Archive for the 'Music' Category

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, Mountain Fiddler

Published November 18, 2009 in Music.

FC-13991Congratulations to West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd, who today marks his 20,774th day in office, making him the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history. To fully appreciate how long Byrd has served, note that he has had time to both filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to endorse (and, presumably, vote for) the first African-American to be elected President. He has come a long way.

Though hampered now by his age and health problems (he will be 92 years old on Friday), Byrd has been an avid country fiddler for most of his life, heavily influenced by the recordings of legendary West Virginia fiddler Clark Kessinger. In 1978, while Byrd was Senate Majority Leader, he recorded an album for County records titled U.S. Senator Robert Byrd: Mountain Fiddler (SFC # FC-13991).

Listen below to a clip from that album of Sen. Byrd, on fiddle and vocals, performing “Rye Whiskey” with Doyle Lawson on guitar, James Bailey on banjo, and Spider Gilliam on bass.

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US Military V-Discs in the Eugene Earle Collection

Published November 11, 2009 in Eugene Earle Collection and Music.

VDISCDuring World War II, the U.S. military and American record companies collaborated to produce a series of records for the “V-Disc” program, a morale-boosting  effort designed to provide troops overseas with access to exclusive new music. Many of the top performers of the day, including Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington, contributed recordings to the project. The V-Discs were produced exclusively for use by military personnel and the artists who volunteered their recordings insisted they not become commercially available, so when the program came to an end in 1949 the Army destroyed most of the original pressing plates and many of the existing discs, making V-Discs a rather collectible commodity today.

The 261 V-Discs in the Eugene Earle Collection represent a wide variety of popular music, including big band jazz, country and blues. Many of the songs were recorded with the military audience in mind, as you can hear in the clip below of Carson Robison performing “Nursery Rhymes of 1944″, from Army V-Disc 145 (SFC # TR/12-19). He really lets Hitler have it, in the classic schoolyard manner.

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Louis Dotson Plays The One-String

Published November 4, 2009 in Music and William R. Ferris Collection.
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Pictured is farmer and musician Louis Dotson of Lorman, Mississippi, photographed by Bill Ferris in 1973, constructing a “one-string guitar” on the wall of his front porch. The traditional instrument, sometimes referred to as a “diddley-bow”, is made by stretching a single guitar string between two nails and played as a slide guitar with a bottle neck or other object used to adjust the pitch. Dotson is quoted extensively in Ferris’ new book, Give My Poor Hear Ease:

“My daddy used to play music. He used to play all the time. That’s how I learned to play the guitar. After he died, the other boys, they took the guitar. I couldn’t get another one. So I decided to put me up a wire. I just call it ‘part of a guitar.’ It’s a one-string guitar, but it sounds like it’s got six strings on it. …Nobody else around here can play it but me. People, they come and listen to me. They say they don’t see how I can do it.”

Listen to a clip of Louis Dotson play “Bottle Up and Go” on the front porch of his farm (complete with crowing rooster), from SFC field tape #FT-10105:

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Clip and photo from the William R. Ferris Collection.

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New “Dolly” Box Set Released

Published October 27, 2009 in Goldband Collection, Music and Publications.

Dolly

Today Sony Legacy will be releasing a new Dolly Parton  box set, appropriately entitled “Dolly”. The four-CD, 99-track set is the first cross-label, career spanning Dolly Parton retrospective.

The Southern Folklife Collection was proud to provide Sony with remote access to the first two songs presented on this compilation, “Puppy Love” and “Girl Left Alone”, recorded in 1959 for Eddie Shuler’s Goldband Records by then thirteen-year-old Dolly Parton.

Listen to “Puppy Love”, from the original master tape (#FT-7670 in the Goldband Records Collection):

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Two Sides of “Pretty Boy Floyd”

Published October 22, 2009 in Music.

PrettyBoyFloyd01On October 22, 1934, the notorious bank robber Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was gunned down by the FBI on farmland outside of East Liverpool, Ohio. Floyd’s decade long career of daring bank robberies and prison escapes had made him both J. Edgar Hoover’s “Public Enemy No. 1″ and a genuine folk hero, especially amongst his fellow Oklahomans, hard hit by the Depression and with little sympathy for the banks.

One of those fellow Oklahomans was of course Woody Guthrie, who helped burnish Floyd’s posthumous reputation with his 1939 recording “Pretty Boy Floyd”, casting the outlaw as a modern-day Robin Hood. The song would be further popularized through covers by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and the Byrds.

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(Clip from SFC CD-827)

While Guthrie’s song is certainly the most well known “Pretty Boy Floyd”, the first may have been the “Pretty Boy Floyd” written by Bob Miller and recorded by Ray Whitley on October 27, 1934, less than a week after Floyd was killed. As you can hear from the clip below, it puts the focus less on the outlaw’s humanitarian pursuits and more on his cross country string of homicides.

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(Clip from SFC 78-9780)

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A Happy Birthday to Gene Autry

Published September 29, 2009 in Music.

SFC_p154_aOn this date 102 years ago Gene Autry, “The Singing Cowboy”, was born in Tioga Springs, Texas. While perhaps best remembered today as a movie cowboy and the singer of holiday classics like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Here Comes Santa Claus”, Autry’s success began in the early thirties as “The Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy”, singing country songs in the style of Jimmie Rodgers, as you can hear in this clip of “The Cowboy Yodel”, from the Bear Family box set That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine (SFC CD-6008), collecting his 1929-1933 recordings:

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By the time of his death at the age of 91, the former railroad station telegraph operator who sang “I have no cares like millionaires/ no grief to make me blue” had gone on to become one of the richest men in America, the owner of radio stations, Hollywood production studios, and a major league baseball team.

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Additional Gene Autry recordings and material can be found in the SFC 78 rpm Recordings Database, the SFC Song Folio Collection (above), and the Library catalog.

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Robert Pete Williams at the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club

Published September 16, 2009 in Archie Green Collection and Music.

Robert Pete Williams

From the early 1960s until the early 1970s a student group known as the Campus Folksong  Club, under the leadership of faculty advisor Archie Green, brought folk musicians from all over the country to perform on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the years, the Folksong Club hosted performances by the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Doc Watson, and in 1965, Louisiana bluesman Robert Pete Williams.

The story of Robert Pete Williams is well known; while serving a life sentence for murder at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in the late 1950s, Williams’ songs and stories were recorded by folklorist and ethnomusicologist Harry Oster.  Under considerable pressure from Oster and others in the academic community, Williams’ sentence was commuted, and by 1964 he was released from the terms of his parole and allowed to tour outside Louisiana for the first time. We are fortunate that some of these early performances were captured on tape, including the Campus Folksong Club concert featured here, tape number FT-4189/FT-4190 in the SFC’s Archie Green Collection.

Listen to a clip of Robert Pete Williams performing “I’ve Grown So Ugly”, live at the University of Illinois, Feb.12, 1965:

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New Sons of the Pioneers Box Set

Published September 1, 2009 in Music and Publications.

wayoutthere2We recently received a copy of Way Out There: The Complete Recordings 1934-1943 (SFC CD-7810), the new Sons of the Pioneers/Roy Rogers box set from German label Bear Family Records. Bear Family boxes are always overstuffed with great material, and this one is no exception, with six CDs and a 160 page hardcover book featuring dozens of photographs and poster reproductions. SFC staff were happy to assist the folks at Bear Family with remote access to material from our 78 rpm record collection during the production of this set.

Listen to the Sons of the Pioneers performing “Way Out There” (from SFC 78-7047):

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The holdings of the SFC are particularly strong in Sons of the Pioneers material, most notably the Sons of the Pioneers Transcription Discs Collection, featuring many non-commercial recordings from the Lucky-U Ranch radio programs of the 1950’s, and the Elizabeth Drake McDonald Collection on the work of songwriter Bob Nolan.

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John D. Loudermilk’s Tobacco Road

Published August 18, 2009 in John D. Loudermilk Collection and Music.

tobaccoroadOur friends downstairs at the North Carolina Collection’s A View to Hugh blog have a wonderful post up about singer/songwriter and North Carolina native John D. Loudermilk, featuring some fine candid photographs by Hugh Morton. Author David Meincke touches briefly on the dozens of artists who have recorded Loudermilk’s most famous composition, “Tobacco Road”, which inspired us to post a few additional “Tobacco Road” clips from our John D. Loudermilk Collection.

Allmusic.com lists over four dozen artists as having recorded the song, and even their database is missing a couple, including this unexpectedly funky 1978 version by Richie Lecea (SFC 45-5754):

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And this 1961 take from England’s Johnny Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys (SFC 45-5753): 

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Another English group, the misleadingly named Nashville Teens (pictured), made “Tobacco Road” a top-20 hit on both sides of the pond in 1964. You can watch them lip sync it on television here.

Loudermilk wrote other hit songs (”A Rose and a Baby Ruth”, “Indian Reservation”), but “Tobacco Road” will likely remain his most lasting contribution to American popular culture. If you have a favorite version, please share in the comments.

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Mike Seeger, 1933-2009

Published August 10, 2009 in Mike Seeger Collection and Music.

sfc_p2944We at the SFC were deeply saddened to hear about Friday’s passing of musician, folklorist, and collector Mike Seeger. He was 75 years old.

Mike Seeger devoted his life to collecting and performing the music of the rural South. He began playing the guitar at the age of 18 and soon added almost a dozen instruments to his repertoire, including the banjo, fiddle, mandolin, dulcimer, and autoharp.

In 1958 he formed the New Lost City Ramblers with Tom Paley and John Cohen. Modeling their sound after the old-time string bands of the 1920s and ’30s, the New Lost City Ramblers helped to bring the music of the Southern rural tradition to the forefront of the 1960s folk revival.

But Mike Seeger may be best remembered here as a collector, recording hundreds of performances and interviews with legendary old-time musicians including Dock Boggs, Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt, and Ernest V. Stoneman. These tapes now reside in the SFC’s Mike Seeger Collection, currently being preserved as part of a two-year preservation and access grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled Fiddles, Banjos and Mountain Music. The grant focuses on several interrelated collections including the collections of  Paul Brown, Eugene Earle, Ralph Epperson, Fiddler’s Grove and Alice Gerrard.

Throughout his life Mike Seeger worked to make the music he loved accessible beyond it’s origins in the rural South. Through preservation projects like  Fiddles, Banjos and Mountain Music, the Southern Folklife Collection seeks to honor his legacy and preserve his lifetime of research for future generations.

Mike Seeger performing Dock Boggs’ “Down South Blues” in 1963 :

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And the following year, performing Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “The Bachelor’s Hall” : 

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From tapes FT-5622 and FT-5635 in the Mike Seeger Collection.

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