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.
Boiling Springs, NC on Saturday, September 26, 1987: My workshop in the Gardner-Webb College Library with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and the Hired Hands ended at 4:30 that afternoon when Dan X. Padgett presented Snuffy with a hat. From my diary:
Afterward I hung around and listened for a while to the Hired Hands’ young banjo picker Randy Lucas play the Bach “Bourrée,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and another classical piece expertly on the banjo.
Here’s a nice example, from Bill’s Pickin’ Parlor, of Randy’s recent work in this milieu:
Then, supper time came.
I went for some barbecue (big regional difference thing — this barbecue was red, vinegary; with shredded pork) with Tom [Hanchett] and Carol [Sawyer] and then was kind of enticed away by Dan X Padgett…
I’d met Padgett the afternoon prior, when I first arrived in Boiling Springs; a respected local banjo elder, he was the teacher of the young banjo player in Horace Scruggs’ band whom I’d met earlier today. Padgett had a long and interesting career, with deep connections to Earl Scruggs and Snuffy Jenkins, as well as memories of an earlier generation of banjo greats. He was interviewed for the Earl Scruggs Center by Craig Havighurst in 2010.
I went with him…
…to his car (an old Cadillac) to look at various memorabilia like photos of him with various important country and bluegrass people. He also showed me a very worn copy of the very first F&S songbook and when I expressed a strong interest in copying it he loaned it to me. I also talked with him about the possibility of obtaining a banjo like one he played during the afternoon, a miniature Mastertone about the size of a mandolin with an actual tone ring, flange, and resonator. He said he’d see about it and we ended up standing at his trunk trying out various instruments.
I was picking away on “St. Anne’s Reel” when I noticed there were some people standing around me, and when I finished and looked around there was Doug Dillard looking at me with that big smile. Quite an introduction!
In an edition of the Shelby Star a week or so earlier, Joe DePriest wrote of Dillard’s association with Earl Scruggs, telling how in 1953 the Salem, Missouri teen first heard “Earl’s Breakdown” on the car radio. It hit him so hard “he ran off the road into a ditch.” Dillard got his folks to take him to Scruggs’s Nashville home. “We knocked on the door, and he came, and we asked him to put some Scruggs tuners on my banjo. He invited us in.”
A newspaper clipping from a 1987 edition of the ‘Shelby Star’ of an article by Joe DePriest on Doug Dillard
Earl welcomed banjo pickers to his home, especially if they wanted Scruggs Pegs. In the “Suggestions for Banjo Beginners” on the first page of Flatt & ScruggsPicture Album — Hymn and Songbook from 1958, Earl invited those interested to contact him in Nashville, and many did:
The first page of the 1958 ‘Flatt & Scruggs Picture Album — Hymn and Songbook’
In 1962 Doug and his brother Rodney went with their band The Dillards to LA, where they were “discovered” at the Hollywood folk club The Ash Grove. With best-selling Elektra LPs, they toured extensively in the West and appeared on CBS’s The Andy Griffith Show as “the Darling Family.”
In 1966 Doug left The Dillards and ventured into what would soon be called “country-rock,” touring with the Byrds and forming a band with former Byrd, Gene Clark. Dillard’s banjo playing had been strongly shaped by his close listening to Scruggs. In the ’60s when players like Bill Keith and Eric Weissberg were pushing banjo boundaries in bluegrass, Doug was pushing boundaries in a different way by finding a place for Scruggs-style banjo in rock. He fitted solid, straight-ahead rolls into pieces like Gene Clark’s “The Radio Song”:
Dillard was heard often on popular Hollywood studio recordings and movie soundtracks during the ’70s. He even had on-screen roles in Robin Williams’ Popeye and Bette Midler’s The Rose.
DePriest’s article quoted Dillard: “During all this time, ‘I never said goodbye to bluegrass.'” He moved to Nashville in 1983 and started a band.
The bluegrass music business was booming in Nashville. A bunch of young pickers were there, touring in bands and doing studio sessions. New Grass Revival featured newcomers Bela Fleck and Pat Flynn; John Hartford, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas — all were in town. The Nashville Bluegrass Band started in 1984; that year Ricky Skaggs won a Grammy for his version of Monroe’s “Wheel Hoss.” Up in the Gulch district, between the Opry and Vanderbilt, the Station Inn was serving bluegrass seven nights a week.
I was introduced to the Doug Dillard Band this afternoon right there where Dan X Padgett and I had been jamming. His four-piece outfit drew from a pool of talented bluegrass musicians.
Rhythm guitarist, vocalist and emcee Ginger Boatwright was a seasoned veteran. During the ’70s she’d toured and recorded with Red White and Blue(grass), and later formed The Bushwackers, an all-female group that began as the house band at Nashville’s Old Time Picking Parlor. Her story is told well in Murphy Hicks Henry’s book Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass. Henry calls her “The first ‘modern’ woman in bluegrass” alluding to her folk revival roots, her styles of humor and dress, and, most importantly, “a softer, smoother, more lyrical quality” of singing.
Having a second guitar as a regular lead instrument in a four-piece band was uncommon at this time. When I met Doug’s young lead guitarist I was surprised to discover he was the son of Lamar Grier, whom I’d hung out with twenty years earlier when he was a Blue Grass Boy. David Grier was 26. He’d studied the lead guitar work of Clarence White (there’s a photo of him with White in Bluegrass Odyssey), Tony Rice, and Doc Watson. He was already an experienced pro.
Playing the electric bass, which was unusual for the time, was Roger Rasnake, a singer-songwriter from Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border.
In 1986 Flying Fish released this band’s first album, What’s That? (FF 377). Here’s the title cut. The band is augmented to six pieces by Vassar Clements on violin and Bobby Clark on mandolin; both played on the album. What we see and hear first is Ginger’s dynamic emcee work. Doug’s composition shows a banjo picker who knew fiddle music — a melodic “A” section followed by a punching Scruggs-style “B” part.
Rasnake made a point of telling me Roland White had sent his regards.
Roland was an old California friend, whom I’d met in 1964 and gotten to know when he was playing with Monroe. He’d just joined the Nashville Bluegrass Band. It was a pleasant surprise to hear from him.
Roger wanted to buy a copy of my book, so I took him up to the library and he bought one which I autographed. I signed several others during the day, including several that people brought with them.
I rested a bit before heading over to Gardner-Webb’s Lutz-Yelton Convocation Center.
That evening was the Doug Dillard concert in the gym. It was good, with Ginger Boatwright doing the MC work, Lamar Grier’s son David picking some nice lead guitar, and good singing by Roger, Doug, and Ginger.
Rasnake did one of his own songs from their album, “Endless Highway.”
It’s familiar today because Alison Krauss covered it in her 1990 album, I’ve Got That Old Feeling.
There was a grand finale at the end with picking by Horace and the boys, and also fiddler Pee Wee Davis, whom I heard briefly in the back room for a while. I bought a souvenir photo of the Dillards with Andy Griffith. Home and in bed by 11.
On Sunday morning:
Up and away by 7:30, carried my bags to Tom and Carol’s dorm. We hit the road and drove to Shelby where we went, on Joe’s advice, to the Pancake House, a local place on the strip which was sure to have livermush. We went in and sat at a table and when the menu came I eagerly perused it. Sure enough, at the top of the list on the right-hand side was “Livermush and Eggs.” And, in case I’d missed it, about halfway down the same list was “Eggs and Livermush.” So I ordered that and actually ate some. Very peppery, other than that not much taste and what there was didn’t really excite me. I mixed it with eggs, like one does with grits. Maybe it’ll help my banjo-picking, who knows.
In Chapel Hill I stayed the night with Tom and Carol and had a bit of time to visit friends and relations and buy a box of instant grits at a supermarket. Next day I was back home in Newfoundland, writing up my diary.
The weekend at the Earl Scruggs Celebration brought me face to face with a music culture in which bluegrass nestled. Seeing, hearing and talking with Snuffy, Pappy, Horace, and Dan put me in touch with generations older than mine, what Bartenstein has called “The Pioneers” and “The Builders” of this music. I feel fortunate to have seen, met and heard them all. Just as important for me was hearing new younger performers like Ginger Boatwright, David Grier, and Randy Lucas.
This was my first opportunity see my folk guitar hero, Etta Baker. It came near the start of her late-in-life performance career. In 1989 the North Carolina Arts Council gave her the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award; in 1991 she won an NEA National Heritage Fellowship. Wayne Martin produced her first CD, for Rounder, in 1991. Later she collaborated with Taj Mahal. Meanwhile Music Maker Relief Foundation, an organization “fighting to preserve American musical traditions,” gave her the support she needed to pursue her career as a musician up to her passing at the age of 93.
It was also my first time to see Doug Dillard. If Snuffy and Pappy personified the era when bluegrass emerged from old-time, Dillard’s new band blended the contemporary sounds of an era when classic, progressive, and newgrass elements were shaping and blending the sounds heard as bluegrass thrived in a festival-dominated scene.
Instead of an alpha male lead singer/emcee/rhythm guitarist, he had an alpha female. Replacing the mandolin or fiddle one expected in a band with a banjo was an acoustic lead guitar. Instead of an old “doghouse” upright the bass player had an electric. The lead vocals were shared between male and female. Repertoire ranged from bluegrass classics through old pop and rock favorites to band member compositions. The group was touring widely. State of the art bluegrass, 1987.
So how did all this fit together for me? I recalled the start of my visit when Joe DePriest took Tom, Carol, and me to visit the Shelby graveyard.
He showed us three graves: first that of Thomas Dixon, the local writer whose The Clansmen was turned by D.W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation. Not far away was the grave of W.J. Cash, author of the immensely influential The Mind of the South. Joe and Tom pondered how the two men would have felt about being buried so close to each other; the image that sticks with me is one of Cash glaring at Dixon.
Joe gave us copies of the Greater Shelby Chamber of Commerce’s glossy full-color brochure, Shelby…it’s home. In it Thomas Dixon is identified as the author “whose novel Birth of a Nation became the first million-dollar movie” thus avoiding the fact that book and movie inspired the racist revival of the KKK. It describes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist W.J. Cash simply as “author,” not mentioning his progressive stances in print against the Klan and Nazism.
Tom wondered, what if the paths of Cash (who lived in Boiling Springs) and the young Scruggs had crossed at the time? He told us:
Cash … thought that the South had no “Culture” to speak of — what would he have had to say about Scruggs’s contribution?
Joe took us to a third gravesite, that of a local Confederate colonel killed in a Civil War battle; after detailing that part of his life its headstone:
… describes him as a lover of the arts who twice rode by horseback all the way to a far-off northern city (Baltimore? New York?) in order to hear Jenny Lind sing. This tells you where Cash’s mind was when he spoke of Culture.
The Shelby brochure ended its historical section saying “Cleveland County has also produced two North Carolina governors and an ambassador, but our most famous son is country singer Earl Scruggs.”
So much for official culture in 1987!
Gardner-Webb’s decision to honor Earl Scruggs reflected a shifting intellectual landscape. A local musician of humble origins — a mill worker — had taken on new meaning and significance because of his national and international recognition and popular culture success. He deserved honor and celebration in his home. I was glad to help.
I don’t know if there were any further Earl Scruggs Celebrations at Gardner-Webb, but today there’s an Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, which is planning to hold its inaugural Earl Scruggs Music Festival in September 2022.
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.
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…
Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg
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