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.

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“Been Here and Gone”

“Been Here and Gone,” by Frederic Ramsey (University of Georgia Press, 1960, 177 pages):

This volume documents Frederic Ramsey Jr.’s journeys through the 1950s South, where he traveled in search of what might still remain of an original, authentic African American musical tradition.

In these photographs, songs, interviews, and narratives, Ramsey portrays farmers, railroad workers, housewives, children, church congregations, and country brass bands from Saratoga, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Ramsey’s images of a past way of life capture the deceptively poor landscapes and lives that gave birth to and sustained some of our warmest and most deeply felt music.

Ramsey: “All along the Mississippi, I bad been hearing about ‘those little old string bands, used to make pretty good music.’

Once, the string bands were quite numerous little, informal organizations, often made up of amateur musicians, who roamed the streets on holidays and at carnival time.  In some districts, they played for private parties, or got together to serenade a friend.”