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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prater and Hayes play “Somethin’ Doing”:

Song starts at 0:40 seconds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from http://www.bluesworld.com:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rough Carpenters (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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam’s new music video (with Chris Vatalaro)

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

Great Sam Amidon interview with Tiny Mix Tapes

Sam and Chris live in Australia

Reviews of Bright Sunny South