilees, minstrel sketches & tunes of Tin Pan Alley – as rendered by fiddlers, bluesmen, songsters, whistlers, jug blowers, string bands, vocal quartets & novelty orchestras.

All music has been digitally remastered and the CD comes with a 20-page full-color booklet containing song descriptions, discography, and a host of historical illustrations. Songs include Under The Chicken Tree, Hen Party Blues, Chicken Reel Stomp, Rooster On The Limb and many more!

from http://www.oxfordamerican.org:

Old Hat Records based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is the brainchild of record collector and music historian Marshall Wyatt. In 1999, as his label’s initial release, Wyatt compiled Music from the Lost Provinces, featuring recordings from the “Golden Age” of old-time stringband music (1927-1931) by such stellar North Carolina–based acts as Grayson & Whitter, Frank Blevins & His Tar Heel Rattlers, the North Carolina Ridge Runners, the Carolina Night Hawks, and Ephraim Woodie & The Henpecked Husbands. Music from the Lost Provincesprovided ample evidence of Wyatt’s gift for producing historical compilations and received glowing reviews from music scholars (Charles K. Wolfe called it “a breathtakingly beautiful album”).

Music from the Lost Provinces set a high standard for Old Hat, and thus far the label has issued seven additional and equally compelling compilations, with an eighth forthcoming on November 20. All of these releases have featured rare 78s from the 1920s through the early 1940s, a period in which Southern musicians, exuberant to share their music through the new medium of recorded sound, performed in unselfconscious styles that extended traditional musical approaches.

Typically Old Hat releases include painstakingly researched album notes (usually written by Wyatt) that are generally revelatory and never pedantic.  The label’s unwavering objective since its founding has been to recapture the magic of Southern vernacular music and to communicate to a new generation the contexts behind that music. In sharing truly wonderful, previously neglected recordings, Old Hat Records has opened windows into long-gone worlds that—thanks to Wyatt—are not forgotten.

“Hard Time, Good Time, End Time”

from http://www.tompkinssquare.com:

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard : Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936 (Tompkins Square Records)

Available as a deluxe 3LP & 3CD Box Set, November 6th.

Work, play, pray – the lifecycle of the rural America that created our greatest generation of country music, 1923 to 1936. These volumes survey songs of labor and occupation, hardship and loss; dance tunes, comic numbers, and novelties that provided distraction and fun; and the hymns and sacred pieces that reached beyond the raw material of daily existence for something enduring.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard features 19 previously un-reissued sides and is largely drawn from the collection of the late Don Wahle of Louisville, Kentucky. A hillbilly 78 collector for many years, his records were hours away from the dump when producer Nathan Salsburg recovered them. Compiled and annotated by Salsburg with accompanying essays by Sarah Bryan(editor of the Old Time Herald), Amanda Petrusich (New York Times; author of It Still Moves), and John Jeremiah Sullivan(Southern editor of the Paris Review; author of Blood Horses and the essay collection Pulphead).

Nathan Salsburg on finding the Don Wahle collection:

One evening late in March 2010, my friend Joe called. He told me that his friend Chris had been on a dumpster job that day, helping clean out the house of a recently deceased hoarder. The hoarder had had some 78-rpm records, and Chris had brought a few home. Joe was there for dinner and he put him on the phone. “What kind of records?” I asked. “Old-timey stuff,” Chris said. Visions of Harry James and Morton Downey, Sr., began swaying lugubriously in my head. I thought about lying back down on the sofa, but I went to look at the records instead.

I had never tried to collect 78s. I was young, broke, and peripatetic, and by the time I might have started, I didn’t live in a place where the getting was good. (Never mind that I had gone to college in Richmond, Indiana, the home of the late Gennett Records. The nation’s first great independent label, it had released thousands of sides by jazz, hillbilly, and “race” artists, stars and ciphers alike, but in those days I was looking for mono Kinks LPs.) And when my shellac fantasies began, I was daunted by the many years the Great Southern Record Canvass had been over. So I contented myself with the vigorous stream of reissues from the likes of Yazoo, Arhoolie, and County Records. I had abandoned hope: thus my swoon when I opened the salvaged boxes.

Read entire article here.

Letter from pioneering hillbilly-record collector John Edwards to Don Wahle, July 4, 1960:

The Return of the “The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of”

 

from http://www.jukeboxplaying.com:

On October 16th, Yazoo Records released a collection of early country and blues recordings, with the illustrious 2-CD set, ‘The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’.

This  is a follow up to Yazoo’s lauded 2006 recording, ‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’, which was likened to the ‘holy grail’ for collectors of early blues and country music. Set in an oversized DVD digipack and featuring a caricature cover by award-winning illustrator Drew Friedman, ‘The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of ‘ highlights 46 tracks culled from the 1920s.

The music captured in the set features performances from bluesmen like Charley Patton, Bukka White and Ishman Bracey, cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, country fiddler Eck Robertson, ‘The Dixie Dewdrop’ banjo player Dave Macon, North Carolinian banjo legend Charlie Poole and numerous others.

Audiophiles will take note of the stellar sound quality presented in the tracks as many re-mastered selections have an incredibly modern sound to them.

‘The Return Of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’ includes an extensive 54-page booklet with rare photographs and notes that chronicle the history of collecting 78 records from the beginning in the 1920s through the 1960s.

Dubbed ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’ of record collecting the booklet marks the first time that this early history has been annotated so thoroughly with first time revelations from pioneer collectors themselves.

Here’s the track listing:

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.

Hard Times in the Country

By Bill Friskics-Warren (http://archives.nodepression.com)

It’s become de rigueur, since the 1997 publication of Invisible Republic, to talk about Appalachian and other antediluvian songs and ballads as emblematic of what author Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.” There’s certainly no denying the eerie cast of records from the late 1920s such as “Country Blues” and “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground”. The former finds Dock Boggs anticipating the gloom-ridden existentialism of “Stones In My Passway” and “Lost Highway”; the latter has Bascom Lunsford prefiguring the surrealism of “All Along The Watchtower” and “Little Wing”. But to ascribe a revisionist, and romanticized, construct like an “old, weird America” to the bulk of the nation’s rural, prewar musical output misses the mark.

Old? Absolutely. But weird? Not by half. The hardship and oppression that reverberate through many of the era’s recordings reflect the numbing grind that Southerners, scratching out a living during the Depression, knew all too well. Privation supplied the subtext for records in which hoedown bands induced their countrymen and women to stomp all over their blues, or to belly-laugh to keep from crying.

The eighteen prewar string-band and songster numbers included on Hard Times In The Country: Down And Out In The Rural South certainly attest to that. Blind Alfred Reed’s 1929 rallying cry “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live” could well have served as the album’s subtitle. The same could be said for just about any of the collection’s plaints about tenant farming or toiling in the coal fields and textile mills — everything from the Bentley Boys’ jaunty-in-spite-of-itself “Down On Penny’s Farm” to Frank Hutchison’s brooding, black-influenced “Miner’s Blues”. Witness “Weave Room Blues”, in which Fisher Hendley moans: “Working in a weave room fighting for my life/Trying to make a living for my young’ins and my wife/Some are needing clothes and some are needing shoes/But I’m getting nothing but those weave room blues.” The rolling banjo figure Hendley plays as he steels his resolve to face another day behind the loom is as inexorable as any factory whistle or assembly line.

The lyrics of these songs abound with strategies for coping with hard luck and trouble — some of the musicians seeking refuge in church, others in humor. “You heard about the farm relief/Well it’s finally got here/They’ve just about relieved the farmer of everything he’s got,” cracks Uncle Dave Macon to kick off the frailing banjo romp “Farm Relief”. Other tracks find their protagonists turning to whiskey for comfort, only to have the bottle let them down — or worse, land them on the chain gang, as it does in Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster’s juggy “Bay Rum Blues”. It’s no wonder that a fair number ran moonshine to stave off the economic and emotional chill, even if it meant contending with corrupt revenuers like those in Lowe Stokes’ “Prohibition Is A Failure”.

Ian Nagoski: 6 Compilations Available

from http://www.tompkinssquare.com:

Tompkins Square label is proud to release six albums compiled by musicologist Ian Nagoski for his Canary label. These titles have appeared as limited edition pressings, and are out of print. However, the albums can now be purchased around the world via the digital service of your choice; Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, Boomkat, Other Music and many others.

v/a – Brass Pins & Pearls: International 78s
A collection of radiant music from around the world compiled from 78rpm discs from the first half of the 20th century. Originally released at two LPs (A String of Pearls in late 2009 and Brass Pins & Match Heads in early 2011), each LP reacted directly to the early deaths of musician-friends of compiler Ian Nagoski and asked, “What is the value of the life of one musician?” The complexly interwoven performances are visceral and lifelike outpourings of strong emotions and outrageous feats of virtuosity. Musicians, famous and unknown alike from staggeringly varied backgrounds, together give the impression of the goodness, wonder and mystery of music itself. These 25 tracks span nearly as many cultures and languages but flow seamlessly as one human voice.

Marika Papagika – The Further the Flame, the Worse it Burns Me: Greek Folk Music in New York City, 1919-28
The Greek singer Marika Papagika was one of the best-selling immigrant performers in the US of the 1920s. Her records were often deeply emotive, full of dignity and grace, ambition, heart-rending sorrow and resignation, and nostalgic patriotism for the world she left behind. This album of eleven songs (drawn from the 250 performances s he left behind from her career in America) from deep in 19th century Greek folklore and pan-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean experience showcase her extraordinary voice, accompanied by some of the best musicians of the New York Greek scene.

Khansahib Ustad Abdul Karim Khan – 1934-1935
Even now, 75 years since his death in 1937, Abdul Karim Khan remains the most revered and admired Hindustani singer of the early 20th century. His influence and legacy continue to pervade Indian music. His voice, elastic, mercurial, and almost impossibly sweet, and his unique style, broadly nationalist the time of the rise of the Independence movement and popularly alluring while still expanding on the refinement and technique of the centuries-old court music from which he had come, was best-preserved at recording session in Bombay in the mid-30s, from which these ten exquisite performances were drawn.

v/a – What Remains of Eden: Anatolian & Levantine Musics, 1928-1952
Coincident with the birth of the modern Middle East in the 1920s-50s was a flurry of recording activity in Cairo, Istanbul, and among the diaspora of the Eastern Mediterranean in the United States. These 15 tracks originate from Istanbul through the heart of Anatolia to Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, spanning the classical to the folk, from cafes to courts, from the joyous to the plaintive, and many distinct ethnicities (Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Kurdish, Maronite, Roma, and Turkish), celebrities and unknowns alike, each with a unique, palpable focus and intensity, each with a powerful story to tell.

v/a – Bed of Pain: Rembetika 1931-1955
The deep, dark hybrid music born in the urban slums of Greece, rembetika is often referred to as “the Greek blues,” for its heroic, blunt truth-telling in the face of suffering. This collection of heavy songs from the style’s “golden era” in the years surrounding WWII includes many of the “heavy-hitters,” great and revered singers and composers, but also includes many obscure artists, including several from the influential American diaspora. For fans of the style, if offers brilliant lesser-known pieces and for the uninitiated, it cuts to the heart of rembetika’s no-bullshit swagger, grief, and fierce beauty.

v/a – To What Strange Place : The Music Of The Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929
Before the Golden Age of Americana on Record, immigrants from the dissolving Ottoman Empire were singing their joys and sorrows to disc in New York City. The virtuosic musicians from Anatolia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Levant living in the U.S. who recorded between WWI and the Depression are presented here across two discs, along with a third disc of masterpieces they imported as memories on shellac-and-stone. The intermingled lives and musics of Christians, Jews, and Muslims represent Middle Eastern culture as it existed within the U.S. a century ago. A fascinating, new view of American Folk Music. Compiled by IAN NAGOSKI. Designed by Susan Archie.