Tag: Libba Cotten

Women’s History Spotlight: Ola Belle Reed, Loretta Lynn, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Each year, March is Women’s History Month, and BGS, Good Country, and Real Roots Radio partnered all last month to highlight a variety of our favorite women in country, bluegrass, and roots music with our Women’s History Spotlight.

Each weekday in March at 11AM Eastern (8AM Pacific) on Real Roots Radio, host Daniel Mullins has been celebrating a powerful woman in roots music during the Women’s History Spotlight segment of The Daniel Mullins Midday Music Spectacular. You can listen to Real Roots Radio online 24/7 or via their FREE app for smartphones or tablets.

Then, each Friday we’ve hosted a recap here on BGS featuring the artists highlighted throughout the previous week. No list is comprehensive, but we hope to feature some familiar favorites as well as some trailblazers whose music and impact might not be as familiar to you.

Let’s look back at March and the vibrant history of women in roots music with our final edition of our Women’s History Spotlight, featuring Elizabeth Cotten, Patty Loveless, Ola Belle Reed, Alison Krauss, and Loretta Lynn.

Elizabeth Cotten

Born in 1893, this North Carolina native had a profound impact on American roots music. While she learned how to play the guitar as a child, and even then began writing songs, she shelved her musical dreams and became a domestic worker, but fate had other plans for Elizabeth Cotten. Decades later (in her sixties), she became a housekeeper for the Seeger family following a chance encounter at a department store. The Seegers, of course, are known through roots music circles for the family’s reputation as talented musicians and respected musicologists, featuring Mike Seeger of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Peggy Seeger, their half-brother Pete Seeger, and more. With the family’s love for music, Elizabeth dusted off her guitar, which she hadn’t touched in decades.

The Seeger family was blown away by Elizabeth’s talent. She had a unique approach to the instrument, due to her being left-handed she would play the instrument upside-down, resulting in the strings being inverted, and allowing her to play the melody with her thumb and the bass lines with her fingers. Additionally, her signature style including some unique alternating bass lines, a technique which is now referred to as “Cotten-style.” Mike Seeger would record Elizabeth for Smithsonian Folkways, introducing her music to the world, including her original composition, “Freight Train,” which has been covered countless times, including by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mac Wiseman, Jim & Jesse, Doc Watson, and more! Other hits of Elizabeth’s include “Shake Suagree” and “Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie,” which have been recorded numerous times throughout roots music. With the popularity of the Folk Revival, Elizabeth would perform with acts such as Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, and would eventually win a Grammy in 1984, before passing away at the age of 94 in 1987.

Patty Loveless

The pride of Elkhorn City, Kentucky and a 2023 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Patty Loveless was a leader of country music’s new traditionalist movement of the ’80s and ’90s, which also saw many successes for fellow Kentuckians Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, The Judds, and Keith Whitley. The daughter of a coal miner, Patty’s neo-traditional sound was mixed with rock and roll attitude and plenty of mountain soul. Over 40 of her singles reached the Billboard Country Singles charts, including “On Down The Line,” “Timber, I’m Falling In Love,” “I’m That Kind of Girl,” “Blame It On Your Heart,” “Here I Am,” and dozens of others.

Like many country artists (especially women), Patty’s commercial success declined at a time when the artistic quality of her music did not. Her stunning rendition of Shawn Camp’s “The Grandpa That I Know” from On Your Way Home moved my father to tears for years, and I know that he was not alone in that. For many, her pair of Mountain Soul albums are still essential listening. On these projects, she celebrates her Kentucky roots with bluegrass-flavored albums littered with special guests including Earl Scruggs, Del McCoury, Travis Tritt, Ricky Skaggs, and more. Patty’s six minute-plus interpretation of the Darrell Scott-penned hit, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” has haunted listeners for over 20 years. Even if it never tickled the Billboard Country Singles chart, there’s a reason Chris Stapleton recruited Loveless to perform the anthem with him during the 2022 CMA Awards — because it still showcases her mountain soul at its finest.

Ola Belle Reed

Picking up the clawhammer banjo as a youngster, Ola Belle Reed brought the music she heard growing up in Grassy Creek, North Carolina with her when her family migrated to the Maryland-Delaware-Pennsylvania area. Ola Belle Reed would entertain Appalachian migrants in the region with various bands, winning them over with her powerful mountain music. (She even turned down an offer to join Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys!) The region’s Appalachian population supported Ola Belle, founding a few of the region’s more popular music parks over the ensuing decades, including New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland and Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Ola Belle Reed would find a new audience on Wheeling, West Virginia’s WWVA in the 1960s. In addition to presenting Appalachian music to new audiences, her legacy includes many original songs that sound as old as the hills. Songs like “High On A Mountain,” “I’ve Endured,” and “You Led Me To The Wrong” have been recorded by Del McCoury, Marty Stuart, Tim O’Brien, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Jason Carter, and more! Ola Belle Reed suffered a stroke in 1987. The following year, she became the first woman to be recognized with a Distinguished Achievement Award by the International Bluegrass Music Association. She passed away in 2002.

Alison Krauss

One of the most Grammy-awarded artists of all time (27 trophies and counting), Alison Krauss’s angelic voice has taken bluegrass to new heights, while she has become one of the most transcendent vocalists of her generation, branching into country, Americana, adult contemporary, rock, and more. A member of the Grand Ole Opry (the historic radio program’s youngest cast member at the time of her membership) and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame (currently the youngest Hall of Famer), Alison was a bit of a violin prodigy as a youngster, becoming enamored with bluegrass when she was exposed to bands like J.D. Crowe & The New South and The Bluegrass Album Band under the tutelage of John Pennell.

She recorded her debut album for Rounder Records when she was just a teenager and by the time she reached adulthood, she blossomed into a full-blown roots music star. The success of her solo albums and records with Union Station returned bluegrass to mainstream country circles at a time when it was desperately needed, providing a shot in the arm for the genre and introducing legions of new fans to the music. Krauss joins names like Flatt & Scruggs and The Osborne Brothers as some of the handful of artists to take bluegrass into the mainstream consciousness. Her ethereal voice has also resulted in highly touted collaborations with Robert Plant, James Taylor, Kenny Rogers, Brad Paisley, Shenandoah, Don Williams, and more.

Loretta Lynn

Country music’s most awarded woman artist, Loretta Lynn completely broke the mold. Nashville had had “girl singers” before, and there had even been female artists singing songs about women’s issues, but often they had been written by men (a la “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”) To have a woman artist singing songs about women’s issues written by a woman was absolutely groundbreaking, and frankly, it intimidated many men in the industry. While now beloved country standards, Loretta sang controversial songs about a wife’s right to say “no” (“Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)”), birth control (“The Pill”), the stigma attached to divorced women (“Rated X”), beating the tar out of women chasing after her husband (“Fist City”), and more. Coincidentally, all of the songs I just mentioned hit number one even though they were banned by some country radios stations – except “The Pill” which peaked at number five.

In addition to songs that connected to women, her heartfelt numbers about growing up in poverty in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky endeared her to fans as well and instilled a sense of pride in folks with similar backgrounds — “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like My Daddy Anymore,” “You’re Looking At Country,” and the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Her vulnerability in not only openly dealing with issues in her own marriage, but unpacking her own mental health on the big screen with the Coal Miner’s Daughter biopic opened the country music industry’s eyes to so many issues that women were wrestling with behind closed doors until Loretta Lynn. Loretta continued making fabulous music late in life (check out “Miss Being Mrs,” where she sings about being a widow), until her passing at the age of 90 in 2022. For these reasons and more – and with all due respect to Kitty Wells – there’s a reason that many country music enthusiasts view the late Loretta Lynn as the Queen of Country Music (myself included).

For our final bonus video as we conclude this fun series, here is the story behind Loretta writing “You Ain’t Woman Enough.” Loretta was as real as it gets!

 

With These Women Inducted Into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Who Should Be Next?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

For the first time in the thirty year history of the International Bluegrass Music Association a class of Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductees includes a woman in every act. The Hall of Fame, helmed by the IBMA and housed inside the Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, infamously lacks women. Before this year’s class it included ten women, total, and only one woman — Louise Scruggs — had ever been inducted as an individual. All others had been inducted as members of bands, duos, or organizations. 

This year Alison Krauss and Lynn Morris join the rarest rank of individual female inductees, alongside influential manager Louise Scruggs. The Stonemans — including Patti, Donna, and Roni — join the likes of songwriter Dixie Hall, who was inducted with her husband, Tom T.; Polly, Miggie, and Janis of the Lewis Family; Marion Leighton Levy of the Rounder Records founders; Sara and Maybelle of the Carter Family; and Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard.

To mark the occasion, we’re celebrating women in bluegrass who certainly deserve induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, beginning with this year’s inductees. The point is, there is no dearth of women in bluegrass, from way back in its earliest days before the genre even had a name to the big-tent-bluegrass present, and many of whom are more than qualified for inclusion in this hall of honor — as innovators, ambassadors, creators, pickers, and forebears, all.

Alison Krauss 

Arguably the most well-known bluegrass musician to achieve mainstream success, Alison Krauss is a no-brainer addition to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. With her stellar collaborations — with Robert Plant, James Taylor, T Bone Burnett, and so many others — her bluegrass bona fides, her technical prowess as a fiddler, her crystalline and influential vocals, and her unparalleled skill for song interpretation she’s the perfect multi-hyphenate bluegrasser to demonstrate to veteran fans or the uninitiated passers-by what the Hall of Fame is all about. Because, no matter how far Alison Krauss may stray from bluegrass, everything she does remains firmly rooted in her ‘grassy foundations.

Lynn Morris

Lynn Morris remains a criminally underappreciated figure in bluegrass, partly due to her career being prematurely ended by a near-fatal stroke in the late 1990s. In the decades prior, this IBMA Award winner was a powerful and influential banjo player, bandleader, and community-builder, carving out a pathway to success in roots music for herself — given that no pathways were being made available to women like her. Morris’ brand of bluegrass was unflinching, driving, and gritty, and to this day it continues to defy stereotypes about what women can contribute to a music that often holds up maleness and horse race-style competition as currency. While at the same time, she retained a level of tenderness and openness rare in masculine-centered bluegrass. Hopefully this induction will spotlight Morris’ important role in bluegrass’ golden age during the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Love Grown Cold,” a semi-viral hit for Morris on many a bluegrass social media page, is merely the tip of the iceberg of what will be this Hall of Famer’s long-lasting legacy in this music.

The Stoneman Family

Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, father and figurehead of country’s legendary Stoneman family, was the man who started it all. No, literally. Pop is credited with being a keystone picker, performer, and pseudo-producer of 1927’s Bristol sessions, which later came to be considered as the “big bang of country music,” the beginning of the genre’s commercial fortunes. His family of pickers, including Donna, Roni, and Patti, became stars of stage and screen thanks to their showmanship, homespun vibes, and blistering-fast picking. The impact of this musical family on country, bluegrass, and Americana music — as a unit and as individuals — can simply not be overstated. From Hee Haw to the Grand Ole Opry to winning a CMA Award to international tours with their own group and as side musicians, the fingerprints of the Stoneman Family are all over American roots music across the globe.

Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper

At one point, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper were perhaps the most famous bluegrass act in the world, landing several singles and tracks in Billboard’s Hot Country Chart in the ‘50s and ‘60s — notably landing four songs in the Top 10. Not on a bluegrass chart, because such a thing did not yet exist, but on the country chart! Granted, at that time bluegrass was still considered simply a subgenre of country and hillbilly music, but imagine not just one “Wagon Wheel”-level hit to their name, but a handful! And somehow, in modern times, Wilma Lee & Stoney are at best relegated to footnotes and asides. Bluegrass has always been a commercial genre and the commercial success of this pair is alone worth induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, all their other achievements and accolades notwithstanding.

Ola Belle Reed

Ola Belle Reed is more than “I’ve Endured” and more than “High on the Mountain.” A Western North Carolina songwriter and picker, Reed typified the politically- and environmentally-conscious, subversive, and grounded style of musicmaking by Appalachian women who lived through the many upheavals and uncertainties within the region and around the world during the twentieth century. Her songs, like “Tear Down the Fences,” highlight that the south, Appalachia, and the people who live there are not monoliths. Just as Reed’s catalog of influential music is not a monolith, either. Truly a glaring omission from Bluegrass’s hall of honor.

Sally Ann Forrester

Born Wilene Russell, “Sally Ann” or “Billie” Forrester — wife of fiddler Howdy Forrester — was one of only two women to have ever been members of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. (The other being Bessie Lee Maudlin, another prime candidate for Hall of Fame induction and inclusion in this list.) With the band, Forrester played accordion and sang as well as “keeping the books.” Inducting the women who were Blue Grass Boys, members of THE titular band of bluegrass, just makes sense! But with Forrester, it also represents an all-too-rare opportunity to canonize a bluegrass accordionist for the ages. Why wouldn’t we want to do that!? Take a listen to her accordion fills on “Rocky Road Blues” and just try to come up with a reason why bluegrass accordion isn’t more popular nowadays. Besides the obvious reasons.

Rose Maddox

Rose Maddox is traditionally credited as the first woman to cut a bluegrass album, recording Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass in 1962 for Capitol Records and including many a bluegrass hit, like “Footprints in the Snow.” Maddox also marked the beginning of a series of women vocalists and musicians in bluegrass who could accomplish the high lonesome sound for which men like Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and others were famous. Women who sang old-time and country up to this point often had rounder, more full, resonant, and rich voices, where men in bluegrass were seemingly attempting to shout tenor to dog whistles. Sexists weren’t sure women could replicate that testicles-in-a-vise-grip sound, but Maddox’s powerful voice immediately commands the same attention – and respect – of the highest and most lonesome. To think there used to be a time when people actually thought (or pretended to think) women couldn’t sing bluegrass!

Elizabeth Cotten

A pillar of American folk music, Elizabeth Cotten’s influence and impact knows no bounds, reaching far from downhome blues, ragtime, and old-time and into bluegrass, folk, Americana, rock, pop, and beyond. Her songs and her playing style continue to influence bluegrass today, but Cotten’s true legacy, one that will stretch on into infinity, is that her existence stands as permission for the Other – for marginalized folks like herself, a Black, working class artisan and musician from the South – to exist and to take up space within these historically white and often forbidding and exclusive roots music communities. Elizabeth Cotten is proof positive that the contributions of Black folks to American roots musics, including if not especially bluegrass, were truly seminal, essential, and vital to the music growing and developing into the entity we all love today. Elizabeth Cotten would be an excellent and unimpeachable first Black and African American inductee into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Let’s make it happen.

Buffalo Gals

In the 1970s the group considered to be the first bluegrass lineup of all women was Buffalo Gals, including Martha Trachtenberg, Susie Monick, Carol Siegel, Sue Raines, and Nancy Josephson. Their first and only record, First Borne, is finally available digitally and via online streaming platforms, but up until recently was largely forgotten. We featured First Borne in our list of the 50 Greatest Bluegrass Albums by women and retold a now-infamous story about the Buffalo Gals performing in their sleeping bags when a festival promoter gave them a set early in the morning because, you guessed it, who would want to see women perform bluegrass!? Hearing this whimsical, zany mash-up of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Loco-motion” we’d make this group headline. Just sayin’. With bands like Della Mae and Sister Sadie enjoying success and acclaim at all levels of the IBMA, perhaps it’s time to pay tribute to the all-women lineups like the Buffalo Gals who came before and blazed the trail.

Gloria Belle

A woman for a Sunny Mountain Boy! Gloria Belle is most famous as a member of Jimmy Martin’s backing band, but it would almost be an insult to reduce her career to having spent time in the shadow of the King of Bluegrass. She was a fantastic picker, multi-instrumentalist, and singer and the first woman to ever release an album on longtime bluegrass label Rebel Records. In 1999 she received IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award after a handful of decades of nonstop recording, touring, and performing in bluegrass. She even made an appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s fantastically popular Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. Another case of an underrated woman who is constantly referred to on the back end of an ampersand after a man or men, Gloria Belle is a perfect example of a woman who deserves induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame on her own merits first and foremost.

Dolly Parton

Though she’ll often refer to it simply as “mountain music,” Dolly Parton is as bluegrass as they come. Albums like The Grass Is Blue, Heartsongs, and Trio demonstrate this fact to an obvious degree, but it’s worth pointing out — especially within the context of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame — that Parton’s bluegrass runs deeper than just being an offshoot of her musical expression. With the shows and festivals at Dollywood, her collaborations with artists like the Grascals, Rhonda Vincent, and Alison Krauss, and her longtime commitment to philanthropy in her home region of East Tennessee and abroad, Dolly is the perfect example the Hall of Fame could utilize to communicate the importance and value of taking bluegrass ideals and spreading them around the world. Plus, who wouldn’t want a ticket to the IBMA Awards show at which Dolly Parton would be inducted? (Pro tip: Dolly has actually attended the IBMA Awards and performed once before, when The Grass Is Blue was nominated in 2000 and Marty Stuart hosted. Let’s please recreate that show. Please.)

We could continue this list into infinity, and that’s exactly the point. Artists and bands like Alison Brown, Laurie Lewis, Missy Raines, Kathy Kallick, Blue Rose, Emmylou Harris, The Whites, Patty Loveless, and so many others are waiting in the wings, qualified, ready, and willing to step up and thrive under the mantle of Bluegrass Hall of Fame induction. And plenty of young women, femmes, and non-binary folks are waiting to have examples to look up to, to signal to them that bluegrass can be a place where they can also make a home. The concept of a Hall of Fame may seem like an unimportant or inconsequential or self-serving enterprise at times, but it can be so much more than that! We can supply those examples. Let’s do it.

BGS 5+5: Sunny War

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Sunny War
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest Album: Simple Syrup
Personal Nicknames: Syd

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

That’s a tough question for me… I would have to say I was probably most moved by Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. I really started getting into old blues when I was 13, and that’s when I first discovered Elizabeth Cotten. When I learned that she was around my age when she wrote songs like “Freight Train” I was very inspired. Just a couple years after learning to play “Freight Train” I actually started hopping freight trains! So the song has become even more meaningful to me over the years as well as her extremely unique guitar style.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

My favorite memory from being on stage was when Aroyn (my bassist) and I played with a new drummer at Live Oak Music Festival in San Luis Obispo. We only managed to get one rehearsal in and the whole performance was a bit of a gamble. The drummer was a friend of mine who we asked to play just a few days before the gig. With such short notice we had to totally wing it and ended up playing the most aggressive version of my songs… ever! But the crowd loved it and we had a great time. On stage it felt like a disaster, but afterwards the audience let us know they really enjoyed how chaotic it was.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I have wanted to be a musician for as long as I can remember. However, I didn’t realize I wanted to pursue music professionally until I was about 23 years old. I had four roommates at the time, a full-time minimum wage job at a mall and no college education. I was so busy working at the mall I had no time for music. I knew that the only way I could afford to be a musician was to either get a degree or figure out how to get paid to play music. I busked on the streets for many years, but slowly broke into the club scene and started touring.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

Before a show my biggest ritual is running through my entire set a couple times. I don’t rehearse vocals but I always rehearse my guitar parts. My guitar style is so silly that I struggle a lot with remembering how I originally played certain songs.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I would pair Nina Simone with black eyed peas, rice and cornbread. Cos that meal is church and so is Nina. Southern Blacks have been eating that meal religiously to welcome the new year since long before my grandma made it for me and my cousins, and Nina has a way of giving me a “fresh start” with every listen.

Photo credit: Randi Steinberger

BGS Celebrates Black History Month (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

We invite our readers to celebrate Black History Month as we always do, by denoting that celebrating Black contributions in bluegrass, country, and old-time — and roots music as a whole — requires centering Black creators, artists, musicians, and perspectives in our community daily, not just in February.

Over the past year we’ve recommitted ourselves to fully incorporating Black Voices into everything we do and we hope that our readers and listeners, our followers and fans, and our family of artists constantly celebrate, acknowledge, and pay credit to Blackness and Black folks, who we have to thank for everything we love about American roots music.

Following a look back on our BGS Artists of the Month, Cover Story, and Shout & Shine subjects, we close our listicle celebration of Black History Month this year with a sampling of some of the most popular features, premieres, music videos, Friends & Neighbors posts, and 5+5 interviews that have featured Black, African American, and otherwise Afro-centric music. We are so grateful for the ongoing, vital contributions of Black artists, writers, creators, and journalists to American roots music and we’re proud to pay credit exactly where it’s due, in this small way.

Black history is American roots music history and all of these incredible folks certainly prove that point.

An edition of our Roots on Screen column featured an interview with Branford Marsalis and dove into his soundtrack for the new Netflix film based on August Wilson’s 1982 play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Bona fide soul man Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams took us behind the scenes of his album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, showing humorous, casual, candid moments from the project’s creation — and giving us all the opportunity to be there, even though we “couldn’t make it.”

Sabine McCalla simply blew us away with her Western AF video session of an original, “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” last year, and we were ecstatic to include her on the BGS Stage lineup for Cabin Fever Fest last weekend, too.

Joy Oladokun’s vision and determination, and her unrelenting trust in both, paid off on a texturally varied second album, in defense of my own happiness (vol. 1), a self-produced exercise in vulnerability and subject of a feature interview. Oladokun will perform a few of her folk-pop songs as part of our Yamaha Guitars + BGS Spotlight Showcase during Folk Alliance’s virtual Folk Unlocked conference this week, as well.

The preeminent hip-hop-meets-bluegrass band, Gangstagrass, stopped by for a 5+5 and to plug their latest, No Time for Enemies. Gangstagrass were another excellent addition to our Cabin Fever Fest lineup and we look forward to being able to catch them in-person again, soon.

To mark Juneteenth 2020, we published a thoughtful round up of new movement music, a sort of patchwork soundtrack for protest, struggle, civil rights, and progress including songs by Leon Bridges, Chastity Brown, Kam Franklin (listen above), and more.

We were ecstatic to feature Valerie June, Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi, Ben Harper, and Yola during our five-episode virtual online variety show, Whiskey Sour Happy Hour, last spring. The show raised over $50,000 for COVID-19 relief — through MusiCares and personal protective equipment via Direct Relief. WSHH season 2? We want that to happen, too! Stay tuned.

Pianist Matt Rollings’ collaboration with Americana-soul duo The War & Treaty was — UNDERSTANDABLY — a mini viral hit, taking off on our social media channels.

Rhiannon Giddens also powerfully and captivatingly warned all of us not to call her names with a new song recently: “The framework in the song is a love affair, but it can happen in any kind of connection,” she explained in a press release. “The real story was accepting my inner strength and refusing to continue being gaslit and held back; and refusing to keep sacrificing my mental health for the sake of anything or anyone.”

We visited once again with now mononymous Kenyan songwriter, Ondara, whose pandemic album, Folk n’ Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation, kept many of us company during sheltering in place.

Speaking of which, Crys Matthews and Heather Mae didn’t let guidelines around social distancing keep them down, as evidenced on “Six Feet Apart.”

Our country-soul queen, Yola, wowed all of us with a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert and some acoustic renderings of her resplendent countrypolitan songs.

As did veteran bluesman Don Bryant, who after a lifelong career writing and recording earned his first Grammy nomination in 2020 for You Make Me Feel, a record that is nothing less than a physical incarnation of rhythm and blues. His Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is entrancing.

Selwyn Birchwood rightly reminded blues fans that it isn’t all sad; in fact, if you aren’t partying to the blues you’re doing it wrong. Just listen to “I Got Drunk, Laid and Stoned” to find out.

Leigh Nash and Ruby Amanfu joined forces on a Congressman John Lewis-inspired number entitled “Good Trouble” just last week, a perfect song to mark Black History Month.

Last year, to mark Women’s History Month (coming up again in March!) we spotlighted the huge influence and contributions of Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, a folk singer and picker famous for playing her guitar left-handed — and upside down and “backwards!” Though Cotten spent most of her adult life working as a housekeeper, her original folksongs and her idiosyncratic picking style still inspire bluegrass, old-time, and blues musicians alike.

Country singer-songwriter Miko Marks returns this year with new music for the first time in thirteen years, after effectively being shut out of Music City and its country music machine because of her Blackness. A recent single release reclaims “Hard Times,” a song composed by Stephen Foster, who was an American songbook stalwart and folk music legend who performed in minstrel shows and in blackface.

Chris Pierce challenges his listeners with a new song this month, “American Silence,” because as he puts it, “It’s important to not give up on reaching out to those who have stayed silent for too long about the issues that affect those around us all.” A timely reminder to all of us — especially those of us who are allies and accomplices — as we approach the one-year anniversary of this most recent racial reckoning in the United States.

And finally, to close this gargantuan list — which is still just the tip of the iceberg of Black music in bluegrass, country, and Americana — we’ll leave you with a relative newcomer in country-soul and Americana, Annie Mack. Mack’s gorgeous blend of genres and styles is anchored by her powerful and tender voice and we were glad to be stopped in our tracks by her debut EP, Testify. 

Editor’s Note: Read part one of our Black History Month collection here.

Photo credit (L to R): Chris Pierce by Mathieu Bitton; Elizabeth Cotten; Annie Mack by Shelly Mosman.

Bluegrass Memoirs: Old-time, Ragtime, & Mrs. Etta Baker

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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 showcase celebrating 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…

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

From Banjo to the Blues, This North Carolina Writer Tells One Big Story

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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.

I tried to tell that story in Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, based on many years of reporting, researching, and listening. It’s a story that covers a lot of ground from the mountains to the coast in The Old North State and beyond, with the likes of James Brown, Bill Monroe, and R.E.M. showing up in key cameo roles at various points.

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.)

Elizabeth Cotten: The Domestic Who Wrote a Folk Classic

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At age 9, in 1904, she quit school to work as a maid. A song she wrote at 11 became a folk classic. She married at 15. She made her first recording at age 62. And she won her Grammy at age 90.

Even the best novelist would be hard-pressed to create a more remarkable heroine than Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. From the time she sneaked into her older brother’s room and flipped his banjo over so she could play left-handed, Elizabeth broke rules and boundaries.

Her legacy song, “Freight Train,” written at age 11, is among the most loved in folk music. Her left-handed, finger-picking guitar style — an alternating bass with her index finger and melody played with her thumb — is much emulated. She was immensely talented, creative, and wicked funny. For a great example of her humor, listen to Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer talk about a chance encounter at the Toronto Folk Festival.

While Elizabeth was raising her daughter, she rarely played outside her home — and only at church. But a chance meeting much later in life led her to become one of the most revered names of the folk revival. While working at a department store, she befriended a frightened little girl who had become separated from her mother. The little girl was Peggy Seeger. Peggy’s mom, Ruth Crawford Seeger, almost immediately invited Elizabeth to work for the family as a domestic.

Ruth was a composer and teacher, her husband Charles created the field of ethnomusicology, but it was Peggy who first heard Elizabeth playing one of the family’s guitars. As a family that studied and documented traditional music, they were delighted to hear the music Elizabeth carried from her North Carolina home. Their son, Mike Seeger, a folklorist and musician, began recording her singing and playing. They released her first album in 1958, when she was 62.

Elizabeth became a vitally important figure in the folk revival, performing at the most acclaimed festivals in North America. Her songs and style frequently were covered by others. Artists in the Skiffle movement recorded and claimed credit for “Freight Train,” a big hit in Great Britain (the Quarrymen, John Lennon’s early band, used to perform it). With the Seeger family’s help, Elizabeth got the copyright in her name.

Her songs have been central to bringing rural southern music to commercial audiences, paving the way for bluegrass as well. Performers as varied as the Grateful Dead and Rhiannon Giddens have recorded her songs, and “Freight Train” is in the repertoire of almost every folk, bluegrass, and rock band on this continent.

It is virtually impossible to summarize Libba Cotten as a person, a musician, or an influence on American music. Her honors are countless. As examples, in 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts declared her a National Heritage Fellow. The Smithsonian Institute declared her a “living treasure.”

Elizabeth performed right up to her death at 94 in 1987. And musicians around the world pay tribute to her daily when they sing “Freight Train.”