Every January and February contain the same complicated emotional cocktail – a hangover from the holidays, a buzz of hope for the future, grief for the year gone by, relief to have moved on, joy in the lack of plans, and perhaps even dread for any winter still to come. Whichever way you slice it, it is a time of mixed emotions, usually of the slightly melancholy variety, but not wholly sad. I call this the “happy-sads.” This gentle gloom has always been beautiful to me in art, music, TV, film, etc. – and especially in an old-time tune!
Old-time music covers a vast range. There are tunes for every occasion and feeling – and the bittersweet is abundant. It’s also possible to get something different from a tune, depending on when and how you come across it. The tunes I find myself most drawn to this time of year are those that lope along, tinged equally with a sweet sadness and hope. Here are six old-time recordings that won’t cure your January/February “happy-sads” but rather, indulge them.
“Lost Indian,” Tricia Spencer & Howard Rains
Based in Lawrence, Kansas, Tricia Spencer and Howard Rains have deep musical roots in Kansas and Texas, respectively. With two wailing fiddles right up top, this is the perfect recording to start off this list. When the band kicks in you want to dance, but also cry?
“Backstep Indi,” Pharis & Jason Romero
A fretless gourd banjo is a sure-fire way to indulge all of your complicated winter feels. Pharis & Jason Romero are no strangers to the cold and gray up in their Canadian home. A modern old-time tune, “Backstep-Indi” winds in and out and back again making it the perfect recording for a reflective chilly day.
“Fire on the Mountain,” Matt Brown
Matt Brown’s recording of “Fire on the Mountain,” a tune from Kentucky fiddler Isham Monday, never fails to inspire peace, personally. It’s just ultimately serene and mournful like a proper January morning (or afternoon or evening). The G cross tuning, fingerstyle banjo, the simple delivery are all just right.
“Railroad Bill,” Etta Baker
The way Etta Baker’s fingerstyle guitar just chugs right along with a slow, but definite evolution during “Railroad Bill” has a familiarity and comfort to it. Her sound is still, steady, and warm, and that minor six chord really hits on a glum winter day.
“Weevils in the Grits,” Sami Braman
Sami Braman’s original tune, “Weevils in the Grits,” marches right along with Brittany Haas guest fiddling alongside her and her band. Open tunings on a fiddle can lean in the more “raging” direction or the drones that they create can open up the sound to something ethereal and archaic. Sometimes you get a combination of both, like we have here! BGS premiered “Weevils in the Grits” last year, too.
“Laughing Boy,” Earl White Stringband
There are several tunes off of the Earl White Stringband album that could have ended up on this list, notably the old-time jam hit “Chips and Sauce,” but this particular one stuck because of that fleeting moment where the melody winks at the minor chord while the band plays the major four and your heart explodes.
Photo Credit: United States Resettlement Administration, Ben Shahn, photographer. (1937) Aunt Samantha Baumgarner i.e. Bumgarner. United States, Asheville, North Carolina. Photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress.
My diary for Saturday September 26, 1987 — Earl Scruggs Celebration day at Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina — begins with an entry on foodways:
I meet Tom (Hanchett) and Carol (Sawyer) at 7:30 and we walk to the Snack Shop. As Joe had predicted the night before there were lots of pickups outside and quite a few people inside having breakfast. I asked the waitress for livermush and she told me they didn’t have it, that sometimes they did but today they were out of it. It wasn’t on the menu.
After breakfast we walked over to G-W’s Dover Library, Celebration headquarters. Horace Scruggs was there.
Outside Horace took me over to meet his banjo player, and he asked me to play a tune or two. I did “Cumberland Gap” and some other simple tune. The picker then played a lot of fancy stuff and told me about his two banjos.
Inside, people were setting up displays in preparation for the 10:00 opening. It was part museum, part market.
… various people were doing crafts; [an] instrument maker was there with his wife, who played guitar, and his young son (maybe 10) who was a good Scruggs-style banjo picker and played non-stop all afternoon long. They were selling cassettes of him.
Horace had brought in two banjos which Earl had loaned him to be displayed at the Celebration. One was a new Gibson Earl Scruggs model, and the other was the old banjo which had belonged to their father and which Earl had had repaired back in the fifties in Nashville.
Later, Tom would be installing storyboards about the connection between country music and the textiles industry in the Piedmont.
After Horace had set up his display Joe suggested he take us on a tour of the area where the Scruggses grew up. So, Tom, Carol, Joe, and I set out in Horace’s Fury.
‘Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo’ page 147 shows the Scruggs homeplace
He took us past the Flint Hill Church, their birthplace (depicted in the above photo from p. 147 of Earl Scruggs and the Five-String Banjo), and the house they’d moved to after their father’s death in 1930 (seen below, from p. 150).
The house has the same chimney as in the picture, but the upper part has been rebuilt with brick. A “beware dogs & keep out” sign was posted. Horace said that the family had decided to get rid of the house, but he wished they had kept it. This is the house he and Earl would walk around when practicing time — they would start a tune and each would walk in a different direction playing softly, to see if they could keep their time so they would be together when they met at the back. The right front room, visible from the road, was the one Earl went in when he figured out how to use the third finger in his banjo style.
‘Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo’ page 150 shows three Scruggs brothers, posing in front of their home
Then Horace took us down to the nearby Broad River to point out the site of Earl’s first professional gig, Ollie Moore’s fish camp.
At 10:00 the Celebration began out in front of the Library. Inoted: A beautiful sunny day which was to get up into the low 80s by the feel of it. The president opened the festivities and then Horace and his bandmates in Riverbend performed a few songs.
At last night’s dinner I’d gotten to know a couple from Raleigh, Margaret and Wayne Martin.
Both were old-time musicians. In 1984 they’d joined with two others to found PineCone, the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, “an organization that would help support traditional roots artists and present their music to the public in a professional and respectful manner.”
An experienced teacher and performer, Margaret was scheduled to workshop with Etta Baker. This was one of the high points of the Celebration.
At 10:30 Margaret Martin set up with Mrs. Etta Baker in the Library lobby and did an hour-long workshop which was very nice. Mrs. B. played banjo some of the time, showing how her daddy picked 2-finger style; then she played the guitar, a D-18 with a built-in pickup, and did her “hits” like “Railroad Bill” and “John Henry” and also some nice Piedmont-style blues like, she said, her sons played. She was low-key but relaxed and effective as a performer, and Martin ran a good workshop, assisting musically but not getting in the way.
In the middle of this Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and the Hired Hands arrived and were standing at the back of the crowd in the lobby. I had a good talk with both of them, trying to give some idea of what I wanted on the workshop.
Banjoist Jenkins and fiddler Sherrill began their careers in the ’30s playing a blend of old-time and country. Snuffy played 3-finger style even before Earl, who acknowledged his influence. Still active after nearly fifty years, they were living history. They’d watched bluegrass develop. What could they say about that? Also, I was particularly interested in having them demonstrate the kind of shows they’d done in their early years — the radio pitches and Snuffy’s baggy-pants comedy.
Unfortunately, Snuffy hadn’t brought along his rig for the full comedy routine but they said they would do some comedy.
I pursued a bit of tune research, wondering about a tune Earl Scruggs had played in his 1945 audition for Monroe. I’d heard that Earl learned it from Snuffy.
I asked Snuffy about “Dear Old Dixie,” which he did play. He told me he learned from a Rutherford County fiddle band, the Barrett Brothers — a group they always beat in contests, he said.
It was noon; Carol and Tom and I took a lunch break. As the afternoon began:
We sat out on the campus green, a broad sloping lawn with a stage at the lower end, and listened to Snuffy Jenkins and Pappy Sherrill along with their band.
The Hired Hands, all younger South Carolinians, included guitarist Harold Lucas; his son Randy, who played banjo and guitar; and Frank Hartley on bass. After a 10-song set, a young guest, Philip Jenkins, was introduced. Philip’s father Hoke was Snuffy’s nephew, a good banjoist who’d recorded with Jim & Jesse in the early ’50s. Philip, playing his dad’s fancy old Gibson, did “Train 45” and “Sally Goodin.”
Snuffy closed out the show by bringing out his “confounded contraption,” a washboard fitted with cowbell, frying pan, wooden block, and an old bicycle horn, on which he played rhythm with eight sewing thimbles as Pappy fiddled “Chicken Reel” and “Alabama Jubilee.”
Snuffy Jenkins & Pappy Sherrill on the cover of their Rounder release, ’33 Years of Pickin’ and Pluckin”
Other bands followed. I wandered around at the back of the crowd, taking in the music from different perspectives and meeting fans. Around two I went back to my room, picked up the tape recorder and headed for the seminar room in the library where the workshop was to be held.
I used the recorder, a Sony Walkman Pro cassette machine with an external mike and a C90 cassette, to record the workshop. What follows is based on a table of contents drafted soon after the event. The tape itself, like most of my research materials, is now in Memorial’s archives, out of reach at the moment.
We began at 3:00 with an introduction by Dr. Brown and a speech of welcome from G-W’s Vice President for Academic Affairs. The band opened up with their theme tune, the old fiddle tune “Twinkle Little Star.” Dr. Brown introduced me and I began in emcee style to introduce the band, a leisurely process involving a bit of humor and local place names. Although this was a workshop, Pappy and Snuffy treated it as a show, offering comic relief and virtuoso instrumentals at regular intervals.
I spoke briefly about the band as living history, mentioning that Pat Ahrens, a writer from Columbia, South Carolina, their base of operations, had written a nice little book about them, with photos, and a discography.
I told how the word “bluegrass” had taken on a musical meaning following Earl Scruggs’ years with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, and then asked Snuffy to talk about his early history. It was a question he’d been asked before. He and Homer were prepared. Their response was pretty much like the one on this YouTube clip, recorded in 1988 at the Tennessee Banjo Institute:
In 1939 Jenkins and Sherrill came together at a radio station in Columbia, South Carolina, as members of the WIS Hillbillies, a band led by Byron Parker, formerly the Monroe Brothers’ emcee and bass singer. Byron Parker and His Mountaineers, a lineup that included Pappy and Snuffy.
Their regular radio shows enabled them to make the bookings that sustained their early career at the small rural schools dotting the countryside around Columbia. Sponsored on the radio by Crazy Water Crystals, a laxative, they recorded 16 tunes and songs — eight 78s — for RCA Victor in 1940 as Byron Parker and His Mountaineers, with fiddle, guitars, mandolin, banjo and Parker’s bass vocal on the hymns. Their broad repertoire included “Up Jumped The Devil” on which Snuffy took banjo breaks which today sound very bluegrassy:
After Parker’s death in 1948, Pappy and Snuffy took over the band and changed the name to The Hired Hands.
Pappy Sherrill was the band’s emcee. He told the history of the band, calling their records “old timey stuff, no extra notes.” Many of their songs and tunes would find their way into bluegrass repertoires. I asked Homer for an example; he played “Carroll County Blues,” the fiddle classic from Mississippians Narmour and Smith that they’d recorded in 1940:
After demonstrating Snuffy’s banjo work, the band did several songs. Here’s how they sounded doing “Long Journey Home” in 1990:
On this song, Snuffy takes all the lead breaks and can also be seen playing clawhammer backup. Regrettably, Homer’s fiddle is in the background here; he usually played lead breaks. Randy Lucas brings in the fingerstyle guitar demonstrated earlier by in the day by Etta Baker. After they’d played four pieces, I posed a question to the band members — what’s the difference between old-time and bluegrass?
Lead singer Harold Lucas began with a joke: “there’s a fine line between old-time and not being able to play at all.” Then, referring to his son Randy, a master of new styles, he described the interplay between old and new generations.
Pappy spoke about growing up listening to the radio. To him, old-time is easier. Bluegrass is fast, with high-pitched singing — not the same. He stressed the importance of duets in old-time.
Randy said “it takes old fellows to play old-time music” and that he got his inspiration from Pappy & Snuffy — “they make music fun.”
As far as he was concerned, said Snuffy, “Ain’t no difference — slow and fast.” He joked about his own “mellow voice — over ripe, almost rotten.”
Returning to the question I’d posed, Pappy and Randy Lucas, now playing banjo, demonstrated the differences between old-time and bluegrass. Pappy fiddled the venerable “Leather Britches” as an example of old-time. Then Randy demonstrated bluegrass with a recent, fancy banjo piece, Don Reno’s “Dixie Breakdown.” Fluent in both styles, each took breaks on both tunes.
I asked about comedy. Pappy described the skits that were an integral part of the Hired Hands show. He said they had a writer, Billy F. Jones, who scripted their comedy pieces, making parts for each member of the band. They weren’t set up to do a skit today, but they did an old traditional musical comic dialogue that originated in 19th century theater, “Arkansas Traveler.” In 1960 the Stanley Brothers had a big record hit with a version that combined the traditional dialogue with new music, titled “How Far to Little Rock”:
Afterward Snuffy and Pappy spoke of their comedy work in the early years — making up, getting into costume, pratfalls, and so on.
Then, after Randy had played “There’s An Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor” demonstrating his mastery of contemporary banjo styles, Snuffy responded to a request and brought out his “confounded contraption,” the washboard, to play along with Pappy on the popular fiddle favorite, “Down Yonder.” Here’s how Snuffy looked playing washboard on another fiddle favorite, “Alabama Jubilee,” at a festival in 1989:
Pappy reminded the audience that they had mostly played as small local schools with audiences all ages. Their show was for the whole family. “No smut.”
Nearing the end of the workshop, I called for questions. A number came in from the audience — asking about their sponsor, the history of Snuffy’s washboard, other touring bands, and their Columbia, South Carolina, base.
Finally, Pappy explained that their shows always included hymns; he had a box full of Stamps-Baxter and Vaughn gospel quartet songbooks, and taught the parts to the group from them. They were complex, responsorial. Here’s an example from their 1940 RCA sessions, “We Shall Rise,” with Byron Parker singing bass.
On this afternoon, Pappy closed with a simpler hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” played on the fiddle.
Afterwards he thanked the audience. I concluded with remarks about the band’s role in the change from old to new in folk traditions, and the transition from home and neighborhood to stage and radio.
Just before Dr. Brown formally ended the workshop, well-known local banjoist Dan X Padgett presented a gift — a hat — to Snuffy. I did not note what the hat looked like, and that detail has escaped my memory. But there’s more coming about Dan X Padgett and the rest of the Celebration in Part 3 of this memoir.
I first heard the music of Etta Baker on a record in 1957. Not until thirty years later did I see her perform live, in the context of a bluegrass-oriented event, on September 26, 1987 at Gardner-Webb College’s Second Annual Earl Scruggs Music Celebration.
Gardner-Webb (G-W) is in Boiling Springs, N.C., an hour’s drive south of Baker’s Morganton home and a few miles southwest of Shelby. Scruggs’ birthplace, Flint Hill, is close by.
In 1986 G-W awarded Scruggs an honorary doctorate. Ill health kept him from attending that Celebration, but his long-time friend John Hartford came and led a seminar about him and performed at a concert honoring him. UNC folklorists taped the proceedings. Their recordings are available online at UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection.
After the success of the 1986 program a committee, chaired by G-W English professor Dr. Joyce Brown and including Shelby journalist and G-W grad Joe DePriest, began planning the 1987 celebration. They received assistance, a grant, from the Folklife Section of the N.C. Arts Council.
In August, a headline appeared on the front page of the Shelby Star: “Scruggs Celebration to get return engagement at G-W.” An article by DePriest quoted Brown: “We hope to make this an annual event — the most significant bluegrass event in the country. This is the logical place to center a recognition of our musical heritage.” DePriest added: “The program is not limited to bluegrass but will also focus on pre-bluegrass string music along with Afro-American contributions.”
The article described an action-packed day of music, with a morning concert-workshop by Etta Baker; an appearance by Riverbend Grass, the band in which Earl’s brother Horace played guitar; an afternoon of performances by six bands with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and The Hired Hands opening; and afternoon workshops “on the history of bluegrass, its early radio days, and the Scruggs contributions.” In the evening was a concert by a popular new Nashville-based group, the Doug Dillard Band.
A scan of the first portions of the Earl Scruggs Celebration announcement from the Shelby ‘Star.’
By then Professor Brown had invited me to participate in the Celebration. My name and picture ran with DePriest’s article next to that of Jenkins, Sherrill, and The Hired Hands, who were slated to “head up the talent” of the Celebration. Touted as “an internationally known music scholar,” I was to conduct the workshop on bluegrass history with Jenkins and Sherrill.
I had never been to North Carolina, a formative location for the bluegrass business I began writing about in the ’60s. In 1974 the Country Music Foundation published my illustrated Bill Monroe discography, and in 1981 I began a regular column in Bluegrass Unlimited, “Thirty Years Ago This Month.” Since 1985, when my second book, Bluegrass: A History, was published, I’d been giving public lectures on bluegrass history.
My early bluegrass experience began in the late ’50s as a musician in the Midwest and northern California. Most of the history I wrote about came to me through research. I’d read Billboard from the early ’40s onward, eagerly followed the writing of people like Bill Vernon and Pete Kuykendall in fan magazines, and interviewed key figures.
I first heard of G-W in the early ’80s during one of those interviews. I asked Flatt & Scruggs manager Louise Scruggs when their first bluegrass college concert took place. She paused: “Gardner-Webb, maybe?” But she was tentative, particularly since she didn’t think it would be easy to document — she hadn’t started managing Lester and Earl until 1956. Not until my 1987 trip to Boiling Springs did I learn the full story of Flatt and Scruggs playing the first college bluegrass concert — I’ll say more about that later.
In 1976, when I wrote about my research on folk and country music in Canada’s Maritime provinces, I opened by saying “I attended many events, taking notes in my omnipresent 3 ½ x 5″ notebooks. As soon afterward as possible, a description of the event was written up in a diary-like journal.” Throughout my visit to Boiling Springs I had a notebook in my pocket. Soon after returning home I wrote a detailed diary of the six-day trip based on my notes. Direct quotes (in italics) follow.
Leaving Wednesday September 23rd, I was met at the Raleigh-Durham airport by Dan Patterson, head of UNC’s Folklore Curriculum. The next afternoon I gave a public lecture hosted by the Curriculum: “Reality and Revival in Bluegrass.” After my talk I was introduced to Tom Hanchett who, with his wife Carol Sawyer, was to drive me to Boiling Springs. We made plans for an early start the next day. Here’s what I wrote in my diary:
Tom Hanchett is in his late twenties, grew up in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and in upstate New York. Went to school at Cornell, was introduced to bluegrass by Country Cooking (Trischka, Wernick, etc.), and plays a bit of old-time fiddle. Had, until about five months ago, been working with the Charlotte (N.C.) Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission as a historian. He had organized “The Charlotte Country Music Story,” a series of concerts there which recognized the town as an early historic center for recording and broadcasting of country music. And he is now working on a Ph.D. in southern urban history at UNC. His wife, Carol Sawyer, is a curator in a Museum of Technological history.
Tom charted our trip from Chapel Hill, in the northeastern Piedmont, to Boiling Springs, in the southwest, with a route that reflected the interest in local history and historic preservation that made him a perfect guide for our trip.
Tom had warned me beforehand that he was not an interstate man, so we followed a route that paralleled the old main railroad line (The Southern) that still runs from Washington to New Orleans.
Near Asheboro we stopped to visit Mac Whatley, mayor of Franklinville. He took us on a tour of this historic textile-mill region. I noted:
Whatley drove us out of town to the North and West, following Deep River, the source of textile mill power. We located the birthplace of Charlie Poole and looked at it from the road. There was a big “no trespassing, keep out” sign there.
We continued on toward Charlotte.
Somewhere along here we were passed by a new Toyota 4-wheel drive pickup with a yellow and black bumper sticker that read “Ralph Stanley for President.”
>We were truly in bluegrass country, I thought. Stopping for lunch and errands in Charlotte, Tom pointed out the hotel where RCA Victor had recorded the Monroe Brothers and many others during the thirties.
We reached the Shelby Star office in the early afternoon and met Joe DePriest, who gave us a quick introduction to the local cultural landscape. A leisurely drive took us to the Cleveland County Historical Museum (lots of famous people there, mainly mill owners), the graveyard, and past the old Lily Mills building in the neighborhood where Earl Scruggs lived while working there. Heading south towards Boiling Springs, we drove past Flint Hill Church. Joe promised Horace would give us a tour of this neighborhood, where Earl grew up, later.
At G-W, I met Dr. Brown, who showed me my room and filled me in on the evening’s itinerary. A group of us involved in tomorrow’s event would be getting acquainted over dinner at Kelly’s Steakhouse, just across the South Carolina line near Blacksburg. At 5:30 we all met outside G-W’s Dover Library to drive there. Here I met Horace Scruggs and his wife Maida. I wrote in my diary:
Earl’s older brother Horace turned out to be a very friendly and easy-going person, not as shy and quiet as Earl, though with (not surprisingly) a very similar voice and accent. His wife, Maida (pronounced May-Ida), is also very friendly. Horace is retired, he worked as a maintenance man for Gardner-Webb and later for the city of Boiling Springs. He is on the Earl Scruggs celebration committee.
Joe and I rode with the Scruggses that night. We both asked questions. I made notes during our drive and dinner. I began by mentioning that Louise had told me Flatt & Scruggs had once played at G-W.
I asked about that and Horace said, yes, they did, that he thought it was when they were working out of Bristol (May 1948 to March 1949, according to my calculations), around 1950. It was a spur of the moment thing, in midweek, and there was not much advertising and not a full house. The crowd was a mixture of townspeople and local students.
Over dinner I asked him a bit about his own musical career.
… he didn’t try music because he didn’t think he could make a living at it. He married in 1941 and went into the army soon after that. His father played clawhammer banjo, and he remembers being awakened in the morning by the sound of his father’s banjo. His father would build a fire in the stove and then play the banjo. Earl and Horace would come in and sit on his knees while he played.
He told me about running the farm after his father died in 1930:
They grew cotton — a crop was 3 bales a year, which they sold at 36 cents a pound (bale is 500 lbs, so that works out to $540.00 a year). They grew corn for feed and meal. Had a mule and a buggy which was originally rubber tired but eventually they ran it on the rims.
He was Earl’s first guitar accompanist, so I asked him if people thought Earl was special as a musician back then.
He said yes, they did, people would come by the house to hear him pick, etc. And when he was still quite young, they entered a banjo contest and Earl beat Snuffy Jenkins. Of course, as Horace was quick to point out, part of this had to do with his age, the youngsters have an advantage in those contests where audience applause decides the issue.
Earl and his mother moved into Shelby when Horace went into the Army, and Earl went to work at Lily Mills.
Earl had been turned down for the draft because he had a nervous stomach. He worked long hours for the mill but later on in the war he would take time off to play music at various places, and, as Horace recalls, was repeatedly lectured by his boss for wasting his time playing the banjo when he should be working to better himself at the mill. His mother was, Horace said, not happy either about Earl’s musical career and just as he was dropping us off at the Library, he told us that his mother had made a prediction which came true that he, Horace, had never told Earl: she said when he left to play professionally that “when I die, he won’t be able to come to my funeral.” And this happened — Earl and Louise were in an accident rushing to her bedside, she died while they were in hospital recovering.
After dinner Horace spoke of Earl’s adventures on the road:
He told me that Earl roomed with Uncle Dave Macon when he traveled to shows with Monroe and the band, and that Uncle Dave always carried with him an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel in which he kept one of his own country hams. He slept on it, used it as a pillow. And he would take it into restaurants, have it sliced and fried for him.
Talk turned to local foodways and Maida and Horace told us about livermush.
This local delicacy consists of hog’s liver and lean hog meat ground and fried, with corn meal, salt and pepper added to taste (some people add a lot of pepper, the seasoning is very personalized); left to harden, it is then sliced and fried. They said Earl eats it, and other natives crave it. It’s found on a north/south line from Blacksburg north to the Virginia border. One native son who now lives in Oregon has a special metal suitcase which he fills with frozen livermush and flies it home with him on yearly visits. It is served at the Snack Shop in Boiling Springs, which is where Earl and Lester and the boys used to stop for meals when travelling though this neck of the woods. Joe remembers seeing the bus there when he was a student, it was no big deal at the time.
As I walked home with Tom and Carol after dinner I proposed that we go for breakfast in the morning to the Snack Shop and see about getting livermush.
They thought I was overenthusiastic I think but they agreed to go.
On October 3, 2020, during IBMA’s Virtual World of Bluegrass, I watched the Bluegrass Situation‘s presentation of Shout & Shine Online, the fifth annual showcasecelebrating equity and inclusion in bluegrass and roots music. This year it featured Black performers, including Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, the blues, folk, bluegrass, and jazz multi-instrumentalist and vocalist from South Los Angeles. Not only do I enjoy his music, I also relish his asides and introductions. He knows a lot about musical sources, histories and meanings.
Introducing his music, Paxton explained that “ragtime” was the word people in his home community used to describe what others might call “old-time” or “traditional” — music that rekindled a shared past. At neighborhood and family social gatherings, he said, people would ask for his music by saying, “Play some of that ragtime music!”
For many people ragtime evokes the aural image of a piano played in the style of early 20th century composer Scott Joplin, an African American whose “Maple Leaf Rag” starred in the soundtrack of the 1973 hit film The Sting. (Paxton performed an arrangement of “Maple Leaf Rag” on five-string banjo for his Shout & Shine Online set.) The basic structure of this solo piano music involves the left hand keeping the rhythm often with large leaps in the bass register — often referred to as “stride” — while the right hand plays syncopated melody on the upper register.
In this form, ragtime is thought of as an urban phenomenon, straddling the border between popular and classical, and as the musical precursor of jazz. Joplin, for instance, composed an opera in 1911, and Julliard piano professor Joshua Rifkin’s 1971 LP of Joplin’s works earned a Grammy nomination. Pioneer jazz pianists like Jelly Roll Morton included ragtime in their repertoires.
Ragtime had another manifestation in the southeast, where Black musicians adapted it to the guitar in a fingerpicking style. Here, the right hand did all the work: the thumb picking the rhythm on the bass strings while the index and middle fingers ragged the tune on the higher strings.
The guitar was more affordable and portable than the piano. Ragtime guitar was featured by early 20th century itinerant musicians like Arnold Shultz in western Kentucky and Blind Boy Fuller in North Carolina. But it was not just the music of popular entertainment, it was also, as Paxton explained, social community music, performed for friends and neighbors.
In 1957, ragtime fingerpicking was a “new thing” within the folk music world that I was becoming acquainted with as a college student. I switched from nylon- to steel-string guitar and started wearing picks on my right hand. One of the recordings popular with us at Oberlin College was a track Peggy Seeger fingerpicked and sang on her 1955 Folkways LP, Songs of Courting and Complaint: “Freight Train.” She’d learned the song and its guitar accompaniment from the Black woman who worked as her family’s maid, North Carolinian Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, its composer.
In 1958 Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten’s first album for Folkways. “Freight Train,” already her best-known song, was on it:
Another tune we were trying to fingerpick in our dorm rooms and dining hall jam sessions was “Railroad Bill.” That song had been recorded by Virginia multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso Hobart Smith back in the ’40s.
“Discovered” at the White Top (Virginia) folk festival in 1936, Smith and his sister, singer Texas Gladden, subsequently performed at the White House and were recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax in 1942. In 1946, Lomax introduced Hobart to New York record company owner Moses Asch. One of Asch’s new Disc label 78s launched Smith’s version of “Railroad Bill” into aural tradition among ’50s fingerpickers. Lomax recorded Smith again in 1959:
Smith had studied and learned fiddle and banjo with African American musician neighbors at a time when the realities of segregation forced him and his friends to visit them surreptitiously. He was inspired to take up the guitar when he saw an itinerant Black bluesman, whom he identified as Blind Lemon Jefferson.
“Railroad Bill” was a well-known song in the southeast. Another song with a similar melody was “The Cannon Ball,” which Maybelle Carter of the famous Carter Family learned from Burnsville, North Carolina, native Lesley Riddle. In the late twenties and early thirties Riddle, an African American, accompanied A.P. Carter on song collecting trips and taught the family several songs they later recorded. Here’s a 1936 radio transcription of Maybelle singing and picking “The Cannon Ball”:
Mike Seeger recorded Riddle several times between 1965 and 1978; in 1993 Rounder issued a CD with 14 performances, including “The Cannon Ball”:
Riddle’s version, with its C to E chord change, is even closer to “Railroad Bill” than Maybelle’s. But in the mid-’50s, when I first became interested in this tune, no LP recordings of it were available.
That changed in 1956, when a new version of “Railroad Bill” was released on an album, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. The first piece on the “B” side, it was fingerpicked by Mrs. Etta Baker:
By the time I arrived at Oberlin College in 1957 it was an underground favorite; the hip older students spoke about trying to play like Mrs. Etta Baker. Copies of the album were passed around.
This album was on the new folk music label Tradition. Based in New York, Tradition hit the ground running in 1956 with at least 14 albums representing Greenwich Village trends in the mid-’50s folk revival: lots of ballads, plenty of Irish and English singers, popular radio performers, folklore collectors, flamenco artists, new concert sensations, and two albums of field recordings in the style of Folkways — one from Ireland, and this one from Appalachia. The recordings for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians were made by Tradition owner Diane Hamilton along with Liam Clancy and Paul Clayton in the summer of 1956.
Diane Hamilton was the pseudonym of Diane Guggenheim (1924–1991), an American mining heiress with a lifelong interest in traditional music, particularly Irish. At the time of the recording, Liam Clancy, soon to become part of the famous Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, had just arrived in New York, following an attachment with Hamilton. His brother Paddy was president of her new company.
New Englander Paul Clayton had studied folklore at the University of Virginia while pursuing a career as a folksinger. He recorded many albums from the mid-’50s until his troubled life ended in 1967 at the age of 36. Today he’s perhaps best known as a songwriter. His “Gotta Travel On” was a country hit in 1958, and his friend Bob Dylan borrowed from one of his songs to compose “Don’t Think Twice.” In 1956 Tradition had just released Paul’s album, Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick.
In his notes for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, Clayton described the album as “the result of a folk-song collecting trip during the Summer of 1956.” Hamilton and Clancy had recently arrived in New York from Ireland; Clancy was keen on collecting southern folk songs, and Clayton, who’d done a lot of that, was the obvious choice for expert guide.
The three met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and headed west for a collecting trip to Appalachia. Their exact itinerary is unknown, but they went as far west as Beech Mountain, the highest point in the eastern U.S., well-known for its folk traditions. There they recorded folktale collector and performer Richard Chase doing three old-time dance tunes on the harmonica. In nearby Banner Elk, Mrs. Edd Presnell played three old-time tunes on her Appalachian dulcimer — an instrument then rarely heard on recordings that Clayton had studied and used in his performances.
The trio also visited Hobart Smith in his Saltville, Virginia, home, seventy miles north of Beech Mountain, recording four fiddle tunes and one banjo piece.
Their travel also took them to Blowing Rock, about a 25 mile drive from Beech Mountain, where they stopped in at the Moses H. Cone Mansion (also known as Flat Top Manor) a popular regional park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Etta Baker, her father Boone Reid, and other family members were vacationing in the area, visiting the mansion. Reid, a musician himself, noticed Clayton was toting a guitar. He told Clayton of Baker’s musical talent and asked him to listen to Etta play her signature, “One Dime Blues.” According to Baker, “Paul was amazed. He got directions to our home and he was over the next day with his tape-recorder along with Liam Clancy and Diane Hamilton.”
They recorded five pieces. “Later,” says Clayton, “We met more of… a very talented family living in Morganton or Gamewell,” and they recorded two banjo pieces each by Boone Reid, then 79 years old, and Etta’s brother-in-law, her sister Cora Phillips’ husband Lacey.
Clayton’s notes indicate that they recorded “considerable instrumental material,” from which they chose “typical and best-performed” examples. This considerable material subsequently disappeared, leaving us today with only the album’s 20 tracks.
These include many familiar pieces from the local old-time repertoire. By following Harry Smith’s precedent in not identifying the color of performers’ skin, Clayton made the point that these musical traditions were regional, not racial. Perhaps since dulcimer player Mrs. Presnell’s first name was not given, all of the musicians were identified on the album notes as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” This lent an air of respect to the names of people often described elsewhere as “informants.”
Because of her fine guitar playing Mrs. Etta Baker was, for us, the most memorable performer on the album. A word of explanation — Mr. Hobart Smith was a fine fiddler, but in 1956 the fiddle hadn’t caught on in the folk revival. That wouldn’t start to happen until a few years later when the New Lost City Ramblers appeared.
With the exception of Smith, who led a string band for a while, the folks on this album made music as part of their social life, playing for their own enjoyment and that of family and friends. Sometimes they provided music for dancing — square dancing, and solo step dancing.
Here’s a good example of ragtime guitar used for solo step dancing: Earl Scruggs playing “Georgia Buck” live in 1961.
Another version was released in 1964 on the The Fabulous Sound of Flatt & Scruggs (Col CL 2255/CS 9055). The album notes say: “Georgia Buck, played by Scruggs on the guitar, represents the rhythmic beat of the old-time buck dancers.”
According to NCPedia, “buck dancing is a folk dance that originated among African Americans during the era of slavery. It was largely associated with the North Carolina Piedmont and, later, with the blues. The original buck dance, or ‘buck and wing,’ referred to a specific step performed by solo dancers, usually men; today the term encompasses a broad variety of improvisational dance steps.”
The Traditional Tune Archive describes “Georgia Buck” as “a black Southern banjo song,” so it’s interesting that Earl played it on the guitar in a style resembling that of Baker, Smith, Riddle and Carter. Where did he learn it that way? We don’t know, but Lester makes a point of describing his music as “hot” during the video and other musicians can be heard saying the same thing off-camera, seemingly endorsing the idea that this is good ragtime.
There are many stories of young white southern musicians learning from older black musicians in their hometown. One example: In 1972-73, Kenny Baker, then playing fiddle with Bill Monroe, did two albums with Buck Graves of guitar fingerpicking he’d learned from his brother, who’d taken lessons from “Earnest Johnson, a blind, black guitarist who sold peanuts in Jenkins, Kentucky during the thirties.” Rebel reissued them in 1989 as The Puritan Sessions (CD 1108).
Listening to Etta Baker on Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians was as close to taking lessons in that style of guitar as most of us undergrad folkies got. After the release of the album, she was not heard again on records for many years. Like Libba Cotten, Baker was a working woman with little time for making music. By the time she retired in 1973 from the Skyland Textile mill in Morganton, North Carolina, she’d endured family tragedies — the deaths of her husband and a son. After retirement she began accepting requests to perform and her music career developed. More about that next time…
I came to North Carolina three decades ago, as music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, knowing very little about the state’s music. Yes, I was plugged into the college-radio end of the spectrum, from Let’s Active to The Connells, and I’d at least heard of Doc and Earl (Watson and Scruggs, respectively). But there was a lot more to it, obviously, and the joy of my career was figuring out that North Carolina’s many disparate strains — old-time and bluegrass, blues and country, rock and pop, soul and r&b, jazz and hip-hop, and of course beach music — were all part of one big story.
As we’ve tried to convey with the book’s subtitle, it involves a wide range of music, from the roots music of bluegrass forefather Charlie Poole and bluegrass-banjo inventor Earl Scruggs to Ben Folds Five’s “punk rock for sissies,” super-producer/deejay 9th Wonder’s hip-hop to the Avett Brothers’ post-punk folk-rock. And what ties all of it together? Glad you asked! The narrative thread running through Step It Up and Go is working-class populism, a deeply rooted North Carolina tradition that runs into the present day. The simple detail of how to earn a living is a pretty prominent feature of each chapter, starting with the four acts in the subtitle.
Fuller (whose 1940 Piedmont blues classic provides my book’s title) and Watson were both blind men who turned to music as a way to provide for their families when few other avenues were available. Eunice Waymon’s plans to be a classical pianist were derailed and she had to start singing pop songs in nightclubs for a living, taking the name Nina Simone because she knew her Methodist preacher mother would not approve. And Superchunk is a punk band known for the 1989 wage-slave anthem “Slack Motherfucker” — and also for running Merge Records, one of the most improbably successful record companies of modern times.
Across genres, the state’s musicians have a proud, idealistic pragmatism that manifests as a certain mindset in which North Carolina is “The Dayjob State.” It’s an outlook that a lot of our state’s greatest artists retain even after music stops being a hobby and they go pro. Two of the state’s best-known Piedmont blues players, Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (of “Freight Train” fame) and master guitarist Etta Baker, had amazing careers as musicians even though they didn’t seriously pursue it until they were both in their 60s. Pastor Shirley Caesar was even older, pushing 80, when she had a viral hit with her old chestnut “Hold My Mule.”
In the modern era, Carolina Chocolate Drops alumnus Rhiannon Giddens has run her career as a lifelong learning experience, involving academic research as well as performing, bringing long-forgotten or even unknown history and ancestors to light in the 21st century. With her creative work spanning from Our Native Daughters to an original opera score, Giddens honors her musical roots while retaining a spirit of collaboration, as many North Carolina musicians have done before her.
Or consider the aforementioned Doc Watson, who died in 2012 as one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians. A flatpicking legend who played guitar better than almost anyone else ever had, he nevertheless carried himself with a self-deprecating nonchalance; he just never seemed as impressed with himself as the rest of the world was. Barry Poss, whose Durham-based bluegrass label Sugar Hill Records released 13 of Watson’s albums over the years, used to express his frustration over Watson’s retiring nature and habit of deferring to other players even though there was never a time when he wasn’t the best musician in the room.
But that didn’t hurt Watson’s legacy in the slightest, and maybe it was just his way of dealing with the world. Jack Lawrence, one of Watson’s longtime accompanists, once told me that if he had been sighted, Watson probably would have been a carpenter or mechanic while picking for fun on weekends. Turns out that Doc was a homebody who would rather have spent more time at home in Deep Gap.
“Ask Doc how he wants to be remembered, and guitar-playing really doesn’t enter into it,” Lawrence said. “He’d rather be remembered just as the good ol’ boy down the road.”
Like the rest of North Carolina’s cast of musical characters, he’s remembered for that and a whole lot more.
Doc Watson needleprint, fashioned out of upholstery fabric samples by artist/musician Caitlin Cary in 2017. (Photo by Scott Sharpe.)
While the late great Arthel “Doc” Watson released scores of albums over the course of his career, he only made the main Billboard charts once and peaked at a modest 193 (for his 1975 album, Memories). But Watson made a far bigger mark as a performer, often in some unusual settings — from the most prestigious concert stages down to humble living rooms.
Even though Watson wasn’t a huge record seller, few artists in the history of American music ever generated more transcendent moments. He remains revered as one of the best flatpick guitarists of all time, and MerleFest (the festival he founded in memory of his late son) stands as an essential acoustic-music event.
Here are some of Watson’s signature moments of performance, captured for the ages. (Listen to the playlist below.)
“Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” – The Three Pickers: Earl Scruggs/Doc Watson/Ricky Skaggs, 2003
We begin with a collaboration between Watson and his fellow North Carolina legend, master of the bluegrass banjo Earl Scruggs, with the old Flatt & Scruggs warhorse “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” — the closing track from the live album they recorded together in Winston-Salem in 2002. The picking is as hot as you’d expect, especially on this track where Ricky Skaggs urges a solo by calling out, “Try one, Doc!” He gets gone.
“Railroad Bill” – Legacy, 2002
Legacy was the Grammy-winning retrospective album Watson made with his longtime, late-period accompanist David Holt, with songs and stories going all the way back to his earliest days playing music. The package includes a live show recorded in Asheville, North Carolina in 2001, with one of his best-ever versions of the Etta Baker Piedmont blues classic “Railroad Bill.” Watson could indeed play about as fast as a runaway train, and this features some of his swiftest guitar runs ever captured.
“Corrina” – Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton, 2020
Watson’s newest release is this live recording of some of his earliest shows in New York City, 1962 in Greenwich Village, when he was one of the rising stars of the budding folk revival. Watson performs here with his father-in-law, the renowned old-time fiddler Gaither Carlton. But what’s really notable is that Watson is playing banjo in the old style rather than guitar. It turns out he was almost as formidable on five strings as six.
“Tennessee Stud” – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, 1972
This Americana landmark captured a revolutionary moment, an intergenerational, country-rock summit with the Dirt Band on one side and the country/folk/bluegrass establishment on the other. And it wasn’t live onstage, but live in the studio, with the tape machine left running to record between-song conversations. That captured some of Watson’s priceless homespun pearls (“That’s a horse’s foot in the gravel, man, that ain’t a train!”), as well as what stands as his definitive recording of this stately, well-worn standard. “Tennessee Stud” made Watson a star all over again to yet another generation of roots-music enthusiasts.
“I Am a Pilgrim” – Doc Watson on Stage, featuring Merle Watson, 1971
Watson had many fine accompanists over the years, but none better than his son Merle, who was always on Doc’s wavelength. Ever modest, Doc always claimed that Merle was the better player. He was, of course, wrong about that, but Merle was a great picker in his own right. Recorded live at Cornell University, this is an excellent version of the old spiritual that also appeared on Circle. “I Am a Pilgrim” would remain an evolving onstage set piece for Doc over the years. After Merle’s tragic death in 1985, Doc would customize the lyrics in performance: “I’ve got a mother, a sister and a brother and a son, they done gone on to that other shore.”
“Blue Smoke” – Doc Watson at Gerdes Folk City, 2001
Another track drawn from one of Watson’s early-period excursions up to New York City, this was recorded during 1962-63 engagements at the legendary Gerdes Folk City nightclub. And this cover of the instrumental by Merle Travis (for whom Doc named his son) is aptly named. When he really got to cooking, Watson could play guitar so fast he just about left a vapor trail.
“Every Day Dirt” (from The Watson Family, 1963)
Ralph Rinzler, the musicologist who first discovered Doc in the early 1960s, recorded this album live at the Watson family homestead in North Carolina. It captures some of what life must have been like growing up singing and playing with Doc; son Merle, wife Rosa Lee and father-in-law Gaither Carlton are among the relatives present. “Every Day Dirt” shows off just how personable a vocalist Watson could be, although as always the real draw is the obligatory killer guitar-picking.
“The Cuckoo Bird” – The Watson Family, 1963
From that same recording, Doc plays guitar accompanied by his son Merle on banjo, covering the old Clarence “Tom” Ashley song that appeared on Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music. Thanks to the familial radar that comes when blood relatives play together, the instrumental interplay is perfect. This is also a great example at Watson’s mastery of the art of call-and-response between his guitar and voice.
“What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” – Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Live Recordings 1963-1980: Off the Record Volume 2
Watson’s modesty was such that his natural inclination was to regard himself as a sideman — even though he was rarely if ever not the best picker and singer in the room. But he plays the role of foil perfectly here, vocally as well as instrumentally, to Monroe’s rippling mandolin and high lonesome tenor on this live version of the first song The Father of Bluegrass ever recorded.
Before he started playing guitar, Watson’s first childhood instrument was actually a harmonica, which he wore out so fast from playing it so much, his parents had to give him another one at Christmas. A new harmonica became a perennial favorite gift. This version of the venerable folk-music classic features Watson blowing a mean harmonica and his descending runs on guitar are also a thing of beauty.
We close with a bit of a wild card, in that it’s a performance by someone else. But it’s one in which the presence of Watson’s spirit looms large enough to be felt. “Your Lone Journey” is a song that Doc and Rosa Lee wrote, and it bids a poignant farewell to a loved one at the moment of death. It is performed here by Watson’s fellow North Carolinians Steep Canyon Rangers, recorded on the main Doc Watson Stage to close out the 2019 MerleFest.
Editor’s Note: David Menconi’s Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk will be published in October by University of North Carolina Press.
For cellist Leyla McCalla, everything begins with rhythm. On the titular single off her sophomore album — ADay for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey — the formally trained McCalla takes her bow, drawing it back like an arrow and embodying for a moment the song’s noted hunter before releasing it in quick, short bursts that suggest a ballooning urgency. McCalla’s approach twists the cello’s low, luscious timbre to produce a different, but equally physical, effect on the listener. As a composer, her technique defies the traditions that shaped her musical foundation, helping her tell more nuanced stories as a result. The song, based on a Haitian proverb, recounts two narratives almost simultaneously — cello and banjo on the one hand; a second cello and fiddle on the other. Instead of devolving into a cacophony, the stories find their nexus, a point that echoes throughout the album and McCalla’s life.
Both literally and figuratively, McCalla’s music exhibits a web of spatial exchange, particular histories bumping up against one another in ways that reveal their convergences. If her first album, 2013’s Vari-Colored Strings, involved original compositions set to Langston Hughes’ poetry — a dialogue between past and present — her newest work moves beyond that tête-à-tête to exhibit a more polyvocal quality. Not only does McCalla sing in Haitian Creole, French, and English, but she also draws on old folk songs, proverbs, and more to shape A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey. That kind of complexity makes sense coming from a Haitian-American musician who grew up in New Jersey, spent time in Ghana, and settled in New Orleans in 2010. Not finding herself in the traditional American landscape, McCalla unearthed her layered identity through a process of self-discovery that largely came to fruition in the Crescent City. After feeling an unusually tangible connection to the city — one bolstered by discovering many family names in its cemeteries — McCalla began researching Haiti and its connection to Louisiana. As a result, she hit upon the ways in which her identity cannot be confined to one explanation, one story. Her music is the result of those many utterances.
While you primarily play cello, you also play guitar and tenor banjo. How do these timbres embody your identity or your perspective?
The cello has all these different roles it can play, musically, and I think that’s one of the things I really like about it. I tend to play the cello like a rhythm instrument. In a recording situation, I’ll overdub, if I’m using the bow. And even sometimes when I’m using the bow, I’m still playing it like it’s a rhythm instrument. I think I play all of those instruments very rhythmically and, in composing and writing songs, I’m always thinking of those instruments as the ground for the song. It’s a different sort of conceptualization of the music, I think, because I’m not trying to fit into the classical context; it gives me a lot more freedom.
When I first heard [“Day for the Hunter…”], I thought, “Maybe I should play that with a bass drum.” Then I thought, “Well, what if I could experiment with the cello being that sound?” I felt like it was very percussive, so I’m bouncing the bow on the string, and that’s kind of how that song was born. I heard the rhythmic structure for it before completing the lyrics and the melody.
You’ve said before how, growing up, you felt disconnected because you identified as a Haitian-American, but didn’t see that reflected in the United States. How has New Orleans helped ground you by giving you a more physical sense of where you came from and who you are?
I think that’s just it. Being here in New Orleans has given me a very physical sense of place, in terms of my heritage. It’s said very often that New Orleans is the northernmost city in the Caribbean, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. The more I stay here, the more I see all of these parallels between the culture of New Orleans and the culture of Haiti. Last weekend was Super Sunday and, Saturday night in the neighborhood, the Mardi Gras Indians came out, and we got to watch them parade and battle each other. It was so intense, but it reminded me of the Rara bands. The rhythm is almost the same. It kind of comes from the same place, like spiritually and culturally.
When I moved to New Orleans, I was like, “Huh, what’s going on here?” Some of these things feel so familiar, so I read a lot of books and did a lot of research and I was like, “Wow, how did I not know that there was a mass migration of people from Haiti to Louisiana in the 1700s during the Haitian Revolution? Why wasn’t I told that? Why isn’t that more talked about?” I remember going to St. Louis Cemetery and seeing my family’s names. That kind of tripped me out.
What an interesting way in which your history found you.
Yeah, and beyond that, I feel like myself here. I feel this sense of belonging that I never really felt up north, and I never felt in New York, and I never felt when I was growing up in New Jersey, and not in Ghana when I lived in West Africa. I think there’s something to that. That, in and of itself, is really inspiring to me. I feel so curious about what’s really going on here in terms of the history, but also in terms of how I understand what’s happening in our society and in our culture now. This album is definitely born out of a lot of curiosity and processing of those things.
Speaking of the album, what kind of narrative legacy do you want to leave for your daughter?
It’s a hard question because there are so many things I want to say. I want her to not feel the limitations that so many people feel now. It scares me that she could grow up feeling that, because she’s a woman or because she’s biracial or because she’s Black or whatever. I want her to understand the things that other people have had to live through and I hope that she doesn’t have to live through to have her freedom. I think it’s important to understand; I think it’s important to know the history and have that as a reference for things that are happening in our society today. I think it’s idealistic to think she won’t experience the pain of prejudice of racism or misogyny in her lifetime. I think that would be naïve, but I hope she’s more prepared than I was to face those things and to know how to deal with them.
I would imagine it kind of unfolds as she gets older, too.
Yeah, I think you have certain experiences in your life that are bigger teachers than any book that you can read or anything that anyone can tell you. That will really be part of her learning process is her life experiences.
Do you see your music providing her with a bit of that legwork? As if you’re able to say through your albums, “Here’s where we are and who we are and where we came from. I hope this helps inform you in some way.”
Definitely. Working on this album, as a new mother, that was so close to my heart and on my mind throughout the whole process, since she was physically not far from me, because I was still nursing. There are a lot of songs that were addressed specifically to a mother or to a child that came up on the record, because I feel like the challenge of figuring out survival in our world, it starts really early — it starts with your relationship with your parents. That comes up for me a lot, in thinking about this record. The thing about these songs is that, yeah, this is something I can share with her and talk about.
What a neat conversation piece around the dinner table.
That’s the fun thing about making a record. This is going to last past my existence and past her existence, and hopefully it’s something she can pass on to her kids, if she decides to have kids. Even if it sucks, I would love to hear the music that my grandmother made. The music industry can make you feel like, “Oh God, what am I doing with my life?” But the creative side of it is really magical and gratifying, and will exist for a while.
What have you learned between your debut and sophomore albums?
Oh, man. I learned a lot. I think when you release an album, you tour it when you’re pregnant, and then get married, and have a baby, and then record another album, it’s impossible not to feel like, “Oh God, I’m learning too much!”
Did you have time to stop and take it all in?
I think it’s hard. I’ve had time to stop physically, but mentally, it’s hard to stop and take it in, and especially me. I’m always, “What’s next? What’s next?” We travel so much with my daughter on the road, and my husband and I started playing music together, so there’s a big learning curve there. I feel lucky to work with the people that I’m working with, and I feel I learn a lot from the musicians that I work with about music, about respect, about self-respect, about how to take care of yourself, about how to stay diligent in your work, which I think is a true challenge as a parent. Your time is just not the same anymore.
Well, it’s a consideration and a responsibility of someone else’s time.
Right. I feel I’m still trying to learn what opportunities to be okay passing on, and what opportunities to take. Luckily, I have a team of people around me that I can trust, that I can express myself with and truly be heard. That’s very important, I think. I feel, in some ways, I’m a lot more organized and engaged than I was before. Now I know more of the questions to ask about how we’re planning things, and how to get this music out into the world in a way that feels that it’s the right way.
And also just how to not be afraid to say, “Hey, I don’t really understand what you’re saying. Can you say that again?” I think — especially as women — we’re not taught to be comfortable with that, because you have the pressure on you to know how to deal with the world, and I think just being engaged and willing to stand up for yourself and say, “Hey, this is making no sense. Explain it to me or fix it” — that’s pretty empowering. I think it’s something that’s come a little bit easier to me since becoming a mother, because I have that instinctiveness, like, “I can’t really bullshit right now. I don’t have the time to be cute and please you right now.”
Right, so “Get to the point and let’s get going.”
Exactly. In some ways, motherhood is very empowering, as difficult as it can be and challenging in all these other ways. I feel I’m less afraid and really realizing that I’m a full-grown woman and this is my time to not try to be cute and hide what I think or what I feel. It’s very valid. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. I guess you have to learn.
You do, but thank goodness you’re learning now instead of 20 years from now.
I know! Think of how many artists … the Darlene Love story comes to mind … you know that film 20 Feet from Stardom, and just her not getting credit for all the creative work she did when she was 16? What gives?
Etta Baker — whose music I love and I’ve learned a bunch of her songs on guitar and gotten into that style of music — didn’t record hardly anything until she was in her 60s, and it was because her husband didn’t want her playing music. God, I can’t imagine. I would be divorced immediately. I guess it wouldn’t happen because my husband plays in my band, but yeah. It’s mind-blowing how far we’ve come in some ways, and how much further we still have to go.
Your last album drew upon Langston Hughes’s work, and your new album incorporates a variety of writing, like folk songs and proverbs. What kind of writing strikes you the most?
I think that I am drawn to those things that speak to me immediately, or the things that kind of make my mind turn over and over again. I felt that way about Hughes’s poetry. I feel that way so much about Haitian music. And I feel that way so much about Louisiana music, and so many other things, as well. Reading the biographies of Nina Simone and Bessie Smith … these women who were true pioneers and really sort of paved the way for me to be onstage — me and so many other artists. Reading about their lives and the decisions that they made, and how many children they had, and how they felt at that time, and what they lived through. Those are the things that really inspire me and motivate me. It’s not limited to Black artists or Black expression, but I feel that’s so much a part of my experience as an American it’s hard for me to not think of those things immediately.
I also read the Loretta Lynn biography. I love reading women musician biographies. Like, “God, how do we do this? How does it happen?” She’s like, “There’s no simple task.” It helps me remember that because, when you’re young and you think, “I’m going to be a musician; I’ll just meet the right people and things will just click into place.” And it’s like, “No, you still have to do that creative and spiritual work that feeds your art and feeds your craft” — like how to stay inspired in the face of having to pay your rent or your mortgage or find a daycare center for your kid, or figure out how to get health insurance. All those things. That’s the great balancing act. How to take care of yourself and your family, and also stay inspired and stay creative, and live your life in this way. That, I feel, is a big question for me, and I’m always answering through my work in some way.
ICYMI, 2016 was a great year for new roots music — go check out our BGS Class of 2016: Albums feature, if you need some convincin'. We were introduced to Courtney Marie Andrews, gifted with a solo album from Amanda Shires, floored by Brandy Clark's sophomore solo effort, and so very much more. Lucky for us, 2016 was also a big year for roots reissues, so those of you playing along at home who have more of a "get off my lawn" approach to listening to music have plenty to be happy about, too. And we've rounded up a handful of this year's reissues that we can't stop spinning.
Etta Baker, Railroad Bill
It's no secret that we at the BGS love Music Maker Relief Foundation, a North Carolina-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving Southern music. One of the many wonderful things they did in 2016 was reissuing Etta Baker's excellent Railroad Bill on vinyl. If experiencing Baker's take on Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" in all its analog glory isn't enough of a draw, perhaps the never-before-seen digital videos that accompany the piece are.
J.D. Crowe and the New South, 0044
One of the most beloved bluegrass albums of all time came from a band that was around for less than a year. That album, nicknamed 0044 after being assigned the number by label Rounder Records, was the sole project of J.D. Crowe and the New South, features musicians like Gordon Lightfoot and Rodney Crowell, and counted Alison Krauss and her band as fans. It was re-released as an expanded vinyl edition on Record Store Day in April. If you're interested in learning the history of this iconic release, Rounder Records founder Bill Nowlin wrote a three-part series about 0044 for us earlier this year. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Trio, The Complete Trio Collection
Oh man, where do we even begin with this one. Dolly, Emmylou, AND Linda? On not one but TWO albums? With bonus demos and unreleased songs? We mere mortals don't deserve it, but we'll sure as hell take it.
Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, The Complete Capitol Singles: 1957-1966
This new collection from Omnivore pulls together 56 of the songs that made Buck Owens a legend, and packages them up all nice and remastered. A liner note introduction written by Dwight Yoakam is the icing on top of this sweet, twangy cake.
The New Kentucky Colonels, Live in Sweden 1973
This sought-after live album from the New Kentucky Colonels has been out of print since 1976, but now it's finally available, and with additional content, to boot. Some 26 tracks chronicle two nights in Stockholm — a big step up from the original LP's 14 songs.
Junior Kimbrough, Meet Me in the City
It was the year of the reissue for Fat Possum Records, who released 30 different blues titles to vinyl in 2016. One of those albums was Junior Kimbrough's Meet Me in the City, a compilation of some of the Mississippi bluesman's greatest tunes, released one year after he passed away from a heart attack at the age of 67 in 1998.
Growing up in Nashville, there were guitar heroes pretty much on every corner. There still are, and a lot of them are younger than me. A lot more are older. I wanted to share some tunes by some of my favorite players then, now, and at points in between. — William Tyler
Chet Atkins — "The Entertainer" When I was in elementary school, we took a music appreciation class where our teacher played us a good amount of Scott Joplin. He was one of my first music heroes and I have always remained drawn to interpretations of his work. Naturally, I had to include a Chet Atkins song on this mix, right? Mr. Guitar? So here is his take on "The Entertainer."
Ry Cooder — "Why Don't You Try Me" The intro to this song sums up almost everything I find so sublime about Ry Cooder. The way he is able to invert chords up and down the neck in such a fluid way, almost like the fluctuations of a choir. And, of course, perfect tone.
Nic Jones — "Planxty Davis" There are a quite a few great pickers and friends out there (I think Nathan Salsburg, among them) who would agree with me in saying that this is one of the all-time great guitar instrumentals. Sort of like "Sleepwalk" by Santo and Johnny for the British folk crowd.
Mary Halvorson — "Cheshire Hotel" Mary Halvorson is one of our great contemporary guitar visionaries. She uses classical jazz voicing and method, but veers into the outer regions just as quickly and does it with so much expression and originality.
Norman Blake — "Northern Winds" This is a special one for me. It is in fact on a Steve Earle album called Train a Comin', but Earle obviously respects Norman Blake's playing enough to give him his own track. I remember hearing this as a kid because my dad had this record and I was totally mesmerized by this song. It's probably the first time I ever heard a guitar instrumental and thought, "I wish I could write something like that."
Robert Wilkins — "That's No Way to Get Along" This got reworked by the Rolling Stones as "Prodigal Son" and it led me back to the original. Wilkins is one of my favorite of the Delta blues players.
Etta Baker — "Carolina Breakdown" The Mississippi Delta styles of playing have always been an influence on me, but the Piedmont style of the Carolinas and Georgia was always a bigger one. Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotten, and Etta Baker — Piedmont players always had a grasp of ragtime that fascinated me and offered a good lesson in learning a style of counterpoint as a finger picker. I love this song. It originally appeared on a compilation called Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians.
Sonny Sharrock — "Blind Willie" One of my favorite guitar records ever is Black Woman by avant jazz legend Sonny Sharrock. It's mostly a barrage of frantic ensemble playing, like Albert Ayler with a guitar. But this short instrumental serves as a beautiful interlude, and it reminds me of an Appalachian dulcimer tune.
Joe Pass — "Autumn Leaves" When I took some rudimentary jazz lessons years ago, "Autumn Leaves" was one of the first songs I learned. Joe Pass is, to me, the noble giant of solo jazz guitar, and this is his stunning version of that tune.
Sandy Bull — "Carmina Burana Fantasy" Sandy Bull was another important formative influence on my playing. He had a knack for reinterpreting pieces of music, sometimes on an unorthodox instrument. Here is his take on Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" or, as someone else described it, "the most overused piece of music in history."
Luiz Bonfa — "Scottish March" I had to include something by Bonfa, whose Solo in Rio is another all-time favorite guitar record. This piece has the same kind of modal drone that you hear in Sharrock's "Blind Willie," and I love the middle section where Bonfa uses the body of the guitar to imitate marching drum sounds.
Noveller — "Concrete Dreams" Noveller is the name under which guitarist Sarah Lipstate composes and performs. I wanted to close this mix with a piece by a guitar player who is using the guitar to paint whole sound environments. Her work is meditative and haunting,
It's no secret that we're in the midst of something of a vinyl revolution. While the fate of the music industry as a whole has been a topic of debate for some time now, vinyl sales were up 30 percent in 2015. And with increasing sales, come increasing opportunities — like the artist-curated vinyl club Magnolia Record Club. Founded by Nashville-via-Memphis musician Drew Holcomb, Magnolia Record Club is a monthly subscription service that, thus far, has served up records by Patty Griffin, Colony House, Holcomb himself, and, most recently, Penny & Sparrow.
"I had heard of a few other vinyl clubs, but not any that were curated by an artist," Holcomb explains. "I know we have a lot of fans who love vinyl and share similar musical tastes to me, so I thought it would be a fun experiment to see if they would trust me to curate records they would want."
Holcomb also sees the club as a way of further connecting his fans and the broader music community. "More than anything, it was about identifying a community within a community," he says. "I feel like people who buy vinyl, for the most part, feel an even stronger connection to music than the average music fan. It’s a very cool subculture and I wanted to find out who those people are in our fan community."
Following March's pick of Penny & Sparrow's Let a Lover Drown You, the next LP subscribers can look forward to is the Lumineers' forthcoming sophomore album, Cleopatra.
"I used to be on Dualtone Records, the Lumineers' label, and I was privy to their debut album before it came out and, like many other people, I knew it was a smash record," Holcomb says. "I started following the band on Twitter before they even had 1,000 followers, so it is fun to tell that story to the club as they set to release their long-awaited follow-up."
As if starting a new vinyl venture isn't enough to keep him busy, Holcomb also recently released an album, Medicine, with his project Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors.
"I wrote Medicine alone, and it was a very personal and intentional album for me," Holcomb says of the LP. "We recorded it in a very classic way — live, with very few overdubs. I even recorded my vocals and acoustic guitars simultaneously, and each song was recorded in one take, start to finish. I wanted the album to feel very warm, nostalgic, but present, and I hope we did that. Our fans reacted very well to this record. It seems like the most cohesive album I have released yet."
Wanna join the club? There's the option to subscribe yourself or, if you're feeling particularly generous, you can gift a friend with a 3-, 6-, or 12-month subscription. Sign up by the end of the day (March 15) to get March's release. If you subscribe after March 15, your first record will be April's pick, the Lumineers. Subscribe here and get to spinnin'.
And … if you're feeling lucky, we've teamed up with MRC for a little contest: Enter code "BGS" at checkout for your chance to win a one-time vinyl four-pack co-curated by BGS and Holcomb, and featuring LPs by Holly Williams, Dylan LeBlanc, Etta Baker, and Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. You're welcome!
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