African Favorites – starting point for appreciating acoustic guitar music of Mali, Guinea, and Congo

For those who have inquired about recommended African CDs, here is a concise starting point for appreciating the precious and startling acoustic guitar music of Mali, Guinea, and the Congo, along with brief product descriptions from the producers.  Missing are anthologies of northern Malian, South African,  and Zimbabwean guitar–I’m not aware of any relevant collections of this caliber.  A lifetime of listening here.  Enjoy.

Origins of Guitar Music: Southern Congo and Northern Zambia, 1950-’58, recordings by Hugh Tracey (Sharp Wood SWP015)

In the new urban culture that invented itself during the fifties in the copper mining towns of Katanga Province in southern Congo and on the Copperbelt in northern Zambia, the guitar became an important status symbol and quickly local styles developed. This also happened in the big southern African railway connection of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. This collection of recordings is an exciting document, the emergence of a new sound – including some famous names such as Mwenda Jean Bosco and George Sibanda, but also others like the wandering Copperbelt minstrel Stephen ‘Tsotsi’ Kasumali, the swing Zambian harmony of the Four Pals, and the raw rumba from up north in Kisangani, plus a couple of tracks from Malawi testifying further the speedy spread of the guitar in central southern Africa at this time. Total time: 72’05”. 24 page booklet.

Roots of Rumba Rock: Congo Classics 1953-1955 (2 CDs, Crammed Discs)

The origins of Congolese rumba, its strange links with traditional music, French crooners and Belgian brass bands… the spectacular reappropriation of Afro-Cuban music by Kinshasa musicians who recognized some of the old likembe (thumb piano) patterns originally brought to Cuba by deported Congolese slaves and proceeded to adapt them to the electric guitar… the social context, the lifestyle of Congolese musicians in the early Fifties… all of that and much more is extensively described in the liner notes written by Kenis and based on interviews with musicians from that era.

In the early Fifties, Kinshasa (then called Léopoldville) became a musical beehive. Being the capital of a country the size of a continent, it was a meeting point for a wide variety of ethnic groups which soon merged their traditions to create new musical styles. But the main reason why the music of Kinshasa grew so strong and conquered all Africa lies in its spectacularly successful reappropriation of Afro-Cuban music, which was instantly recognized and adopted as a prodigal son coming back home. Which of course it really was: only two generations had passed since the end of the slave trade from Congo to Cuba, and most elements in Cuban music sounded very familiar to Congolese ears.

The World Is Shaking – Cubanismo From The Congo, 1954-55 (Honest Jon’s Records)

Echoes of music exported in the slave trade came home on radios and records. Congolese musicians who strayed from the traditional realm with its plethora of lutes and likembes (thumb pianos) — all the various indigenous instruments — began to master imported guitars and horns by mimicking what they heard. The jazz of Louis Armstrong and the ballads of European torch singers like Tino Rossi captured the imagination of the rapidly expanding working class — and then the familiar-sounding music of Latin America, in the form of the shiny shellac of HMV’s GV series of 78s (G for the English Gramophone Company; V for Victor in the US).

Listen to likembe player Boniface Koufidilia as he makes the transition from traditional to modern in the first few seconds of Bino, which then hits you with a vamping violin whilst he muses about death (including that of the popular Brazzaville musician Paul Kamba). Andre Denis and Albert Bongu both echo the the sounds of palm-wine brought to the Belgian Congo by the coastmen. The sweet vocal harmonies of Vincent Kuli’s track were learned perhaps in a mission church. Rene Mbu’s nimble, likembe-like guitar plucking shines on Boma Limbala. Is Laurent Lomande using a banjo as a backdrop to Elisa? Aren’t those kazoos, buzzing along on Jean Mpia’s Tika?

Guitar Seche (Popular African Music)

This is the first release in the African guitar series, featuring this imported instrument, affordable and easy to carry around. Guitare Sèche is the French term for acoustic guitar, and the album features four of these: a new one, a fairly good one and two battered specimens. The album has been recorded in Conakry directly onto digital 8- track. Guitar music, without vocals, which you hear everywhere when travelling in Guinea is hard to find on record.

Djessou Mory Kanté, a younger brother of Kanté Manfila now living in Paris where he is one of the most requested session guitarists, came up with the idea for this album. it features: Papa Diabaté, the father of modern Guinean guitar playing. Djessou Mory’s brothers Bakary and Djekoria Mory Kanté plus Moriken Kouyaté – all three much in demand in Guinea. With comprehensive notes by Eric Charry, of Wesleyan University, an authority on Mande guitar music.

Big String Theory (Xenophile Records, Amazon mp3)

This project was instigated in 1992 by Globestyle Records’ Ben Mandelson. The idea was to make a fiery, acoustic recording of the Malian music known as “bajourou”- literally “big string” or “big tune.” This recording focusses on guitars highlighting intricate exchanges between two of this genre’s top guitar players: Djelimady Tounkara and Bouba Sacko.

Intent on bringing these two great players together for the first time. Mandelson and Lucy Duran travelled to the Mali capital, Bamako. Djelimady Tounkara is best known as lead guitarist of the Super Rail Band–the band that launched the careers of both Salif Keita and Mory Kante. Bouba Sacko has an impressive career of accompanying top jelimoussow–female griot singers–including the great Kandia Kouyate. President of Mali’s fledgling music union and former Rail Band singer Lafia Biabate completed the team.

Big String Theory was recorded direct to DAT in Bamako on acoustic instruments, and the session was followed by a 1993 tour of the UK. Critics were immediately won over by the group’s dynamic energy. Bringing Tounkara and Sacko together was an idea that would never have happened without the input of the two English producers. While the two guitarists remain friends, they have never played together in recent years. So this recording has the added spark of two masters jostling for position in each others’ worlds.

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Giggers

> Incidentally, the family pronounces “Giggers” with a hard G — referring
> to the habit of the members of the band, who lived in the Missouri
> bootheel near the Mississippi River, going into the shallow backwaters
> in
> the spring and “gigging” with old three-pronged forks the grinnell fish
> they found. “Grinnell’s not exactly a game fish,” one of the sons
> laughed.
> “It’s considered a junk fish, but back in the Depression, when times
> were
> hard, we were glad to get them.” The term “grinnell giggers” was a local
> phrase that roughly meant the equivalent of “white trash.”

Lester McCumbers (a belated appreciation) August 15 1921 – January 26, 2015

The making of ... The Crooked Tune, An Old Time Fiddler in a Modern World

Lester McCumbers was more than West Virginia’s last old world, old time fiddler. A man no doubt born into the remoteness of mountains and music and soaked it up in a regional style that over decades stood as a highly cherished remainder of an archaic sound that has recently caught the modern ear.

The New York Times did a wise man and the student piece about Lester McCumbers back in the late 1990s. http://nyti.ms/1CmUBWF. And he continued to graciously host visitors from photographers to musicians committed to the old time sound and wanted to experience the exchange in person rather from a recording. Soon visitors no doubt realized there was more to Lester than the music or maybe there was more to the music.

Lester embodies the power of music, how music can more than compensate the lack of material things, how music infuses a kind of civility that draws people.  It…

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Cell Phones and Music in West Africa

from http://www.dailydot.com:

African musicians are increasingly turning to memory cards from mobile phones to distribute music.

With access to the Internet limited and prohibitively expensive, cell phones are a cheap alternative for storing and sharing information. Africa also has a higher rate of mobile use than either the United States or Europe, having grown 40-fold in the last decade.

Just as the Sony Walkman helped give rise to a mixtape culture—trading tapes and bootleg copies of albums or live recordings—an independent scene has emerged with microSD cards. Tracks are traded from one phone to another via Bluetooth connections or card readers.

“In much of West Africa, cell phones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices.” noted Chris Kirkley of Sahel Sounds, an independent record label, based in Portland, Ore. “In lieu of personal computers and high-speed Internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer-to-peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.”

Kirkley has been collecting music from memory cards on mobile phones in the Sahara, including Mali and Senegal. In 2010, he released a stellar compilation LP, Music from Saharan Cellphones, that captured not only the music that was popular on “the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers” and nomadic desert renegades Tinariwen.

For Kirkley, the distribution represents a cultural reclamation of the music, an independent system by and for the people.

“The ubiquity of cellphones has created a busy soundscape,” Kirkley told Motherboard. “There a furious outcry by these corporate machines who based their business on distribution and propagation, but it’s just the sound of a system in its death throes.”

For those who are skeptical about the media being the message, it’s important to note that SanDisk thumb drives were crucial in Cuba some years back. Those devoted to publishing their thoughts online would type up what they wished to say on their unconnected home computers, walk into a tourist hotel (where they were not legally allowed to be), and plug into one of the hotel’s business center computers to post from there.

In fact, in West Africa, the use of memory cards is a symptom of an explosion of musical exuberance extravagant even for the region. There is so much music that expecting only one distribution channel would be “kind of like trying to pour a bottle of Coke into a straw,” according the Wall Street Journal’s West Africa correspondent, Drew Hinshaw.

“Channels of distribution are flourishing in much of Africa,” Hinshaw told the Daily Dot. “USB sticks, cheap smart phones and the like. It feels to me that African pop music is bubbling up right now — finding a humorous, sometimes sinister electro cool voice—and maybe because the channels to circulate little hits are flourishing.”

Nic Offer took a month to travel through Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.  In West Africa, “absolutely everyone is listening to music on their phone,” he said. “The phone is everyone’s new boombox or Walkman.”

Being a musician, Offer wanted to get some of the music that was so ubiquitous on his trip. The concierge at his hotel told him to get a memory card, because “that’s how things were done, that’s how music was sold.” He walked Offer to a cell phone kiosk and the proprietor sold him 100 “hits,” which he burnt, as it were, onto an SD card, as well as a small radio that played those cards.

“Brass band coming through”

excerpt from “Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis,” by Ian Zack:

Reverend Gary Davis’s first memory of hearing a guitar—that it sounded like “a brass band coming through”—is no idle quip. From his earliest years, he imagined the six-stringed instrument in his hands as capable of making the fantastic cacophony of sounds he heard from those rousing brass bands. That conception would help fuel his revolutionary approach to the guitar, not as a mere vocal accompaniment but as a band in a box with cornets, trombones, tubas, clarinets, and drums all at his disposal.

Carnival, circus, wild West, and minstrel shows crisscrossed the nation at the turn of the twentieth century, featuring many of the musicians who would pioneer the new sounds of ragtime, blues, and jazz—what music publishers and the press had dubbed “coon songs.”

Traveling companies usually pitched huge canvas tents that could seat hundreds of people around a stage lit in the early years by kerosene lamps. They put on extravagant spectacles with music, theatrical comedy, minstrelsy (with both white and black performers in blackface), acrobatics, and circus freak-show acts.

Every show had at least one brass band with a dozen or more members, and some of the white-owned circuses employed a white band for the main stage and a black band for the sideshow tent. When traveling shows arrived in a town, usually by rail, they drummed up business by sending their bands parading through the streets to the town center decked out in gold braided silks, sometimes riding atop colorful horse-pulled bandwagons.

Brass bands performed at schools and in factory yards, and on the earliest 78 rpm recording they could be heard playing popular songs, Sousa marches, blues, and ragtime. Gary Davis played all those genres on guitar, and the songs he heard traveling bands play would show up later in his own repertoire.

In the fall of 1915, for instance, most of the brass bands on tour were performing the songs of William “King” Phillips, a cornetist whose composition “Florida Blues” Davis would teach to students but never record. During the same season, the brass bands were cutting their teeth on the latest sheet music hit of W. C. Handy, “Hesitating Blues,” a song Davis would make famous (as “Hesitation Blues”) for guitarists during the folk revival. Davis also would record several marches, including, most famously, “Soldier’s Drill,” which he derived in part from John Philip Sousa.

R. Crumb on American Routes

		Music, Comics & Collecting Records: R. Crumb & Jerry Zolten
		September 24th, 2014 ~ This week on American Routes we spin some shellac and wax nostalgic with the iconic cartoonist, musician and record collector Robert Crumb, who’ll share with us his love of musical times gone by. Then, we talk to educator and vinyl aficionado Jerry Zolten about the story of Paramount Records, started by a furniture manufacturer, whose recorded legacy is now contained in two swank suitcases. Listen To Hour 1 Listen To Hour 2

Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City

Jeff Place – Authority on the Folkways (Asch) Archives of Smithsonian

Smithsonian Folkways producer and archivist Jeff Place holds one of the original glass studio recordings he would have listened to in the making of his recent project Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

from http://www.washingtonpost.com:

Over the past three decades, Jeff Place has been the central figure researching, organizing and ultimately releasing the recordings represented in one of the world’s most important collections of 20th- century music: The Rinzler archives includes the 12 record labels now collectively known as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

On a recent weekday, Place stood in the Rinzler vault — a windowless room stacked with recordings from 19th-century wax cylinders to 8-tracks. He carefully slid a glass disc out of a paper sleeve and held it up to show the black film — the area where sound had been recorded — peeling like a bad sunburn. This Lead Belly radio recording, dating to the 1940s, could no longer be played. But there was good news. Place had copied and digitized it years ago.

“You sneeze, and they break,” he says. “The whole idea is you want to take these in and get them out to the public. We don’t want to hoard these things. We want to get this stuff out of this room.”

In 1987, the Smithsonian made a deal to buy Folkways after the death of the label’s founder, Moses Asch. Place scored an interview and got the archivist job.

“Folkways was huge,” recalls Tony Seeger, Pete’s nephew and an ethnomusicologist who worked as curator alongside Place until 2000. “Moses Asch had all this artwork very carefully stored and 2,168 LPs. For each of those there was a file. We knew we couldn’t do it in a day, but Jeff’s a fairly unstoppable person. He also brought a pretty good knowledge of American folk music. He knew what it meant when he found something special.”

Place never met Asch, who died in 1986, but he does share part of his philosophy. Asch, he learned, wasn’t desperate for hit records. In fact, a hit would disrupt the Folkways formula by putting undue pressure on the label to press and distribute albums. Asch simply wanted to record as much good music as he could and reach those who were passionate about it.

Walking through the Smithsonian offices, Place points out the activity. One person is converting fast-dissolving master recordings; another is scanning slides from a music festival into the computer system.

There’s a room where anyone can make an appointment and come in and listen to records. There’s also a disc-burning machine — “the robot,” Place calls it — through which visitors can order discs long out of print that have been digitized, such as the aforementioned “Sounds of Medicine,” a 1955 album featuring “stethoscope sounds” from a variety of ailing patients, as well as the 1982 release “Cable Car Soundscapes.”

Last fall, Place stepped down as full-time archivist to become the Rinzler curator, which is really what he has been doing the past few years. He likes to work out of his house in Mayo, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay, which he shares with his wife, Barrie, and his collection of about 20,000 records.

Still, Place remains the ultimate authority on Folkways and doesn’t sound ready to retire. A Pete Seeger box and book — the third in a trilogy that began with Guthrie in 2012 and Lead Belly this year — should be out in 2016. There’s also work to be done on the music of the banjo-playing lawyer Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

“This is the stuff,” Place says, still wide-eyed as he stands in front of rows of Lead Belly, Guthrie and Seeger masters. “You look in this room. All these tapes, these records. Every one of them has a story. Every time you take one out and copy it, you’re in for it.”

Funk Banjo of Dan Gellert

by Frank Basile (http://donegone.net):

Dan Gellert. All you have to do is say the name to invoke awe. He was already legendary more than 30 years ago with his funky, restless playing and now represents a whole way of looking at the music. He has what seems to be an endless capacity to turn the smaller internal phrases of old-time music around and around, nudging them rhythmically and embellishing them melodically.

We’re not talking about jazz, here… the individual moves aren’t particularly revolutionary… harmony is not re-invented… the melody is never completely abandoned.. but the overall effect is damned amazing. Anyone looking to do a “tight duet” with Dan is going to be disappointed. He’s NOT going to stand still, period. No it’s not jazz.

It’s FUNK.

If you look at his banjo playing from a technical perspective, you’ll find a couple of things to note. In his clawhammer playing, Dan’s music is notably “chordless.” This gives his music a stark, linear quality. In terms of note quality, he also likes the notes ‘between the frets,’ and has a way of generating that feeling even on a fretted banjo, although he really flies on fretless banjos of all kinds.

You’ll also note that, eschewing chords in general, he doesn’t fill up rhythmic space with a bunch of clutter. Every note matters… and when I say that, the spaces BETWEEN the notes matter, too. The basic ingredients of the right (picking) hand are also pretty traditional: basic stroke, drop-thumb, occasional double thumb, galax lick – it’s the service to which these things are put.

Any one of these can be employed at any point in the tune to nudge the rhythm along or to inject syncopation. Dan likes to surprise himself – he’s not attached to perfection.. just the fun of being in the moment.

Roots of R. Crumb

from http://dangerousminds.net:

This slideshow of R. Crumb’s blues-inspired works happens to be set to a Paramount record, Charley Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues.”

What concerns us here are Paramount’s print ads, which ran in The Chicago Defender. I’ve tried mightily to find the names of the artists who drew these. People in a better position to know than I assure me their identities are lost to the years, though they may have been staff illustrators at a Madison ad agency.

The loss of that knowledge is a damned shame, because without knowing it, those artists altered the history of underground comix, by serving as an acknowledged influence on that form’s grand pooh-bah, Robert Crumb.

Even a superficial glance at some of these ads reveals a precursor to Crumb’s famous signature style (it’s strikingly evident in the slouching posture of some of these characters), and Crumb paid direct homage to these artists in a series of trading card sets that have been compiled into the book R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country—the comix artist’s abiding passion for the music of the early recording era has never been a secret.

Here are a few of those ads.

It’s astonishing that these have never been collected into a coffee table art book. The illustration work is wonderful, and for historical interest, these are hard to beat. The only place I know of where they’ve been compiled is in the insane Rise and Fall of Paramount Records box sets jointly released by Jack White’s Third Man label and John Fahey’s Revenant Records.

New Young Fogies (#2)

Anna & Benton Flippen. photo by erynn marshall.

edited from Anna Roberts-Gevalt (from www.hearthmusic.com):

I guess I wanted to have a CD that, when people asked me—what is this music? —I could hand it to them, in answer. It’s hard to describe traditional music sometimes, hard to explain how deep it reaches. There’s all of these young folks who are spending their time visiting people their grandparent’s age, who are obsessing over recordings and obscure fiddlers from the 20s and 30s, who are proud to be carrying on local or family traditions.

We did one session in Knott County, Kentucky, on the property of this wonderful older banjo player. It’s a rare piece of pasture in Knott County, where the hills are so close to each other. To get there, you have to literally drive your car up a creek for a hundred yards. We loaded Joe’s recording equipment into a pickup and brought it over to the house.

We set up on the back porch of this cabin that was over one hundred years old. It was a beautiful summer night, raining here and there. I remember sitting on the porch as Brett Ratliff recorded “Jubilee”—it was dark, but for the light of a lamp, and he was recording, and two of our friends sat on the porch listening—two women holding their little kids in their arms, the kids sleepy after a long day. Something about that song, that old porch, the mountains all around, and the faces of these little sleeping kids— the music seemed such a natural part of that landscape. It was beautiful.

A few months ago, I went to visit the grave of this great fiddler Isham Monday, in Monroe County Kentucky—he passed away in 1964. I had been learning a lot of the tunes he played from Bruce Greene—Bruce didn’t meet him either, but he spent a lot of time in that part of Western Kentucky, visiting with musicians. I wanted to see what the land looked like, to get a sense of it, to dig deep into trying to understand the tunes.
I spent the day in Tompkinsville—a small town with more than one abandoned storefront. Quiet. People in town, then in the library, had no idea who Isham was… They were amused, curious, that I would come so far to find a forgotten fiddler’s grave. Bruce Greene talks about this—visiting older fiddlers who felt like no one was interested in their music anymore. And so we owe a lot to the field recorders of the 70s, who were interested, and who recorded the tunes so that we could learn them.

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean

 

from: http://nehirecords.com:

We are pleased to announce this 3 CD boxed set covering the UK origins of so much of American music. The emigrants sailed from Britain to America with their own music and reached the Appalachian Mountains where due to poor communications and no electricity their music became trapped and developed a life of its own. This much overlooked and historically vital area of American musical development is covered for the first time ever as the beginning of the US/UK musical love affair that continues to this day.

With the full support of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Museum of Appalachia, with the notes being written by world-renowned Folk music scholar Steve Roud, creator of the Roud Folk Song Index.

Featuring a mixture of well-known songs by some of American music’s most celebrated stars and rare versions from some lesser known but equally relevant artists, this release covers all bases, containing 75 numbers recorded in the USA with their origins in the British Isles, encompassing Old- Timey, Blues, Cajun, Bluegrass, Gospel, and Country.

Some of the most famous songs recorded in the USA with origins in the British Isles, encompassing Old-Timey, Blues, Cajun, Bluegrass, Gospel, and Country, by some of American Folk music’s greatest artists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Bill Monroe, Blind Blake, Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Carter Family, Charlie Poole, Chubby Parker, Clarence Ashley, Cliff Carlisle, Darby & Tarlton, Jimmie Davis, Dick Justice, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Frank Hutchison, Gid Tanner, Grayson & Whitter, Kelly Harrell, Leadbelly, Riley Puckett, Roy Harvey, Sam McGhee, Stoneman Family, Tex Ritter, and Uncle Dave Macon, amongst many others. The artists and songs that feature here went on to influence many of the biggest acts of the 20th century – Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin & Nirvana, amongst many others.

These songs have passed from the old nation to the new one where they became standards.

Harry Smith’s Paper Airplanes

from http://blogs.getty.edu:

Treasures from the Vault: Harry Smith and Patterns in the Wind, by Jan Bender

Harry Smith liked to look for keys to the universal patterns that shape our cultures and the hidden realms of the human unconscious. He compared patterns in native American music with the eccentric rhythms of jazz; the patterns in Seminole patchwork with those on Ukrainian Easter eggs; the intricate diagrams of master occultists with the ambient rhythms of the sounds of New York street life—and somehow assembled from these a harmonic web of cosmographic ideas, employing all the investigative rigor of his early anthropological training.

His work explored many mediums, from music to film to painting to collecting, and his collections of peculiar impedimentia—seemingly unrelated objects threaded with meaning—expanded to fill his small New York hotel rooms.

One of the groups of objects Harry Smith assembled, as Nancy Perloff noted in her piece on Smith’s archives earlier this year, was a collection of over 250 paper airplanes found from 1961 through 1987 on the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan. Harry would pick up these transient paper objects, otherwise doomed to be swept away or decayed in the weather, and find meaning, value and purpose in them.

He tagged each with the time and location of their finding, acting as a meticulous field worker, freezing the moment of a stranger’s whim for later inspection and evaluation. These wound up squirreled away amidst his other collections, rarely seen by others, but enlarged by his telling into the World’s Largest Paper Airplane Collection.

Over 250 of these creations have been preserved. One of the most poignant is a connect-the-dots worksheet, printed on fragile, acidic paper, depicting a child gazing up into the air and declaring, “Oh! how I wish I could fly, There’s so much to see from the sky.”

We can only guess at what deeper meanings Harry Smith might have glimpsed in this collection. He was clearly interested in the cataloging of the types of airplanes he found as an expression of their folding methods. He kept the most unusual examples of folding, and documented on at least one slip of paper the discarding of some of the plainer examples he had found in multiples. This would have accorded with his interest in the multitudinous varieties of patterns to be found in folk craft traditions, and discovering their cross-cultural unifying principles.

Harry Smith also chronicled the meaningful but hidden patterns of New York life in an audio recording project of the 1980s, documenting entire days filled with the sounds of footsteps, the noise of crowds, the mewing of cats, the roar of traffic, and the sighing of the wind. Perhaps his paper airplanes are a visual example of this quotidian yet symbolic realm.

Every paper airplane sent into the winds of the city told stories about the weather, and the world, and which days New Yorkers were most inspired to commit small acts of defiance, or freedom, or hope, placing news of the human heart into those webs of resonance described by sound, space, light, and interval. Every time a schoolchild launched her boredom out of a classroom window, she might be sending a message into the hands of Harry Smith.

– See more at: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/treasures-from-the-vault-harry-smith-and-patterns-in-the-wind/?utm_source=grinews115&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=grinews115#sthash.VjvhyQsJ.dpuf

Help Wanted: Weems String Band

from an exchange on rec.music.country.old-time:
Granddaughter of Dick Weems: My great grandfather is Dick Weems (Dickson Augustus Weems) was his full name and he was part of the Weems String Band.  My grandfather is his youngest Son.  My uncle still has Dicks original fiddle, I don’t know that my Aunt owns all the musical rights to their music and I am sure that if a CD is being put together she would know something about it.  If I can send you any of that information please feel free to send me an email at…

Respondent:  You are descended from royalty.

Their recorded songs are, at least to many of us in this subculture, among
the most astounding and great bits of music ever.  They had a
hard-to-describe sound that’s not quite like much of the mainstream of
old-time recordings of that era — there’s something a little more scary and
less cute about their sound than many of their recording contemporaries,
probably due in substantial part to the cello.

There’s only one problem that I’m aware of: one of their two recorded songs
(Davy) requires you (at least if you hang out with the sort of folks I hang
out with) to give a short mini-dissertation about history, and how the use
of what we now call “the N word,” and the indulging of a certain racial
stereotype regarding dancing prowess, didn’t really necessarily mean, at the
time they were recording, that the user was a bad person.

At the risk of being accused as being one of those Soviet-era photo-retouchers who
airbrushed Kremlin figures out of old photos when they fell into disfavor,
maybe somebody with good digital editing technology could remix a version of
Davy with those vocals taken out???

Mexican Song

from www.loc.gov:

The corrido is a type of socially relevant narrative ballad that served in Mexico as the main informational and educational outlet.

Rancheras, literally “music of the ranches,” are traditional songs usually accompanied by guitar and/or horns.

The merging of European and indigenous Mexican musical traditions has long been a hallmark of Mexican American music beyond the church. Corridos gave rise to other forms of music such as Tejano (literally “Texas music”). Tejano music, the name given to several different forms of folk music developed by the Mexican American community in Texas, combines the waltz and polka stylings brought to Texas in the mid-nineteenth century by northern European immigrants with Spanish-language songs that originated south of the border and were passed down through generations of Mexicans.

Habanera music is also found among Mexican Americans. It has a meter influenced by the music of North Africa and is found throughout the Spanish speaking world today.

Conjunto music is one of the dominant dance music forms of Mexican Americans today. Related to Tejano music, its roots lie in South Texas at the end of the nineteenth Century, following the introduction of the button accordion into Mexican working-class communities along the Texas-Mexican border by Northern European immigrants. The accordion-based musical form was used to accompany celebrations of all kinds. Thanks to a strong recording history from the 1920s onwards, conjunto grew to become the most powerful musical symbol of Mexican American working-class culture.

Mariachi music is perhaps the most well-known Mexican American folk music form, having gained wide popularity throughout the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century mostly through its promotion in school bands and at mariachi festivals.

Mariachi originated in rural Mexico in the nineteenth century and, like Tejano, was eventually influenced by the polka and waltz. The typical mariachi ensemble consists of violins, accordions, trumpets and guitars. Mexican folk harps are also sometimes employed. There is generally no lead singer. All players sing choruses and take turns singing the lead. Mariachi vocalization, which emphasizes an operative quality, encompasses a romantic “bolero” sound, falsetto singing, and a more aggressive style known as son jaliscense.

Son Jarocho is another well-known Mexican music style that has gained popularity in the United States. Fusing Spanish and African elements, much of it is syncopated, combines instrumental music with improvised and fixed oral poetry along romantic or bawdy themes, and is sung in a call-and-response format. The instrumentation usually includes a large diatonic harp (arpa), a small, eight-stringed guitar (jarana) and a four-stringed guitar (requinto).

Akonting Story

by Chuck Levy (from http://www.banjourneys.com):

In 2006, the Center for Arts in Healthcare and Education at the University of Florida began to work with a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya to form a collaborative exchange. As part of this, hospital leaders from Kenya came to visit in Gainesville, and while they were here they visited when I played for patients.

It happened to be a good day, when children responded by smiling and dancing, and adults let down their burdens for a moment. Although I was never sure if it was my musicianship or simply the fact that I was a doctor playing for patients, my new African friends were very enthusiastic about my performance, and invited me to come to Nairobi.

I was also able get approval to use my grant to visit to The Gambia under the tutelage of Daniel Jatta, who introduced me to Ekona Diatta and Remi Diatta, master Jola akonting players. I only speak English. Neither Remi nor Ekona speak English. Yet both were patient and able teachers. It helped that while akonting technique turns out not to be identical to clawhammer, it is mighty similar. By the end of my visit I could play a few tunes.

However, when I returned home to the U.S., and tried to present what I learned, I was unsatisfied. With some reflection, it became obvious that I had not paid enough attention to the singing, which is so integral to Jola music. Therefore I returned to Gambia in 2008 for a second round of instruction, to learn to sing the Jola akonting songs. I met Greg C. Adams there, and together we traveled with our hosts to their home village, Mlonp along the southern shore of the Cassamance River.

A Language of Song

from http://read.dukeupress.edu:

A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, by Samuel Charters (Duke University Press):

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.”

In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia.

Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers.

Songsters

from  Kirstin Fawcett (smithsonian.com):
It’s the early 20th century, and an African-American musician is standing on a street corner, his nimble fingers coaxing melodies out of a fiddle, guitar or banjo. His surroundings could be any town, village or city—he’s visited everywhere from Baltimore to Baton Rouge. He’s carried each region’s soundscape with him like a souvenir.

Out of his mouth streams a polyglot of melody. Vaudeville tunes. Radio hits. Country. He can sing the blues, but he’s not necessarily a bluesman; he can switch from ragtime to a reel without missing a beat. He’s an itinerant performer with the versatility of a jukebox, a man who’s played for so many different audiences that he can now confidently play for all of them. He is a songster.

According to Barry Lee Pearson, a scholar of African-American music at the University of Maryland, songsters were active beginning in the 1870s, when newly-freed slaves were able to travel and play music for a living. Their sound, he says, preceded blues music and laid the foundation for the genre’s rise in popularity. Smithsonianmag.com spoke with Pearson about the songster’s history and his contribution to American music.

Where did the term “songster” come from, and why is it used to describe a traveling musician?

The songster’s kind of an artificial creation. It’s a term that’s been in use for thousands of years, meaning a person who sings. Generally, it’s attributed to the work of [anthropologist] Howard Otum, who was doing field work in Mississippi in the early 1900s. In 1911, he published a couple of major articles in the Journal of American Folklore, and he included in one of those a breakdown of different individuals [who sang secular songs]. One of them, which stuck around in both academic and popular usage, was the songster.

The term referred to . . . itinerant musicians, or street corner musicians who played a variety of tunes in order to make a little money from passersby. But these guys couldn’t stick to one place too long. Some journeyed as hobos with guitars. They traveled through the mountains and hit the coal or railroad camps to try to pick up a few bucks. Others traveled in a single city—one block, one day; next day, another neighborhood.

What kind of music did the songster perform?

The songster had a repertoire that may have included blues songs, but also contained the spectrum of songs African Americans would’ve been singing at the time. [They performed] anything from reels to breakdowns—songs associated with square dance tradition—to vaudeville hits from around the turn of the century.

A lot of “songsters” featured on Classic African American Songsters are also famous blues musicians. Is there a distinction between the two?

In the late 1950s a new term was introduced—“the blues man.” A new focus turned towards blues as the primary form of African-American expression. The songster began to lose out as kind of either an ancestor figure or maybe even sort of like a musical bookmark—before there was the blues man, there was the songster.

One could say the songster’s always been the songster, and for some reason people started focusing more so on their blues repertoire. For example, Robert Johnson, for most of his musical career, sang blues. But when he was out performing, he sang everything. John Jackson is another example; he sang blues, and was discovered when people were looking for blues musicians. They were really glad to find him, and then people found out that he knew all these other songs. The same thing happened with Lead Belly.

So it became more of a tendency for music fans—record collectors in particular—to invent this new character, the bluesman, who sings all blues songs. This also coincided with the recording industry having a preference for blues musicians. This was because when you went to record someone, you could not claim copyright for it if they had a song that somebody had previously written. But blues musicians tended to have their own materials, whether it was their own version of the blues song or something that they’d actually written. They could claim it as a new song and avoid any copyright problems. It doesn’t mean, however, that people stopped singing these others songs. It just meant that blues became the new most popular form of secular party/dance music within the black community.

The term “songster” seems to have fallen out of use in today’s modern music climate. Do you see it making a comeback?

It’s strange. It never died out completely; it was also used for a while to describe older banjo players, particularly black banjo players, because they also had this mixed repertoire of songs that weren’t blues, but came right before blues. It stayed in that community’s parlance.

The term songster is coming back in the hands of younger black musicians, who are consciously [embracing] this broad repertoire of songs that they created and performed—the pre-blues materials we were mentioning earlier. You have groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops out there; you might have people that are doing songs from the turn of the century, and you have people re-learning the banjo and the fiddle. It’s a revival of sorts. They are performing this part of their cultural heritage, which for many years seems to have been overlooked by younger musicians. It’s part of a broader historical reclamation process.

Juju and Pedal Steel

from http://www.afropop.org:

Pedal steel is one of the world’s most unique instruments. To play one, you need to use both pedals and knee levers, all while plucking the strings and sliding a metal bar called the steel. It’s most well known for its role in country music, but the history of the instrument actually dates back to Hawaii, where the pedal-less lap steel was developed back in the late 19th century.

And while Nashville is still considered the center of the pedal steel community, in late ‘70s Nigeria, the pedal steel sound became a signature component of the juju genre. As part of our new “Accounting for Taste” program, we look at the instrument’s rise to prominence in Lagos. Here, we trace in more detail the strange path of the pedal steel and its surprising ties to Africa.

Joseph Kekuku is widely (though not conclusively) considered the inventor of the Hawaiian steel guitar. According to a 1933 article by steel player Ken Kapua (from Lorene Ruymar’s The Hawaiian Steel Guitar and Its Great Hawaiian Musicians), when Kekuku was 11 years old in 1885, he picked up a bolt while walking along a railroad and slid it on the strings of his guitar, producing a rough version of what would become the lap steel sound.

In 1904, Kekuku left Hawaii for the mainland US and eventually Europe, where his “Birds of Paradise” tour was a major success and led to two Hollywood films. His success, along with that of traveling Hawaiian tent shows, helped introduce non-Hawaiians to the steel guitar sound. Few, if any, recordings of Kekuku survive today, but you can hear his influence on other early Hawaiian steel performers, like Sol Ho’op’i.

It would come as a shock for many steel players in the ’70s to hear the instrument played by a man who had invented his own unique technique in a style miles away from Dolly Parton records. In 1977, pedal steel appeared for the first time on a juju record: King Sunny Ade and His African Beats’ Syncro Chapter One. Demola Adepoju was credited with playing the “Hawaiian guitar” on the album. According to Perlowin,

“Demola’s first exposure was to the non-pedal steel. He was in Lagos where he lived. And somehow he heard a record of Hawaiian music, which uses the non-pedal steel and he thought, ‘I want to learn to play that instrument.’ What he told me is he scoured the docks, because Lagos is a seaport town and he asked sailors if any of them had a Hawaiian guitar–very specifically Hawaiian. And eventually somebody did and he bought it.

He taught himself a few licks in secret and he was playing in some amateur band and they were doing some battle of the band and they were not doing particularly well, so he ran home, grabbed his lap steel and started playing his Hawaiian steel, not pedal, on a few licks. And nobody had ever heard that sound before. So they consequently won the Battle of the Bands. Now, the way I understand it, somebody brought him to the attention–not first of King Sunny Ade, but Ebenezer Obey, King Sunny Ade’s competitor, and he said no. And then they brought him to King Sunny Ade and Sunny Ade said, ‘Let’s try it.’”

At the time, Obey and King Sunny Ade were the two most popular juju leaders in Nigeria and were fiercely competitive with one another. Both Obey and Ade experimented with adding new instruments to distinguish their sounds–Fender Rhodes and synths, among others. Ade took a chance on Demola, and he bought two pedal steels in England, which he brought back to Nigeria for Demola to play. Ade also wanted to emulate the slide sound of the traditional Nigerian violin or goje, which he felt was missing from juju. So pedal steel was, in a sense, a natural fit for juju, while it also added a new, almost otherworldly sound to the music.

In 1982, many Westerners first heard juju, when Island Records released King Sunny Ade’s Juju Music. After the death of Bob Marley the previous year, Island was looking for another international superstar. While Ade would not ultimately match Marley’s success, Juju Music did introduce many to popular music from Africa for the very first time. Featured prominently on the album was Demola’s heavenly pedal steel. It was a style completely his own. Demola taught himself his own technique, so it sounded nothing like American country pedal.

W.K. McNeil

from http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net and https://scholarworks.iu.edu:

William Kinneth (W. K.) McNeil was a prominent folklorist and historian of Arkansas and Ozark regional folk traditions, especially their folk music and songs, speech, tales, and legends. He published books and articles in both popular and scholarly outlets and produced widely disseminated recordings.

McNeil was also active in producing recordings and writing liner notes. He received acclaim for his box sets such as The Blues: A Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues Singers (1993) for the Smithsonian Institution and Somewhere in Arkansas: Early Country Music: Recordings from Arkansas, 1928–1932.

Here is an edited excerpt of McNeil’s review of one of the greatest old time LPs.

Back Home in the Blue Ridge: Fred Cockerham, Tommy Jarrell & Oscar Jenkins. Recorded by Charles Faurot & Richard Nevins. Produced by Richard Nevins. (County 723)

Back Home in the Blue Ridge consists of four instrumentals and eight vocal numbers. Most of the tunes presented here are often recorded traditional numbers. There are, however, a few rarely recorded pieces, like the Primitive Baptist hymn “When Sorrow’s Encompass Me Round” which, to me, is the high point of the album.

The main emphasis of Back Home in- the Blue Ridge, however, is on the contrast between the more rhythmic, and probably older, style of fiddling represented by Tommy Jarrell and the mellower, less rhythmic playing of Oscar Jenkins. If’ it can be assumed that the selections on this album are representative of the traditional material found in the sections of northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia where Jarrell, Cockerham and Jenkins live then then folk music repertoire there is composed almost entirely of post-1860 items.

It would, however, be incorrect to assume that such numbers have been in local tradition for the past one-hundred and thirteen years. For example, “Cumberland Gap”  was not known in the region until about 1915 and “Bile ‘Em Cabbage Down” did not “come around” until about 1925. A number of other old songs and fiddle tunes were first introduced to this section during the decade after 1915. Their arrival then was perhaps facilitated by improved roads and transportation.

While one can hear the interplay between Fred Cockerham’s clawhammer banjo and Tommy Jarrell’s fiddle on “Sally Ann” his appreciation would undoubtedly be heightened if he could also see the musicians in action. And we can listen and enjoy the skillful usage of double stops and open string harmonies used by Tommy Jarrell on “old Joe Clark” and “Breaking Up Christmas ” and yet never fully comprehend Jarrell’s technical brilliance or ever achieve the excitement of seeing these feats accomplished. But, given the limitations of a record, this is an outstanding sampling of traditional music and unquestionably one of the best albums of its type on the market today-.

 

 

Islam and The Levee Camp Holler

edited from Jonathan Curiel (http://m.sfgate.com):

 Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connection between Islam and American blues music, she’ll play two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that’s heard from mosques around the world), and “Levee Camp Holler” an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.

“Levee Camp Holler” is no ordinary song. It’s the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. (“Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin’, man, I feelin’ bad . . . Well, I was thinkin’ ’bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.”)

But it’s the song’s melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam’s best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, “Levee Camp Holler” emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter’s vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both “Levee Camp Holler” and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

 “I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious,” says Diouf, an author and scholar who is also a researcher at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “People were saying, ‘Wow. That’s really audible. It’s really there.’ “

Classic American Ballads

Classic American Ballads from Smithsonian Folkways (CD SFW4021)

from http://www.rambles.net:

The set debuts with the venerable “Banks of the Ohio,” exemplifying the curious truth that in ballads the vilest acts are usually set to lovely waltz melodies. The performers are two giants of American folk, guitar master Doc Watson and bluegrass founder Bill Monroe, and no more need be said, except that as often as I’ve heard this ballad (possibly first on an early Joan Baez record with the Greenbriar Boys) I never tire of it.

In my mind — don’t ask me why — the psychopath-killer’s day job is as a small-town bookkeeper. The final cut is a splendid unaccompanied reading (by Doc Watson’s mother Annie) of another well-known ballad, “The F.F.V.” (aka “Engine 143” and “Wreck of the C&O”) dating to a fatal accident in Virginia in 1890.

The artists are in part revivalists (e.g., Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger), in part source singers (Pink Anderson, Buck Ramsey), and in another part figures with allegiances in both camps (Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie). Seeger is used to particularly strong effect; his readings of “Blue Mountain Lake” and “Young Charlotte” make clear just how good he could be in the service of purely traditional songs.

On the other hand, Rolf Kahn & Eric Von Schmidt’s “Frankie & Johnny,” in my judgment the least successful track, is overcooked and overlong (6:39). Oddly, the title notwithstanding, this is “Frankie & Albert,” the St. Louis folk ballad on which the 1904 Tin Pan Alley song, which I’ve disliked since I was a kid, was loosely based. The version you want to hear is Mississippi John Hurt’s “Frankie,” which you can find on Volume 1 of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and elsewhere.

Most everything, though, is a delight. Not least is Doug Wallin’s riveting “Naomi Wise,” carried by his voice alone. Bascom Lamar Lunsford weighs in with a welcome, if suitably ominous, reading of “Springfield Mountain,” among the first ballads created on American soil, well known in the latter 18th and 19th centuries but nearly forgotten now. Let it be a warning to all, namely us herpetophobes who shake at the sight even of harmless snakes.

Hermes Nye warms my heart with “Sam Bass,” which has always ranked high on my list of favorite American folk songs. Bruce Buckley delivers a suitably lugubrious “Pearl Bryan,” about a shockingly cruel, much-publicized-at-the-time murder in 1896 Cincinnati. Among the missing is Cisco Houston’s good-humored rendering of “Zebra Dun,” which is done instead by the late Joan O’Bryant, so we’ll have to settle for his way with “Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tail,” written in 1917 by cowboy versifier Gail Gardner to relate a drunken scrap with Ol’ Scratch in the mountains outside Prescott, Arizona.

The liner booklet provides a rich source of often obscure information about songs, composers and performers. A typo, though, accomplishes some gender switching when we learn that “Cowboy’s Lament/Streets of Laredo” (sung in fine fashion by another, more recent cowpuncher poet, the late Buck Ramsey) was the creation (in 1876) of “cowboy poet Frances [sic] Henry Maynard.” The correct spelling, of course, is Francis, and he preferred to be known as Frank.

Like many vernacular writers, Maynard composed on the template of a pre-existing text, which commenced its career in the 18th-century British Isles as “The Unfortunate Rake” (whose title character is dying not of a gunshot, as the later cowboy, but of venereal disease) before evolving into “Tom Sherman’s Barroom,” “St. James Hospital” and more.

John Ciardi, Alan Lomax, Ga. Sea Island Singers

Singing starts at 2:17.

A segment on the Georgia Sea Island Singers shot at St. Simons Island – featuring Bessie Jones, John Davis, Peter Davis, Willis Proctor, Mable Hillery, Emma Lee Ramsey, Joe Dixon, Joe Armstrong, and others unidentified, and guest host Alan Lomax – from the short-lived CBS educational program “Accent,” hosted by poet John Ciardi, 1962.

George Mukabi

from www.elijahwald.com:

GEORGE MUKABI: KENYAN GUITAR MASTER

George Mukabi was probably the finest Kenyan fingerstyle player of the 1950s. His playing is somewhat similar to that of the Congolese greats, but with a distinct local flavor.

According to John Low’s”History of Kenyan Guitar Music: 1945-1980″ (African Music, 1982, 6(2), 17-36), Mukabi was of the Kissa people, and apparently created what became the popular “sukuti” of “Kakamega” guitar style in the early 1950s.

He had heard records of the “Nyasa” Malawian bands and set out to play similar music in a fingerpicking style. His playing was massively popular and influential, affecting urban players like John Mwale (several of whose recordings fill out this CD).

These recordings are from cassettes that were still available in Nairobi in 1990, essentially as “golden oldies” packages. The recording quality is generally quite good, and the music is superb. It is bizarre that none of Mukabi’s material has been released outside Kenya, as he is one of the greatest of the African acoustic players.

No one who loves intricate fingerpicking should be unaware of his work. There is a swing and humor to his singing, and an inventiveness to his accompaniments that makes him well worth an entire album.

To buy this CD, go here.

 

Rattlesnake Rattles Inside Fiddles

 

edited from Hilda Downer (www.appalachianhistory.net) and en.wikipedia.org/:

The postmaster handed over the small package saying he was sorry it was empty. Indeed, the box felt weightless and upon being shaken, its sound was inaudible like that of the first few flurries of a mountain winter. Because I knew what was inside, I opened the taped end gingerly, but with a quick tug to dislodge the flap – the stubby finger of a rattle flexed outward through the resulting side opening.

It swayed from side to side and lifted its “head” like a big fat bug in rigor mortis. My hand recoiled from the rattle’s touch. Between layers of cotton, six rattles filed away like expensive silverware, a strange gift from a friend in Oregon for me to distribute among my son’s  band.

My son knew fiddlers often inserted a rattle in the f-hole for good luck. Could there be some logical rationale behind this superstition? Because rattlesnakes are only indigenous to the Western hemisphere, the root of magical or practical use of the rattle would trace back to Native Americans.

Opposed to the African reverence of the snake as an object of worship, the European Christian association of the serpent with Satan led to a “reversed bad luck” akin to current motorcycle gang and military jewelry depicting a rattlesnake coiled around a skull or dagger.

The famous Revolutionary War flag portraying the rattlesnake and slogan, “Don’t Tread On Me” represented the shared bravery of soldiers and a snake that warns its victims before striking.

The act of keeping a rattle in a musical instrument as an amulet to ward off evil spirits, especially for people steeped in superstition before their arrival to this country, could easily have derived from their own volition.

However, the use of rattles for warding off pests must precede the Revolutionary War, learned from Native Americans as early settlers adopted other natural remedies. The particular practice had to begin prior to the 1900s when the fiddle was considered to be the Devil’s instrument. Therefore, the fiddle was not allowed indoors, but was hung in the barn or on the porch as a compromise for what was useful to get the work done at corn shuckings and the like.

These open spaces had spiders, mud daubers, and mice seeking refuge in a new home. The smell of the rattle sent a strong message to such vermin to stay away. Certainly, from their first encounters with the Eastern Diamondback rattlers from the coastal area to the timber rattlers in the Appalachian Mountains as they migrated westward, settlers felt a need to be in harmony with a world wilder and stranger than fiction.

To keep a part of something on them that belonged, the rattle of a snake with its own music, just might help them become more a part of the new world they had to either adapt to or not survive at all.

Calypso Roots

E.T. Mensah

from afropop.org and http://www.retroafric.com:

E.T. Mensah & the Tempos: King of Highlife Anthology (RetroAfric 4 CD set, 64 page booklet)

E.T. Mensah ‘The King of Highlife’ is a true legend of African music – the founding father of that most popular style of dance music, which spread like a bushfire across the African continent and beyond during the 1950s and 60s.
Highlife was the first Pan-African pop music and still survives as the basis for contemporary genres like Afrobeat, afropop, hiplife and is an essential ingredient of earlier forms including Congo rumba, soukous, mbalax and the original Afrobeat.
Emmanuel Tetteh Mensah was a multi-instrumentalist and band leader whose dance band Highlife re-Africanised American swing music, blending it with Caribbean melodies, Latin rhythms and indigenous elements from the musically rich culture of Ghana (then known as The Gold Coast).
Although he had started out on a musical career in the 1930s, E.T. recorded his first 78rpm discs in 1952 and as he later claimed: “When my records came out in 1952 they vibrated into the ears of the listening public in Nigeria and other parts of Africa. It was from this period on that music fans throughout West Africa began to acclaim me as the King of Highlife.” That reputation carried right across the continent, being enjoyed by, and influencing, musicians as far apart as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Senegambia, Congo and Kenya.

Throughout the 69 songs on the the four CDs of E.T. Mensah & the Tempos: King of Highlife Anthology (RetroAfric), we hear highlife’s appropriation of palm wine guitar lyricism, the clave beat and many arranging ideas from Afro-Latin music, swing jazz, elements of calypso (including a Latin-esque cover of “Sloop John B”), along with hints of rock ‘n’ roll and the new music emerging from the Congo at the time.

We learn in the John Collins’ precise and deeply informed booklet (60 pages long, and fascinating from top to bottom) that E.T.’s band was a constant work in progress. All the dynamics of struggle are there—mass departures, rebellions over pay, scurrying to find new players in time for a crucial gig. Musicians enjoyed a low status in Ghana, especially in the days before its independence, and this bandleader’s ability to keep the gigs and recordings flowing at this quality level, amid so much turnover, testifies to his greatness as much as any musical ability.

There are wonderful stories behind some of the songs—playing “All For You” with Louis Armstrong in 1956; and earning a scold from Kwameh Nkrumah when the celebratory 1957 song “Ghana Freedom Highlife” also praised rivals of the independence movement. (The band had to re-record the song, minus the offending lyrics.)

But mostly what endures here is the music: Its innocence, playfulness and gentle humor remain seductive all these years later. In part, that’s because this music captured so many cultural elements surrounding one of the most exciting moments in African history, when the first African nation earned its independence. As so often in the African story, dramatic history yields powerful and enduring music. Kudos to the folks at RetroAfric for once again documenting a crucial chapter in African music history with definitive thoroughness and style.

Pre-Rococo Texas Fiddle

P.T. Bell

 

from howardrains.blogspot.com and https://tshaonline.org:
In studying these older Texas styles, I have noticed some stylistic similarities. As one would expect, there are elements of longbow playing in many of the old fiddlers, there are also a lot of “hollerin’ tunes” that have a vocal shout in them like “Lost Indian”, there are also regional influences like Mexican, German, Czech, Cajun, Appalachian, Scottish, Irish, and blues.

The old fiddlers seemed to have very idiosyncratic styles that show elements of many of these influences while still sounding very old, some quite archaic. A great many of these old tunes were crooked. In the commercial recordings from Texas of the 1920s and ’30s, you can really hear the early signs of where Texas fiddling was going to go with contest and swing styles, but the Library of Congress recordings preserve a lot of music that would soon be lost.

As contest fiddling and more commercial sounds became more prevalent, many of the old timers I speak with now say that the fellows who were the old timers in their day just stopped playing, because they knew people had no interest in what they did. People wanted to hear the most eloquently rococo rendition of Sally Gooden performed in the modern contest style, not some scratchy, out of tune, old version of some utterly bizarre piece that perhaps only one fellow in Falfurrias, Texas played on his back porch. I guess I have always gravitated towards the weird stuff.

The recordings  of Peter Tumlison Bell (available from Field Recorders’ Collective, FRC410) are a window into pre-rococo Texas fiddling . The distinctly Scottish affectations of bowing and phrasing can be heard in his version of the tune “Ladies Fancy,” played with the G-string tuned down to E. Similarly, the presence of distinctly hard bowed triplets in the tune “Morg Williams Cotillion” and the languid left-hand rolls in an unnamed march learned from his father “during the War” set his recordings apart from any other.

Along with distinct but obviously related tunes found in the Eastern mountains like “Sugar in My Coffee,” are others perhaps older which somehow survived through many generations of the Bell family. The tune “Killie Ma Crankey” appears to be related to the Scottish tune “Braes of Killiekranke” commemorating the battle of Killiekrankie which took place on July 27, 1689. Remarkably, such playing with its distinctive and recognizably Celtic styling survived over many generations and thousands of miles.

Only a Miner

Only A Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Song.
By Archie Green.
University of Illinois Press.

edited from David E. Whisnant (http://thenation.com):

Books frequently deliver less than their titles promise. Archie Green’s delivers much more. Two decades ago–when he himself was a skilled worker on the San Francisco waterfront–Green began to compile a discography of coal-mining songs, which even then he recognized as a rich and evocative record of the consciousness and lore of American workingmen.

The limited discographical project eventually matured into Only a Miner, which examines more than a century of the complex interaction between coal mining and the dynamics of American culture, and comments on the nature and socio-political implications of work itself, as well as on our habitual attitudes toward inherently dangerous work.

Only a Miner demonstrates that the culture of coal miners is vital, rich and sophisticated. The first known recorded coal-mining song was preserved on an Edison cylinder in, 1908. The first to emerge as a popular hit was The Dream of the Miner’s Child, recorded by Vernon Dalhart in 1925, shortly after he was transformed from a light opera tenor into, a guitar-playing “citybilly” by a record company that was sensitive to the possibilities of a new market.

From among the hundreds of coal-mining songs eventually distributed by commercial recording companies, Green chooses about a dozen for special attention. Some are almost universally known: Sixteen Tons, which Merle Travis wrote and recorded in 1946, reached millions of listeners through Tennessee Ernie Ford’s records and television show in the mid-1950s.

Chapters which at one level are case studies of single songs persistently spill over their announced boundaries. The chapter on the title song, Only a Miner — found among miners from the Kentucky coal country to the Colorado silver region — explores the capacity of occupational lore to move across political and geographical boundaries.

The chapter on race and hillbilly records is also about the effect of the recording industry upon the social status and self-image of the folk performer. The chapter on Coal Creek Troubles, probably the finest in the book, explores the ramifications not only of the iniquitous convict lease system in the South, but also the apparently unalterable exploitative relationship between the energy-rich Appalachian resource colony and profligate use of energy in the rest of the nation.

Green brings to his subject not only the skills of a trained academician but also a sense–literally worked into his mind and body –of the lives of working people, and therefore a profound respect for both miners and their rich lore.

Le Grand Kallé

from http://www.rootsworld.com:

Le Grand Kallé
His Life, His Music: Joseph Kabasele and the Creation of Modern Congolese Music (2 CD set, http://www.sternsmusic.com)

It may be difficult for a contemporary westerner approaching mid-20th century Congolese rumba for the first time to have any real understanding of how this music sent rhythmic shock waves up and down the African continent in the 1950s and 60s. It might take a few spins to recognize that the grooves held so firmly in check under what seem like such polite, non-threatening vocal harmonies are no less radical for their rigidity.

And of course electric guitar bands such as Kabasele’s, as well as OK Jazz, African Fiesta and others ran elegant, fluid, shimmering circles around anyone in American pop music of the same era. Perhaps frustratingly, this music is one of the few things taken from the Congo that hasn’t led to environmental and social catastrophe, civil war or megalomaniacal dictatorships.

Somehow, in the years leading up to the country’s 1960 independence, and the absolute failure of that moment, this sensual, harmonious, dance band music managed to contain all the hopes that nothing else this resource-rich hunk of Central Africa seemed able to hold onto. It was also a product of a burgeoning pre-independence Congolese middle class, and at the music’s forefront was vocalist/bandleader/songwriter Joseph Kabasele, aka Le Grand Kallé.

Kabasele’s obsession with musical forms outside his Catholic household led him, as a teenager in the 1940s, to studios in what was then (before the ouster of the Belgians and a name change to Kinshasa) Leopoldville. Thanks to that city’s reasonably close proximity to the Atlantic, imported records, especially those made by Afro-Cuban sextets, complete with African-derived clave rhythms, filled Kabasele’s ears.

And it was this influence that went on to permeate so much of Congolese pop music, and much of Africa, for decades to come. Kabasele’s voice, as well as his skill for penning songs, earned him his own name and photo on 78s released in the early 1950s; so it was only a matter of time before he attracted musicians whose names still loom large in African pop music history.

Tabu Rey Rochereau, Manu Dibango, and guitar maestro Nicolas Kasanda (Nico) were all members of Kabasele’s African Jazz Orchestre at one time or another. And for the better part of two decades, they cranked out hundreds of sides, traveled the world, and spread rhumba around Africa in much the same way Elvis Presley infected mid-fifties working class North American teenagers with the itch to jack a seemingly speed-induced R&B frenzy into what had been known as hillbilly music.

This collection splits the recordings into those Kabasele made pre-independence with the always evolving version of his original band between 1951 and ’62, while disc two houses cuts done with a completely made-over version of the band (it seems Kabasele was not known for paying band members) between 1964 and 1970. And it is undeniably the first disc, featuring tunes showing the style in its infancy and rawness, which is closer to essential.

Of course, “Independence Cha Cha” is included here, rush-cut when the early hope of Patrice Lumumba, a friend and fan of Kabasele, was still in the air. There is also the 5-minute single version of “African Jazz Mokili Mobimbo,” the band’s spirited announcement that the entire world wants to hear the music of Africa. But elsewhere, we hear the first doses of Nico, and with it, the beginnings of Congolese electric guitar, a style still unmatched in its equal measure of subtlety and body-moving intensity.

While complications brought on from hypertension ultimately took him out at age 52, his band is still arguably the most influential to ever appear on the continent. It, more than independence or forced modernization, truly helped to steer Africa in a different direction.

 

Confederates In Brazil

edited from  Ron Harris (http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com, and http://blog.eogn.com/):

UP TO 20,000 CONFEDERATES fled a crumbling South, taking slaves, cotton and watermelon seeds to new colonies in Brazil. Today, Brazilian descendants there don Civil War attire and sing old American songs to honor their family histories.

AMERICANA, Brazil – There’s not much left now to tell their story, save a small museum and scores of weather-beaten tombstones in a shaded cemetery far from the American towns and cities they once called home.

Historians say theirs was the only political exodus of American citizens in the history of the United States, though it is rarely mentioned in history books. In the latter half of the 1800s, thousands of Americans from all over the South left their homes and families in search of new lives in Mexico, Cuba and Brazil.

Many returned disillusioned soon afterward; others were wiped out or run off by locals. But in Brazil they carved out a foothold, and many prospered.

Each year, a dwindling handful of their descendants gather at a special memorial ground surrounded by seemingly endless sugar-cane fields in this city of 150,000, to pay homage to the men and women, most buried nearby, who came as pioneers.

An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Confederates emigrated from the United States during the years right after the Civil War. The number would have been much larger, historians say, had not the still-revered Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee publicly urged Southerners to stay in the United States.

Still, the fever to leave spread, and thousands shipped out of emigration stations set up in Galveston, Texas, New Orleans, Baltimore, New York City, Mobile, Ala., and Newport News, Va.

Many chose Brazil, where the government promised cheap land in the hope that the Americans’ farming techniques would establish the country as a leader in a worldwide cotton market depleted by the Civil War.

Brazil was also attractive to many Southerners because it still practiced slavery – until the country abolished it in 1888. Many hoped to start a plantation system based on a life they had cherished in the South.

They established several colonies, one in northern Brazil 500 miles from the mouth of the Amazon River, which became the city of Santarem, another in Rio Doce near the coast, three more – Juguia, New Texas and Xiririca – in southern Brazil, and another just outside a town called Santa Barbara, 80 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

One community, which bordered Santa Barbara, was dubbed Villa Americana by native Brazilians and officially became Americana some years later. In the interim, the Confederates introduced to Brazil baseball, peaches, pecans, various strains of rice, cotton and even a rose.

There were fortunes made in cotton and watermelon with seeds brought from Georgia. They also brought with them their rebel spirit. When a brief Brazilian civil war erupted in 1932 as the state of Sao Paulo tried to secede, many of the Confederate descendants, such as Roberto Steagall, fought on the side of the secessionists.

Today Americana is a city of 120,000 people. The ties to the old South live on. Fiesta Confederada is a celebration that takes place in the cemetery where the old Confederates are buried. The food served includes southern fried chicken, vinegar pie, chess pie, and biscuits. Banjos are played and Confederate songs are sung. The men wear Confederate uniforms, and the women dress in pink and blue and wear matching ribbons in their hair. The festival often looks like scenes from “Gone With the Wind.”

 

 

“Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides”

from http://pitchfork.com, http://nodepression.com, http://www.thebluegrasssituation.com, and http://blackgrooves.org:

FOUR REASONS TO DROP A CHUNK OF CHANGE ON “LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION” (edited from Eryk Pruitt):

LEADBELLY’S DUET WITH BESSIE SMITH

Whoa. When I first put on this track, I have to say I was plenty revved up at the prospect of a track with Lead Belly singing duet with Bessie Smith. I mean, can you imagine…? What we get instead is Lead Belly singing along with a recording off a 78. We hear him listening to a record the same way we would: singing along with a legend. He is silent, reverent, and touchingly sweet. You can hear the deep respect he holds for Bessie in every breath and it’s amazing.

THE ESSAYS

One of the best parts of the collections are the liner notes. Glossy booklets written by scholars who also like to nerd out. The book has two of such essays. One by Robert Santelli, the Executive Director of the Grammy Museum, and another by Grammy-winning Smithsonian Folkways archivist Jeff Place. The Place essay is very in-depth and compelling and well worth multiple readings. Especially enlightening is the piece “Why He Sang Certain Songs” by his niece Tiny Robinson.

THE WNYC FOLK SONGS OF AMERICA RADIO SHOWS

Lead Belly sits in on two radio shows featuring his music. Lead Belly spent his later years in New York City in the nascent stages of the folk scene. He enjoyed a fine bit of notoriety and appeared on a couple radio programs. These sets on WNYC run six and seven songs, and the second one features the Oleander Quartet.

LINER NOTES

Not only are you getting five CDs with 108 tracks, but each of those tracks are given due diligence in the back half of the book. As you may know, you can buy 20 different Lead Belly albums and get 22 different recordings of “Goodnight Irene” or “Midnight Special.” The liner notes tell you precisely what is unique about the recordings included in the box set, or offer interesting anecdotes of each one. It’s an in-depth, immersive experience.

THE FINAL TRACK

The fifth CD of this set features selections from what are now considered Lead Belly’s “Final Sessions,” which were all recorded in the home of Frederic Ramsey around 1948. These showcase a level of intimacy that is not captured in his Library of Congress and radio sessions, as he performs while talking, laughing, and singing with those in the room.

It’s fitting that the final track on The Smithsonian Folkways Collection isn’t a song, but a brief monologue called “In the World”, based on a half-remembered conversation from long ago. It makes for a fitting epilogue to this monumental box set, primarily because it reveals Lead Belly’s role as an archivist of American music, passing tunes and ideas along from one person to the next, from one generation to the next. “We all gotta get peace together because we’re in the world together,” he muses. “I never heard nothing like it. Now you got it now.”

 

Gourd Banjo Making Workshop: NYC, 7/26-8/1/15

from http://us5.campaign-archive1.com:
From Jamaica to Brooklyn: Gourd Banjo Making Workshop
Brooklyn Lutherie
The Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street suite #E003,
Brooklyn, NY,
11215

Gourd Banjo Making Workshop offered by Jeff Menzies July 26-August 1st. Jeff Menzies is a professor of sculpture at the Edna Manley College of Visual Arts and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. Instrument making has become an extension of his sculptural practice. Jeff is offering a weeklong intensive gourd banjo making workshop walking students through the Art of making a gourd instrument where students will explore form and function.

An emphasis on the history of the banjo will be analyzed throughout the course. Students are welcome to create a gourd instrument of their own design with the technical support of Jeff Menzies. No experience in wood working or music is required. Tuition is $650. $150 deposit is required to secure your enrollment.

All materials are supplied with the tuition fee. There is a limited enrollment of 12 students so don’t wait to long to register. Registration closes on June 26th. Please feel free to email Jeff Menzies directly with questions. Jeffsbanjer@yahoo.com. http://www.jeffreymenzies.com

Craig Johnson

by Pat Conte (from http://fieldrecorder.org):

2009 was a year that shook the earth for me; unfathomable losses of my mentors, collaborators, peers, and luminaries that I met and admired, and some I wished to have met. Most shared that denominator that they left this world better than it was before them.

Those of you who did not meet Craig, who was among those lost in 2009, have been cheated; those that knew him have been robbed. They knew his arresting magnetism, his sensitivity, his humor offsetting his broad wisdom, and depth that stretched out like expanding galaxies. And there was so much more to come from Craig. As for the facets of just his musical life, this CD comprises only a few drops from the clear, cool, rolling river that sometimes side-branched off into deep woods and hollows, and that always refreshed those that met him.

If you are encountering Craig’s music here for the first time, prepare to be enriched, to reflect, to laugh and to sob, and to dance. As for the rest of you—rejoice in all of that as well, and in his music, here again—and remember.

Cajuns in China

from http://www.kithfolk.com (issue #2) and http://louisianaentertainment.gov:

In April 2014, public radio program American Routes along with the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for the Arts and lots more folks sponsored the first-ever tour of traditional Louisiana Cajun artists to China.

Joel Savoy, Jesse Lege & Cajun Country Revival (Nadine Landry & Sammy Lind of Foghorn Stringband) bundled up along with Nick Spitzer of American Routes and Cajun filmmaker Connie Castille to tour China and to showcase American Cajun culture to Chinese audiences. The group toured through Beijing, Guangzhou, Harbin, Shanghai and Nanjing.

“I searched everywhere,” Spitzer said. “The Pine Leaf Boys have played in Hong Kong, but as far as we can tell, no Cajuns have toured the mainland.”

Spitzer, professor of American studies and anthropology at Tulane University (where Routes is produced), conducted oral-history workshops and lecture on French Louisiana cultures during the trip as well.

The performance tours are “Part of a larger package that’s focusing on American community-based culture and creativity,” Spitzer said. “We’re going to China and showing them we’re not all Hollywood (film clips) and Broadway (recordings), and we’re not all common-denominator Clear Channel rock ‘n’ roll.

“We have all these community-based traditional arts that play into culture preservation, tourism, pluralism, diversity, democracy without a big ideological (statement). We’re not flying a flag in front of it. We’re just saying, ‘These are the people.’

“It has immense effect … because China has historically been focused on, ‘Who are the peasants? Who are the average citizens? What about the farmer?’ So we’re bringing them that. ‘What about the Cajun farmer? What about the truck driver?’ I find it very exciting.”

“I guess it’s sort of a new version of cowboy diplomacy,” Spitzer said. “It’s not George Bush-style shoot-’em-up. It’s real cowboys, real Cajuns, real gospel music, real jazz.

“I think it’s what we’ve got to offer the world, and it’s what the world wants from us. And I think it can help us recover some of it here at a time when the whole country seems so divided and alienated. I feel like sometimes we have to almost go abroad to remind ourselves of who we are in the world.”

 

 

Fifty Essential CDs of Appalachian Music

by Mike Yates (www.mustrad.org.uk):

Fifty Essential CDs of Appalachian Music (see also here)

A. Solo/single group performers.

1.  Jean Ritchie, Ballads from her Appalachian Family Tradition.  Smithsonian-Folkways SFW CD 40145. 

Sixteen Child ballads sung by one of the greatest Appalachian singers.  Cecil Sharp would have loved this!

2.  Frank Proffitt of Reese, NC, Folk-Legacy CD-1. 

A wonderful performer who had a large repertoire of rare and unusual songs and ballads.

3.  The Watson Family, Smithsonian-Folkways CD SF40012. 

First recordings of Doc Watson and his family. 

4 – 5.  Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley.  The Original Folkways Recordings, 1960 – 1962.  CD SF40029/30.

Lovely collection of songs and instrumentals.

6.  Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina.  Smithsonian-Folkways SF CD 40082. 

Lunsford was an important collector/singer who preserved many songs and ballads which would otherwise have disappeared. 

7.  Texas Gladden, Ballad Legacy, Rounder CD 1800. 

Another splendid ballad singer.

8 – 9.  Hobart Smith, Blue Ridge Legacy, Rounder CD 1799 & In Sacred Trust.  The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes.  Smithsonian-Folkways SFW C 40141. 

Brother of Texas Gladden, this multi-instrumentalist and singer just about sums up all that is good in Appalachian music.

10 – 11.  Roscoe Holcomb.  The High Lonesome Sound, Smithsonian-Folkways SF CD 40104 & An Untamed Sense of Control, Smithsonian-Folkways SFW CD 40144. 

Banjo-player and singer, Roscoe Holcomb first appeared on the double CD set Mountain Music of Kentucky, compiled and annotated by John Cohen (#’s 43 – 44 below).  These two solo albums confirm his status as one of the most outstanding Appalachian performers ever recorded.

12 – 13.  The Hammons Family.  The Traditions of a West Virginia Family and their Friends.  Rounder 1504/05.

A successful attempt by Carl Fleischhauer and Alan Jabbour of the Library of Congress to present a fuller, more rounded, picture of the musical culture of one Appalachian family.

14 – 16.  Dock Boggs.  Country Blues, Complete Early Recordings (1927 – 29), Revenant 205.  Dock Boggs, his Folkways Years, Smithsonian-Folkways SF 40108. 

Three CDs worth of material from the legendary banjo-player/singer who cut twelve sides in 1927 – 29 before vanishing into obscurity.  He was rediscovered some thirty years later, when he was recorded extensively.

17 – 18.  Ernest V Stoneman, The Unsung Father of Country Music, 1925 – 1934.  5- String Productions 5SPH 001. 

Stoneman, along with his family and friends from the area around Galax, VA, recorded dozens of songs and tunes.  This 2 CD selection contains some of the best.

19.  I’m Going Down to North Carolina.  The Complete Recordings of the Red Fox Chasers, 1928 – 31.Tompkins Square TSQ 2219. 

Excellent collection of songs and string band music from one specific region of north- west North Carolina.

20.  Da Costa Waltz’s Southern Broadcasters & Frank Jenkins’ Pilot Mountaineers, Document DOCD-8023. 

Early string bands from the area around Galax, NC.  (See also # 29 below).

21 – 24.  Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers and the Highlanders, JSP 4 CD box set, JSP7734. 

Poole’s music ranged from ancient ballads to more modern pieces, and showed how the music was rapidly changing.

25 – 28.  The Carter Family, 1927 – 1934. JSP 4 CD box set, JSPCD7001.

From the hills of Virginia.  No matter what they played, they were always rooted in their native soil.  One of the most influential groups ever to be recorded.  Their 1935 – 1941 recordings are also available on another 4 CD box set, JSP7708.

29.  Old Time Mountain Music, with Oscar Jenkins, Fred Cockerham & Tommy Jarrell, County CD 2735. 

Three friends who kept their regional music alive.  Jarrell was the son of fiddler Ben Jarrell, who recorded with Da Costa Waltz’s Southern Broadcasters in 1927.  (See # 20 above).

B. Anthologies:

30.  Dark Holler.  Old Love Songs and Ballads Smithsonian-Folkways SFW CD 40159.

Field recordings of singers who learnt their songs from people who sang to Cecil Sharp in 1916.  Also come with a DVD, The End of An Old Song, John Cohen’s portrait of Appalachian singer Dillard Chandler.

31.  High Atmosphere.  Ballads and banjo tunes from Virginia & North Carolina.  Rounder CD 0028. 

Excellent set of field recordings made by John Cohen in 1965.

32 – 38.  Kentucky Mountain Music.  Classic Recordings of the 1920s & 1930s. 

Rare and essential commercial recordings of Kentucky mountain music, together with Alan Lomax’s 1937 Kentucky Library of Congress recordings.

39.  Southern Journey.  Volume 2.  Ballads and Breakdowns, Songs from the Southern Mountains.  Rounder CD 1702.

Good selection of songs, ballads and instrumental tunes.  Other recordings by some of these artists can be found scattered throughout the other 12 CDs in this series.

40.  Music from the Lost Provinces.  Old-Time stringbands from Ashe County, North Carolina and Vicinity.  1927 – 1931.  Old Hat CD-1001. 

Important early recordings by such people as Grayson & Whitter, Frank Blevins, Jack Reedy and The Hill Billies.

41 – 42.  Mountain Music of Kentucky, compiled and annotated by John Cohen.  Smithsonian-Folkways SF CD 40077. 

Great selection of recordings made in 1959.

43 – 44.  The Traditional Music of Beech Mountain.  Volume 1, The Older ballads and Gospel Songs, Folk-Legacy CD-22.  The Traditional Music of Beech Mountain.  Volume 2, The Later Songs and Hymns, Folk-Legacy CD-23. 

Two of the best albums ever made of traditional Appalachian singers and their ballads and songs.

45 – 48.  Meeting’s a Pleasure.  Folk-Songs from the Upper South, Volumes 1 & 2, and Volumes 3 & 4.  Two double CDs.  Musical Traditions MTCD505-6 & MTCD507-8.

Over 130 tracks of material collected in Kentucky & West Virginia, showing a very strong tradition.

49 – 50.  The North Carolina Banjo Collection, Rounder CD 0439/40. 

The banjo entered the Appalachians via Afro/American slaves.  These two CDs show just how much one instrument could influence the various directions that traditional music could take.

Birchfield and Hausenfluck

Jean Ritchie

 

 

 

 

from https://www.facebook.com/americanfolklifecenter?fref=nf:

We’re very sad to pass on the news of the death of Jean Ritchie on Monday, June 1. She was 92 years old. No one was more important to the survival, appreciation, and revival of traditional Appalachian folk music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than this ballad singer, songwriter, folksong collector, Fulbright scholar, and champion of the Appalachian dulcimer. The producers of a recent tribute CD to Jean write:

“We are so sad to have to share the news that our beloved Jean passed away on Monday evening. She was surrounded by members of her family, who sang at her bedside in the last hours. Her family asks that in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be sent to Appalachian Voices. [ http://www.appalachianvoices.org/ ]”

Ritchie was recorded many times for the AFC archive–our first recordings of her go back to 1946. In 2009, she and her late husband, the photographer and filmmaker George Pickow, arranged for their extensive archive of audio and video recordings, film, photographs, and manuscripts—the results of their seven decades of involvement in traditional performances and folklife documentation—to be preserved in the AFC archive. To read more about Ritchie, Pickow, and their remarkable collection, please download the issue of Folklife Center News at the link below.

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/news/pdf/FCN_Vol33no1-2.pdf…

Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country

 

from http://valcourrecords.com:

During the last few decades of the twentieth century,

it became fashionable in some circles to belittle the

work of Alan and John Lomax. As is often the fate of

intellectuals who reach beyond academia to a broader

public, they were considered somehow suspect, and

their work came to be misunderstood, neglected, and

often ignored by many scholars who would otherwise

be interested in traditional music.

Often, the two very different people—and very different thinkers—

were combined into one conglomerate Lomax, a sort of

golem that came to symbolize old-fashioned approaches

to folk music.

To the detriment of the study of American vernacular music,

however, misgivings about the Lomaxes and their missions

bled over into and contributed to a monumental failure to address the bulk

of their extensive collections. And while many famous

performers whose legacies were intertwined with the

Lomaxes became icons of American roots music (Lead

belly, for instance, or Muddy Waters), the broad scope of

even their earliest field collections largely overwhelmed

the assembled academic and archival apparatuses of the

twentieth century.

In this century, however, things have changed with

respect to such collections and to the role of early field

collections in general. The gears of the old machine

have been oiled up, so to speak, and things seem to be

getting rolling again. There are a number of reasons

for this: first, technology increasingly provides more

efficient access to the media they collected.

Hoyt Ming (#2)

from http://www.mscountrymusictrail.org:

Choctaw County fiddler Hoyt Ming (1902-1985) led the lively string band recorded as “Floyd Ming & His Pep Steppers” at a Memphis Victor session in 1928. His “Indian War Whoop,” with its fiddling “holler,” became an old-time country music standby. Potato farmer Hoyt, with his wife Rozelle on guitar and brother Troy on mandolin, regularly played at fairs, fiddling contests, and rallies before World War II. Rediscovered in 1973, Hoyt and Rozelle Ming returned to recording and live appearances.

Born in Choctaw County on October 6, 1902, into a musical farming family of German-American extraction, Hoyt began teaching himself to play fiddle at fifteen, after admiring a string band that played for his father Clough at the Mings’ house. At least three of Hoyt’s seven brothers and one sister learned to play string instruments at about the same time; his brother Troy took up the mandolin and joined him in forming a family band that played for local dances and parties.

By 1928 Hoyt had married guitarist Rozelle Young; they relocated to rural Lee County and appeared as a trio, with Rozelle’s sister on mandolin. Hoyt heard that Victor Talking Machine record producer and scout Ralph Peer, who was already overseeing Jimmie Rodgers’ rise to stardom, was about to hold auditions in nearby Tupelo. Hoyt, Rozelle, Troy, and square dance caller A. D. Coggin auditioned as a quartet, and became one of the first acts from this area to get the go-ahead to record.

Their February 13, 1928, recording session at an auditorium in Memphis produced four instrumental recordings, typical of Mississippi string band music of the time in repeating musical phrases and showing subtle blues influences—but with particularly driving rhythms and Hoyt’s specialty “war whoop” fiddle inflection on the most celebrated record.

Rozelle Ming tended to stomp her foot on the beats. Atypically, Ralph Peer not only chose to leave that sound in, but named the band the “Pep Steppers” after it. The record label proceeded to transcribe Hoyt’s name as “Floyd Ming,” leading to inevitable confusion later.

The brief initial recording experience led to Pep Stepper appearances at fairs, political rallies and fiddler’s contests through the 1930s, but with their focus on raising a family, Hoyt and Rozelle kept music a sideline, and Hoyt tended to his main occupation, potato farming. Infrequent gigs made it hard to keep a band together, and by the 1950s, they’d essentially given up playing for audiences.

Unbeknownst to them at the time, Harry Smith included “Indian War Whoop” in Folkways Records 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, and the tune became a favorite in the 1950s-’60s folk revival. In 1973, David Freeman of the “old time” music label Country Records approached Hoyt about appearing again, having tracked down the mysterious “Floyd” Ming by searching around the Tupelo area one Victor record had pointed to.

By that summer, Hoyt, Rozelle and new young accompanists began playing at large-scale folk festivals and recorded a full album, “New Hot Tunes!” for Freeman’s Homestead imprint. “Monkey in the Dogcart” became a frequently played instrumental from that album. In 1975 they contributed to the soundtrack of the motion picture “Ode to Billy Joe,” based on Bobbie Gentry’s song. Hoyt Ming passed on in 1985, two years after his wife.

See also here.

Naomi Wise

from notes to “Classic American Ballads,” by Jeff Place, Katie Ortiz, and Max Smith (SFW4021):

The ballad “Omie Wise” dates back to the 19th century. It was first published in 1874 in conjunction

with a story written by Braxton Craven, president of North Carolina’s Trinity College, about

the 1808 murder by Jonathan Lewis of his pregnant lover Naomi Wise in Randolph County, North

Carolina .

The real Naomi was born in 1789 and (most likely because she was an orphan) worked for a

family, the Adams family, in Randolph County. Jonathan Lewis worked as a clerk in a store owned

by Benjamin Elliot in Asheboro, North Carolina, and every weekend he would ride his horse past

the Adams farm on his way to visit his family.

The story goes that Naomi and John fell in love when he stopped one day to ask her for a drink of

water, then helped her carry her bucket back to the house.

From there, the variations in the story take all sorts of twists and turns. Some say the two shared

a genuine love until Lewis’ mother urged him to marry a wealthier woman; most claim that Naomi

was murdered to cover up a pregnancy out of wedlock; all tell of the pure and beautiful woman who

so naively placed her trust in a malicious man’s love.

The only contemporary account available of Naomi Wise comes from a handwritten poem entitled

“A true account of Nayomy Wise” by Mary Woods. According to Woods’ poem, and backed by

the records for “bastardy bonds” in the Randolph County Papers (located in the North Carolina

State Archives), Naomi Wise had borne two children out of wedlock by the time she met Lewis:

Nancy and Henry Wise, born in 1799 and 1804 respectively.

In Woods’ version of the tale, Naomi became pregnant by Lewis and demanded that he marry her

rather than post a bastardy bond.  Naomi is still the victim of murder, but she is not the innocent and

virginal character in the ballads.

Whatever the circumstances of Naomi Wise’s situation, her story ended when she was drowned

in the Deep River in 1808 by Jonathan Lewis, who was arrested and held in the Randolph County

jail. He managed to escape—it is worth noting that his employer (and brother of the woman he

planned to marry instead of Naomi) was in charge of guarding his cell.

Many years later, Lewis was recaptured and brought to trial, but he was acquitted for lack of

sufficient evidence. It is said that he confessed to the murder of Naomi Wise on his deathbed in 1820.

Today Randolph County still has several landmarks dedicated to its most famous murder. The

Naomi Wise Spring and Naomi Falls are both located in the Deep River, where her body was found

and her gravestone lies.

Country Brass Bands

from Ry Cooder interview with Jas Obrecht:

Ry: In the South Carolina area they also had country bands, those jump bands playing on broken Confederate horns they found in the field, playing hymns and things. That’s a whole other bag. Do you know “The Music from the South” series that Frederick Ramsey put together on Folkways? One of the volumes was called Country Brass Bands. He went down there and he recorded two country brass bands, which were kind of loose organizations of guys who knew each other and would play on the weekends or for dances.

Apparently, this started after the Civil War. The Confederate armies all had brass bands and marching bands as part of the morale building. And when they lost, these guys just laid their instruments down in the field and left them. Then after the war goes by and the black people return to the field or their homes, and they actually found these horns in the dirt or left in sheds or I don’t where.

In time, they became handed down in families, broken, full of holes, tied together with tape. And they didn’t learn to play like the guys in New Orleans, with proper fingering. They knew only the bugle mouth and a little fingering, all wrong, but they liked these things and so they started playing in bands.

You gotta get that record. He found two of these bands – there are about ten guys in each group, and they play some kind of hymns that they know in this style, on broken instruments. They have no chops, they’ve got no mouth embouchure at all. But they play this so it’s strictly from the guts. It’s the life vibration that they live in, a pure expression through a horn rather than, say, a guitar.

Also, in those days when Ramsey was doing this work, in the ’50s, he did an early news magazine show on CBS called Omnibus. You must see this – it’s strictly important. Ramsey did one called something like, “They Took a Blue Note.” It was an hour show of jazz. They came to Ramsey, being the expert at the time, and he put it together for them.

It shows him going down into Alabama. You see a little of New Orleans – that’s a really nice funeral there. Then you’re out there and there’s Horace Sprott, who was one of his discoveries, playing the harmonica and plowing the field – that’s kind of stagey and dumb. But all of a sudden, around the corner come five guys behind a barn, and they have these beat-up horns. They stand up and play this stuff, and you just fall on your knees.

I’m telling you, you will have a transcendent experience, because it’s right in front of your face. It’s a thing that you can barely believe, but it’s one of the great documents of pure soul. These guys are field hands in the 1950s, they’re all middle-aged men, hard-working guys, and they play these horns in some crazy way. The sound that comes out is utterly mind-boggling. It’s just too good.

The Ragtime Skedaddlers

from https://jazzlives.wordpress.com and http://www.ragtimers.org:

The Latest Popular Mandolin and Guitar Music, by The Ragtime Skedaddlers (http://ragtimeskedaddlers.bandcamp.com)

A hundred years ago, ragtime was America’s original popular music, a blend of African-American folk roots with marches and old-world dances. While usually played today as a solo piano music, in their time rags, cakewalks, and marches were often played by string bands consisting of mandolins, banjos, and guitars. Using arrangements published during the ragtime era, the Ragtime Skedaddlers continue the tradition of ragtime string bands.

Unlike other “traditional” groups who take their inspiration from various notions of New Orleans jazz or Chicago jazz, the Skedaddlers go back to a time when string ragtime, light-hearted yet propulsive, was America’s true popular music.  This trio doesn’t speed up or approach the music with either clownish levity or undue scholarly seriousness.

Rather, they are old-fashioned melodists, creating sweet lines that arch and tumble over one another in mid-air. It is as if Dvorak had been transplanted to a Southern or Middle Western backyard picnic or country dance in 1895 and had immersed himself in sweet harmonies and dance-like motions. The Skedaddlers are entrancing on their own, and a delightful change from the often heavy ensembles so prevalent in occasions of this sort.

This CD has a lot going for it. The musicians are talented and well rehearsed. The playlist has a theme (arrangements for mandolin and guitar taken from early publications) and the recorded sound is very good. The liner notes are filled with interesting historical data and minutiae about the composers, the arrangers and the early publications themselves. Quality artwork is featured, including many old photographs. And to top it off, the music is lively and likeable.

The Ragtime Skedaddlers are mandolinists Dennis Pash and Nick Robinson and guitarist Dave Krinkel. With this disc and their previous release (Mandophone CD0901), they have produced perhaps the only high fidelity recordings devoted almost exclusively to these early arrangements of rags and cakewalks for mandolins and guitar.

We are treated to perennial favorites (Peacherine Rag, Eli Green’s Cake Walk, Apple Jack, Chicken Chowder), rare discoveries (A Florida Cracker, Mississippi Bubble, Shiftless Johnson) and other enjoyable selections. To break up the cakewalk theme and add a bit of variety, the Skedaddlers have also included a Brazilian choro (Dengozo), an Indian intermezzo (Silver Heels) and an habañera (Cuban Belles).

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The Wreck of the Old 97

from www.loc.gov and www.wsls.com:

Folklorist Norm Cohen has astutely observed that “folklore thrives where danger threatens” (The Long Steel Rail, p. 169). The annals of commercially recorded traditional and popular song provide abundant support for this conclusion. In fact, by the early twentieth century — especially the decades of the teens and twenties — nearly every imaginable disaster or mishap was memorialized in song.

Natural disasters are represented by songs like “The Cyclone of Ryecove,” “The Oakville Twister,” “Joe Hoover’s Mississippi Flood Song,” and  “The Santa Barbara Earthquake.” Man-made disasters are remembered in  “The Explosion at Eccles, West Virginia,”  “The Ohio Prison Fire,” and “The Stone Mountain Tank Explosion.” Murder, robbery, swindling and other bad behavior figure prominently in such songs as “Billy the Kid,” “The Outlaw John Dillinger,” “Otto Wood the Bandit,” and “Ponzi the Swindler.”

Other songs have addressed anxieties about new-fangled flying contraptions. For instance a horrible  dirigible crash inspired at least 12 recorded versions of “The Wreck of the Shenandoah.” But wrecks of trains, not zeppelins, spawned by far the greatest number of songs. Of these, “The Wreck of the Old 97,” which referenced the 1903 train wreck near Danville, Virginia, was one of the most recorded songs.

In the 1920s and 1930s it was as popular as “Casey Jones,” a song that is probably more familiar to listeners today. Unlike many versions of “Casey Jones” and other popular songs like “The Wreck of Number Nine,” “The Wreck of the Old 97″ presented the details of the crash relatively accurately.  The engineer did crash while trying to make up time on a dangerous, descending curve. His terrible death is also accurately described.

At the University of Virginia, Larry Aaron found the papers of David George from Gretna, who claimed to have written the original ballad. Aaron came to believe that it was really written by Fred Lewey, originally from Rockingham County, who may have been working in Danville at the time of the wreck. Lewey and Charles Noell are usually given joint credit.

“Lawrence (McFall) made me aware of a 400-page transcript of a trial in 1905 in Danville between the estate of Steve Broady and Southern Railway. Very few people know about this trial,” Aaron said. “The transcript disproves a lot of things formerly believed about the story.”

Traditionally and in the ballad, Broady is blamed for the wreck since the train started out an hour behind schedule and, as the song goes, he swore “to put her in Spencer (N.C.) on time” or “put her in Hell.”

The transcript plus a file Aaron found while digging through the Danville Courthouse provided new information about Broady and the train journey from Monroe and destined for Spencer.

“For instance, I found a memo from Southern Railroad that showed Broady had run the same route more than 25 times. This is important because it has been thought that Broady didn’t know the track,” he said. “He knew the road, but he didn’t know the train because he usually ran freight trains.”

Through a twist in fate, Broady replaced the engineer who usually ran the Old 97, the fastest train of Southern Railroad.

In the file, Aaron also found a map made in 1905 that showed where the train jumped the tracks and where it landed, which proved important.

“I wondered all along how fast the train was going when it jumped the trestle, so I sent the information about the incline and curvature on the track to two engineers at Virginia Tech. They used particle dynamics and figured the best guess to be he was going 75 miles an hour,” Aaron explained.

Aaron also found out Broady hadn’t been ordered to get to Spencer on time, even though he started out an hour behind, and that he wasn’t the wild-eyed engineer legend has claimed. Aaron admits that Broady was going too fast, though, for whatever reason. That truth probably died with the people who died in the wreck.

Chanteys and Anthems

by Nathan Luna (www.mustrad.org.uk):

Bahamas 1935 – Chanteys and Anthems from Andros and Cat Island (Rounder 1822)

The sweetness of a voice rings out over a deep bass and extraneous fuzz in Round the Bay of Mexico, one of the more charming chanteys heard on Bahamas 1935.  The song is led by Henry Lundy, and bassed by David “Pappie” Pryor.  This song and most of the music found on this CD are products of the sponging days in the Bahamas when sponging crews would spend weeks at a time on the water in small sailboats.  It is primarily group vocal music and contains echoes of many other African-American and Afro-Caribbean vocal group forms, including spirituals, quartet singing, and work songs.

The characteristic style of singing found on most of the songs is known as rhyming.  A lead singer, or rhymer, usually begins the song by establishing the melody.  This melody is then taken up by a group of singers, or sometimes a single bass singer, which utilize multiple tempos, tonal levels, and rhythmic patterns to create a complex song structure over which the lead singer or rhymer can continue to improvise new lyrics or rhymes.

The effect is not far from quartet singing, though the multiple rhythms and tempos make for a generally more complex song style.  Apparently this complex style of singing found its heyday in the early 1900’s when spongers were plentiful and sharply declined with the failure of the sponge industry in the late 1930s.

Lomax, who recorded in 1935, appears to have arrived just before this decline and fortuitously so, in my opinion, for one thing that impressed me about these early recordings was the breadth of rhyming that could be heard when compared to later recordings of Bahamian rhyming, those found on the Rounder release ‘Kneelin Down Inside the Gate’, for instance.

Lomax, in an essay included in the booklet notes, proposes that the particular style of singing employed in Bahamian rhyming music stems from the Bahamian sponger’s connection to the sea.  He writes: “The distinctive effect of multiple tempos [found in the music] …  flows …  from the marriage of Bahamians to the sea and small sailboats.

A sailboat moving through the sea before a good wind moves in several tempos: the lift, plunge and roll of the vessel through the water, and the forward motion of the boat itself, which increases imperceptibly and with an effect of mounting thrill as sails are trimmed and as the breeze picks up.  Other rhythms can be heard in the rapid slatting of ropes against the sail, the slow creaking of the mast and the blocks, and the slide of water along the side and perhaps against the deck.”

Lion Songs

from http://www.kirkusreviews.com, http://www.dukeupress.edu, and http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com:

 Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Music That Made Zimbabwe, by Banning Eyre (Duke University Press):

Lion Songs, by Banning Eyre, is an authoritative biography of Thomas Mapfumo that narrates the life and career of this creative, complex, and iconic figure.  Eyre ties the arc of Mapfumo’s career to the history of Zimbabwe. The genre Mapfumo created in the 1970s called chimurenga, or “struggle” music, challenged the Rhodesian government—which banned his music and jailed him—and became important to Zimbabwe achieving independence in 1980.

“People, there is corruption” he sang in the 2000 hit “Disaster.” “People, there is corruption here.” Unsurprisingly, police raided kiosks in the markets of Harare and destroyed Mapfumo’s albums, and Central Intelligence Organization agents threatened to beat Mapfumo if he played protest songs in concert. His family—Thomas and his wife, Verna, son and daughter Tai and Chiedza (then teenagers), and daughter Mati (then a toddler)—no longer felt safe.

In 2000, the family boarded a plane out of Zimbabwe, to settle in Eugene, Oregon.

The author asserts from the outset that “in the end, there is no way to understand Thomas Mapfumo without understanding Zimbabwe, and no better way to know Zimbabwe than through an examination of the life and work of Thomas Mapfumo.”

Yet both the complex, contradictory artist and his country, the former Rhodesia, defy easy understanding.  Many of those closest to Thomas and his story are left with the nagging sense that he could have, should have, counted more.” Eyre is plainly one of them, and this biography is the result, though it gives ample space to those questioning Mapfumo’s originality, politics, business dealings, and decision to leave Zimbabwe for Oregon almost two decades ago, with even the author acknowledging, “Thomas’s career was certainly compromised, if not ruined, by his move to America.”

The transition to life in Eugene wasn’t easy. A late-night stranger wandered into their first home. Feeling unsafe, they moved into another house, where mold left their drummer laid up sick for months. Mapfumo’s wife traded her lucrative old job as a real estate agent in Harare for caregiver in a retirement home. And Mapfumo’s musical output slowed from roughly one new album release per year to just two in six years, the result of contract problems, lengthy recording sessions brought on by his own perfectionist streak, and difficulty finding and keeping savvy handlers.

But still, Mapfumo says, the decision to go into exile was a good one, and Eyre agrees, with a caveat. “I think that as a person, he did a very honorable thing—he put his family first—and he has nothing left to prove as a musician,” he says. “But he’s been away long enough now that the culture back home is starting to move on.”

A labor of love, Lion Songs is the product of a twenty-five year friendship and professional relationship between Eyre and Mapfumo that demonstrates Mapfumo’s musical and political importance to his nation, its freedom struggle, and its culture.

The Dead March

Arkansas at 78 RPM

Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers and Hoss Hair Pullers (Dust-to-Digital DTD-36)

excerpt of review by Mile Yates (www.mustrad.org):

For the traveling recording men of the late 1920s, Arkansas offered enticing pickings.  The region was thronged with vigorous, idiosyncratic stringbands.  This album carries the listener from the hillbilly music craze of the ’20s to the song-based country music of the late ’30s.  Scarcely more than a decade, but a period, in music as in all American life, of galvanic change – Tony Russell

 Actually, unlike the Appalachians and Georgia, Arkansas was, perhaps, just a tad too far away from New York and the other northern cities where the 1920s’ record companies were based.  And so recordings of Arkansas musicians from this period were never too plentiful, which is a pity, because judging by these few examples we can only suggest that, musically speaking, this was indeed a region which carried a rich musical heritage.

During the period 1928 – 30 the musicians had to travel out of the State to make recordings in such cities as Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago or New York, for the Okeh, Vocalion and Victor record companies.

Later, in 1931 – 32, Columbia Records also recorded a handful of Arkansas groups; but it was not until 1937 that the Brunswick – ARC record company sent a recording team to Hot Springs.  By then, of course, the music had begun to change and this fine CD covers both the early string band music that was captured in the late ’20s and early ’30s, together with a few later pieces.

I suppose that as there were so few recordings made of early Arkansas string band music we must expect some overlap with previously issued CDs and, sadly, this is the case here.  In 1995 County Records issued a 2 CD set – Echoes of the Ozarks CD-3506 & CD-3507) – which together contain forty-one cuts, and twelve of these tracks can be found on the Dust-To-Digital set.

But, that does leave us with fourteen tracks which are new to me, all of which, in one way or another, are of great interest.  Actually, it is not surprising to find duplication here, because many of the duplicated tracks are among the best old-timey recording ever made.  I am certain that tracks such as the Morrison Twin Brothers String Band’s Dry and Dusty, Pope’s Arkansas Mountaineers’ Jaw Bone, Luke Highnight & His Ozark Strutters’ Fort Smith Breakdown or the Arkansas Barefoot Boys’ Eighth of January can stand alongside any recordings made during the late 1920s/early 1930s.

Fiddling Bob Larkan’s McLeod’s Reel (also known as Hop High Ladies in the States) is reminiscent of some of the recordings that were made by the Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham and I was not surprised to learn that Bob Larkan was originally from New York.  According to Tony Russell, the high strain of Silver Nail, recorded by Bob Larkan, is related to Scott Skinner’s tune Arthur Seat (or should that be Arthur’s Seat?).

Bob Larkan’s set Paddy, Won’t You Drink Some Good Old Cider, an extremely well-played tune, is also interesting for being the first recording to be made of the piece.  The Georgia musicians Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett later made a better-known recording.

Robinson County, played here by the little known L O Birkhead & R M Lane (although we are told that Lane may not actually be the second fiddler on this track!).  The tune was also recorded by Ted Sharp, Hinman & Sharp, (available on County CD-3506) and these are the only two known early recording; so was it originally a local tune, even though there is no Robinson County in Arkansas?  Drunkard’s Hecups (sic), from the Reaves White County Ramblers, is also of interest in that it is one of only a handful or early recordings where we can hear the fiddle strings being beaten by a pair of straws.

Lonnie Glosson (1908 – 2001) was a competent musician who can be heard on two tracks.  Lonnie’s Fox Chase highlights his ability on the mouthorgan, while Arkansas Hard Luck Blues, a talking-blues, shows that he was also an accomplished guitarist.  Glosson was one of those musicians who continued recording long after the 78’s had become obsolete and he cut several LPs in later life.  Other tracks also show how things were beginning to change.

Dr Smith’s Champion Hoss Hair Pullers, led by a country doctor called Henry Harlin Smith, recording a number of sentimental songs and are especially remembered for pieces such as Picture on the Wall and Save My Mother’s Picture from the Sale, but here they can be heard singing a ‘coon’ song Just Give Me the Leavings, which was written by two Afro-Americans, James Weldon Johnson and Bob Cole, in 1904.  Many old-timey bands from this period broke up because there was too little interest in their music.

The Hoss Hair Pullers, on the other hand, became so successful that they were unable to keep up with demand for their public engagements, and so they folded.  Johnson and Cole also composed the song My Castle on the Nile, which was recorded by an obscure group of musicians known as the Wonder State Harmonists.  The Harmonists also recorded a version of another ‘coon’ song, Turnip Greens, which blues singer Bo Carter had previously recorded as Good Old Turnip Greens in 1928.

The group’s leader may have been one William Walden Shepherd (1890 -1979) a banjo-playing member of the Arkansas Bar Association, who practiced in the town of Little Rock.  The group also recorded an up-beat instrumental, Petit Jean Gallop, apparently named after Petit Jean Mountain which can be found in Arkansas’s Conway County.  One other group, George Edgin’s Corn Dodgers with Earl Wright & Brown Rich, give us another song, The Arkansas Hotel, a song recorded variously as All Go Hungry Hash House or Second-Class Hotel by other singers and musicians.

If, like me, you love old-timey music then you will have to get a copy of this album.  The music is superb and Tony Russell’s notes, aided at times by the fieldwork of the late W K McNeil, are both fascinating and faultless.