AUTHOR'S NOTES
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Having just come back to New Orleans after a month and a half writing on my novel at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I have had mountain music on my mind a lot. The VCCA is just north of Lynchburg, in the middle of an area that has been terrifically fertile for string band music and old-time performers of every description, many of whom were recorded during the great boom of regional recording in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
On the way back from Virginia I made a side trip I had been wanting to make for a while, to County Sales's retail warehouse in Floyd, VA, where one can find an endless selection of CDs, cassettes of bluegrass, country, and old-time music, mostly of that region, including all the wonderful reissues on the German Bear Family label, the Austrian Document label, and Japanese BMG, as well as domestic specialty labels like Rounder, Rebel, and County. They also have a nice selection of videos and books. I spent a lovely few hours there, because of which I will be eating beans for dinner for the next few months. It was worth it, though.
For those of you who are curious and maybe not yet familiar with this kind of music, I am putting up links to a few CDs and books, mostly through Amazon.com, that might be interesting. If you want to browse a little more, County Sales has their own website - www.countysales.com - which is very much worth visiting.
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This is the latest, and last volume in County's 3-disc series devoted to Charlie Poole, a North Carolina songster and banjo picker. Charlie Poole radiated brio and a kind of swaggering bonhomie that was all his. Songs like "I'm The Man Who Rode The Mule Around The World" and "Hungry Hash House" are infectious musically and classically tall-tale humorous in their lyrics. The recording quality is kind of primitive, but all three discs are full of terrific songs, performed wonderfully.
Click here to read about this CD at Amazon.com |
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Through County, you can also order Rambling Blues, a bio of Poole, by Kinney Rorrer, which is very readable and full of fascinating pictures not just of Poole and his bands but of handbills, record labels, and the early-20th Century mill towns in which Poole came up. It also includes lyrics to a number of Poole's songs. Real good stuff. |
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Another great musician and personality of that time and place was Uncle Dave Macon, a figure roughly analagous to Poole in many ways, as an important early banjoist and repository of old-time songs. He was enormously popular in his time. The disc pictured is a good place to start listening to him.
Click here to read about this CD at Amazon.com |
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Grayson and Whitter were a great duet team from roughly that same area, Grayson being one of the finest fiddlers of that time and Whitter a guitarist and personality. Many of the songs they popularized, such as "Handsome Molly," "Ommie Wise," and "Short Life of Trouble," moved smack into the middle of the old-time country repertoire. The disc pictured is an extremely worthwhile purchase. Ralph Stanley did a very hot CD of their songs, titled Short Life of Trouble, on the Rebel label, which you can find through either Amazon or County Sales.
Click here to read about this CD at Amazon.com |
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For anyone who likes to play this kind of music, another excellent find at County Sales was the Old-Time String Band Songbook, containing a whole lot of old-time tunes from the repertoire of the seminal band the New Lost City Ramblers, led by Mike Seeger and John Cohen. Old ballads, fiddle-type tunes, brother duets, material from the Carter Family, Charlie Poole, Clarence Ashley and many others.
Click here to read about this book at Amazon.com |
| Lastly, everybody knows Bill Monroe. While in Floyd I found this 3-CD set of most, if not all, of the duets he recorded with his brother Charlie, as The Monroe Brothers, between 1936 and 1938. These 60 tracks are a kind of apotheosis of the brother-duet approach popular at that time, and lay out a repertoire that country singers are still working out of today - songs like "New River Train," "What Would You Give In Exchange," "Drifting Too Far From The Shore," and "Nine Pound Hammer." It's a little pricey, but not horribly so, and it is a terrific way to have all their wonderful performances together in one place. |
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