Tag: Oberlin

Bluegrass Memoirs: Visiting Rusty York (Part 1)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On the afternoon of Tuesday August 15, 1972, the day after Carl Fleischhauer and I interviewed J.D. Crowe in Lexington, Kentucky, we dropped in on Rusty York at his Jewel Recording Studios in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, a small city just north of Cincinnati.

The Jewel Recording Studios in the Mt. Healthy suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, August 15, 1972. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

I first heard York in the fall of 1959 when Tom Barton, a new friend from Bloomington, Indiana, visited me in Oberlin and brought as a house gift a new LP by a company I’d never heard of, Starday. Banjo In The Hills (“16 Great Mountain Songs by All Star Artists 16”) included excellent numbers by bands I (a bluegrass fan since ’57) knew and liked: The Stanley Brothers, Carl Story, Bill Clifton, Jim Eanes, Jim & Jesse. It also included two tracks by a group new to me, Rusty York and Willard Hale: an instrumental, “Banjo Breakdown,” and a great cheating song, “Don’t Do It.”

I really took to that song! Our band Crooked Stovepipe put it on our first CD in 1993. We still do it at almost every show.

Owner and recording engineer Rusty York in the office at the Jewel Recording Studios in the Mt. Healthy suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, August 15, 1972. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

Keen to hear more of York and Hale, I added them to my mental checklist when shopping for recordings. At Oberlin, students couldn’t have cars, so we confined our shopping to a local shoe store’s sales bin of used jukebox 45s. Every once in a while, I’d snag recent singles by favorites like Monroe, Reno & Smiley, or Jimmy Reed. In 1960, not long after hearing “Don’t Do It,” I found “Sugaree,” a Chess Records single by Rusty York, in the bin. I hadn’t heard it, bought it on spec — the shoe store didn’t have a record player.

Chess Records’ 45rpm of “Sugaree,” a Marty Robbins track cut by Rusty York. Photo by Neil V. Rosenberg.

Man, was I disappointed when I got home and listened! It wasn’t bluegrass at all, it was a Marty Robbins rockabilly song, with York singing in a band fronted by sax and his electric guitar with piano, bass and drums behind:

The other side was “Red Rooster,” a rock version of “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” Not bad, some hot guitar licks, but pretty ho-hum, I thought. Must be a different Rusty York I figured; after all, Chess was a Chicago label, while Starday was from Nashville.

A couple years later in Bloomington, Indiana, I came across four EPs (45 rpm, big hole, six tracks each) by Rusty York and the Kentucky Mountain Boys on the Bluegrass Special label, distributed by Jimmie Skinner music in Cincinnati. What a contrast — bluegrass standards done up in proper style! The songs were all familiar bluegrass standards, like this version of the mountain folk song “Cindy”:

I didn’t hear of him again until the summer of 1967, when I was working in a southern Indiana band, the Stoney Lonesome Boys, led by fiddler Roger Smith. He was helping his friend George Brock, a Connersville-based gospel singer, put together an album and asked me if I would play banjo that fall on their recording at Rusty York’s studio in Ohio. Surprised to learn York had a studio, I accepted Roger’s invitation. We — Roger, Vernon McQueen, Vernon Bowling, Paul Hill, and I — rehearsed with Brock at Roger’s home in Columbus, Indiana, in September. On Sunday, October 1 we headed to the Cincinnati suburb of Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Accompanying us was bluegrass DJ Ervin Barrett.

Rusty’s Jewel Recording Studio was a converted two-car garage attached to his suburban home. It was a big open room. Along the back wall was a raised glassed-in platform on which the recorder and mixing board sat. The recorder was a series 300 Ampex deck, an open reel machine just like the two in the studio of Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music where I was then employed. This state-of-the-art monaural unit recorded everything onto a single track.

Lines from 10 microphones fed into York’s mixing board. From them, through the board, emerged a single track that was fed onto the tape. We had six instruments and four voices. Each of us stood before one or two microphones. We could see and talk to each other over low baffles. Rusty had recorded bluegrass before. He had selected specific locations in the room for instruments and voices.

George Brock had chosen 12 songs. We were to record them in the sequence on which they would appear on the LP — beginning with side one, band one, and finishing with side two, band six. We tuned up, took our places in front of the mics, and started on the first song.

While we played, Rusty was at the mixing board setting levels. By the end of several run-throughs, he knew when the vocal trio came in or the mandolin took a break, how the song kicked off and ended, and other sonic arrangement features. Where the focus of the song moved from instruments to voices, he made mental notes to adjust the microphones at the right time. Each song had its moves, like running a football play or driving a race car for a lap.

He would tape each trial run through and play it back through big speakers. It soon became clear to me that York was very adept at mixing on the fly. We were there about three hours. About a month later George sent me a copy of the album, George Brock and The Traveling Crusaders, Jewel LP 115.

George Brock and The Traveling Crusaders, ‘Sing Darkened Way’ LP cover.

York’s brief notes give George’s bio, describe the album as “some of the most authentic bluegrass music to be found on record today,” identify The Traveling Crusaders personnel (I was “Neal Rosenberger”), and close by saying: “These fellows accompany George on most of his personal appearances and they are very successful on all their engagements.” I suppose we were successful at this, our only engagement! It’s one of my favorite recordings, reminding me of both Roger Smith‘s coaching and York’s skill and vision as a producer.

When Carl and I began to plan our 1972 trip I pulled out that five-year old George Brock album and found Jewel’s PO Box and phone numbers. Before I left St. John’s, Newfoundland, I wrote Rusty at that address, told him I was planning research in Ohio and asked for an interview.

We hit the road that Tuesday in August 1972 after lunch in Louisville, and headed for Cincinnati, about 100 miles northeast along the Ohio River. My notes:

Arrived in Mt. Healthy about 3:30 as I remember. Parked across the street from a phone booth, went to call Rusty York and as it turned out the number I had was out of date.

Jewel Recording Studios in the Mt. Healthy suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, August 15, 1972. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

I looked up Jewel in the phone book and found the address was just around the corner from us.

We walked over, went in. A number of people milling around, not looking surprised or impressed to see us — a secretary said Rusty was out to lunch and so I explained who we were and that I’d written, etc. She called him at home and then said he’d be back soon. When he returned, he was quite cordial, said he hadn’t had time to answer (I hadn’t expected him to), and he was booked solid with sessions and didn’t have time for an interview but if we wanted to stick around, we were welcome.

He immediately engaged Carl in conversation vis-à-vis cameras and such, pulled his cameras out of his safe, told of recording a gospel rock festival the previous weekend (a 4-track [recorder] along with other equipment, sat in a Dodge van outside the studio) at which there was a big movie outfit a la Woodstock — they used his sound. He takes all the cover photos, hence the interest in cameras.

Owner and recording engineer Rusty York in the office at the Jewel Recording Studios in the Mt. Healthy suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, August 15, 1972. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

Though I’d known some of the high points of Rusty’s career (the early bluegrass, the rockabilly hit, The Bluegrass Special EPs) and had worked in his studio, I really didn’t know much about him beyond that. Born in 1935, raised in Eastern Kentucky, he’d moved to Cincinnati when he was 17. By the 1972 he’d had a long career there as a performer and a worker in the music industry. His story is told online at Hillbilly-Music.com. A more detailed account was published by the late bluegrass and county historian Ivan Tribe’s July 1998 article in Bluegrass Unlimited.

By that August 1972 afternoon, Rusty had pretty much left behind the life of performing that developed during his 20 years in Cincinnati.

He moved into Cincinnati’s “Over The Rhine” Appalachian immigrant neighborhood in 1952. He was seventeen. He didn’t finish high school, going to work right away in a restaurant. He moved next to a job as an office boy in a stockbroker’s office. In the evenings he started going to the local music clubs. He was already playing guitar and banjo. Meeting other “briars” like Willard Hale, he played in local clubs and, as he would describe to us that afternoon, mixing rock and roll beside the bluegrass. He also began working in radio. He became a familiar figure in the regional country music business.

York soon became acquainted with another Kentuckian, the leading figure in the Cincinnati country scene, Jimmie Skinner, a hillbilly singer whose recording career began in the 1930s. By the mid-’50s his Jimmie Skinner Music Center was the leading mail-order country music business in the U.S. Rusty worked on Skinner’s weekly broadcasts from the Center as engineer, DJ, and musician; and he also played in Skinner’s band. Here’s what Rusty and Jimmie sounded like, later, in 1961, on Skinner’s most famous composition, “Doin’ My Time.”

York next ventured into recording. His first sides were covers of new rock and roll hits, including a Buddy Holly tune released in 1957 on Syd Nathan’s King records. His next recordings were made the following year accompanying Kentucky-born country singer, also a Skinner employee, Connie Hall, on Mercury-Starday, and it was at this time he cut his first bluegrass sides with Hale, including “Don’t Do It.”

By 1959 York was again recording rockabilly covers, and it was in this context that “Sugaree” came about. This was his only hit, and it led to a tour sponsored by Dick Clark that began at the Hollywood Bowl where Rusty opened for a show that included Annette Funicello, Duane Eddy, and Frankie Avalon.

Rusty made further rock singles and was later inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Although he made a few appearances with this music in rockabilly nostalgia tours, his musical career after “Sugaree” moved in the direction of country and folk.

In 1961 he returned to bluegrass, producing the Bluegrass Special EP series mentioned earlier. At this point he started his own studio. Then, in 1964 and 1965, he began a stint as the opening act for Bobby Bare.

Bare – who grew up in Ironton, Ohio, southeast of Cincinnati, just across the river from Kentucky and West Virginia – began his career in Southern Ohio, but by the time Rusty joined his operation he was a national country star, a Grammy winner with hits like “Detroit City.” Here’s what Bare’s show looked like around time Rusty joined him:

Rusty made some country recordings during his tours with Bare, which included numerous stints in Las Vegas. By 1970 he’d scaled back his performing and focused more on the studio, and in fact now owned two studios.

To be continued. Next time, Hanging Out At Jewel…

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 Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg. Black and white photos by Carl Fleischhauer. Record photos by Neil V. Rosenberg.

Edited by Justin Hiltner.

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