78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South (American Made Music Series)

78 Blues

78

Blues F olksongs and p h onographs in the A me rican S outh

j o hn minton

university p r e s s of m i s s i s s i p p i / j a c k s o n

America n Made M usic Series Advisory Board David Evans, General Editor

John Edward Hasse

Barry Jean Ancelet

Kip Lornell

Edward A. Berlin

Frank McArthur

Joyce J. Bolden

Bill Malone

Rob Bowman

Eddie S. Meadows

S usan C. Cook

Manuel H. Peña

Curtis Ellison

David Sanjek

W illiam Ferris

Wayne D. Shirley

Michael H arris

Robert Walser

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2008 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2008 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Minton, John, 1957–   78 blues : folksongs and phonographs in the American south / John Minton.    p. cm. — (American made music series)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-934110-19-5 (cloth : alk. paper)  1.  Folk music—Southern States—History and criticism.  2.  Folk songs—Southern States—History and criticism.  3.  Sound recordings—Southern States—History—20th century.  I. Title.  II.  Title: Seventy-eight blues.   ML3551.5.M56 2008   781.640975—dc22 2007033485 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Linda and J anet

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix

Prelude | 3 Sup posing We H ave Us a L ittle Tune Here

Chapter One | 11 Lea rning to Listen

Chapter Two | 34 Tru e Relations

Chapter Three | 44 Let’s G et This Dance S tarted

Chapter Four | 77 He r e’s One You Can All Sing Right with Us

viii | Contents

Chapter Five | 95 A S pecial Pra yer on the M an That’s A - Catching the Record

Chapter Six | 125 I Oug ht to Be Recording Right Now

Chapter Seven | 149 A Corn Licker Still in Georgia

Coda | 211 Well Folks, Here We Are Again

Notes | 229 Rec ord and Song Index | 267 Per former Index | 277 G eneral Index | 285

Acknowledgments

This book sprouted from a truly ponderous doctoral dissertation completed long ago at the University of Texas at Austin under the direction of Roger deV. Renwick, whose good counsel and encouragement during that ordeal were surpassed only by his good-humored patience waiting for something to reach print. At the other end of the line, David Evans, editor of the American Made Music Series, managed somehow to see this book in a woefully overgrown manuscript, lending his estimable knowledge and insight as well. At Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, my institutional home for the last seventeen years, Cheryl Truesdell and Christine Smith of the Helmke Library’s Document Delivery Service have never failed to fill even the oddest request. Thanks too to Elmer Denman of the Learning Resource Center, who made time at the worst possible time to help with the illustrations. At the University Press of Mississippi, editor-in-chief Craig Gill, managing editor Anne Stascavage, and assistant editor Valerie Jones were unfailingly helpful and supportive. Will Rigby expertly copyedited the manuscript, also bringing to bear his own vast musical knowledge. Besides providing me with a place to hang for the past decade and a half, Tim Hogan of Wooden Nickel Records in Fort Wayne has always gone to whatever lengths necessary to find whatever I have needed—and always come through. This book would have been impossible otherwise. Beyond the world of books, I have enjoyed the support of various musical partners, particularly my bandmates in the Possum Trot Orchestra: Susie Suraci, Rob Suraci, and Dave Kartholl. They have proven remarkably tolerant ix

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of someone who talks way too much about music, gently reminding me that sometimes you just have to shut up and pick. In so doing, they have also reminded me why music really is important enough merely to talk about too. This book is lovingly dedicated to my wife, Linda, and our daughter, Janet, who have learned to live most graciously with someone who puts records before real life. Try to imagine what that’s like. Fort Wayne, Indiana Summer 2007

78 Blues

Prelude S u p p os i n g W e H a v e Us a L i t tl e T u n e H e r e

It’s July 23, 1928, the offices of Columbia Records, 1819 Broadway, New York City. Three musicians from the Carolina-Virginia Piedmont have arrived to record Southern string band music. The North Carolina Ramblers—banjoist Charlie Poole, guitarist Roy Harvey, and fiddler Lonnie Austin—have long been a live attraction back home, where Columbia has recently discovered an untapped market for its phonograph records. The Ramblers have played a big part in that. Just three years before, their first release, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues”/“Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight Mister” (Columbia 15038-D, 1925), sold an unexpected 102,000 copies, a smash hit by any standards of the day. Since then, Poole and the Ramblers have appeared on a dozen more Columbia releases. They will never duplicate the success of that first record, but they are never anything but dependable. July 23 is especially productive. Ordinarily the group manages two, maybe four sides a session, but today they log their next six releases, twelve sides total. More than usual, the songs are weighted toward the sentimental favorites for which Charlie is renowned at stores and private homes in mill villages like Leaksville, Draper, and Spray. Most come from sheet music published between 1855 and 1904, titles like P. J. Downey and L. T. Billings’s “Old and Only in the Way” (1880), Gussie Davis’s “Let’s All of Us Stay at Home (Husband and Wife Were Angry One Night)” (1896), and Henry Harrison’s “I Cannot Call Her Mother” (1855). One piece—“Ramblin’ Blues”—is Charlie’s take on Memphis bluesman W. C. Handy’s 1916 composition “Beale Street Blues.” (Poole also likes nineteenth-century minstrel material, but Handy’s blues reflect more recent 

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Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, in New York City to record. September 1926. Charlie Poole, Posey Rorer, Roy Harvey. Courtesy Kinney Rorrer.

black trends.) And two tracks recall the very roots of white mountain tradition. “Hangman, Hangman, Slack The Rope” (Columbia 15385-D, 1928) descends several centuries from a medieval British ballad, that most hallowed of all Appalachian folk survivals: this is the kind of song mothers and grandmothers back in Spray sing to babies. “Shootin’ Creek” (Columbia 15286-D, 1928), on the other hand, derives from the fiddle music British and Irish immigrants brought along with their ballads, reshaped by African American styles—and an African instrument: the banjo. Actually, “Shootin’ Creek” is just the old dance tune more often called “Cripple Creek,” still the first piece many banjo players learn.1 The Ramblers have renamed their version for one particularly beloved homeplace—complete with a vivid portrait of when, where, why, and how folks back there make this kind of music. As the record begins, Austin and Poole are playing the tune, when they are suddenly interrupted by an insistent pounding. “Who’s that knocking that door out there?” Poole sounds startled. He’s imagining himself in an isolated Piedmont cabin. “That’s me,” replies Roy Harvey. “Dog, if it ain’t old Roy Harvey,” enthuses Poole. “Hello, Roy. How you getting ’long?”

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“Hello, Charlie, it look like you’re having some music around here.” “Yes, boy.” “Who is that you got with you there?” wonders Harvey. “That’s old Lonnie Austin,” chides Poole. “Don’t you know him?” “Oh, yeah.” Harvey remembers now. “That’s that old boy we used to play with up on Shooting Creek.” According to Poole biographer Kinney Rorrer, “The real Shootin’ Creek was a place in Franklin County [Virginia] known for its liquor and hospitality. Poole and his musician friends often stayed there at a boarding house run by a prominent bootlegger.”2 “Yes, boy,” Charlie again assures Harvey. But Harvey now is reminded of something else. “You remember that old tune you used to play, ‘Shootin’ Creek’?” “Yes, boy. Have you got your guitar with you?” Charlie wants to know. “I reckon I have got it.” “Boy, supposing we have us a little tune here.” “All right, just wait till I roll down my britches and get these overshoes off and we’ll go,” Harvey pleads. The home folks don’t need a hymnbook to read what’s clear. They can almost smell the muddy fields. It’s the too-wet-to-plow times when country people stay indoors and pick. But then, moonshiners and layabouts like Poole and his pals just fiddle all their time away anyhow. “All right,” Poole allows. “All right,” Harvey signals. “Let’s step on it.” And with that, the Ramblers—Poole’s banjo, Austin’s fiddle, and Harvey’s guitar—go back to “Shootin’ Creek.” Midway through, Harvey appeals directly to listeners back home, hollering “Boy, I wish we was going up Shootin’ Creek!” then “Best people in the world!” Listeners back home responded. Of the day’s twelve selections, “Shootin’ Creek” did best, with official sales of 14,571. (The other nod to older traditions—“Hangman, Hangman Slack Your Rope”—fared less well, with only 6,546 sold.) Nearly four years later—February 9, 1932, the studios of Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. William Lee Conley Broonzy, a formidable singer and guitarist from Scott, Mississippi, is imagining another bootlegger’s joint. February that year was relatively mild in Richmond. Anyway, this Southern son had already shivered through his share of Midwest winters. For the past decade,

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Broonzy has been living in Chicago, along with thousands of other recent arrivals from his native Delta. Broonzy’s urbanized slant on black Delta tradition has made him a local sensation—and a hot recording property, known to legions of blues fans as Big Bill. Today he manages a dozen sides himself, ten eventually being issued on Gennett’s Champion and Superior imprints. One is a slice of street life like Broonzy often re-creates with his records, “Brown Skin Shuffle” (Champion 16411, 1932). As Big Bill shuffles, sometime accompanist Steele Smith blurts “Boy, where you going with that g’itar?” “I’m going down to Miss Johnson’s.” Unfazed, Broonzy plays on. “What do they do down there and where at she live?” Listeners may be wondering, too. “She live 1306 Miller,” Broonzy deadpans over his driving guitar, “and, boy, we drink booze down there to beat the band.” Bill’s bearings on Chicago’s nightlife could not be more concrete. His destination is in the heart of the city’s black West Side, a hotbed of blues. But then, Bill’s instrumental barrage is part of that neighborhood’s real-life soundtrack. “Can you sing them blues?” Smith sounds skeptical. “These blues ain’t supposed to be sung, boy,” Broonzy quips, “they supposed to be barrelhoused.” (A barrelhouse is an improvised drinking establishment like Miss Johnson’s—maybe just a private home with a plank on two barrels for a bar. Many listeners had leaned on such bars.) “Well, let’s hear you barrelhouse ’em then,” Smith taunts. “How is that for barrelhousing?” Bill counters, really tearing into the piece. “Boy, you can barrelhouse them blues,” Smith concedes. “Do you know how to kick that gong around?” “Well, you know.” Bill sounds coy. “How is this for kicking the gong around?” Bill’s put-on may puzzle some, but his hip urban circle is in on the joke: kicking the gong around is street slang for smoking dope.3 “You can kick that gong around, boy, go on to town now!” Smith has been won over at last, credibly simulating a noisy barrelhouse for the remainder: “Let’s shake. Get off the puppy’s tail now. Stomp it, boy. Aw get dirty with it! Now let’s go to town! Aw shout! Play it, boy, you can do it!” Bringing the West Side to life is a regular feature of Bill’s records. His very first release, “House Rent Stomp” (Paramount 12656, 1927), paid tribute to his neighborhood’s ubiquitous rent parties. “All of them [local residents] was from some part of the South and had come to Chicago to better their living,” he

P relude: Supposing We Have Us a Little Tune Here | 

later explained. “And those people started to give parties and some Saturday nights they would make enough money [by charging admission or selling food and drink] to pay the rent, and so they started to call them ‘house rent parties.’” With free food and drink for musicians, Broonzy was soon a regular: “The people there asked me to come to their house. Some of them had known me at home [the Delta], and they knew I could play and sing the blues.” These experiences later spilled over onto “House Rent Stomp,” “Brownskin Shuffle,” and many other Broonzy releases. “I went [to parties] every Saturday night,” Bill recalled of another, “and I named one of my [recorded] guitar solos the Saturday Night Rub. I named it like that because that’s all they was doing while I was playing. A man and a woman would join up out on the floor and rub their bellies together and stomp and say to me: ‘Play that thing, old boy.’ ”4 “Saturday Night Rub” (Champion 16081, 1930) even features Broonzy’s friend Frank Brasswell in these roles. Egging Bill on (“Aw do it now. This is that ‘Saturday Night Rub.’ Aw get that rhythm now. Aww wobble. Aw get hot”), he suddenly demands, “Hey woman, do your old man know you here?” “Yes, he’s on the floor somewhere,” Brasswell answers himself in falsetto, finishing the record in his own voice: “Aww go on now. Aw get warm. Aw gonna do that rub!” Like Charlie Poole, Big Bill sometimes liked to feel the people who knew him at home were right there in the studio. Charlie Poole and Bill Broonzy were two of the hundreds of musicians making old-time records, the thousands of 78 r.p.m. phonograph discs of black and white folk music recorded and released between the mid-1920s and World War II by commercial record labels looking for a Southern market. This book explores how Southerners during this period thought about folksongs and phonograph records, how oral tradition bearers navigated a mass medium. How did people accustomed to communicating musically in face-to-face settings learn to interact with an electronic medium and, through it, with one another? How did such a community experience records as musical events, comparable, say, to a mother lulling a child to sleep or a noisy house party? Charlie Poole, Bill Broonzy, and hundreds of other early recording artists offered one answer, going to some lengths to show that phonographs could be very much like folksongs. Which is not to say Southerners did not notice the musical changes phonographs wrought. Styles now came and went with changing tastes; stars were born; fortunes were made; empires were founded—all a far cry from folk music. Then too, even the most mundane aspects of canned music could seem a little

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weird to downhome musicians. Less than a year after recording “Shootin’ Creek,” Charlie Poole and his pals were back in New York, this time in the studio of one of Columbia’s competitors, the Brunswick label. On May 11, 1929, they recorded a drama stretching over four sides—“A Trip to New York” (Brunswick 324 and 325)—its progress traced in their subtitles: “Part 1: On the Train,” “Part 2: The Audition,” “Part 3: In New York,” “Part 4: In the Studio.” Hitching the horse and wagon behind the hometown depot, the boys catch the train to New York in hopes of making phonograph records. From first audition to finished product, they act out each step, all with more than a little tongue-in-cheek irony. (The paradox, say, of a finished record about making a test record—the plot of “Part 3: In New York”—is obvious.) As luck would have it, the morning after they board, the group runs into a record company talent scout right there on the train. Pounding on another imaginary door—the group’s sleeping berth—Roy Harvey gushes, “Get up, boys, get up, all of you. There’s a man on here from New York that makes records, and he heard us playing last night and he’s very much interested. He’s coming down to hear us play now!” Inevitably, there follows a classic bit of Southern humor in a classic format, pitting a sharp-talking city slicker against a passel of fiddling hillbillies. “Well boys, that’s very good. Where are you from?” the man from New York wants to know. “Uh, we’re from way down South. We’re from right close to Gobbler’s Knob—you oughta know where that is,” drawls Harvey. “Yeah . . .” The condescension is almost palpable. “So you do a good deal of playing down South?” “Oh yeah, we play about all the time,” Harvey assures him. “We play for all the corn shuckings, and the cane strippings, wood choppings. We have played for a few big weddings!” “Well what do you get for playing entertainment like that?” There’s no question what’s on the city slicker’s mind. “Well, if it’s a wedding and a big wedding, we usually get around five dollars. But if it’s just a ordinary wedding, or something like that, why, they usually pay us in corn, and buckwheat flour, or cane molasses—just anything.” “Yeah?” The New Yorker still is unconvinced. “What other good numbers have you?” “Uh, numbers?” Harvey seems stumped. “We ain’t got no numbers, but we got some of the best tunes ever you heard in your life.”

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Obliging with another ditty, Harvey finally comes to the point. “Well now about, uh, how much do you charge for, uh, for making us some records?” “Oh, we’ll pay you for them.” “Oh no.” Roy’s on his best manners. “We don’t want nothing out of it, no money or nothing like that, never thought of that. We just want to get our names on it, so ma and pa’ll see it when it comes out, if we go back down that a-way.” The city boy brightens. You can almost hear the wheels turning. “Well, you boys come around the studio in the morning about nine o’clock.” Uh-oh! the folks back home are thinking. Actually, Southerners could imagine all sorts of ways phonographs were not at all like folksongs.

Chapter One

Learning to Listen

W

hen I was eight or nine, my mother bought records at a neighborhood five-and-dime chain store. Her preference was country and western, but she listened to other styles as well. My own favorites were, predictably, the Beatles. I still remember the day she went after a record she had just heard on the radio, something called “Mr. Tambourine Man” by a folksinger named Bob Dylan. My mother came back home disappointed. The Woolworth’s did not have Dylan’s recording on a 45, so she had settled for a cover by the Byrds, a group of electrified former folkies who, by rearranging Dylan’s song with a Beatles bounce, pioneered what came to be called folk rock. Bob Dylan, it turned out, was a young man from Hibbing, Minnesota, named Robert Allen Zimmerman who allegedly had rechristened himself for a dead Welsh poet (none other than Dylan Thomas). This new Dylan proved to be quite a wordsmith as well. From his early fame in the urban folksong revival, he emerged as the single most important songwriter in rock—arguably the greatest American songwriter of all time—the only contemporary of the Beatles to influence them more than they influenced him. Not long after, I heard the rumor, current among my peers, that “Mr. Tambourine Man” was “about drugs,” an interpretation then invariably assigned to any song with cryptic lyrics. I still really do not know what “Mr. Tambourine Man” is about, though I love it to this day, whether by Dylan or the Byrds.1 It was around this time, on one of my own trips to the record counter at Woolworth’s, that I first heard the equally cryptic “Sunshine Superman” 11

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(another record “about drugs”!) by a British folksinger called Donovan. I was later told that Donovan, who had a last name after all (Leitch), was the “Scottish Dylan.”2 About this time too I had my first face-to-face encounter with a self-styled folksinger, sitting around a campfire in a crowd of strangers while a young man strummed a guitar and sang songs most of us identified with nationally known records—the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” (Capitol 4049, 1958), “Abilene” by George Hamilton IV (RCA Victor 47-0948, 1963). He also sang a piece I had not heard before, though the song’s unusually repetitive style (what I much later learned was termed incremental repetition) made it easy for me, like thousands before, instantly to commit it to memory. The song began, Hangman, hangman, Slack your rope awhile. I think I see my father coming, He’s traveled many a mile. Father, did you bring me any silver? Father, did you bring me any gold? Father did you come to see me hung, High upon the gallows pole? The father replied that the last—to see the speaker hang—was indeed the case, and the narrative proceeded in like fashion through a succession of relatives (mother, sister, brother), each of whom had come only to witness the prisoner’s demise. Finally, the condemned’s sweetheart arrived, presumably with the ransom, but the hangman had apparently grown impatient, and the performance ended abruptly with a strangling sound. Having heard the song once, I sang it to myself for years, when I was pleasantly shocked to hear it again—this time sitting around a stereo in a suburban Houston living room—performed by the British rock group Led Zeppelin on their third album.3 Like a lot of my peers, I grew up a little confused about what makes a folksong. But records? Those I knew. But it turns out this song—and many more I knew from similar sources— does stem from something more properly called folksong, having been performed at other, more intimate hearths and on other, less cosmopolitan recordings. For this is one of the venerated Child ballads—so called for Harvard professor Francis James Child—the very cornerstones of American folksong research. My

Learning to Listen | 13

song, the ballad folklorists know as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Child 95), is the British derivative of a story current throughout Western Europe, most likely introduced into English tradition by Gypsies in the second half of the seventeenth century.4 These British offshoots were subsequently transplanted to North America, where in the twentieth century folklorists documented an especially hale branch. North Carolina alone yielded two score versions. One of the earliest was noted by Cecil Sharp from Mrs. Sarah Buckner at Black Mountain on September 19, 1916. A decade and a day later, on the twentieth of September 1926, Charlie Poole, a banjo-picking mill hand from Randolph County, recorded another in New York City for the Columbia Phonograph Company, which marketed the resulting 78 r.p.m. disc to the same Southerners who’d contributed the piece to academic folksong collections. (Led Zeppelin’s version, of course, involved some rather different Atlantic crossings—and some rather different records. It derives from a recording by legendary African American folksinger Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (1888–1949), as re-created in the 1960s by folksong revivalist Fred Gerlach.)5 We know little about Mrs. Buckner except that she was white, married, and residing or visiting at Black Mountain when Cecil Sharp arrived in September 1916. However, given the nature of Sharp’s collecting and choice of informants, and of her repertoire specifically, I suspect she did most of her singing for family and neighbors—probably mainly for her own children—coincidental to the drudgery and tribulation of maintaining an Appalachian household at a bare subsistence level. The thirteen pieces she contributed to Sharp’s landmark collection of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932) epitomize the older domestic traditions of the Anglo-American South, consisting almost entirely of unaccompanied ballads of British descent.6 Charlie Poole was a far more public personality. Born March 22, 1892, in the hamlet of Millboro, Poole was working in the textile mills by the age of eight. Around that same time he took up music, the (a)vocation that eventually rescued him from the weaveroom. Acquaintances from the Granite Cotton Mill on the Haw River, where he was employed during the ’teens, recalled how Charlie would “lay out of work” to lounge on the nearby bridge, playing his banjo and singing within hearing of his workmates, who would lean out of the mill windows to wave and converse. Poole’s work schedule became increasingly sporadic as the years passed. He traveled widely and incessantly with other itinerants, performing whenever and wherever they found an audience. In 1925 he and his group, aptly named The North Carolina Ramblers, approached Columbia about making records.

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Columbia said “yes,” the results were successful, and Poole eventually appeared on more than one hundred discs, cementing his reputation as an entertainer. But celebrity only accelerated his rambling and boozing. He died in 1931 at the height of his popularity, felled by an alcohol-induced heart attack on the eve of a trip to Hollywood to appear in motion pictures. Three-quarters of a century later, Charlie Poole’s presence in Southern music is perceptible yet—particularly in contemporary bluegrass, where his three-finger banjo style and repertoire endure. That repertoire suited a crowdpleasing public entertainer. Although he adapted a few older pieces like “The Maid” to the newer instrumental idioms sweeping the turn-of-the-century South, Charlie’s song stock consisted mainly of titles from late-nineteenthcentury sheet music, the vaudeville stage, and Tin Pan Alley’s professional tunesmiths, with a lesser proportion of African American material, whether straight from black tradition or through the filter of blackface minstrelsy and popular print.7 If Southerners proved remarkably adept at reformatting oral traditions for records, there was precedent in their earlier accommodation of print. These crosscurrents flow through this book as well. This is a book about recorded music. It does not specifically concern my own record listening, though from time to time I return to my and my generation’s experiences. Because this is a book about making and listening to records as very personal activities, and these are the examples I know firsthand. Nor does this book specifically concern Charlie Poole, Sarah Buckner, or “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” though these singers and this song do epitomize my primary subjects: the thousands of 78 r.p.m. phonograph records of Southern folk music issued by commercial companies between the mid-1920s and World War II in deference to the musical tastes of recalcitrant Southern consumers. As the examples of Buckner and Poole suggest, the tag Southern folk music and song encompasses a wide range of occasions both public and private, mixing songs of lengthy grassroots currency with those of recent popular coinage. Both classes reveal the mutual influences of oral tradition and print—and, later, of commercial recordings. Inevitably, the South’s racial politics get involved. Buckner and Poole were white, but blacks also sang for folklorists and phonograph companies. Academic folksong collections were sometimes devoted to black traditions, sometimes to white, occasionally to both, but the distinction is always there. The same is true of the records: originally segregated as hillbilly (white) and race (black), now often lumped together as old-time, downhome, vintage, and so on, the distinction is still there. Which is not to say folksong collections and old-time records overlap

Learning to Listen | 15

completely. Academics and corporations both sampled selectively, the former consciously seeking domestic tradition bearers like Sarah Buckner, the latter cautiously investing in proven public entertainers like Charlie Poole. Yet these examples also suggest enough common stock and cross-pollination across this spectrum—blacks like Lead Belly occasionally performed “The Maid” for collectors and corporations, just as Buckner and Poole sang or recorded a few songs from black tradition—that glosses like Southern folk music and song and old-time records are not too misleading. The historical relations of oral tradition, popular print, and old-time records have been much discussed. My book rests plumb on this scholarship and its painstaking reconstructions. I stray a bit, however, from a purely historical approach to ask a closely related though somewhat neglected question: How did early-twentieth-century Southerners instantaneously experience phonograph records as musical events—as personal interactions or social occasions expressing cultural values through musical performance? Granted, some might question whether records truly qualify as personal interactions or social occasions, at least in the same sense as folksongs—a mother rocking a child to sleep while murmuring a lullaby; a church congregation singing a hymn; an amateur string band entertaining at a community dance: performances whose distinct qualities reflect some sort of direct human contact.8 Not that there is any question such live folksong performances were among the most routine yet profound musical events in the early-twentiethcentury South. Nor is it in dispute that these performances provided the primary bases for old-time records. But there is also a conventional wisdom—and a daunting scholarly consensus—that the real-world personal warmth defining folk music cannot withstand the recording process. I hope to show that, for old-time records anyway, this just is not true. Despite the obvious contrasts between playing a gospel record at home and singing a hymn in church, I think Southerners often experienced these records in the moment as folksong performances, as familiar social occasions—or at least as close kin. In fact, there is every indication old-time artists and their listeners instantly identified with one another as very real people—that a record like Charlie Poole’s “Hangman, Hangman Slack Your Rope” created an immediate sense of personal belonging much closer to the folksong experience than, say, listening to the same piece on Led Zeppelin III. But I would also be the last to suggest that listening to a Led Zeppelin album creates no personal warmth. Sound recordings may technically qualify as an impersonal mass medium, but it is common sense that records are uniquely

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Negro child playing phonograph in cabin home. Transylvania Project, Louisiana. January 1939. Photo by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

human events of some kind. In the century-and-a-third since their invention, sound recordings have absorbed untold time, energy, and resources—besides the personal investments and cultural capital they represent. Their contents are priceless. Today, records are the most common way music enters everyday lives globally. They happen in their own good time, they have their place, they communicate in their own special ways. Most world citizens have some idea what a record is, and that idea is usually anything but static and impersonal. Of course, records are often associated with more obvious occasions or activities (Saturday night at a dance club or discotheque, for instance). But in and of themselves, records are events as much as any other musical performances. And common sense also says these must be social occasions or cultural events—that records do have a personal dimension—if only because most records feature music, and music is an extremely personal expression. That this sense of human contact may vary from record to record—particularly with records from different communities, cultures, or artistic traditions—only underscores its import. With old-time records, these personal impressions could be so strong that recording artists and listeners might feel they knew each other firsthand. Considering

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most performers came from the very communities buying the records, they really may have. So this book also rests on the assumption that perceptions of electronic media are culture-specific and cross-culturally variable—as much so as oral or written communication—and that any culture’s rules for understanding electronic media may rise to the level of its other means of expression, oral, written, or otherwise. In other words, just as people must learn to use speech or writing as part of their basic enculturation, they learn to communicate through records or radio as culturally defined media. More to the point, just as people absorb music and their community’s musical tastes with their upbringing, they must learn recorded music the same way, so that how people think about records may—like musical tastes—vary from community to community. Insisting that record listening is a cultural capability—which is merely to say it is learned, not instinctive—challenges another common opinion: that everyone responds alike to electronic media, which allegedly disregard or dissolve cultural boundaries. The idea seems to be that all people everywhere listen to records, talk on the telephone, watch TV, and so on exactly the same way, almost as an instinctive reflex, an inborn skill. I suppose just the opposite. I assume people experience records as culture. That being the case (and how could it be otherwise?), early-twentieth-century Southerners must have experienced records quite differently from how we do today. The catch, of course, is to figure out exactly how. How, after all, do you determine what people were thinking, or thought they were doing, when they listened to records eighty years ago? Some outside testimony survives, but it is spotty at best. Other historical documents are helpful too. In the end, though, it comes down to the records. That these particular records were intimately tied to an especially personal kind of music—folksong—is key: re-creating a range of musical occasions well known from other sources, many actually come with listening instructions. Given the virtual disappearance of such traditions over the last half century, we are also afforded an illuminating counterexample: our own. For whatever Sarah Buckner or Charlie Poole thought about records, it could not have been what we think. That their experiences nonetheless shaped how we still hear records makes that contrast all the more telling. Many things affect how people experience records. The words and music may be most obvious, but other factors include how listeners identify with performers, or how performers imagine their listeners. The role of music-making in the community, or the relation between live and recorded music is very important: a community where most records imitate live music will think about

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records differently than one where most live music imitates records. These are a few variables determining recorded music’s overall place in the community, which in turn also impacts how the community interprets recorded music. I know from many accounts, and many acquaintances, that my experiences are not atypical of people growing up with American popular music after the mid-1950s. I got into records in the 1960s, mainly in and around one of the world’s largest cities (Houston). Even there, I experienced some folk music— the usual children’s songs, seasonal favorites, and such—but I barely noticed. Records and radio were the music I liked, and besides, folk for me meant Bob Dylan and the Byrds. True, much of my musical upbringing was distinctly Southern. But I also listened to transatlantic rock acts known around the world. For a while, it seemed all the best music was British. Music-making was indeed growing distant from most people’s workaday lives—except, of course, for the professionals who made the records that now supplied most people’s music. Homemade music was not quite an anomaly, but it was not routine, and what little there was tended to be fairly deliberate, needing formal training (piano lessons, school band) or feeding off media: like most guitar players I knew, I “taught myself ” mainly by learning to reproduce the sounds on records. Overall, music was media, and media were selfperpetuating. A lot of the music I saw was on television, with performers—often virtual puppets fronting unseen session musicians—only pretending to sing and play the prerecorded soundtrack to canned applause or a carefully coached studio audience. A lot of the rest took place in gigantic arenas, with performers staged to look like they were on television. Anyway, on TV or in person, they were usually there only to promote their latest records. Exactly who these people were was not always clear. Some seemed to be manufactured phonies, others serious artists. Many were complete ciphers. And some were just the “new Dylan” or the “next Beatles.” But image and hype were all an understood part of the game. The music too veered between sheer banality, mere novelty, and true originality. (Stylistically, even folk was now a commercial option—and not at all bad for it.) At worst, song lyrics were so trite their meanings were irrelevant. At best, they seemed so far removed from ordinary experience they imagined extraordinary states: literary flight, fantasy, genius, narcosis. But records always mattered most. We listened to records constantly: on the radio, on our own, all the time. We shared them and talked about them. Constantly. We went to see live music, of course, but the premium was on acts with records—the bigger the records the better. It says something about my community’s embrace of pop culture, mass media, and modern technology

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that some of my most vivid memories of family vacations are the records in radio rotation on long drives. It also reveals something of the lapse in everyday music-making. For me, music has always meant records. They are their own reality, sometimes seeming more real than live music. In fact, though I would not have thought of it then, I grew up with a strong sense of records as social occasions or cultural events. Records identified me with particular groups, their values and outlooks. They were a big part of how I thought of myself as a person. They were some of the most meaningful moments of my life. And that is the gist: I sensed all this in the moment I listened to recorded music, the instant I closed the loop with an unseen performer and experienced a record. For me, a record was as much a social occasion as saying grace or telling a joke—a minor social occasion, sure; taken for granted, maybe, but for the very reason that it is important enough to do all the time. So too the breach may be more obvious than the norm: telling a joke badly can be awkward, making a joke of saying grace is generally frowned upon—but nothing compared to what people making jokes during records I liked once risked. And I think my first inkling of any of this was being jarred by old-time records. When I was in high school, I stumbled into a new format: the reissue LP reprising old 78 r.p.m. singles. I think Robert Johnson’s records were the first. I know I first read his name in Writings and Drawings (1973) by Bob Dylan, dedicated “to the magnificent Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie who sparked it off.”9 I vaguely knew Guthrie through Dylan, but Robert Johnson was a blank. Within weeks, though, I read in a posthumous tribute to Duane Allman that “Duane’s eyes widened just thinking about Robert Johnson.”10 Obviously, I needed some Robert Johnson records. Sure enough, the closest shop had his complete oeuvre—a couple of Columbia albums featuring twodozen-odd songs cut between 1936 and 1937. Turns out I knew quite a few Robert Johnson songs: Cream’s “Crossroads” and “From Four Until Late,” “Love in Vain” and “Stop Breaking Down” by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin’s “Lemon Song.”11 The links to the Allman Brothers’ blues rock and especially Duane Allman’s lyrical slide playing were also unmistakable. Johnson’s music was different—fantastic on its own, I thought. But curiously, many friends who loved Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Cream, or the Allmans hated his records. And I now think it was not just the musical differences, or the dodgy sound of old 78s, but something more fundamental about the records themselves as self-contained experiences. We knew how to listen to Allman Brothers records. We were part of their early seventies Southern counterculture, we felt we understood their albums, that they were for us.12 Robert Johnson’s records were clearly meant for

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other ears. Even then, I knew enough of Southern culture and history to realize they drew breath from a vast black rural underclass and a vanished way of life. Tuning into that wavelength seemed about as realistic as time travel. But I was already hooked on the attempt. A little before or after, a friend’s father had given me another pair of old-time reissues. (He had bought them thinking they were contemporary bluegrass and was flat disgusted with their actual contents.) The Skillet Lickers was devoted entirely to Georgia’s premier old-time string band. Smokey Mountain Ballads featured more titles by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, plus Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter Family, the Monroe Brothers, Wade and J. E. Mainer, the Dixon Brothers, and Fiddling Arthur Smith—all pillars of early country music.13 Even more than Robert Johnson, these reminded me of Dylan. Right away, I caught the link between “Tanner’s Farm” and Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” But like Johnson’s records, “Tanner’s Farm” summons a different world from Dylan’s surreal rewrite: a bygone working-class culture and decades of day-to-day hardships in close-knit Southern communities.14 Recording artists like the Skillet Lickers obviously imagined their listeners differently, too. Some of their records even carried statements to that effect. Two items especially fascinated me: “Soldier’s Joy” (Columbia 15538-D, 1928), and an excerpt from the famous fourteen-part “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia” (1927–30). As “Soldier’s Joy” begins, singer Riley Puckett strums his guitar and fiddler Clayton McMichen drawls, “Well, folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers, red-hot and raring to go, gonna play you another little tune this morning. Want you to grab that gal and shake a foot and moan! Don’t you let ’em dance on your new carpet: you make ’em roll it up!” And with that Mac leads the group in an old-time square dance, “Soldier’s Joy.” Something about that struck my sixteen-year-old self as—well, just really old-time. But “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia—Parts 9 and 10” (Columbia 15531-D, 1929) topped even that. Over two sides, the Skillet Lickers portray a passel of fiddling moonshiners who strike a deal with a big-city bootlegger, leaving the mountains to set up a speakeasy in Atlanta, where they are lucky to escape with their fiddles and their lives. I knew better than to take this at face value: even if I had not been around self-deprecating Southern humor all my life, I’d watched enough Hee Haw.15 Yet in other ways, these skits faced the very realities TV dissolves, allowing a role for music-making in daily life rather at odds with televised America’s penchant for self-reflecting media. All resemblances aside, the “Corn Licker” records suggested a world without Hee Haw. And I knew they said something different from Dylan’s. Something was happening here, I just didn’t know what it was.

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All this was just an impression then. I know now that many of the differences I sensed reflect basic contrasts between popular music and what academics describe as folksong. I am now also certain this explains why these records suggested such different experiences, such different ideas about how records connect people. It only stands to reason that anyone coming to records from folk music would think about them very differently from someone raised on post-Beatles rock. In fact, few people living could have experienced records anything like the way Sarah Buckner or Charlie Poole did, hustled from a world with no records into the first great age of recorded roots music. Mrs. Buckner and her neighbors actually helped define the ideal folk community. In this conventional view, the folk are a sedentary lot, attached to a specific locale marked as their home place and livelihood, and perhaps as inaccessible or undesirable as well. This homeland also is recognized as being culturally distinct from the national mainstream: a rural district or region, a provincial village or town, an urban ghetto or suburban neighborhood. One trait looms especially large in this sense of cultural difference: the centrality of oral communication to such communities, even to the exclusion of print or electronic media. By definition, a folk culture is transmitted mainly during face-to-face, small-group interactions. As a result, music-making occurs as an integral part of the daily routine, precluding elaborate instrumentation, rehearsal, or staging. Folksongs are thus artful in a dual sense, evaluated aesthetically but applied to personal goals, those practical ends (putting the baby down, praising the Lord, cutting the rug) being a key factor in such aesthetic judgments. Some people may excel at performing, but there is neither the specialization nor the rigid division between singer and audience found in professional entertainment. Instead, participants’ most important identities are social or personal (mother, child, workmate, neighbor, church member) rather than professional or artistic, and any material reward is nominal or minimal, compensation usually consisting merely of affection or sociability in kind. Other forms of communication may contribute to these performances—for example, many of the ballads in Sarah Buckner’s repertoire were disseminated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the popular press—but these are readily adapted to the tradition, and singing as an activity is sustained by interpersonal means, as singers impart or acquire their abilities and repertoires within an oral tradition paralleling an intimate network of kith and kin. The performances themselves, like the performers, are quintessentially familiar. Their meanings, while perhaps implicit for natives and obscure for

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others, express the community’s most fundamental values and beliefs. Ideal folksingers customarily cannot conceive of music-making apart from personal involvement with the most important people in their day-to-day lives, and are only peripherally aware of the possibilities offered by print or electronic media as alternatives to oral communication.16 Such, anyway, is the ideal folksong community depicted by Cecil Sharp (1859–1924) and codified by his successors. Yet Sharp himself recognized the gap between his limited experience in the Appalachians and his generalizations about the area’s folk culture. By his own admission, these deliberately ignored the “less lovely side of the picture” that had “already been emphasized, perhaps with unnecessary insistence, by other observers”—that is, the unmistakable signs of the rural South’s entry into the modern industrial world.17 And Sharp is today emblematic of the folksong collector who collected very little of what the folk actually sang. Intent on salvaging British survivals—particularly the older ballads cataloged by F. J. Child (1825–1896)—he excluded religious songs, popular adaptations, and native compositions every bit as essential to the Southern repertoire. Interested in performances appropriate to casual domestic settings, he neglected the semiprofessional public entertainments equally central to Southern tradition. In fact, Sharp reported finding almost no instrumental music at a time when, as D. K. Wilgus observes, “there well might have been a banjo picker behind every bush.”18 Somewhere in the North Carolina foliage was Charles Cleveland Poole, already a banjo-picking local entertainer of some repute. Truly an instrumentalist apart from the casual pickers who even then popu­ lated the South, Charlie and his Ramblers—Norman Woodlieff or Roy Harvey on guitar and Posey Rorer or Lonnie Austin on fiddle—set a standard of virtuosity among old-time artists, an indelible and innovative influence on Southern string-band music. Notwithstanding the success of his neotraditionalist trios, Poole reportedly favored a more progressive group, the Highlanders, which featured a second fiddle and piano and gravitated even more toward topical trends. Sure, he knew a few venerable British folksongs; but he preferred the newer creations many Southerners were singing. And he established an easy rapport with phonograph records, radio broadcasts, and Hollywood films, those ultramodern nemeses of salvage folklorists like Cecil Sharp. In eliciting from singers only what he wanted, Sharp “learned to ask for ‘love-songs,’ which is their name for these ditties.”19 That alone is a tacit admission that folklorists and folk hear songs differently. Not that the folk draw no such distinctions. But they also link items and idioms, occasions and media

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Big Bill Broonzy, recording for the Philips label during his folksinger phase, Baarn, The Netherlands, February 1956. Courtesy Guido van Rijn collection.

that folklorists segregate or exclude altogether. In the famous retort of African American singer William Broonzy, who had little patience with folksong purists, “I guess all songs is folksongs. . . . I never heard no horse sing ’em.”20 Broonzy was reared in another of America’s canonical folksong traditions: the black Delta, where he was born at Scott, Mississippi, in 1893. Like Charlie Poole he never abandoned his musical upbringing, but neither was he constrained by it. And like Poole, he too owed his musical liberties to an ostensibly impersonal medium. Despite, that is, his eminently sensible exclusion of some nonhumans from the sphere of vocal performance—his skepticism regarding the musical abilities of equines is clearly justified—Broonzy had frequently heard phonographs sing songs, including his own: as Big Bill, he was one of the most successful recording artists of the pre–World War II era, appearing on hundreds of discs under this and other pseudonyms, both as frontman and as accompanist. Again like Poole, though, Broonzy quite explicitly related these records—these things-not-folks—to the interpersonal performances formative to his own enculturation and later life experiences—related them, that is, to the human dimension of so-called folksong. Big Bill was obviously right: only people sing songs. But not all songs people the same singing communities. In the end, there is a distinct personal quality tying even Bill’s recorded songs—like those of Charlie Poole—more closely

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to Sarah Buckner’s domestic musings than to Led Zeppelin’s blues-based heavy metal albums or the folk rock releases of Bob Dylan and the Byrds. On records like “Brown Skin Shuffle,” Broonzy consciously dramatized the fact.21 So understanding old-time records as musical events is something of a balancing act. While Southern folk, under the right conditions, were quite receptive to influences like the phonograph—far more than many folklorists cared to admit—that receptivity reflected factors in their customary lifeways distinguishing them from contemporary readers—distinguishing them, more importantly, from many of their own contemporaries. This duality in fact constitutes my rationale for occasionally retaining the terms hillbilly and race despite some present, entirely understandable uneasiness with them. Obviously, these labels are pejorative and demeaning, employed mainly by record companies, journalists, and academics rather than recording artists and their public.22 And that, ironically, strikes me as their special virtue. They succinctly suggest, in connotation and etymology, these records’ origins in the clash of a postindustrial nation-state and a marginalized folk, persons this dominant society regarded as different or even inferior—backward, insular, uneducated—in part because of the greater importance of oral traditions in their daily lives. So pervasive were those traditions that Southerners declined to purchase phonographs in any quantity until they could also buy records of their funny-sounding music, which, beginning in the 1920s, record companies supplied by alternately attempting imitations with pop singers, bringing Southern artists to Northern studios, or sending field units to the South. No wonder these records seem so stubbornly personal, so defiantly personable. If ever records conveyed the human dimensions of folksongs, these would have to be those records. But then there is that conventional wisdom—and that daunting scholarly consensus—that the personal qualities of folksongs do not stand a chance with phonographs, that mass media are levelers of cultural differences and local identities, that records could not possibly be musical events in the same sense as folksongs. Amazingly, communications research has determined all of this without ever showing much interest in records, much less in oral tradition.23 Folklorists have had quite a bit more to say about both. For the first folklorists the touchstone of authenticity was that shadowy catchall oral tradition, and its purported by-products: anonymously composed, communally re-created songs transmitted from time immemorial by word of mouth. Such were the qualities ascribed to the medieval or Child ballads, whose canonization launched American folksong studies. Never mind that many of Professor Child’s own texts were preserved on eighteenth- and nineteenth-

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century broadsides, the cheaply printed song sheets (sometimes compiled in chapbooks or songsters) much loved by the working classes of Great Britain, Ireland, and North America. Famously likening collections of broadsides to “veritable dung-hills, in which, only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a moderate jewel [i.e., a medieval survival],” Child, whose experience with folksong did not extend much beyond his library, was happily untroubled that by his day songs originating on broadsides outnumbered medieval remnants among living folksingers.24 By the early twentieth century this broadside strain, already past its own heyday, was tolerated if not quite approved. Usually even the most open-minded collectors and editors still followed what D. K. Wilgus termed the “Child-andother” format, publishing Child ballads first, followed by such “later” pieces as they deemed fit.25 (Besides broadsides, American blues ballads might also fit this “other later” bill.)26 Attitudes toward the broadside’s modern counterparts—vaudeville and the minstrel stage, late-nineteenth-century sheet music and songbooks, and, increasingly, records or radio—varied somewhat. Most folklorists—Cecil Sharp, for one—vilified them as they once had broadsides. Or take Kentuckian Josiah Combs (1886–1960), who devoted an entire chapter of his Sorbonne dissertation Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis (1925) to “The Passing of the Folk-Song” in his native Appalachia. A stickler even for his day, Combs actually excluded most oral traditions from “the folk-song of the traditional type,” which he restricted to older pieces like “ ‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows’ [Child 95], the high-water mark of iterative composition” (the medieval ballad’s distinctive incremental repetition). These he deemed “far superior” even to such indisputably oral (if comparatively recent) forms as black spirituals. Allowing “the reasons for the passing of the folk-song are numerous,” Combs nonetheless indicted “musical instruments” in particular as “aiding in the destruction of the folk-song in the Highlands, and elsewhere over America, in the rural sections. Such are the organ, piano, and especially the phonograph.” The organ and piano were to be faulted for “importing printed music, which the Highlander is learning; something far removed from the unwritten, oral music of his ancestors.” The phonograph was just to be faulted—period. “The phonograph,” Combs pronounced, “has exerted a bad influence on Highland music, as it has over America in general, among all classes. Whenever an instrument makes all the music itself, ‘canned music’ as the Highlander sometimes calls it, one acquires quickly the habit of listening to it, thus losing personal initiative to learn the art himself.” And he concluded, “the Highlander is learning to ‘listen,’ and to listen to cheap, undignified jazz music and ragtime, and to

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silly, mushy, sentimental love songs and vaudeville music, along with the good music which the phonograph offers.”27 Combs might well have been surveying the repertoire of Charlie Poole, who the following year began his own dissertation on Appalachian tradition with the Columbia Phonograph Company. The first side he cut was Harry Braisted and Stanley Carter’s 1899 composition “The Girl I Left in Sunny Tennessee” (Columbia 15043-D)—silly, mushy, and sentimental to its Tin Pan Alley core. Whether Combs would have ranked even Poole’s “Hangman, Hangman, Slack the Rope” (Child 95) “along with the good music which the phonograph offers” is doubtful. If he had nothing good to say about records, Combs had nothing but bad to say about the Highland banjo picker, “almost without exception a shiftless character,” whose “chief stock-in-trade . . . consists of railroad songs and outlaw songs.” “Whenever the banjo picker gets his hands on a traditional folk-song,” huffed Combs, “as he sometimes does, he hangs, draws, and quarters it, until it is hardly recognizable.” The tone may seem harsh, but this description also fits Poole perfectly.28 Not all collectors were quite so astringent, but few were more approving. Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935) closed her book On the Trail of Negro FolkSongs (1925) expressing the hope she might “some time spend a sabbatical year loitering down through the South on the trail of more Negro folk-songs, before the material vanishes forever, killed by the Victrola, the radio, and the lure of cheap printed music.”29 One might counter that her own collection is filled with material from the nineteenth-century minstrel stage and its printed ephemera. But then, she could not know that over the next two decades commercial phonograph companies would do as much as folklorists to track down black folksongs. But Combs and Scarborough—and many like-minded colleagues—were right, if only in a limited sense: Southerners were “learning to ‘listen,’ ” and to listen to phonograph recordings of remarkably varied provenience. Of course, community-based songsters were increasingly making records as well. Nor was their consumption entirely passive: besides learning to listen, many persons were learning to sing from records, just as they had from nineteenth-century broadsides or turn-of-the-century sheet music. Academics grudgingly registered that circumstance, too. Howard W. Odum (1884–1954) and Guy B. Johnson (1901–1991) adopted a more pragmatic if not altogether approving view. In 1926 they allowed, “it is no longer possible to speak with certainty of the folk blues, so entangled are the relations between them and the formal compositions” disseminated by print, records, and radio. They even estimated that

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“the phonograph record has surpassed sheet music as a conveyor of blues to the public,” concluding “that the student of Negro song tomorrow will have to know what was on the phonograph records of today before he may dare to speak of origins.”30 Only outside academe did the phonograph find friends. One was the prolific Ozark collector Vance Randolph (1892–1980), a former newspaperman who, perhaps because of that background, was more kindly disposed toward mass media, including old-time records.31 Yet even as Randolph’s monumental Ozark Folksongs made its way to press, there appeared the first academic study of old-time records, D. K. Wilgus’s M.A. thesis, “A Catalogue of American Folksongs on Commercial Records” (1947).32 More than anyone, Wilgus (1918–1989) shepherded downhome records into the academic fold simply by stating the obvious: that by the 1920s, the phonograph had assumed a role filled for centuries by print. As early as 1951, he was making the point in the discipline’s premier quarterly, the Journal of American Folklore, commending “a more general awareness of the positive, shaping force exerted on traditional songs by ‘the hillbilly type of music’—the modern broadside, disseminated by radio and recording as well as in print and in person.”33 Fifteen years later, introducing the landmark Hillbilly Issue of the same journal, Wilgus—by then a UCLA professor and doyen of American folksong studies—allowed that his “first references to hillbilly music as a ‘broadside tradition’ were partially motivated by the need to confer, by a convenient analogy, academic respectability on the music.” In the long run, however, the broadside analogy had “proved more than convenient. The hillbilly vein has indeed functioned as a broadside tradition since 1923 in accepting material from the folk and transmitting material to the folk.” Still, Wilgus cautioned, “to focus attention totally on the effect of these [recorded] broadside performances on domestic tradition—that normally witnessed by the folksong collector—is to be myopic, if not to miss the point entirely.” Far from constituting “a mere transition or interruption in folk tradition,” this commercial vein had proven “self-perpetuating and so circular that some of the ‘effects’ sought for by the folklorist [in domestic traditions] are evidenced within the music profession itself.”34 In his own way, Wilgus was making the same point as Big Bill Broonzy. That is, just as all songs are—literally speaking—folksongs, Southern folksongs have—practically speaking—always involved more than purely interpersonal domestic traditions. Southerners may have clung more tenaciously than others to such idealized forms, but they were also long accustomed to drawing

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remarkably fine distinctions among commercial media. It is not just that singers and songs have for centuries circulated between the folk and professional domains, a wholly uncontroversial matter at this late date. The true crux is that these may not always be separate domains at all. Even today there is much truth to Wilgus’s charge that folklorists tend to “consider folk and commercial such antithetical concepts that anything other than domestic folk tradition seems to belong in a single non-folk category.”35 Yet in practice, any two media productions may be as distinct from one another as some are akin to—and others removed from—the folk ideal. Students of popular print now recognize that, whatever their role in disseminating traditional material, broadsides entailed a very different kind of reading than other literature.36 In learning to listen to records, Southerners were learning more than isolated songs; rather, they were assimilating the very act of listening to records—or of listening to some records but not others—as an integral part of the folksong experience. Admittedly, Wilgus’s own work remained focused on the phonograph’s historical dimensions—on its role in accepting material from, and transmitting material to, the folk.37 The same was still true of the field as a whole, but its purview was widening, now driven by an acknowledged cadre of academically credentialed race-and-hillbilly researchers—Bruce Bastin, Norm Cohen, David Evans, William Ferris, Archie Green, Judith McCulloh, Bill Malone, Peter Narváez, Paul Oliver, Neil V. Rosenberg, Jeff Todd Titon, Charles K. Wolfe, and others—many of whom had, like Wilgus, long pursued commercially recorded American music as an adjunct to more conventional academic subjects. Studies now regularly appeared with university presses and in scholarly journals as well as with nonacademic imprints and periodicals. Some universities even established special research centers.38 Ironically, just as old-time records seemed poised for academic respectability, they again found themselves ruled out of bounds. More ironic still, the ruling came from a redefinition of folklore that might seem especially amenable to recorded folk music. Never really a unified approach, this trend—variously identified as contextual, behavioral, performance-centered, rhetorical, sociolinguistic, processural, and so forth—emphasized the act of artistic communication itself over artistic end products, a “self-conscious reorientation,” in Richard Bauman’s signal formulation, “from the traditional focus upon folklore as ‘item’—the things of folklore—to a conceptualization of folklore as ‘event’—the doing of folklore.”39 But while the movement’s proponents often framed their concerns in contrast to the field’s prevailing interests—and especially to historical studies

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and comparative textual analyses—not all felt these to be in conflict. Nor was this perspective necessarily inimical to such “things” as phonograph records. One early advocate, Roger Abrahams, even touted its potential to rehabilitate troublesome forms like records or print, “especially evident in folksong scholarship whenever the problem of broadside printings [or sound recordings] of traditional songs has been encountered, . . . a situation often discussed by D. K. Wilgus.”40 Unfortunately, other born-again evangelists adopted a more confrontational tack, instigating the academic food fight now known as the text/context debate. The culprits on both sides were many. As the lead article in a special Journal of American Folklore on this new perspective, Dan Ben-Amos’s “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context” raised some particular ire.41 It also muddied already troubled waters with the hopelessly vague term context. Honestly, the whole episode would hardly bear mention were it not for one thing: though it escaped notice then as now, the controversy was largely about old-time records as musical events. Actually, Ben-Amos’s definition may have been controversial less for what he included than what he excluded. Contending that “folklore is not an aggregate of things, but a process—a communicative process to be exact,” Ben-Amos defined it simply as “artistic communication in small groups.” Granted, folklorists had always focused on that communicative process, but viewed historically as oral tradition or transmission. For Ben-Amos, though, oral tradition was an “accidental quality” of folklore, sometimes there, sometimes not. Treating oral tradition as a defining feature of folklore had led folklorists to “concentrate upon isolated forms and ignore the real social and literary exchange between cultures and artistic media and channels of communication,” which in turn “has been a source of constant frustration for folklorists who searched for material uncontaminated by print or broadcast.” The way out is simple: “it is not the life history of the text that determines its folkloristic quality but its present mode of existence. On the one hand, a popular melody, a current joke, or a political anecdote that has been incorporated into the artistic process in small group situations is folklore, no matter how long it has existed in that context. On the other hand, a song, a tale, or a riddle that is performed on television or appears in print ceases to be folklore because there is a change in its communicative context.”42 Ensuing brouhaha notwithstanding, most of Ben-Amos’s criticisms were frankly more relevant to Josiah Combs’s era than his own. By the time his piece appeared, for instance, few folklorists still “insist[ed] on the purity of folklore

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texts, . . . uncontaminated by print or broadcast.”43 Most expected just the opposite. Then again, the response suggests such arguments were not entirely offtarget. Or maybe it was just the impression that their authors questioned the validity of any approach but their own. That was one reservation expressed by D. K. Wilgus, who responded to Ben-Amos and the rising contextualist tide in no less a forum than his 1972 presidential address to the American Folklore Society. Wilgus voiced quite a few objections to Ben-Amos’s arguments. While he did not say as much, he may have been especially miffed by the claim that any song transmitted electronically ceases to be a folksong, or that historical approaches ignore “the real social and literary exchange between cultures and artistic media.” The main point of his address is that “performances on commercial recordings can be as valid as ‘field texts’ for folklore study.”44 As proof, Wilgus adduced two old-time recordings of “The Little Grave in Georgia,” one song inspired by the infamous 1913 murder of fourteen-year-old Atlanta factory worker Mary Phagan and subsequent lynching of her wrongly accused boss, Leo M. Frank. Restricting his analysis “to quite narrow ‘textual’ aspects” and “a small part of the problem . . . of the ‘doings’ of the song, its composition,” Wilgus argues “our standpoint has to be historical.” Still, his comparative textual analysis reveals much about social and literary exchanges, tracing these recorded broadsides through oral sources and popular print to a well-known folk lyric complex and thence from North American to Irish tradition. Moreover, even within this “narrow ‘textual’ ” scope, Wilgus considers many factors he can reasonably call “contexts,” including “Southern folkways, Southern folksong style, the commercial recording industry, the individual performers, the murder of little Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank, and the socioeconomic background of events.” In turn, he argues, his findings cast additional light on these “contexts.”45 Wilgus’s alternative contexts may have been a clever rhetorical ploy, but they foreshadowed the utter confusion that followed. Mainly, would-be disputants just argued past one another.46 Wilgus’s partisans no more noticed that he had conceded too much than Ben-Amos’s bedfellows conceded their overblown claims to have redefined folklore. There is, of course, no reason the study of recorded folk music is limited to historical questions, any more than it says much to say a recorded song ceases to be folk just because it has been recorded. Many did take up the word game, though, and pretty soon folklorists of all stripes—including old-time record researchers—were using context to refer to all sorts of different things, sometimes as if that alone meant something.47 (Not that the term ever meant much: how small is a small group context anyway?) In

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a stunning reversal, even Dan Ben-Amos later numbered mass media among folklore’s so-called contexts. If that view “involves the extension of the idea of folklore into new contexts,” it might also remind us that not all media are of a kind, any more than they are just like oral traditions.48 The reminder may be overdue. At present, folklorists have not only overcome their former squeamishness but have embraced mass media with a passion, turning increasingly from conventional folk genres to forms existing only as media. Witness the recent enthusiasm for so-called photocopylore, faxlore, or netlore—jokes, cartoons, or urban legends transmitted as photocopies or faxes or over the Internet. Maybe such things may bear some superficial resemblances to folklore, but the argument that they are modern equivalents of oral traditions—or even of broadsides—seems a little thin.49 Ideally, extending the idea of folklore into new contexts would entail a little more critical scrutiny of such facile assumptions. Doing so may reveal that folklore is not always the most appropriate idea. But what other idea could be appropriate to old-time records? And how could Southerners not experience these as extensions of the interpersonal performances defining their pre-phonograph traditions? Categorically claiming that phonograph records cease to be folksongs is as misleading as saying these experiences are lost to history. That we were not in the room at the precise moment an Appalachian homesteader or Delta sharecropper played a record does not mean the occasion is beyond recall. Had we been present, there is a good chance the event was transpiring entirely in the listener’s head. That the performer was absent no doubt influenced those perceptions. Precisely how it influenced them remains to be discovered, as does the significance of the audience’s absence from the recording studio. Even so, it is hard not to know what some people were thinking or thought they were doing at the very moment they listened to Charlie Poole’s “Shootin’ Creek,” or Big Bill’s “Saturday Night Rub,” or Clayton McMichen’s “Soldier’s Joy,” or hundreds of similar records. At least Charlie, Big Bill, and Mac left pretty good clues about what they thought they were up to: there are hundreds of records where these and scores of similar artists deliberately cued listeners on their thoughts and intentions—whether in little dramas or commentaries, spoken asides, even in the songs themselves—revealing that whatever view folklorists have taken, early-twentieth-century Southerners experienced phonograph records as many different musical events. Some were likened to community traditions and familiar social occasions, others edged toward the experiences and expressions typifying later pop music and mass media, many fell some-

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where between. Hearing all of these recorded events as they once sounded is this book’s goal. Meanwhile, the study of old-time records, always academically marginal, has proceeded ever further from the institutional mainstream. It may be the better for it—or at least none the worse. While academics have not totally abandoned the field, the enterprise has always depended on untenured enthusiasts. Today most new research comes from journalists and pop music critics, independent scholars and music historians, record collectors and roots music revivalists. This has proven anything but a liability, not least because the subject’s popular appeal has created greater public interest than any province of academic folklore. Moreover, almost all of this work is worthwhile, much of it superb. Nonetheless, it predictably reflects the backgrounds and interests of its authors and their audiences. Especially telling is the tendency to focus on the records’ musical content alone, or to treat them simply as varieties of popular music, mere equivalents of recent forms better suited to that description: modern country music, contemporary urban blues or the folk blues revival, rock and its various subcategories. As a result, old-time records’ unique qualities are too often obscured. This does not mean such views are entirely misguided. In fact, how people once heard old-time records does still influence how we listen today, the ways we still experience records as expressions of basic human relationships. Listening to old-time records is indeed something of a balancing act. While they should not be confused with contemporary roots styles—any more than with pre-phonograph oral traditions—they obviously are from the same planet. They still resound in the best things American music has ever produced: contemporary blues and country, gospel, rock, and more. And how can anyone truly hear Bob Dylan—one of the greatest artists American popular music has yet produced—without learning how to listen to old-time records? Throughout his career, Dylan has continually replenished his art with folksong—“the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player,” as he once described it, before coming right to the point: “Everybody knows that I’m not a folksinger.”50 Well, maybe not everybody. But almost everybody knows Dylan chooses his words carefully: old-time records have always guided his feel for folk tradition. And while he may not be a folksinger, he has put legions like me in touch with those same records.51 As I have said, how and why I have for the past four decades personally identified with Bob Dylan’s records is not this book’s subject. But it helps explain why for the past three decades I have also been fascinated by records

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whose authors and audiences identified with one another so differently. It may also explain why my experiences seem to me no more different from those of Sarah Buckner’s children—who if they existed must have learned to listen to old-time records—than from those of children in the present digital age. And it reassures me that even post-Beatles rockers who do not draw too fine a distinction between Robert Johnson and the Rolling Stones are not completely mishearing. For while these experiences are all distinct, they are hardly alien— more a family tree. After all, over the past few years, I also have learned to listen to music on the Internet. I also know for a fact that I do not listen to music on the Internet like people born after 1980. But then this also tells me that it is at least possible to empathize with other ways of listening. And it also suggests that old-time records are not any farther removed from my generation’s listening experiences than digital music— maybe less so. Even those of us who did not always know what Bob Dylan wasn’t might be closer to real folksongs than we were aware. One of my own earliest musical memories is of my mother, a native of the James Brothers’ old Missouri haunts, singing snatches of “Jesse James” (Laws E 1) around home, a reasonably canonical folksong in a quintessential folk setting—not too different from what I imagine went on in the Buckner house. Of course, she more often sang things like Tex Williams’s “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” (Capitol 1437, 1947). And she also introduced me to Bob Dylan. If I can find in my earliest, most intimate musical encounters a faint link to Southern tradition, even these summoned voices that seemed wonderfully different from the people who raised me, voices with no direction home. Bringing it all back home, Mrs. Buckner’s brood might be a bit puzzled by a generation convinced their mothers were unwittingly dislodging them with the musical hallucinations of strangers. Listening to the likes of the North Carolina Ramblers, Sarah Buckner’s children could not help hearing people very much like their own family. But then I doubt they could help noticing that their musical world was changing too, and that records had a lot to do with it. Given Charlie Poole’s legendary boozing and carousing, given his love of outlaw ballads and hell-raising songs—given his newfound celebrity as a recording artist—I suspect his listeners heard more than a few worldly hallucinations in his records. Still, it’s possible even a dead-drunk, coked-to-the-gills, ex-con coal miner listening to Poole’s “Hangman, Hangman, Slack The Rope” on a whorehouse jukebox experienced just the opposite. Personally, I think it more likely he heard the voice of his mother back home. Maybe old-time records really did sound like nothing before or since. But maybe we can still hear them.

Chapter Two

T r u e Rela t ions

S

o what manner of musical events were old-time records? The key pieces to that puzzle are, of course, the records themselves, thousands of canned performances that by some accounts have ceased to be folksongs—or have at least lost their personal bearings. Thankfully, hundreds of these records argue just the opposite, actually taking time to announce their occasions. Have another listen to one item that started me on this quest, “Soldier’s Joy” (Columbia 15538-D, 1928), by Georgia’s premier string band, the Skillet Lickers. As the record begins, singer Riley Puckett strums his guitar and fiddler Clayton McMichen drawls, “Well, folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers, red hot and raring to go, gonna play you another little tune this morning. Want you to grab that gal and shake a foot and moan! Don’t you let ’em dance on your new carpet: you make ’em roll it up!” And with that, McMichen and company launch into a rousing version of that little square dance tune “Soldier’s Joy.” But exactly where are the Skillet Lickers and the folks? McMichen does not quite settle the question, since he assumes his intended listeners already know. The rest of us may have to look a little longer. Revisiting the South of seven or eight decades ago is a challenge to be sure, but we are aided by as efficient a time machine as humans are ever likely to invent, requiring no means of transport beyond a record player. For in asking how people understood old-time records as musical events, I am not especially concerned with the times when and places where these records were made and 34

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played. Accounts of these do survive, and they are of no small relevance.1 Our goal, however, is the sense of these records, the intangibles rendering them meaningful grounds for personal interaction, if only of a vicarious sort. In other words, we are mainly interested in imaginary settings, states of mind in which performers and audiences understood each other not as disembodied strangers separated by an ostensibly impersonal medium, but as known or knowable persons whose common backgrounds gave them a very real stake in one another’s personal experiences. And in his own way, McMichen really is telling us the problem has already been solved. Old-time records are rife with spoken asides, monologues, or dramas tying their contents to live music-making. We have already considered a few; several hundred others fill the following chapters. Still, even with full-blown dramas, latter-day listeners may miss the most telling details. And not all clues are this obvious. There are other more subtle testimonies to how Southerners understood records, which were not always cast as mere extensions of oral traditions. Sometimes Southerners experienced records as if they were square dances; sometimes they experienced them as records. And sometimes they just thought them weird. Our object, then, is any expression—spoken, dramatic, or otherwise—illuminating records as any kind of musical event. In the end, these cues imagine many different occasions; taken as a whole, they suggest a coherent aesthetic for experiencing records, a kind of Southern primer on how to hear records, or how to hear different records differently. Wonderfully, Southern tradition not only inspired most of the music on old-time records, reflecting their origins in familiar personal activities or community occasions; it also provided the means to imagine these records as various musical events. Southerners were used to drawing such fine distinctions long before the phonograph. Even with oral traditions, they had always envisioned many ways of cooperating in music-making, many different kinds or degrees of personal involvement. As Richard Bauman observes, “art is commonly conceived as an all-or-nothing phenomenon—something either is or is not art—but conceived as performance, in terms of an interpretive frame, verbal art may be culturally defined as varying in intensity as well as range.”2 Most people intuitively recognize these interpretive frames and their nuances. It’s well known, for instance, that more people can repeat jokes than actually tell them. The reasons are many: some people really can’t tell jokes, sometimes those who can hedge on items that may be offensive (or worse, not get a laugh), sometimes other factors intrude. But most people recognize the difference between merely repeating a funny story and really telling a joke like it’s supposed to be told. If

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the speaker begins “I can’t really tell jokes but . . . , ” one may suspect from the outset. Then again, such disclaimers sometimes conceal consummate performers. Other subtleties abound. Joke parodies confound ordinary expectations by bending or breaking the rules.3 Badly told jokes are a category all their own. There are even jokes about jokes, their patterns and rules.4 So a folk tradition usually embodies an entire range of performance, stretching from mere reports, through differing degrees of total involvement, to self-reflective irony or self-conscious parody. Certainly this was the case with Southern folksong. While these distinctions were sometimes overlooked or ignored by early collectors, their presence is unmistakable. And sometimes they were duly noted. The Ozark “Bald Knobber Song,” for example, describes a vigilante gang operating in Taney County, Missouri, in the 1880s. Tempers had not completely cooled by 1932, when Vance Randolph collected the piece from one local. “Mr. Carney,” Randolph wrote, “wishes it made clear that he does not approve of the song, which he describes as ‘doggerel.’ ” Randolph himself observed, “I should not care to sing this song publicly, even today, in either Forsythe or Kirbyville.” The difference between actually performing and merely repeating “The Bald Knobber Song” was clearly appreciated in Taney County.5 Another approach shapes a drinking song in Randolph’s collection, “The Three Crows,” a ballad parody raised to even greater absurdity in actual performance. This piece, the informant explained, “was usually lined, just as the minister used to line hymns in church.” Tradition bearers obviously recognized the irony of employing a sacred singing style for a decidedly profane performance.6 Moreover, while such fine distinctions may be taken for granted, they still require some means of invoking or shifting these interpretive frames. The statements “Have you heard the one about . . . ” or “Stop me if you’ve heard it before . . .” usually indicate the speaker is about to tell a joke, while “I can’t really tell jokes but . . . ” more likely introduces a mere paraphrase. Similarly, singing a folksong means letting people know you are singing a folksong. This is not quite as silly as it sounds: aside from the obvious circumstance of someone bursting into song, singers must constantly cue others on these finer distinctions if their performances are to be understood as they intend. So folk traditions also come with conventional keys or cues to signal what is going on—like saying “Stop me if you’ve heard it . . . ” before telling a joke.7 Sometimes these cues are voiced outright; other times they are imbedded in the performances themselves. Obvious examples of the second sort include not just the basic contrast between

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speaking and singing, or between different singing styles, but textual features like subject matter and tone; rhythm and rhyme; figurative language and stock imagery; and so forth. More overt framing techniques include not just outright declarations of intent (“I’d like to sing y’all an old song now”), but appeals to tradition (“Here’s one they all used to sing back in my growing-up years”); attribution to another (“This was always my mother’s favorite hymn”); even a disclaimer of performance (“I can’t really sing it like it’s supposed to be sung, but here goes”).8 It turns out some people who claim they can’t sing or tell jokes really can—yet another nuance. In sum, challenged to reconcile folksongs and phonographs, Southerners already possessed traditional techniques for sorting such performances— including the means to relate expressions in one medium to those in another (“I think Mama got the words for this from this old hymnbook she used to have”). The last point is crucial, another instance where old-time records expanded on broadside literature. Long before the phonograph, Southerners had domesticated print media, which variously anticipated records—by preserving or transmitting individual songs, for instance. But print touched tradition in ways besides the purely historical. Even for silent individuals, the very act of reading a broadside might create an experience not totally removed from folksong. Tellingly, such solitary readings were not necessarily the norm. Accounts of people reading broadsides in groups, often to illiterate family and friends, or of singers using them simply as prompts for performances reveal these as very different readings from those the literati know, very different literary experiences. Broadsides were not mere adjuncts of folksongs, however. They were also a world unto themselves, a distinct format with its own qualities and conventions, its own traditions. And like the folksongs they jostled, broadsides carefully keyed these nuances—whether directly in their songs and poems, in parenthetical asides and notations from writers and printers, or because of how people understood broadsides and their role in their musical lives—framing themselves as sundry musical events. Not surprisingly, old-time records carried on that practice too. After all, broadsides and old-time records were true relations, as closely tied to one another as each to oral tradition. Some of the very first Southern recording artists were also among the very last broadside poets, publishers, and peddlers. In naturalizing phonographs, Southerners looked not just to folksongs but to popular print and its own double-dealings, learning to listen much as they earlier had learned to read.

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A nineteenth-century American broadside. First documented on British broadsides of the 1700s, “The Mermaid” (Child 289) alternated between print and oral tradition until the twentieth century, when it appeared on at least three old-time records: the Carter Family’s “The Wave on the Sea” (Bluebird 33-0512, 1941), Ernest V. Stoneman’s “The Sailor’s Song” (OKeh 45015, 1925), and “The Raging Sea, How It Roars” (  Victor 21648, 1928), also by Stoneman and his Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers. America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress.

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Some broadsides were even treated as personal communications—or at least near equivalents. This is the gist of the commonplace “come-all-ye” opening: “Come all you young men and maidens, attend unto my rhyme,” “Ye gallant Britons, I pray draw near / Unto the news I have brought you here,” and so forth. The ploy was so characteristic that come-all-ye even became a synonym for broadside.9 Similar are those items traditionally framed as true relations—unaffected confidences on mutual concerns: “You royal lovers far and near, / A true relation you shall hear, / Of a young couple who prov’d to be / A pattern of true loyalty.”10 Or consider such ubiquitous notations as “To be sung to the tune of _______” or “Air: _______” (the customary cues for reanimating tuneless texts), “Suitable for use in the home or in public,” “A choice selection of tunes for church service,” and so forth, all presupposing the printed text as mere accessory to real-life singing.11 Then again, broadsides might be cast simply as reports or descriptions of live performances or oral traditions; witness the much-reprinted Forget Me Not Songster (Boston and Philadelphia, 1840 and after), subtitled A choice collection of old ballad songs as sung by our grandmothers.12 Other items were more particular. A nineteenth-century American broadside, “Change for a $10 Bill,” is subtitled “An Old Story done up in new dress, and sung to the tune of: Monkey turned Barber.” Old and new are relative terms in folksong, but like “The Monkey Turned Barber” (Laws Q 14), the bawdy ballad updated here was known on both sides of the Atlantic.13 Another undated American songsheet—“Wreck on the C. & O. Railroad at Clifton’s Ford, Va.” (Laws G 3)—bears the notation “as sung by Bailey Briscoe, with Dakota Jack, the Cow Boy Medicine Man.”14 No doubt Briscoe hawked it through personal appearances with Jack’s traveling medicine show (another commercial precursor of old-time records). If Briscoe is little remembered, Songs Sung By R. D. BURNETT. The blind man. Monticello - - - Kentucky (c. 1913) has a better-known source. Its six titles—and many more besides—were indeed sung throughout south-central Kentucky and surrounding states by Richard D. “Dick” Burnett (1883–1975). Like many itinerant street singers, Burnett initially supplemented his busking by selling songbooks and ballet cards, later graduating to records. He did a brisk trade with his personalized songbook. “I sold 6000 o’ them books at ten cents apiece,” he later recalled, adding, “but along toward the last, when I went to makin’ these records, I just quit the other. Oh, I sold the supply o’ books I had on hand, but after I’d made the records, I’d sell the records instead. It was better to sell the records—people could listen to the record, and the songbooks just had the words in ’em.”15 Even so, the book’s patrons would have

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had little trouble reanimating its contents: most selections were well-known folksongs.16 Whether as conventional fiction or actual fact, broadsides sometimes selectively represented oral traditions. In the next breath, they might proclaim their self-sufficiency. A format unto itself, the broadside possessed its own unique properties, its own repertoire, its own artistic traditions. Items often tout the newness or novelty of their contents.17 There were even broadsides about broadsides. The medley was “a [printed] song made up from cross readings of titles of other [printed] songs.” “Known as early as 1620,” the genre is “valuable in indicating titles of songs that were popular in their time.” In one—“Chanting Benny, OR THE BATCH OF BALLADS”—an imaginary broadside peddler declares “My songs have had a tidy run, / I’ve plenty in my fist, sir, / And if you like to pick out one, / I’ll just run through my list, sir.” He proceeds to do just that, with the refrain “So listen to me while I cry, / Songs three yards a penny, / Then if you feel inclin’d to buy, / Encourage chanting Benny.”18 These examples foreground the medium and its individual creations. Others implicate consumers—being directed, for instance, to the tavern crowd, a key broadside readership.19 Similar demographics included rural audiences as opposed to townsfolk, women readers as opposed to men, particular crafts or occupations, regional enclaves, and so forth. Sometimes these groups are subtly invoked by subject matter or style; at others they are explicitly addressed in texts, titles, or dedications. These may be quite general (and perhaps purely conventional), as in The Newcastle Songster or The Sheep-Shearer’s Garland. Or they may be as particular as “A Copy of Verses Humbly Presented to All My Worthy Masters and Mistresses of Stamford, Lincolnshire, By John Mewse, Bellman. 1814,” or “A Copy of Verses Presented by Isaac Rag, Bellman, to the Masters and Mistresses of Holbourne Division, in the Parish of St. Gile’s-in-the-Fields.”20 Some examples address the very act of reading with startling directness. Two separate songs—both originating as broadsides, each later resurfacing in oral tradition and on old-time records—describe a 1904 train crash in East Tennessee. “The Southern Railroad Wreck, Which Occurred Near New Market, Tenn., Sept. 1904” was (as this simple ballet card states) “Written and composed by Charles O. Oaks,” a blind minstrel, broadside peddler, and recording artist from Richmond, Kentucky, whose career paralleled Dick Burnett’s. Two years later, R. H. Brooks of Whitesburg, Tennessee, published a more elaborate “New Market Wreck,” featuring his song’s text plus musical notation for four voices, “respectfully inscribed to the Songland Male Quartette League of Robertson Creek.” The second verse advertises other bonuses:

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The trains were going East and West, And speeding on their way; They ran together on a curve, And what a wreck that day. The cars were bursted, torn and split, And spread across the track; You’ll see a picture of the wreck, Just over on the back. Reversing the page, readers find a picture of the locomotives’ impending collision, along with a prose account of the tragedy, a portrait of the composer, and “DIRECTIONS—For imitating the running of the trains, whistling, and explosion of the wreck, before playing the song, entitled ‘The New Market Wreck,’ by R. H. Brooks, Whitesburg, Tenn.”21 That broadsides composers, printers, and peddlers advertised themselves is just human nature—like the prolific seventeenth-century poet assuring readers “Whatever yet was published by me, / Was known by ‘Martin Parker,’ or M. P.”22 The most interesting title in Songs Sung By R. D. BURNETT. The blind man is Burnett’s own “Song of the Orphan Boy,” which describes the robbery and shooting that blinded him, setting him on his present path. Its chorus entreats Oh, dear friends today, if you could not see your way Oh, how lonely and sad you would be, Don’t think it any wrong to buy one of my son[g]s, Won’t you buy from a blind man like me.23 And it is just a short step from “The Orphan Boy” to those songsheets selfconsciously exposing their own artificiality, parodying the format’s conventions, even ironically undermining their own rationale. In the early nineteenth century London’s two greatest broadside printers, John Pitts and James Catnach, neighbors in the Seven Dials publishing district, feuded endlessly. Pitts eventually adopted the curious tactic of publishing broadsides denouncing broadsides, deriding Catnach for “printing libel[s] . . . which [were] sung from door to door” or for his “badly printed Dying Speeches”—actually a fairly good description of Pitts’s own stock in trade.24 Genres like the dying speech or last goodnight—poems or songs (allegedly) composed by condemned criminals, then printed as broadsides and hawked at their executions—were themselves

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often parodied. Another Seven Dials burlesque professed to be “just printed and published, a full, true, and pertickler account of the life, trial, character, confession, behaviour, condemnation, and hexecution [sic] of that unfortunate malefactor, Richard Wilbyforce, who was hexecuted on Monday last, For the small charge of one ha’penny! and for the most horrible, dreadful, and wicked murder of Samuel—I mean Sarah Spriggens, a lady’s maid, young, tender, and handsome.” The piece is a virtual inventory of the dying speech’s clichés, beginning with the obligatory come-all-ye (“Come, all you blessed Christians dear. . . ”) and unfolding through its set stages (crime, discovery, trial, condemnation), all to the refrain “For the small charge of a ha-penny.” This was, incidentally, not just a come-all-ye’s customary price but the customary cry of peddlers hawking dying speeches at public executions.25 Other broadsheets push this existential paradox a step further, adducing their materiality not as mere practical circumstance (as in “Chanting Benny,” Blind Dick Burnett’s “Song of the Orphan,” or R. H. Brooks’s “New Market Wreck”), but as a pretext for ironic self-commentary, even self-contradiction. Published in Macon, Georgia, in 1864, the Confederate States Almanac includes among its verses an appeal to the paper shortage caused by the Federal blockade, certainly a tongue-in-cheek topic for print publication: Bring us scraps of cotton thread, Bring the night cap from your head, … Anything that paper makes, Every Editor now takes, And will pay you for your rags, And your good-for-nothing bags, Bring them in and bring them soon, Morning, evening, and at noon.26 This shortage may partly explain another Civil War–era broadside. One senses, however, a more deliberate irony behind a sheet of blank checks from the Exchange Bank of Virginia, its reverse featuring a set of pro-Southern “Running Rhymes” to be sung to the tune of “Dixie.”27 As direct descendents of broadsides, it is hardly surprising that old-time records perpetuated these strategies. Of course, both also took cues from folksingers, just as they borrowed their songs. All of these media—oral, printed, or recorded—might accordingly trace a common trajectory. Sometimes they were framed as mere reports on other performances (“Here’s the way they used

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to sing them real hymns back in the day”); at others they actually stood in for these (“Close your eyes and I’m gonna take you back there with me right now”). Sometimes they were regarded as self-contained experiences, distinguished from other musical traditions or media by their own rules and conventions (“This ain’t one of them made-up hymns—this is how it’s supposed to be sung, straight from the book”); but they might also self-consciously comment on these very relations, ironically denouncing their incongruities (“Course, my mama was my songbook”).28 All of this has an obvious bearing on how Southerners experienced oldtime records as musical events, especially compared to the folksongs previously defining their musical lives. Even more than broadsides, old-time records practically demanded such explanations. Print reduced folksongs to one-dimensional husks; records were a different matter altogether. As Blind Dick Burnett recalled, “after I’d made the records, I’d sell the records instead. It was better to sell the records—people could listen to the record, and the songbooks just had the words in ’em.” By reintroducing sound, records seemed infinitely more like live performances, and all the more puzzling for it. After all, phonograph records obviously were not folksongs. So why did they seem at times so similar, at others so different? Fortunately, recording artists rose to this challenge. To explain these puzzling relations—to account for old-time records as musical events—they consistently envisioned four major possibilities, alternately framing records as 1). remote, stylized depictions of live music-making; 2). bona fide folksong performances in their own right; 3). self-contained musical events on a par with, yet distinct from, live performances; or 4). logical contradictions, whose relations to live music-making presented out-and-out paradoxes. These approaches are by no means mutually exclusive, nor are their boundaries impermeable. Any two or more sometimes surface on the same record. Maybe it is best to think of them as grammatical tenses or moods in the phonograph’s Southern vernacular, inflections that may cooperate in any given expression to signal any number of relations between a speaker’s present circumstances, his topics, and listeners. So what manner of musical events were old-time records? If we are to unlock that puzzle, these indeed seem the most promising keys. Our first stop is an Atlanta street corner where the Skillet Lickers and their crowd really did once meet to make music. To the literal-minded, these folks are all long dead. For the record, they are all down there still, always ready to play another little tune.

Chapter Three

l e t ’ s get this d an c e sta rted

H

“

ello, folks, now I’m with you once again. I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old Southern darkey I heard play coming down Decatur Street the other day because his good gal done throwed him down.” It’s April 2, 1927. The speaker is Riley Puckett, sometime Skillet Licker, presently recording solo at Columbia Records’ Atlanta studio on Peachtree Street. But Puckett and his listeners are imagining him out busking on another of his favorite street corners. In adapting folksongs for phonographs, Southern performers often framed records as depictions—but only depictions—of traditional music-making, describing a few activities or interactions from such events to evoke the total experience. Puckett’s brief monologue on “The Darkey’s Wail” (Columbia 15163-D, 1927) illustrates one approach. “Alabama Square Dance” (Broadway 8234, 1929) by his fellow Georgians Chumber, Coker, and Rice—actually mandolinist Archie Lee Chumbler, fiddler Howard Coker, and guitarist Hoke Rice—typifies another.1 As the record begins, Rice casually fingers his instrument, mimicking an impatient audience. Let’s get this dance started here, good night! They been out fifteen or twenty minutes. Where’s the musicians at? Co k e r : Uh, Archie, he stepped out. R i c e : Stepped out? Co k e r : Yeah. R i c e : Gonna get him a drink, I guess. R i c e [ s tr u m m i n g guita r]:

44

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“Alabama Square Dance.” Recreation evening at community school under direction of WPA (Work Projects Administration) recreational supervisor. Coffee County, Alabama. April 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

I suppose so. Well, it’s time he’s getting back in here. Co k er : Well say, big boy, what about you singing a song? R i c e : What do you wanna hear, “Alabama Jubilee”? Co k er : Yeah. C o ke r :

Rice:

“All right,” replies Rice, who obliges by flailing his guitar and crooning “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here and it’s a Alabama Jubilee.” Not quite all the gang, but the words are hardly out of his mouth when Coker gushes with relief, “Here he comes now, let’s get started! Where you been, Archie?” Archie’s coming sure enough, and they’re both suddenly drowned out by Chumbler, who stumbles in, violently clearing his throat, hiccuping and slurring drunkenly. Boy, that was fine stuff I had out there. R i c e : Fine stuff  ? Ch u m b l e r: Yeah, that was something else, big boy, that was good—, drink I had, hic! Ch u m b l e r:

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Somebody give you a drink? Oh boy, they didn’t miss it, hic! R i c e : Well listen, don’t you drink too much. Ch u m b l e r: Oh well, I don’t never drink too much. R i c e : No, but we got a dance here to play for tonight. Ch u m b l e r: And they don’t make that much, hic. R i c e : We just on the second set now. Ch u m b l e r: Oh well, that’s all right. What does anybody wanna dance for when we got this—, stuff around, hic? R i c e : Well, let’s get started here. What are you gonna play? Co k e r : “Rabun Gap.” R i c e : “Rabun Gap.” Let her flicker! Rice:

Ch u m b l e r:

Launching into an uptempo fiddle tune, the band members simulate a rowdy hoedown, alternating dance calls with shouts of encouragement from their imaginary audience: “Get your partners, boys, get your partners, let’s go.” “Promenade the hall.” “Swing that good looking girl, right then left.” “Swing her all around. Left then right.” “Hear that fiddle boy play!” “Play it, boy, play it.” “Ain’t that good music!” “Swing that girl in red calico. All around and about. Promenade home.” Eventually the music ends, and Coker pipes up in falsetto, “Say mister, you’ll have to excuse me standing on your feet.” “Aw that’s all right,” Chumbler drawls. “I stand on ’em most of the time myself. Fact is, little girl, I wouldn’t mind you staying on ’em.” And there the side ends. Though they have received scant attention, such dramas appeared with remarkable frequency on old-time records. Many were fanciful set pieces deriving more or less directly from the phonograph’s commercial forebears: blackface minstrelsy, the medicine show, vaudeville, and so forth.2 Of greater interest here are items like “Alabama Square Dance,” contrived specifically to re-create live musical events on record. Given traditional dance music’s role in old-time records, reenactments of public balls were predictably common. Country breakdowns, picnics, and barbecues in the mold of “Alabama Square Dance” also figure in “Searcy County Rag” by Ashley’s Melody Men (Victor V-40158, 1929), a string band from Searcy County, Arkansas; “Beaver Slide Rag” (Columbia 14210-D, 1927) and “Chittlin’ Supper” (Columbia 14426-D, 1929) by Georgian Peg Leg Howell and His Gang; and “Sea Board Stomp” by Floridian Blind Arthur Blake (Paramount 12583, 1927). A half-a-dozen-odd titles by Georgia’s John “Dilly” Dilleshaw and His Dill Pickles fall into this class: “A Georgia Barbecue At Stone Mountain—Parts

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1 and 2” (Vocalion 5454, 1930); “Georgia Bust Down”/“Pickin’ Off Peanuts” (Vocalion 5436, 1930); “Lye Soap” (Vocalion 5446, 1930); “Sand Mountain Drag” (Vocalion 5421, 1930); and “The Square Dance Fight On Ball Top Mountain— Parts 1 and 2” (Vocalion 5419, 1930). But there are a whole slew of others.3 Rating their own subdivision are reenactments of cooperative subsistence activities culminating in music, dance, and general festivity—for instance, the Skillet Lickers’ “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15298-D, 1928), “A Bee Hunt on Hill for Sartin Creek—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15700-D, 1930), and “Hog Killing Day—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15468-D, 1928). There are several depictions of corn shuckings or husking bees: the Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers, “Old Time Corn Shuckin’—Parts 1 and 2” (Victor 20835, 1927); Herschel Brown & His Boys, “Corn Shucking Party In Georgia” (OKeh 45250, 1928); and Calaway’s West Virginia Mountaineers, “The Corn Shuckers Frolic” (Gennett 6546, 1928). Also in this category are the portrayals of musical moonshiners, whether at sequestered stills or public points-of-sale. While most were directly inspired by the Skillet Lickers’ wildly successful “Corn Licker Still in Georgia” series, all have a basis in reality. Moonshining and bootlegging were important kin-based economic activities in the South, particularly in times of depressed farm prices. They also engaged more than a few musicians, booze always being closely linked to music-making. Thus the family business depicted on “Moonshiner and His Money” by Charlie Bowman and His Brothers (Columbia 15387-D, 1929) has a real-life parallel in the moonshining activities of brothers Jim and Dave Couch, members of another musical family from the same vicinity.4 Many race dramas depict the rural dance’s urban counterpart, the inner city house party or, more particularly, house rent party. Literally intended to raise the host’s rent, rent parties were ubiquitous among black migrants in cities like Chicago, vividly recounted in Big Bill Broonzy’s autobiography—and vividly re-created by him (and many others) on records like “House Rent Stomp” (Paramount 12656, 1927) and “Saturday Night Rub” (Champion 16081, 1930).5 Almost indistinguishable from these rent parties are the dance hall, barroom, or juke joint settings of records like the South Memphis Jug Band’s “Policy Rag” (Vocalion 02585, 1933) or Winston Holmes and Charlie Turner’s “Kansas City Dog Walk” (Paramount 12815, 1929). These and similar establishments—nightclubs, liquor stores, taverns, barbecue stands, cafés, and barrelhouses (all distinct cultural institutions with overlapping functions)—also figure in Kokomo Arnold’s “Back Door Blues” (Decca 7156, 1935); Henry Brown’s “Stomp ’Em Down to the Bricks” (Brunswick 7086, 1929); Jim Clarke’s “Fat

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Tavern on southside of Chicago. April 1941. Photo by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Pictured on the left is Dan Dixon. On the right is Lonnie Johnson (1889–1970), a pre–World War II recording star whose career on records stretched, unbroken, into the late 1960s. The tavern is Squares Boulevard Lounge.

Fanny Stomp” (Vocalion 1536, 1929); and many others.6 Similar are the gambling dens captured on Lucille Bogan’s “Baking Powder Blues” (Banner 33059, 1933); Foster and Harris’s “The Alley Crap Game” (Paramount 12709, 1928); or “Darktown Gamblin’—Parts 1 (The Crap Game) and 2 (The Skin Game)” (Columbia 14531-D, 1930) by Robert and Charlie Hicks. The foregoing are all by race artists but are matched by hillbilly depictions of urban bootlegging operations, usually as adjuncts of rural stills. Set in an Atlanta speakeasy, the Skillet Lickers’ “A Night in a Blind Tiger—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15503-D, 1929) is devoted entirely to the theme. But such establishments figure in many moonshiner skits. Needless to say, all of these sound recordings include music or song. More elusive was another essential feature of such events: dancing. Here too, artists drew partly on traditional precedents, partly on effects contrived specifically for records, representing dancing or dancers through traditional dance calls or other descriptive exclamations; through audible clogging, tapping, or

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drumming; through monologues or dialogues; or through some combination of these. The dancing on the Skillet Lickers’ “Slow Buck” (Columbia 15267-D, 1928) consists mainly of Riley Puckett drumming his fingers on his guitar, reinforced by some dramatic exposition. Midway through, the music abruptly stops and Clayton McMichen exclaims, “Say boy, I thought you said you could dance.” “Man, I can dance,” counters Puckett. McMichen isn’t convinced. “Ehh, didn’t look much like it, ehh, kind of dragging around there a little bit, kind of sh—, . . . ” “You don’t believe I can dance?!” Puckett interrupts. “Why, bust loose!” “All right, I’m gonna bust loose all right,” McMichen replies as the music resumes, “kind of shake that thing up a little bit and do that slow drag, boy, you wasn’t doing nothing then. Come on, let’s go!” “All right, let’s go back!” shouts Puckett, who now begins drumming furiously on his guitar. Most listeners could themselves conjure the step this record imagines: buck dancing or buck-and-wing, characterized by its heavy rhythmic clogging. The tradition was especially popular around the Skillet Lickers’ North Georgia homebase; indeed, their personal appearances often featured bucking by mandolinist Ted Hawkins, who may even be clogging along in this record’s background.7 This sort of acrobatic display was even more characteristic of black dance traditions, and is even more commonly included on black records.8 “Hungry Man’s Scuffle” (Vocalion 25015, 1933) by the Jolly Jivers—Alabama pianist Walter Roland and his longtime associates Sonny Scott and Lucille Bogan—also mentions bucking. “Let your feet get happy, boy,” Bogan commands as Roland’s piano begins, “that’s what I want to see, let your feet get happy. Shucks, now listen to that stuff. You hear that, don’t you, boy?” “Uh-huh,” acknowledges Scott. “Can you do the buck and wing?” Bogan persists. “Little bit.” “Well, I wanna see you do it,” she demands as Scott begins frantically clogging, his replies becoming increasingly labored and breathless. Similar are Winston Holmes and Charlie Turner’s “Kansas City Dog Walk” (Paramount 12815, 1929); Big Maceo’s “Texas Stomp” (Victor 20-2028, 1945) and “Detroit Jump” (Victor 20-2173, 1945); Bumble Bee Slim and Memphis Minnie’s “New Orleans Stop Time” (Vocalion 03197, 1936); Champion Jack Dupree’s “Dupree Shake Dance” (OKeh 06104, 1941); and Washboard Sam’s “Do That Shake Dance” (Bluebird unissued, 1942), whose titles name the steps they envision. On “Come On Mama” (Jewel 20033, 1930) vocalist Hannah May boastfully demonstrates a series of movements for pianist Georgia Tom. “Say how you like this step?” May demands, “watch me shimmy, I’m gonna shake. How you like this mess around?” She continues with the Bobby Jones, the snake hips, and the slow motion. Of her last step she allows only “I don’t know what you call that.” “Mighty fine,” responds Dorsey, whose

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sung verses mention the do-se-la, the Mississippi rub, the Mobile Bay, the black snake wiggle, and the possum trot. Some of these routines are probably fictional, perhaps parodying colorful dance names. But as that suggests, others (the mess around, the snake hips, the possum trot) were entirely real, danced in black communities across America. Ma Rainey’s “Georgia Cake Walk” (Paramount 12590, 1927) dramatizes another famous step. “Say, Ma,” the unidentified male speaker (UM) demands as the band begins. “What is it?” Rainey (MR) replies. Where’d you get that primrose from? Cakewalk last night. UM : Down at where? M R : Cakewalk last night. UM : What you know about a cakewalk, woman? M R : That was the Georgia Camp Meeting Cakewalk. UM : Georgia Camp Meeting? M R : Yeah! UM : Ha! Say you must be from Gainesville, Georgia [Rainey was in fact from Georgia, but from Columbus on the other side of the state]. M R : I don’t care where I’m from, I can cakewalk all right. UM : I guess you can cakewalk. M R : Yes! UM : Well, let me see you. M R : All right, you don’t believe I can cakewalk? UM : Yeah, go ahead. M R : Here I go. Ohh, children. UM : Look at that fool dance. Ma, you’ve done lost your head, haven’t you? M R : No, just cakewalking, boy. UM : Well one thing, I’m gonna sure step on it with you! M R : Ohh, children. Turn the other way! UM : If you shimmy in here, you gonna wobble outside! Here, here, woman, here, here! Stop that mess in here! You can’t do that in here! Look out, Ma, here come big sister and little one. M R : Let ’em come on! UM : I’m going home, Ma! You gonna get this place raided. Aw shake it, Ma, shake it, honey! Ma, you going home with me? M R : Yes! UM : Well let’s go. Aw do that thing, Ma, do that thing. Aw play it, son, play it now. UM : MR:

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Of the items named so far, Cow Cow Davenport’s “Mootch Piddle” rates further mention. Davenport’s monologue focuses on another popular step— the mooche—also mentioning the mess around. Other well-known dance steps invariably turn up somewhere or another. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Hot Dogs” (Paramount 12493, 1927) cites the black bottom. The boogie woogie is practically ubiquitous, not merely as a musical form but as the dance that tune-type accompanies. “Here the way my girl do that thing,” guitarist Curley Weaver declares as he lays down a driving boogie groove on “Baby Boogie Woogie” (OKeh 8928, 1931), “you don’t mind yours do that thing?” (Cited above, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” “Lightnin’s Boogie,” and “Boogie-Woogie Swing” belong here too.) The jitter (or jitterbug) figures in Big Maceo and Tampa Red’s “Texas Stomp,” with Maceo interjecting “Come back, girl. Show Tampa how you can jitter.” The Charleston turns up on Blind Blake’s “Dry Bone Shuffle” (Paramount 12479, 1927) and “Slippery Rag” (Paramount 12794, 1929), signified by Blake’s passing exclamations “Everybody can’t do the Charleston like that” and “Do the Charleston, this what they call a ‘Charleston Mess Around.’ ” It receives expanded treatment on Too Tight Henry’s “Charleston Contest—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 14374-D, 1928). In a slightly odder vein, “Peg Leg Stomp” (Columbia 14298-D, 1927), also by the Atlanta-based singer/guitarist Joshua Barnes “Peg Leg” Howell (1888–1966) and His Gang (fiddler Eddie Anthony and second guitarist Henry Williams), proclaims a perverse twist on a familiar figure we have already encountered, the stomp. “Do the Peg Leg Stomp!” Howell exhorts his imaginary audience: “Peg Leg Stomp again!” Howell’s nickname was, incidentally, no affectation: a 1916 gunshot wound had cost him a leg. (As “Macon Ed,” Eddie Anthony has his “gal” dancing a more conventional variant of this step on “Warm Wipe Stomp,” OKeh 8877, 1930.) This cockeyed joke recurs on Howell’s “Beaver Slide,” which imagines its dancers stepping—among other figures—the Papa Stobb. Papa Stobb was another of Howell’s nicknames, also taken from his peg (or stob) leg. (At the same session he celebrated himself in “Papa Stobb Blues,” Columbia 14238-D, 1927.) The stomp is also one subject of “Hokum Stomp” (Champion 16360, 1930) by Jane Lucas and the Hokum Boys (Big Bill Broonzy and Georgia Tom Dorsey). But most of this illusory ball’s other constituents—evoked entirely through Lucas’s running commentary—again seem to be pure fictions, poking fun at outlandish dance names. Lucas’s patter epitomizes the extended monologues often used to represent dancing or dancers. “All right for the first couple,” she begins, “but that’s hot, you better let it alone. First couple doing the African

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crawl. Next couple doing the St. Louis nightmare. Here’s a hot one now, the State Street stomp. And this is hotter than that—Aw, boot that thing.” As Lucas and her pals “pass the jug,” she also spies “a couple doing the hamfatchet” and an “old lady about fifty years old over here working the grandma’s ball,” plus the Forty-Seventh Street stomp, the St. Louis train, and the endurance stomp. “Yeah and somebody’s been using that thing!” interjects Dorsey. “Why should I grieve?!” Lucas shoots back. Contrasting with such individualist, semi-improvisational black routines, white performers more often envision the precisely directed sets of the quadrille or square dance. (These also appear less frequently on black items.) On these records, movements are represented—as they only could be—by dance calls. Actually, dance calls are incidental to most rural dance dramas, “Alabama Square Dance” being one case in point. Often, though, they appear by themselves, with no additional exposition. Typical is “Richmond Cotillion” (Gennett 6220, 1927) by Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, aptly described in the Gennett catalog as “Barn Dance with Calls—Called by Ben Jarrell.” Fiddling all the while, Jarrell manages a fairly complete set: “Hands up and circle to the left; break and swing; promenade. First lady swing to the right; swing your partner; form to the next and gents follow. Ladies to the center with the right hand across; gents back; right hand to your partner; fall back one; fall back two; fall back three; fall back four; break and swing and swing on the corner. Gents to the center with the right hand across; gents back; right hand to your partner; break and swing and swing on the corner. Ladies to the center with their backs together; swing your partner; pass her one time and swing.” This format was quite common and was apparently sensed as a selling point by phonograph companies, which often noted it in titles, on record labels, or in catalogs.9 Many of these conventions—and the Georgia buck dance tradition— also figure in “Bibb County Grind” by the South Georgia Highballers (OKeh 45155, 1927), set in another venue routinely re-created on phonograph records: the street-corner busking many artists knew firsthand. Here band members Albert Eldridge and Melgie Ward encounter Albert’s brother, guitarist Vander Eldridge, “going down Main Street, smoking a cheap cigar, sassy.” As Vander launches into a rousing instrumental, Ward assures listeners that the record perfectly captures “the way he [Vander] play it in Macon, Georgia [the seat of their native Bibb County] when he’s up there.” “You talk about buck dancing, I sure do love to buck dance that piece,” adds Albert. Their dialogue carries over to the record’s reverse, “Blue Grass Twist.”10

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Street musicians, Maynardsville, Tennessee. October 1935. Photo by Ben Shahn. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Other skits in this mold include “Hokum Blues” by Coley Jones and the Dallas String Band (Columbia 14389-D, 1928), familiar serenaders on that city’s streets in the 1920s and ’30s;11 “Birmingham Rag” (Columbia 15436-D, 1929) by South Carolinian Jimmie Tarlton, who in his youth hoboed the country from New York to California, working at cotton mills and playing on street corners or with medicine shows;12 “Skoodle Um Skoo” (Paramount 12501, 1927) by New Orleans native Papa Charlie Jackson, who toured with medicine shows in the teens and frequently played for tips on Chicago’s famous Maxwell Street in the 1920s and ’30s;13 and “G Burns Is Gonna Rise Again” (OKeh 8577, 1928) by T. C. Johnson, Tom “Blue Coat” Nelson, and the mysterious “Porkchop.” A group of country dance musicians from Vicksburg, Mississippi, Johnson, Nelson and Porkchop set their vignette on the avenues of Memphis, where their session was held, and where they probably busked during this trip or others.14 The brothers Robert and Charlie Hicks, professionally known as Barbecue Bob (1902–1931) and Laughing Charley (or Charley Lincoln) (1900–1963), recorded a pair of dramas based on their busking in and around Atlanta. The Hicks brothers reportedly got their chance to record after local media person-

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ality Dan Hornsby heard them play at the barbecue stand where they doubled cleaning windshields and serving spareribs, a venue re-created on “It Won’t Be Long Now—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 14268-D, 1927). A second two-part vignette—“Darktown Gamblin’—Part 1 (The Crap Game) and Part 2 (The Skin Game)” (Columbia 14531-D, 1930)—also alludes wryly to the Hicks’s busking— and their fast lifestyles. “That’s what you doing for a living now?!” taunts Charlie when he encounters Bob playing and singing on an imaginary thoroughfare. “Yes, that’s about as good a thing as I know,” his brother replies, “What you doing for a living?” “Shooting craps, boy,” crows Charlie, “it’s something you can have money all the time!” Notwithstanding their boastful optimism and early success, the streets of Atlanta proved the Hicks’s undoing. Within a few months of their 1930 session, Bob was dead of pneumonia brought on by the flu. Grief-stricken, Charlie lapsed into alcoholism and occasional violent outbursts, eventually ending his own days in prison.15 Once more, the Skillet Lickers provide the rural counterpoint to these urban sketches. On “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain” (Columbia 15598-D, 1930), they reenact a payday busking at a country store, a popular activity among rural pickers after the wages of just-paid workers. All together, these recorded dramas are remarkable in their coverage, inventorying musical venues both major and minor, spanning the domestic/ public or folk/commercial spectrum. The Skillet Lickers also provided a spoton re-creation of a medicine show (“Kickapoo Medicine Show—Parts 1 and 2,” Columbia 15482-D, 1929), a setting group members all knew from firsthand experience. So did most of the performers featured on OKeh’s six-part “Medicine Show” (“Acts 1 and 2,” OKeh 45380, 1929; “Acts 3 and 4,” OKeh 45391, 1929; “Acts 5 and 6,” OKeh 45413, 1929), produced by the label as a showcase for these artists. A similar atmosphere pervades “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree—Parts 1 and 2” (Vocalion 1428, 1929), hardly surprising, since Jackson was also a medicine show veteran. Recorded dramas also include several full-blown re-creations of the South’s celebrated fiddle contests, the most successful being the Skillet Lickers’ “A Fiddlers’ Convention in Georgia—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15140-D, 1927), and “Fiddlers Convention—Parts 3 and 4” (Columbia 15667-D, 1930).16 County fairs receive detailed treatments in “County Fair—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45494, 1929) by Herschel Brown and His Boys; the Skillet Lickers’ “A Day at the County Fair—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15332-D, 1928); and Fiddlin’ John Carson and Moonshine Kate’s “Going to the County Fair” (OKeh 45321, 1929). “Possum Trot School Exhibition—Parts 1 and 2” (Victor 21264, 1928) by Ernest V. Stoneman

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and the Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers spoofs a community program at a country school house, interspersing stock orations and recitations with musical performances. Stoneman and his Corn Shuckers also re-create to a tee a traditional wedding-night shivaree on the two-part “Serenade in the Mountains” (Victor 21518, 1928), complete with rough music, realistically provided by adding an enthusiastically banged pot to the ensemble.17 The I. C. Glee Club Quartet was one of several gospel quartets sponsored by the Illinois Central Railroad’s Memphis operation, all composed of Illinois Central (I. C.) employees and named for the line. Besides performing at employee functions or local lodges and churches, the groups were also featured at special public events intended to boost rail traffic, including onboard concerts. As one member later recalled: “the singing groups was active riding up and down the road. Folks would come in to hear them, and some would ride the train with them. They’d go from Chicago to New Orleans. Wherever they’d go, they’d have to have extra cars.”18 The Glee Club’s “Panama to Chi” (OKeh 8929, 1930) dramatizes just that: boarding the line’s Panama Limited to Chicago, the group aptly entertains their fellow passengers with the gospel standard “This Train.” The subject of Bessie Smith’s “At the Christmas Ball” (Columbia 35842, 1925) should be clear enough. Re-creations of more solemn religious observances defy individual citation: reenactments of church services by black evangelists, complete with sermons, congregational responses, and music and song, rated among the most numerous and popular of all prewar titles, even generating their own special category on labels and in catalogs: “Sermons with singing.” This is also the only class of records covered here to have already received extended analysis, in Paul Oliver’s definitive Songsters and Saints (1984). The following overview adds little to Oliver’s account. By Oliver’s reckoning, between the mid-1920s and World War II, roughly 750 sermons by seventy preachers were released on race records. A quarter of these were by a single Baptist minister, the Rev. J. M. Gates of Atlanta.19 Indeed, while various creeds were represented on such releases, the vast majority featured either Baptists or the so-called Holiness, Sanctified, or Pentecostal churches. These denominations hardly dominated black religious life, but they did appeal especially to the lower-class blacks who bought most race records, and who could best appreciate the doctrines—and doctrinal differences— recorded sermons dramatized. Shunning musical instruments as instruments of the devil (literally!), Baptists like Gates stuck to their a cappella long-meter hymns, sometimes lined out

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the old-fashioned way. (Lining out is the traditional practice in which a leader solos a hymn one line at a time, each line then being sung back by the whole congregation.) By contrast, the Pentecostals expressly took their cue from the final lines of the Book of Psalms: “Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! / Praise him with timbrel and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! / Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! / Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! / Praise the Lord!” (150:3–6). The Holiness sects did just that, even if it meant praising the Lord with instruments usually associated with disreputable worldly genres like jazz or blues. The themes and tenets espoused in the sermons similarly reflected differences in these respective faiths, as did preaching styles. Often derided by staid denominations for their emotionalism, even the Baptists paled beside the fervor of Sanctified singing and preaching—as hundreds of recorded sermons with singing document. Moreover, while most of these envision regular Sunday services, other occasions and observances received some attention. Titles like Rev. J. F. Forest’s “Funeral Sermon” (Gennett 6323, 1927), Rev. M. H. Holt’s “Funeral Sermon”/ “The Burial Service” (Victor 23417, 1930), or Rev. C. F. Thornton’s “We’ve Got to Move (A Funeral Sermon)” (Columbia unissued, 1927) require little additional explanation. Neither do Rev. Forest’s “Sermon on Baptism” (Gennett 6262, 1927), Rev. Lionel Jackson’s “Baptism at the River” (Columbia unissued, 1927), Rev. R. M. Massey’s “Old Time Baptism—Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 12618, 1928), or Rev. Nathan Smith’s “Baptism at Burning Bush” (Decca 7148, 1935). “Assisted by his Burning Bush Sunday School pupils,” Rev. Smith also illustrated “Joining Church” (Decca 7150, 1935), the “Burning Bush Sunday School—Parts 1 and 2” (Decca 7112, 1935), and a “Prayer Meeting Service at Burning Bush” (Decca unissued, 1935). His “Collection Time” (Decca 7150, 1935) concerns other obligations. Prayer meetings appeared on other records. So did praise or song services, and testifying or experience meetings, in which church members recounted their conversion experiences.20 Even administrative functions received their due. Rev. Gates yields the pulpit at the “Deacon Board Meeting—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 8730, 1928) to his associate Deacon Leon Davis. Gates’s own “Baptist World Alliance in Atlanta, Georgia” (Bluebird B8256, 1939) describes a loftier summit. (Formed in London in 1905, this august body did in fact hold its Congress in Atlanta that year.) As with all recorded dramas, these sermons with singing obviously involved selective representations, as the faithful strove to recast familiar traditions in an unfamiliar medium; as with other dramas, some of the effects of this refashion-

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Singing “Trying to Make a Hundred, Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do” during the collection at Negro church in Heard County, Georgia. April 1941. Photo by Jack Delano. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

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ing seem obvious, others less so, still others being debatable. Casting a cautious eye toward “the ‘hour-long’ sermons often mentioned in the literature,” Oliver suggests “six or seven minutes” as a more reasonable estimate for many black folk sermons. Oliver may be underestimating a bit, but it is likely that the threeor-so minutes available on a 78 r.p.m. side would require less shortening than sometimes assumed. That preachers on record were almost always assisted by other actors (often members of their real congregations), who responded to the sermons and joined in the singing, created a dynamic ambience, no doubt helping record listeners imagine their own active involvement in an unfolding ritual. But there is no quarreling with Oliver’s observation that “experiencing a record is different from experiencing a live sermon within the church.” Record companies may have had other agendas. “Typically,” Oliver writes, “the black sermon on record is introduced by the preacher with a statement of his chosen Biblical text and verse; a quotation, sometimes quite brief, from that text; and the ‘subject’ or title of the sermon itself. So consistent is this pattern as to suggest that it was a formula required by the recording companies which accorded with common practice.” Companies may also have encouraged recorded preachers increasingly to abandon traditional themes in favor of novel topics drawn from current events or pop culture, a noticeable trend in the field, especially among the best-selling artists.21 The popularity of recorded preachers may explain why even predominantly secular artists occasionally re-created church services on record.22 There are also a few more idiosyncratic sketches of ritual forms. New Orleans jazz pioneer Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton reenacted that city’s famous jazz funerals on “Dead Man Blues” (Victor 20252, 1926) and “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble?” (Bluebird B-10429, 1939). “Didn’t He Ramble” is especially effective. The record opens with the minister’s eulogy—“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, / If the women don’t get you, the whiskey must”—accompanied by the wailing of mourners and a solemn dirge. Suddenly, signaled by a dramatic drum roll, the dirge segues into the title tune, played as a joyous fast-tempo march. Recounting the typical New Orleans funeral, another New Orleans jazz pioneer might have been describing Morton’s record instead: They [the band] played a mournful hymn on the way to the cemetery, the drummer Baby Dodds recalled, “to put a weeping in their [the mourners’] hearts.” They had no duties during the actual burial and on hot afternoons, as the minister spoke at the graveside, some of the men would scatter for refreshments. It was up to the drummer, Dodds remembered, to get them back in line when the time came.

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When they put the body in the ground and say “ashes to ashes”—well, that’s the drummer’s cue right there. . . . And the snare drummer alone goes out into the middle of the street and he’d start to roll and he rolled loud. . . . And you could see guys jumpin’ over graves and comin’ out of people’s houses and out of bar rooms and, oh, just flyin’. . . . Then, reunited, the men would march away from the cemetery playing something joyous, like “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,” in celebration of the departed’s entry into heaven.23

Troy Ferguson’s “College Blues” (Columbia 14483-D, 1929) is a bit obscure but seems to portray a black musician entertaining at a white fraternity party (a well-known tradition); he also appears to be pimping women to the frat boys (not unknown either). Much clearer is “I Had To Smack That Thing” (Paramount 13019, 1930) by Cincinnati-based singer and pianist Frances “Barrelhouse Frankie” Wallace, whose mid-performance dialogue with an unidentified male simulates the haggling of a piano-playing prostitute and a potential client in a brothel’s downstairs parlor. Complementing these public settings, other dramas re-create casual, homemade music-making. Representative are the Skillet Lickers’ “Nancy Rollin” (Columbia 15382-D, 1928) and the North Carolina Ramblers’ “Shootin’ Creek” (Columbia 15286-D, 1928), both conjuring their homey surroundings with a prefatory knock at the door, followed by greetings all around and an impromptu picking session. “Hell Amongst the Yearlings” (Vocalion 5446, 1930) by Dilly and His Dill Pickles begins with the boys pushing away from the dinner table—“Make out your dinner, boys!” “Man, I done eat so much now I’m ’bout to bust”—prompting Dilly’s suggestion “well just bring your chairs and let’s go out in the yard where it’s cool and have some music, what do you say?” “Over at Tom’s House” (Conqueror 8103, 1931) by the Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers is set at the home of Clarence “Tom” Ashley, who refers repeatedly to his reallife wife, Hettie, their babies, and the family dog, George. (Hettie is represented in falsetto, George by a band member’s barking and Ashley’s repeated request “Hettie, why don’t you put that dog out of here?”) “Grandma’s Rag” (Gennett 6706, 1928) by Taylor, Moore and Burnett suggests a similar setting, mainly through the character “Grandma” (another male speaking in falsetto). From the urban perspective, the Tub Jug Washboard Band’s “Washboard Rag” (Paramount 12682, 1928) imagines a big-city tenement, pitting the noisy ensemble against an irate neighbor. Also in this class are a pair of dramas documenting the neighborly, back-and-forth visiting of Victor’s two best-selling acts, “The

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Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas” (Bluebird B-6762, 1931) and “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family” (Victor 23574, 1931). Only slightly more formal are the various glimpses of offstage activities. The titles of “Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers—Parts 1 and 2” (Bluebird 5559, 1934); Paul and John’s “Band Rehearsal for Old Settler’s Reunion” (OKeh 45280, 1928); the Livingstone College Male Quartet’s “Quartet Rehearsal” (Victor 20824, 1927); and “Practice Night at Chicken Bristle” (Brunswick 404, 1930) by Bob Miller and His Hinky Dinkers are self-explanatory. “Too Tight Henry” Lee Castle’s “Charleston Contest—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 14374-D, 1928) depicts Castle rehearsing on the first side then performing for a dance competition on the second. Fiddlin’ Powers and Family’s “Old Virginia Reel—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45154, 1927) follows the same arrangement. Elsewhere musicians are depicted on their way to the gig. We have already encountered the Hokum Boys’ “Brown Skin Shuffle” (Champion 16411, 1932), where Big Bill’s headed down to Miss Johnson’s. Similar are Robert Hill’s “G Blues” (Bluebird B6795, 1936); Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas’s “Pick Poor Robin Clean” (Paramount 13074, 1931); and Freddie Slack’s “Down the Road Apiece” (Columbia 35707, 1940, faithfully re-created, opening dialogue and all, on Amos Milburn’s “Down the Road Apiece,” Aladdin 161, 1946). By contrast, Ivy Smith’s monologue on “State Street Jive” (Vocalion 1198, 1928) depicts an audience member bound for a musical venue. Over Cow Cow Davenport’s barrelhouse piano Smith exclaims: “Lord, I’m going down on old State Street this morning, ’cause my man’s down there and I’m sure gonna find him. Get down there, I’m gonna stop by Thirty-Four-0-Nine. Stop at old John’s place, get me some good corn liquor and have a whopping good time.” She seems to reach her destination mid-side, from that point suggesting a barroom atmosphere (“Boot that thing, boy, boot it. Aww, play it, Mr. Strange Man. Whup it down to a low moan now and a dusty gravy”). Lottie Kimbrough’s “Wayward Girl Blues” (Gennett 6607, 1928) reverses the situation. As Miles Pruitt’s guitar begins, Winston Holmes hails his longtime partner: “Hello, Lottie, let’s go down to the cabaret tonight and have a big time.” “Aw, I can’t do it, buddy,” she responds, “I’m all in.” “Why, what’s the matter?” “I’ve got the blues.” “Well, tell me about it,” suggests Holmes, cueing Kimbrough’s song of a penitent daughter’s visit to her mother’s deathbed. A bit of qualification: first, the preceding discussion omits countless records where spoken asides or interjections are limited to incidental commentary or simple expressions of approval or encouragement: “Play it, boys, while I sing it!” “Aw, sing it, mama, sing it! Aw, fill my heart with snap beans and

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onions—sing it, broad!” “Go on there, Gid, bear down on it [the fiddle]!” “Blow it [the harmonica], boy, blow on it some!” “Whup that piano, Mr. Piano Whupper. Whup it till it breaks!” “Play ’em [the blues] till I get sloppy drunk!” “Aww, play it till I turn high yellow.”24 My reasons are partly practical, such comments being so routine that any reasonably comprehensive list would number in the hundreds. But there is also a conceptual justification. Obviously such passing asides do much to convey a live ambience and may sometimes have been intended to do just that.25 It is probably no accident that they are omnipresent in the dramas I have included. Taken alone, however, they do not unmistakably register the same conscious intent—or at least the same level or degree of intent—as full-blown dramas or expositions more deliberately relating records to live performances. Accordingly, I have admitted such comments only when they coincide with contrivances clearly intended to represent live events, or with unambiguous references to activities other than recorded music-making. In other words, merely exhorting a guitarist to “stomp it, boy” does not rate inclusion; encouraging an imaginary dancer to “do that stomp” does. Conversely, I also have ignored dramas where the music is a contrivance. Old-time records often featured musical skits (or skits with music)—usually comic, generally derived from vaudeville or minstrelsy—portraying situations where music-making was not obligatory or customary, maybe not even plausible or possible.26 These records thus partake of the wholly artificial reality of musical theatre or film. They stand in direct contrast to the foregoing examples, which reference real-life events where music was integral. Overall, this real-life play-acting seems a natural response by communitybased musicians to a novel medium, just as its consistent commercial success reveals its appeal for consumers only then learning to listen to records. Nor were such dramas unique to race and hillbilly discs, but appeared on records by other ethnic or regional groups then adapting their music to records.27 It seems only logical that such communities would assimilate new media relative to their primary musical experiences. That those traditions already offered means for sorting musical events and media greatly facilitated the process: as we have seen, the frames or keys employed by old-time artists often had precedents in oral traditions or broadside literature. Others, however, were clearly developed in response to this particular problem—created for the express purpose of relating folksongs and phonographs. Aside from their immediate focus on the performances themselves and their novel format, these keys may foreground any of a record’s other aspects. But certain factors consistently received special attention. “Searcy County Rag”

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by Ashley’s Melody Men is instructive. The side opens by identifying the performers (“Well, hello there, boys,” steel guitarist Hobart Ashley begins, “here’s old Homer here with that mean banjo”) and their performance (“Let’s play one”) with a specific setting (“They having a dance here tonight. They having a time”) within a general locale (Searcy County, in the Arkansas Ozarks) where such performances routinely transpire between ordinary folks and pickers like these. Given the old-time trade’s regional basis, many of this record’s buyers were probably already acquainted with the Melody Men. But even those who were not would know similar music or musicians, and from precisely such settings. And recording artists clearly felt such matters were crucial to understanding records: as a group, recorded dramas follow “Searcy County Rag” in casting their spotlights especially on settings, musical traditions, and participants.

Settings While recording artists seem more concerned with social or cultural realities— with musical events—than mere physical settings, they do locate themselves within the ordinary time-space continuum, at least as the medium permits. Sometimes an event’s real-world surroundings are evoked verbally (“Aw, pull down them windows, boy, shut that door.” “Let’s get this dance started here, good night! They been out fifteen or twenty minutes. Where’s the musicians at?”). At others, they involve simple sound effects (clogging on the floor, knocking at the door). Really, though, such factors are registered only as they coincide with some well-defined social setting or cultural scene. Thus scores of old-time records get under way with well-recognized conventions for making personal contact: a knock at the door, a customary greeting, a chance meeting or prearranged rendezvous at times and places defining a community’s daily routine or special occasions. Others conclude not merely with contrived stage exits (receding footsteps, a closing door) but familiar niceties (a traditional leavetaking or benediction) or practicalities (a bar’s closing-time routine). The ubiquitous knock at the door epitomizes this dual purpose, denoting a material surrounding with a social courtesy connoting direct personal contact. The entrance to this imaginary world also admits endless variations. Compare the North Carolina Ramblers’ “Shootin’ Creek” to Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot” (OKeh 8949, 1931), which begins with a mock confrontation at an imaginary nightclub’s door, as much a figurative as literal designation. “Twenty-five cents! Ha!” the indignant singer snorts as the piano begins. “No, no, I wouldn’t

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pay twenty-five cents to go in nowhere!” The song that follows describes a more congenial—and presumably less costly—social function, an “all night strut” “up in Harlem every Saturday night.” Some dramas treat conviviality as a context unto itself. Bill Broonzy and Frank Brasswell never specify a physical location for their “Pig Meat Strut” (Champion 16081, 1930). A barbecue stand would not be a bad guess, though pig meat can also refer to young women. Anyway, the record’s only obvious setting is the sociability evoked by Brasswell’s running commentary: “Oh, play it now. Oh, play that ‘Pig Meat Strut.’ Play it now. Everybody do that ‘Pig Meat Strut.’ Take it around; bring it back. Now strut. Oh, do it. Get it out now!” Yet the result is palpably interactive, drawing listeners into an unfolding scene while obliging them to complete the picture. In many instances, then, a record’s setting is keyed more through symbolic prompts than physical props, imaginatively reconstructing a lived world. Mapping the record against a real topography, John Dilleshaw’s “Lye Soap” just as vividly sketches its rural milieu. “All right, boys,” Dilly announces, “we come up here to play for these folks up here on Dog River tonight; let’s get started. What’d be a good tune to get started with?” “ ‘Lye Soap,’ ” responds banjoist Shorty Lindsey. “ ‘Lye Soap’? Bust down!” As the band begins, Dilly inquires, “Y’all have any trouble a-finding the way over here? I took the wrong fork of the road up yonder. Went about three mile out of the way. Had to stop and ask an old man over there where this place was. Thought he never was coming to the door. Must have been hard of hearing.” As the record winds on, he braces for additional difficulties. “Making up a cloud back over yonder when I come in. Was it raining when you come in, Shorty? I was just a-thinking if it was to come a big rain, get that river up, we never in the world would get out of here.” As it ends, he wonders, “You reckon this kind of music suits these folks? Ain’t heard nobody say anything about money yet.” The question of payment commonly serves as a close. Opening with a knock at the door, Troy Ferguson’s “College Blues” ends with the pianist being paid by his white patron as he exits the same (“That’s good, Troy, here’s your four dollars.” “Thank you sir, Captain, goodbye”). John Dilleshaw caps another rural dance re-creation (“Pickin’ Off Peanuts”) wondering, “Have any idea as to what we’ll get out of this? I hope they pay us. I don’t like this here ten cents on a corner.” Barroom or house party sketches often conclude with the arrival of the police (“Don’t Drink It Here,” “Mootch Piddle”). Others end at closing time. As “Texas Stomp” nears its finish, pianist Maceo Merriweather blurts out “Landlady, bring me a half a pint,” replying to himself, “ ‘It’s too late.’ Let’s

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swing then, boys,” he resolves. “Is that too late?” interjects his partner Tampa Red, “let’s swing it on out and get high and go home. I got some right here in my pocket.” On Myra Taylor’s “Tell Your Best Friend Nothing” (Mercury 8027, 1946) one band member asks another, “Say, home [boy], what time is it?” “Uh, uh, four-fifteen a.m., man.” “Well put me back in the alley, Jack.” The first side of Ma Rainey’s “Blues the World Forgot” ends with a police raid; the second side opens with Ma, her band, and the bar’s patrons in jail. With characteristic ingenuity, Dilleshaw’s “Hell Amongst the Yearlings” depicts an after-dinner jam on a north Georgia homestead. Throughout, he chats about livestock, crops, the weather, bird and insect pests. Then, just as the side winds down, he exclaims, “Well, boys, when we get through playing this here tune, let’s go out to the barn, I wanna show you my pigs.” It’s hard to imagine any record more concretely evoking old-time music’s real-world tethers. But others are just as particular. “Brown Skin Shuffle” finds Big Bill “going down to Miss Johnson’s” at “Thirteen-0-Six Miller.” On “State Street Jive,” Ivy Smith announces she’s on her way down to “old John’s place” at “Thirty-Four-0-Nine [State Street].” Their destinations lie, respectively, on Chicago’s musically rich West and South Sides, where they both regularly performed (and recorded). On “Kansas City Dog Walk,” Winston Holmes and Charlie Turner are “going down to the Yellow Front and walk the dog all night long,” referring to a Prohibition-era gambling joint (the Yellow Front Café) run by Kansas City bootlegger and music patron Ellis Burton.28 Blind Blake’s “Hastings St. (Hastings St. Boogy)” (Paramount 12863, 1929) celebrates Detroit’s main thoroughfare for black music. “Aw Spand,” Blake tells pianist Charlie Spand, “you ain’t never been to Detroit in your life, go down on Hastings Street, where they doing the woogie, doing it very woogie.” “Must be had somebody in Detroit you really wild about,” he continues, “you go back there now you gonna sure get woogie. I know you want to go back to OneSixty-Nine Brady. But I can’t hardly rest. Always telling me about Brady Street: I wonder what is on Brady? Must be something there very marvelous, mmm, mmm, mmm.” Apparently, the area was still “very marvelous” twenty years later, when Mississippian John Lee Hooker commenced to boogying—“doing it very woogie”—down on Hastings. His first and most famous hit, “Boogie Chillen” (Modern 20-627, 1948), describes Henry’s Swing Club, a Hastings Street dive where Hooker gigged after moving to Detroit in the late 1940s. In 1935 there took place in New Orleans a landmark recording session featuring barrelhouse piano greats Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery, Jesse “Monkey Joe” Coleman, and Harry Carter (Chatmon), all of whom were

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then working in or around Jackson, Mississippi. As he waited his own turn to record, Coleman could not resist commenting on Montgomery’s performances. On “The Woman I Love Blues” (Bluebird B6140, 1935), he interjects “play that piano, Mister Brother, play it a long time. I know you got the blues. Look like you’ve got your mind on Farish Street. All around Devil’s Café.” The reference is to Jackson’s Farish Street district, whose legion juke joints made it a favorite haunt of pianists like Little Brother and Monkey Joe.29 Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s spoken preface to the autobiographical “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town” (ARC unissued, 1935) pays tribute to Shreveport’s red light district, Fannin Street, the site of his earliest experiences in professional music (and dissolute living).30 Given the centrality of Beale Street not merely to Memphis but to the mid-South’s music, it would be amazing if there were no similar references to Beale. There are, of course—for instance, on the Beale Street Sheiks’ “Beale Town Bound” (Paramount 12576, 1927), which Memphis blues doyen (and Beale Street stalwart) Frank Stokes introduces by declaring, “on my way. I’m Beale town bound.” “Every time I feel like rocking, I feel like rocking downtown,” he adds during a guitar break. In Memphis, Beale Street was “rocking downtown.” On “Beaver Slide Rag” Peg Leg Howell urges, “let’s go down to Beaver Slide and do ‘The Papa Stobb,’ ” naming a very poor black district on Atlanta’s west side, known for its crime, house parties, and music. The Tennessee Ramblers’ skit “A Fiddler’s Contest” opens with guitarist Walt McKinney announcing “Howdy folks, this is the Tennessee Ramblers at Market Hall in Knoxville, Tennessee, for the purpose of entering the contest at Market Hall.” McKinney refers to the huge fiddlers conventions staged biannually in the 1920s at Market Hall in Knoxville by old-time fiddler and local entrepreneur Frank “Squire” Murphy, where the Ramblers were real-life fixtures and perennial winners.31 Some venues mentioned on old-time records are still famous today. Others are mere inference—but this very obscurity only underscores artists’ groundings in local settings, and their assumption that listeners shared this base. On “Chittlin’ Supper,” Peg Leg Howell is on his way “to the house in the rear, Bob’s, down there in the rear of Hawkin Alley,” presumably an Atlanta hotspot—perhaps in Beaver Slide? Many listeners had probably been there. On “G Blues” Robert Hill declares, “I’m going down on Blue Front get a pint of that old bad whiskey. I’m gonna buy it from Bird.” Little is known of Hill, a harmonica player who turned up around Hollandale, Mississippi, in the 1930s, later recording in New Orleans with Hollandale guitarists Eugene “Sonny Boy Nelson” Powell and Willie “Brother” Harris, who accompany him here. That he addresses his

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Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee. October 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

comments to them may indicate that Blue Front and the bootlegger Bird (or Byrd) were also fixtures around Hollandale.32 Johnson, Nelson and Porkchop’s “G Burns Is Gonna Rise Again” drops a migratory place name—Sandy Bottom—possibly (though not necessarily) designating a shantytown or popular party spot around their Vicksburg homebase: “The reason I don’t come down in Sandy Bottom,” confides Porkchop, “ ’cause every time I come down there, the first thing that I can hear when I get in the bottom is . . . , ” at which the group segues into their parody of a minstrel parody (“These Bones Is Gonna Rise Again”) of a folk spiritual. Oscar “Buddy” Woods most likely references his native Shreveport on “Muscat Hill Blues” (Vocalion 03906, 1937), declaring “I’m going down to the Golden Slipper and get my jug refilled. Then I’m going to walk back to Muscat Hill.” Like “Sandy Bottom,” “Muscat Hill” suggests a local neighborhood, redlight district, or outlying shantytown. On the other hand, few Southern cities have not at one time boasted a Golden (or Silver) Slipper bar. The Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers’ “Over at Tom’s House” (Conqueror 8103, 1931) is ostensibly set at Clarence “Tom” Ashley’s home at Shouns, Tennessee, where he’s

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visited by fiddler Clarence Greene and harmonica player Gwen Foster. Asked of their recent whereabouts, Foster declares “I’ve been down to Sam Hannah’s Dance Hall,” while Greene replies “I’ve been down to Elizabethton, Tennessee, over on Cat Island with old Hog Moore on a home-brew party.” Located at the confluence of the Doe and Watauga Rivers, Elizabethton and Cat Island (now Cat Island Memorial Park) are entirely real. “Hog Moore” may (or may not) be the group’s musical associate, Byrd Moore. Sam Hannah and his dance hall are mysteries. And then there’s John Dilleshaw’s “Sand Mountain Drag,” another of his country breakdown re-creations. Envisioning the Sand Mountain area of northeast Alabama, Dilly summons its social milieu with his signature pith (“Sure is lots of folks down here tonight. Where’d all these people come from?”), at one point remarking “Look at that red dress gal over yonder. Yeah, that’s her. I know that old boy she’s with. I used to play baseball with him eight or ten years ago. We played down in Smith’s pasture.” Whether or not “Smith’s pasture” actually existed, the detail is as brilliantly evocative as Dilly’s admiring comments on “that red dress gal over yonder.” The many personal references in these asides are also revealing, of course. There are quite a few others. On “Railroad Blues” (Champion S-16804, 1934) Sam McGee suddenly observes “here come Deford Bailey now with the harmonica.” Actually, McGee is accompanied only by his own fingerpicked guitar, expertly imitating an outbound train while plugging his friend and occasional partner, fellow Grand Ole Opry member and black harmonica virtuoso Deford Bailey. Like many mouth harpers, Bailey also specialized in train imitations, including his signature “Pan-American Blues” (Brunswick 146, 1927). In the next breath McGee names another Nashville-based railroad man of his acquaintance, a local engineer: “Tom Long coming through Nashville with a load of pig iron!” Some similar references turn out to be too personal, again defying precise identification. On “Painful Blues” (Columbia 14642-D, 1931) Guitar Sammie (Blind Willie McTell) seems to tell Ruth Day (Ruth Mary Willis), “Lord, Lord, that’s the way Pawn [a relative? a personal acquaintance?] used to play it, long years ago.” “And I know you love it like that cause I know you can sing it,” he continues. “Sing that thing, child.” On his final break he again declares, “That the way Pawn used to do it.” Though cryptic, McTell’s aside reveals another common cue. Sometimes performers link their performances rather than just their own persons to a particular milieu, exhorting themselves or another to “play it the way you do down in such-and-such a location,” invariably a location where “that’s the way they played it” in real life. On “Going to Germany” (Victor V38585, 1929), Gus Cannon

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encourages harmonica ace Noah Lewis to “play it, Mr. Lewis, play. Aw, play it from down in Dixie now. Play it right on from down in Dixie.” “Here the way they do in Tampa,” Fred McMullen says of his slide guitar playing on “Tampa Strut” (Vocalion 1740, 1933). Very little is known about McMullen, but this bolsters the suggestion that he was originally from Florida.33 Accompanying Mary Willis on “Rough Alley Blues” (OKeh 8921, 1931), Blind Willie McTell situates his guitar break at a favorite busking location in downtown Atlanta, exclaiming “that the way I doing it when I down on Harris Street corner.”34 Cincinnati singer Walter Coleman’s “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” (Decca unissued, 1936) concludes with a nod to a hometown blues venue (and red-light district): “Aw, play it like you’re back at George Street!” George Street was a major thoroughfare in Cincinnati’s black West End, where Coleman and his groups regularly played.35 Ivy Smith enlivens the house party atmosphere on Cow Cow Davenport’s “Alabama Strut” by goading Davenport to “play that thing, boy, play it. Play it with a feeling. Play it like you did down in old Baltimore.” Born in Alabama in 1894, the peripatetic Davenport probably once did play it like that in Baltimore. West Virginia guitarists Roy Harvey and Jess Johnston similarly localize “Guitar Rag” (Champion 16730, 1930). “Hello there, Jess,” Harvey begins. “Hello, Roy.” “Boy, it looks like you been a-playing some—see you got your guitar with you,” persists Harvey. “Yeah, I been playing a little. . . ” “Say,” Harvey interrupts, “let’s you and I try that old number you used to play, that, uh, ‘Guitar Rag’ then, work on it like you used to way back in West Virginia.” “All right!” agrees Johnston as they tear into the piece.36 Other examples take a comparative view. On “Papa Freddie” Spruell’s “Milk Cow Blues” (OKeh 8422, 1926) an unidentified male speaker seems delighted to encounter his friend “old Freddie” up in Chicago. “You know why?” “Why, boy?” responds Spruell. “I want to hear you play them old blues like you used to play downhome,” his buddy replies, insisting “ ’cause nobody else can’t play them blues like you, Freddie.” Louisiana-born Spruell was in fact among the legion of Southerners bringing downhome blues to Chicago, where all his records were cut.37 Big Maceo (Major Merriweather) and Tampa Red (Hudson Woodbridge a.k.a. Whittaker) were two others. But their “Detroit Jump” (also cut in Chicago) looks to a parallel urban blues scene. “Tampa, you ever been to Detroit?” inquires Maceo as the performance begins. “Yeah, man,” his partner rejoins. “I want you to come on go back over there with me,” continues Maceo, “I’m gonna show you how the womens do over there.” “When you going back,

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man? Say when you going back over there, Macy?” “Man, I’m going back over there in October.” “Now if I ain’t got no money can you—, will you lend me my fare?” “Yeah, man!” “Well you all right with me then. We’ll show ’em how to cut the rug over there.” Once more, art and life coincided: a couple years later, Maceo did move to Detroit, where he continued to record and perform until his death.

Musical Traditions It’s just a short hop from Maceo’s “Detroit Jump” to commentaries on the actual pieces being performed and their own life histories, especially as these signal some relation between records and live performances. Most of these involve more or less overt references to an item’s traditionality. On “Serenade in the Mountains” Ernest Stoneman declares: “Say, let’s play a little tune together we ain’t played together in a coon’s age. Let’s play that good old tune ‘Down to the Stillhouse to Get a Little Cider.’ ” Actually, the tune may not be much older than the group’s fiddler Eck Dunford (1878–1953), but it had been around long enough to take hold throughout the Southeast. John Dilleshaw is delighted by A. A. Gray’s “Streak O’ Lean—Streak O’ Fat” (Vocalion 5430, 1930): “Listen, I hear music. Why that’s that old tune ‘Streak O’ Lean—Streak O’ Fat.’ Boy, I’ve danced a-many a-night by that.” “Reminds me of when I used to carry that Johnson gal around to those dances,” he adds. “Such fiddling! Never heard nothing like it before.” “Streak O’ Lean” was in fact quite popular around Dilleshaw and Gray’s northwest Georgia–northeast Alabama stomping grounds. Charlie Poole and Roy Harvey’s “Southern Medley” (Columbia 15615-D, 1930) begins with Harvey observing, “Well, Charlie old boy, it’s been a long time since you and I alone played any together, hadn’t it?” “Yes it has, boy.” “Let’s try a few of those old Southern melodies for the boys.” “Aw it does me good to hear you say that.” “Let’s go!” “Good!” Their “old Southern melodies” are all familiar folk-minstrel pieces: “Dixie,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Way Down Upon the Swawnee River,” and “Turkey in the Straw.” On “Moonshiner and His Money,” Charlie Bowman introduces “an old tune called ‘Money in Both Pockets.’ ” Grayson and Whitter’s “Old Jimmy Sutton” opens with fiddler G. B. Grayson announcing: “all right, folks, now each one of you get your girl and let’s fix to start the dance right away. We’re gonna give you an old breakdown entitled ‘Old Jimmie Sutton.’ ” On the dance drama “Shelven Rock” by Charlie Wilson

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and His Hillbillies, Asa Martin proposes, “now, boys, suppose we play that old favorite of mine, this old ‘Shelven Rock.’ ” Frank Hutchison prefaces “The Burglar Man” (OKeh 45313, 1928): “All right, boys, I’m gonna play a beautiful little song entitled ‘The Old Burglar Man.’ Watch out for the old maid.” “Beautiful” does not quite square with this item’s grotesque theme, but the selection certainly ranks among the South’s best-known humorous ballads.38 In the same playful vein, Harkreader and Moore’s “Old Joe” begins with guitarist Grady Moore telling fiddler Sid Harkreader, “Let’s give ’em an old-timer, Sid.” “No,” Harkreader replies, “let’s give ’em ‘Old Joe.’ ” “Shoot boy!” assents Moore. Actually, the piece that follows—“Old Joe Clark”—is an old-timer in fact as well as in name, easily one of the South’s best-known fiddle songs.39 In these instances, tradition means relative antiquity (“that good old tune,” “that old tune you used to play,” “a few of those old Southern melodies,” “an old breakdown”). But third-person plural pronouns can also intimate an item’s familiarity: “what they call that ‘Terrible Rag’ ” (Buddy Boy Hawkins, “A Rag Blues,” Paramount 12814, 1929); “the dance now they call the Geechee Dance” (Blind Blake, “Southern Rag,” Paramount 12565, 1927); “that tune they call ‘Nancy Rollin’ ” (the Skillet Lickers, “Nancy Rollin”); “that new dance they got out now . . . they call ‘Skoodle Um Skoo’ ” (Papa Charlie Jackson, “Skoodle Um Skoo”). Emphasizing common knowledge or communal ownership—the public domain—even a tune that is new to some participants is effectively familiarized by such an appeal. On the Skillet Lickers’ “Pretty Little Widow” (Columbia 15334-D, 1928) Clayton McMichen asks banjoist Fate Norris, “Well, Fate, how are you and your little widow getting along by now?” “Oh, boy, fine, fine.” “Yeah? They tell me y’all getting up quite a case down there, is that so?” “You bet.” “I just learned a new tune they call ‘The Little Widow,’ I’m gonna play it for you and her.” In thus tying the musical content of “The Little Widow” to its social context, Mac illustrates another feature of community-based traditions often used to key records. “Shootin’ Creek” localizes a widespread fiddle tune (“Cripple Creek”) to a Virginia hamlet the North Carolina Ramblers knew firsthand. Their “Bill Mason” (Columbia 15407-D, 1929) takes a similar approach. [train whistle] Mmmm. That man sure does blow a wicked whistle, don’t he? Sounds like that old fellow that used to run on the Southern, between Monroe [Virginia] and Spencer [West Virginia], pulled that Crescent Limited. What was his name, Charlie?

Roy Harvey:

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Oh, you thinking about Bill Mason. RH : Oh, yeah. Whatever ’come of him? CP : Well, he got married here a while back. RH : Oh, married. I thought he’s sick, that’s what’s the matter with him, I thought. CP : Yeah, was murdered near about it, but then he got married here a while back and they made up a song on him. RH : Let’s play it then. CP : All right. [music begins] Ch a r l i e P o o l e :

“Bill Mason” actually derives from “Bill Mason’s Bride,” a much-printed turn-of-the-century poem that entered oral tradition. Its frequent attribution to Bret Harte is open to question, as is the imputation that it is based on fact. Regardless, the Ramblers’ recording reframes a well-known popculture artifact as a local folk ballad, supposedly made by known persons about a common acquaintance (“they made up a song on him”), inspired by actual events.40 Whatever the actual circumstances of the creation of “Bill Mason,” the Ramblers and their fans definitely understood how folksongs were made. Other items emphasize a singer’s personal identification with his or her song. A former railroad engineer himself, Roy Harvey brought his old colleague Earl Shirkey along on “The Railroad Blues” (Columbia 15406-D, 1929). “Say, Roy,” Shirkey begins, “remember them old railroad days?” “Reckon I do, boy,” replies Harvey, imitating a train whistle. “That sure makes you feel blue, don’t it?” inquires Shirkey. “Nothing else. Boy, you want me to sing you some of them railroad blues?” “Go ahead and sing me one,” agrees Shirkey. Even listeners unacquainted with Harvey and Shirkey might glean from this exchange that the two were in fact railroad men, that their account of the railroader’s life expressed in the very fashion of folksong their personal viewpoints and experiences.41 Overall, old-time records appealed to listeners’ sense that recording artists were not musical professionals as we now understand that role, but working-class men and women much like themselves. This was true even of superstars like the most famous ex-railroader on old-time records, Jimmie Rodgers, billed by his label as “the Singing Brakeman.” In fact, all old-time records suggest something of their authors’ backgrounds, further assuming listeners shared their upbringing and outlook. But some reveal more than others.

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Participants Old-time artists thought their listeners well-versed in Southern folk music and its various settings, acknowledging them as co-participants in a living tradition; indeed, it was on precisely that score that they and their listeners could actively cooperate in records similarly rooted in people’s real lives, records that accordingly took great interest in personal introductions. Many examples even function something like artist résumés—whether presenting their personal pedigrees, regional backgrounds, or musical credentials. On “Baking Powder Blues,” Birmingham native Lucille Bogan demands of fellow Alabaman Walter Roland, “Boy, you know where I’m from? I’m from the Black Belt. If you be all right, we might carry you back there too!” Originally named for its rich, dark soil, the Black Belt or Black Prairie of central Alabama and eastern Mississippi was by the early nineteenth century already famous for its cotton production. The resulting concentration there of African slaves (and, later, black tenant farmers) suggested, however, a second meaning for Black Belt: the term now often describes this and the contiguous cotton-producing areas of Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, all still characterized by relatively high black populations.42 In this same vein, Too Tight Henry’s “Charleston Contest” recalls, “when I was a poor boy, first started out playing music, and tried to travel from town to town and I didn’t have any money.” That account is borne out by what little is known of his life and itinerant musical career.43 William (Bill) Moore may have been more sedentary than Castle, but his résumé was every bit as traditional. On “Barbershop Rag” (Paramount 12613, 1928) he describes himself as the “only barber in the world can shave you and give you music while he’s doing it. Aw, set ’em, Barber Moore, set ’em. Strap that razor, barber, strap it. That’s strapping that razor; strap it, boy, strap it. Next! Fresh water, fresh! Next! Close shave, barber, close shave,” and so forth, finishing “Barber Bill knows how to do it!” A resident of Tappahanock, Essex County, Virginia, Moore (1893–1951) really did barber there and in nearby Warsaw, where he had a second shop. In his off hours he also played for local dances, whether on guitar (the instrument he used on all eight of the sides he recorded for Paramount), fiddle, or piano. His boasting aside, Moore was not the only Southern barber whose establishment featured traditional music—far from it.44 On the whole, though, artists’ conviction that listeners share their background tends to be more implicit than explicit. Indeed, while artists’ own credentials may be best revealed in full-blown dramas, the clearest glimpses

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of listeners—or rather of performers’ sense of those listeners—sometimes emerge from the briefest, most casual comments. Far from obscuring their intent, this elliptical, knowing quality confirms absolutely artists’ belief that listeners shared their frames of reference, shared their experiences, expectations, and understandings. Consider the opening of Bessie Smith’s “At the Christmas Ball,” which summons its total context—historical, cultural, social, and seasonal—with a customary pitch and a traditional couplet. “Hey, Bessie, Christmas gift!” shouts an unidentified band member. “Hurray for Christmas!” Bessie replies, singing “Christmas comes but once a year, / And to me it brings good cheer.” Smith’s intended audience would not have needed a folklorist to explain that “at Christmas time [in the South] Negroes used to go to all the homes where they had worked during the year. If they could sneak up on the white family and say ‘Christmas Gift’ before the white, they were entitled to a present.”45 A seemingly offhanded aside may thus conceal an extremely long reach. A barroom, barrelhouse, or tavern materializes in a solitary cry of “Bring me a half pint of that rock and rye, boys! So we both can get high” (Charlie Spand, “Rock and Rye”); or “Aw, bring Kokomo another half a pint!” (Kokomo Arnold, “Back Door Blues”); or “Who’s the landlady? Tell her to bring me another bowl of chitlins and a bottle of that red soda pop” (Myra Taylor, “Tell Your Best Friend Nothing”). On “Tight in Chicago,” singer Mozelle Alderson sketches an inner-city rent party simply by shouting encouragement during pianist Judson Brown’s mid-performance solo—“Aw, stomp that box! I didn’t say stomp the toes off your shoes, I said stomp that box!”—then exclaiming as the side ends “What is that I hear? Sound like the landlord’s footsteps; don’t let him in here! Come on in everybody—let’s have a ball! We don’t care nothing about that it’s tight in Chicago!” Warren Caplinger directs most of his running commentary on “Saro” to his Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, intimating the dance setting only in a brief final aside: “Can’t that boy play a nasty guitar?!” he begins, “step on that banjo, Willie. Hot dog, that’s got it. Tear the hairs out of that bow, George, that’s fine. Bear down on her, boys, bear down on her. Get that red-haired gal over there and dance one with her, boy. She’s some high stepper, boys.” The West Virginia Coon Hunters’ “Greasy String” is even more economical. “Kill your own self !” exclaims W. A. Meadows as the band heats up, “dance kid, I fotched you here. Tell me when you coming back,” then toward the side’s end, “Not long now.” On Harkreader and Moore’s “Old Joe,” Grady Moore’s nod to an imaginary audience—“Let’s give ’em an old-timer”—and a few errant dance calls serve for a square dance.

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The prize for concision may go to Jarvis and Justice’s “Poor Girl’s Waltz,” which encapsulates the course of an entire evening in a couple of tempo changes and a few laconic asides. As fiddler Reese Jarvis swings into a slow waltz, guitarist Dick Justice advises, “Court your girls, boys.” Suddenly, they move to the next dance set, an upbeat “Turkey in the Straw.” “All dance,” exclaims Justice. “Now court ’em again,” he instructs as the fiddle resumes the waltz, then, with another tempo shift, “Dance again!” Old-time artists were masters of the telling detail—elaborate drama or casual aside, those little touches evoking the total experience. Arriving for a Ramblers’ jam on “Shootin’ Creek,” Roy Harvey admonishes the others, “wait till I roll down my britches and get these overshoes off and we’ll go.” What might strike modern urbanites as insignificant fluff would for his audience concretely suggest the too-wet-to-plow conditions providing them a rare opportunity for leisure activities.46 Its ingenuous economy is underscored by Alberta Hunter’s “Boogie-Woogie Swing,” which enlists the same act—removing one’s shoes—to a completely different purpose. Hunter evokes an urban (as opposed to rural) milieu simply by entreating a group of imaginary house partyers “take your shoes off, don’t be dancing so loud—the folks downstairs are kicking [complaining about the noise].” Telling details indeed! Challenged to reconcile folksongs and phonographs, old-time artists rose to the occasion—or rather to every conceivable occasion. So pervasive was this impulse, so ingenuous the response, that a solitary performer could flesh out a whole cast of characters. Cow Cow Davenport’s one-sided conversation on “Mootch Piddle” illustrates how. “It’s on now,” he declares as his piano begins. “We gonna have a function here tonight. Aw pull down them windows, boy, shut that door. Yes, now whup them keyboards. Play that thing, you longhaired rascal. Come on, boy, grab one of them broads; let’s go back. Aw. Come on, boy, let’s do that thing. What?! ‘Mootch Piddle.’ Come on, let’s mootch it, mama. Hah? What you say? I say mootch it! Don’t mootch it up and down. Mootch it ’round and ’round. Now that’s the way to do it,” and so forth. Similar mock-dialogues occupy Henry Brown’s “Stomp ’Em Down to the Bricks,” Jim Clarke’s “Fat Fanny Stomp,” Pine Top Smith’s “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” and John Dilleshaw’s “Georgia Bust Down” and “Pickin’ Off Peanuts.” But the technique also filled out the casts in actual dialogues or dramas, or in briefer monologues. Another solo option was simply to narrate. Backed only by his own banjo, Mississippi-born Gus “Banjo Joe” Cannon describes his arrival in his adopted hometown on “Madison Street Rag” (Paramount 12588, 1927).

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First time I was in Memphis, with Tenne- with the -see, I was walking on up Main Street. I meets an old friend of mine. He say, “Hello there, Joe.” I say, “Hello.” He said, “What that you got in that suitcase?” I say, “A banjo.” He say, “Can you play the ‘Madison Street Rag’?” I said, “Naw, man, I don’t know nothing ’bout the ‘Madison Street Rag.’ ” He says, “Supposing I whistle it.” I say, “All right, whistle it, I can play it.” So here he go. [clears throat, whistles] I say, “Yeah, man, I can play that.” He said, “Come on go down here on Madison, corner Fourth and Madison with me.” So I goes on down there. We gets right on the corner. Here we was down here on the corner. [plays banjo louder] Right down here on the corner, now we starting a ball. Oh man, we having a good time. Uhm-mm. In a few minute here come the man with the headache stick [billy club]. And you know one thing, that boy ran slap off and left me? Here he go. Catch him! [banjo flourish] Uhm-mm, play it long time. Uhm-mm. Aw shucks. Now ain’t that good? Uhm-mm. Aw shucks. Uhm-mm, play it now, boy. I’m going to play it.

Again, Cannon’s tale is remarkable for its specificity, pinpointing a spot due north of Beale Street where he and his groups actually busked. Samuel Charters reports that when he played “Madison Street Rag” for Cannon three decades later, Cannon insisted, “That’s just how it was!”47 But Cannon wasn’t the only storyteller on record. Jimmie Davis’s “Saturday Night Stroll” (Victor 23688, 1932) narrates a walk through one of Louisiana’s black neighborhoods, including stops “by the old country church” and “the old country dance” to listen to the music coming from within. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Hot Dogs” recounts a police raid “last Saturday night down at that booger rooger.” (With Jefferson clogging furiously to simulate dancing—or running!—this side was actually credited to “Blind Lemon Jefferson and His Feet.”) John Lee Hooker tells how he came to Detroit on “Boogie Chillen” (Modern 20-627, 1948). Strikingly similar is an earlier recording, “Boogie” (Planet 101, 1947) by James “Snooky” Pryor and Moody Jones. Like Hooker, Jones and Pryor were Delta transplants, familiar street singers around Chicago’s South Side. Pryor’s midpoint monologue describes that scene: “One day, I was walking down Princeton Street. I heard the boogie right there on the corner. Boys, it took me off my feet, and I had to boogie too.” Incidentally, when Hooker refurbished “Boogie Chillen” for Chicago’s Chess label (“Walkin’ the Boogie,” Chess 1513, 1952), he relocated his own story from Detroit’s Hastings Street to Chicago’s Parkway, which intersects Princeton just off Lake Michigan. While the title of “John L’s House Rent Boogie” (Modern 814, 1951)

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suggests a rent party, it also narrates a street scene, with Hooker desperately busking to pay his landlady. As musically rich as those of any American city, Atlanta’s streets received similar treatments. “Atlanta Strut” (Columbia 14657-D, 1929) finds Blind Sammie (Blind Willie McTell) “going down to Merrit Avenue the other night, met up with a gang of stags. ‘Samuel, come on go with me down to the Atlanta Strut tonight.’ ‘Well, I don’t care to go.’ Showed me a quart of corn. . . .” The corn changes Samuel’s mind, luring him to the “strut,” whose conviviality, music, and dance he describes in detail. Riley Puckett’s preface to “The Darkey’s Wail” (Columbia 15163-D, 1927) is briefer but just as pointed. “Hello, folks, now I’m with you once again,” he begins, “I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old Southern darkey I heard play coming down Decatur Street the other day because his good gal done throwed him down.” The piece is actually an instrumental rendition of the blues ballad “John Henry” (Laws I 1), played in the traditional fashion with a slide. Puckett’s take on Decatur—a favorite busking spot for Atlanta musicians, both black and white—is also right on the mark. There Atlantans could hear the likes of Blind Willie McTell or Puckett himself, or their contemporary Peg Leg Howell, who played “John Henry” in exactly the manner of “The Darkey’s Wail”—and who was discovered playing on Decatur by one of Puckett’s own patrons, Columbia A&R man Wilbur C. “Bill” Brown.48 In its true-to-life depiction of music-making down on Decatur, “The Darkey’s Wail” exemplifies the record-as-report. Yet in directly addressing his listeners (“Hello, folks, now I’m with you once again. . . ”), Puckett also broaches a very different way of thinking about folksongs and phonographs.

Chapter Four

Here’s One Y ou Can A ll S ing Righ t wit h U s

H

“

ow do! Well folks, you heard about the Farm Relief, read about it, heard them talk about it.” Uncle Dave Macon seems to have a pretty good idea what his listeners have been up to. Certainly he knows what they are doing at the moment: listening to him. “Well, it finally got here,” he continues. “They’ve just about relieved the farmer of everything he’s got, now I’m telling you right. Now I’ll sing you about it after I play you a pretty little prelude on the banjo.” It’s June 20, 1929, and Tennessee’s prolific David Harrison Macon—better known to his legion fans as Uncle Dave—is in the studio yet again, this time at the Brunswick label’s Chicago operation. His listeners might be forgiven for thinking Uncle Dave is right there in the room with them. He seems to think as much himself. While some old-time records are cast as remote, static, or stylized representations of traditional music-making, others are framed as functional equivalents of live performances, as near-enough presentations. Here recording artists extend their personal invitations to listeners, encouraging them to participate in records as immanent, eminently accessible events. Just replay the Skillet Lickers’ “Soldier’s Joy,” where champion fiddler Clayton McMichen, “red hot and raring to go,” ready to “play you another little tune this morning,” enjoins listeners to “roll up that new carpet, grab that gal and shake a foot and moan!” Or take a listen to Mac’s similar comments on “Flatwoods” (Columbia 15472-D, 1929). With Riley Puckett once more strumming his guitar in the background, McMichen declares “Well, folks, here we are again, now, we’re gonna have a regular old shindig, a regular old country barn dance. We gonna play a 77

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Uncle Dave Macon (right) with longtime partner, Sam McGhee. John Edwards Memorial Foundation/ Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

little tune called ‘Flatwoods,’ so Riley, step on her and let’s go back, son!” As he and Riley step on her, Mac reinforces the regular old country barn dance atmosphere with traditional dance calls: “Lady ’round the lady and the gent also / Lady ’round the gent and the gents don’t go. . . . ” How do such examples differ from dramas or narratives? Conceived as a distinct approach to cueing records, McMichen’s prefaces capture the basic thrust, particularly in his use of the imperative mood, the present progressive tense, and most importantly, in his direct appeals to his audience. Obviously, such elements—including direct address—occur in dramas. There, however, they are addressed by actors to one another, or to imaginary characters on a self-contained theatrical set. To address directly one’s actual audience, the record listeners; to demand their immediate involvement in the record; to include those listeners in the record’s unfolding action—these involve a much different idea of the 78 r.p.m. phonograph disc as a musical event. Granted, the distinction is sometimes subtle. While I have classed Burnett and Rutherford’s “Ladies on the Steamboat” with the dance dramas in the previous chapter, Blind Dick Burnett’s introductory remarks are little different from Mac’s on “Soldier’s Joy” or “Flatwoods.” “Now folks,” he begins, “we’re gonna play some good dance music, if you ain’t right, get right. Get ready now, let’s go.” Only a couple of errant dance calls and an aside to a make-believe dancer (“Go back there, Sam, and catch that gal”) suggest that Burnett’s intent

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is primarily dramatic—that the “folks” he addresses are a dramatic contrivance and not the record’s listeners. Other items are still more ambiguous. Most of the Barn Dance with Calls records I have classed as dramas include no other overtly dramatic features. So why conclude that they are intended to dramatize dances rather than actively engage listeners? How do we know their imperatives—“hands up and circle to the left; break and swing; promenade”—are addressed to a make-believe cast, not the record’s audience? Actually we do not—which is kind of the point. Despite the 78 r.p.m. record’s obvious limitations—its three-minute time-span, for instance, or tendency to skip at any mildly rambunctious movement— people often danced to old-time records, occasionally including these. That does not seem to have been the rule with dance-call records, but a given title’s momentary character could be a very personal matter.1 If people just sat and listened, it was a drama; as soon as someone do-si-doed, the drama became a bona fide square dance. Either way, its personal groundings are unmistakable. And that really is the point: since the whole gist of these cues is the record’s malleability as a musical event, it is best not to be too rigid ourselves, especially since artists regarded these strategies as complementary rather than exclusive. The distinction is really a matter of emphasis: just as dramas demand vicarious participation, more direct appeals to listeners necessarily maintain some dramatic distance. It is unlikely, for example, that Clayton McMichen really expected listeners to roll up the carpet. In practice, old-time artists employed these strategies more or less interchangeably, sometimes on the same record. Uncle Dave, for instance, begins “Station Will Be Changed After a While” (Vocalion 15341, 1925) directly engaging his listeners: “now good people, I’m a-gonna try to play you a pretty little instrumental piece and sing you a beautiful sentimental song.” The instrumental follows directly; the subsequent song (the folk hymn named in the title) is framed as a report: “Now this is a song that was sung by a colored preacher,” he pauses to announce. “And he told the congregation that he’s a-going to preach to ’em from the one-eyed chapter of the two-eyed verse of the three who failed to see Peter in the four corners of the Corinthians. And remember, people, the station will be changed after a while.” If anything, these occasional ambiguities again testify to how completely Southerners related phonographs to various facets of folksongs. Moreover, any ambiguous cases are far outnumbered by examples clearly contrasting with dramas or narratives, unmistakably reaching out to listeners to involve them directly in recorded performances conceived as effective equivalents of live events. Sometimes these appeals concern no activity beyond

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communication itself, representing almost pure instances of language’s linecheck function, like the verbal tics intended to establish or extend conversations, confirm listeners’ attention, or elicit feedback: listen, I mean, right?, you know?, I’m telling you, and so forth. The parallel to the broadside’s come-all-ye is unmistakable too. Indeed, it is tempting to read Dick Burnett’s introduction to “Ladies on the Steamboat” against the come-all-ye of his printed broadside, “The Song of the Orphan Boy”: “Oh, dear friends today, if you could not see your way / Oh, how lonely and sad you would be, / Don’t think it any wrong to buy one of my son[g]s, / Won’t you buy from a blind man like me.” But then as we already know, Blind Dick later switched from selling personalized songbooks to peddling his own records.2 These cues usually are pretty straightforward, often just a simple declarative statement at a record’s outset: “People, my good girl has left me, that’s the reason why I’m gonna sing you this song” (Jim Jackson, “This Morning She Was Gone,” Victor V38003, 1928). “Girls, I want to tell you about these sweet men—these men going around here trying to play cute. I’m hard on you boys, yes sir” (Bessie Smith, “Pinchbacks—Take ’Em Away,” Columbia 14025-D, 1924). “Listen here, people, these my blues, I brought ’em all the way from Birmingham” (Buddy Boy Hawkins, “Snatch It Back Blues,” Paramount 12475, 1927). Like all such keys, these examples focus listeners first and foremost on the medium itself. But instead of being set off as a remote stage, the record becomes an immediate interpersonal link uniting artists and fans in an unfolding, cooperative act. Once more, these dynamics are most clearly revealed in attitudes toward the participants, their social identities and cultural ties; the performances themselves and the musical traditions they embody; and the material, social, and cultural settings in which they occur—or rather in which they are occurring, as works-in-progress.

Participants Even if they never actually have met, performers assume they are personally acquainted with their listeners in other ways—most significantly, through their common acquaintance with Southern folk music. Here, though, this historical fact is reinforced by their cooperation in a record instantaneously manifesting that tradition. Their identification is accordingly twofold: artists and fans are co-participants in Southern folksong both across time and space and at that very moment, via a 78 r.p.m. phonograph disc.

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Envisioning their audiences, performers may be quite general, addressing everybody or any and all people or folks who happen to be listening. On “Countin’ the Blues” (Paramount 12238, 1924), Ma Rainey declares “Lord, I’ve got the blues this morning, I want everybody to go down in prayer. Lord, Lord.” Midway through “The Franklin Blues” (Vocalion 15318, 1926), Sam McGee pauses to interject “Hello, folks, this is Sam McGee from Tennessee just a-getting right. Let’s go, Sam.” On the reverse, “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” he reminds folks “this is Sam McGee just from Tennessee just a-getting right. Come on now, Sam.” Other appeals are more particular—addressed just to females, for instance. Ida May Mack’s “When You Lose Your Daddy” (Victor 21690, 1928) recalls Bessie Smith’s “Pinchbacks—Take ’Em Away”: “Well girls, you know how you feel when your good man’s gone.” Ida Cox’s “Pleading Blues” (Paramount 12513, 1927) is even more explicit: “Well girls, you know how you feel when your best man has quit you. And that’s the case with me. And I want you to listen while I sing this song. And try and sympathize with me.” Leroy Carr’s “Good Woman Blues” (Vocalion 03296, 1934) adopts a different stance toward female listeners. “I got to get these women told,” he begins. “I got to tell them a thing or two. So they know what I’m talking about.” Other bluesmen appeal to male solidarity. Harvey Hull introduces “Gang of Brown Skin Women” (Gennett 6122, 1927) “Gang around, boys! I’m gonna tell you about my brownskin gals.” Roy Harvey and Leonard Copeland’s “Lonesome Weary Blues” (Columbia 15582-D, 1929) opens with Harvey proclaiming, “Boys, when I’m blue and downhearted, I just reach and get my old Gibson guitar and play those ‘Weary Lonesome Blues.’ ” Some records commend themselves even more particularly, again underscoring performers’ conviction that listeners share their backgrounds and beliefs. Bo Weevil Jackson (Sam Butler) begins “When the Saints Come Marching Home” (Paramount 12390, 1926): “Now I wants all you church members to get right. I wants you all to be just like the saints, when y’all come marching home.” “Uncle Dave’s Beloved Solo” (Vocalion 15439, 1926) opens with Macon announcing: “Now people, you all know I love God, and love to go to church. Now I’m going to play you that beautiful old piece, ‘Rock of Ages Cleft For Me, Let Me Hide Myself in Thee.’ ” The “Beloved Solo” is actually an instrumental medley commencing with that well-known hymn. Midway through, Uncle Dave pauses to exclaim “Now soldier boys, listen for that lonesome bugle call,” imitating a bugle on his banjo before marching on. Uncle Dave was quite the Christian soldier himself. A year after the Scopes Trial he reaffirmed his fundamentalism in “The Bible’s True” (Vocalion 15322, 1926). Opening with an instrumental hymn, he pauses to testify, “Now people, that was ‘Will There Be

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Any Stars in My Crown.’ Now I don’t believe in evolution nor revolution, but when it comes to the good old Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, I’m right there.” His song even more defiantly debunks Darwinian heresies. He obviously feels he has found some sympathetic ears. These direct appeals may be just as particular as dramas or narratives. Some of the most striking examples again come from Uncle Dave. One of the older performers recording commercially in the twenties and thirties, Macon (1870–1952) had long been a well-known musical figure around central Tennessee, renowned for his personal charm, comic repartee, and instant rapport with audiences. He brought that same warmth and easy familiarity to his old-time releases, coming across even on record as everyone’s favorite uncle. His autobiographical “From Heaven to Earth” (Brunswick 329, 1928) informs listeners, “Now good people, I wagoned and farmed for over twenty years, and the style of my wagoning firm was the Macon Midway Mule and Mitchell Wagon Transportation Company, situated on the dividing line [of Rutherford and Cannon Counties], operated by gentlemen on-and-up-time. Main office: eight-and-aquarter miles east [of] Main Street, Murfreesboro, and ten-and-three-quarter miles west [of] Main Street, Woodbury, Tennessee. Now here’s my song.” That piece further invites listeners—who by and large shared Uncle Dave’s workingclass background—to identify with his experiences freighting and farming. In 1929, Macon recorded four sides recounting his “Travels,” each combining banjo songs with traditional humor, homey wisdom, and tongue-in-cheek autobiography. His preface to “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 3 (In and Around Nashville)” (Brunswick 355, 1929) recalls “From Heaven to Earth”: “Well folks, you know I live with my mother-in-law’s daughter forty-two miles from Nashville, and I been in and around Nashville, in there and out. And I’ve heard a heap of things and seen a right smart and now I’m singing you a little about ’em.” “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 1 (Misery in Arkansas)” (Brunswick 340, 1929) is earmarked for one special listener. “Now good people,” he begins, “I’m a-singing this song especially for my old schoolmate friend, Joe Morris of Nashville, Tennessee, one of the leading clothing men. He’s a man who’ll address you at the door, and he’ll dress you up before you go out.” (Macon’s “Darling Zelma Lee,” Vocalion 5380, 1929, features a similar dedication: “Now I’m singing this song especially for my old friend Lonzo Bragg and his wife way down in Tennessee.”) “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 2 (Around Louisville, Ky.)” (Brunswick 349, 1929) relates Macon’s adventures after “riding over that big bridge from New Albany, Indiana, to Louisville, Kentucky,” while “Uncle Dave’s Travels— Part 4 (Visit at the Old Maid’s)” (Brunswick 362, 1929) describes an “ice cream festival” “right recently down in a little town in Indiana.”

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“Tennessee Jubilee” (Brunswick 355, 1929) brings listeners all the more cozily within Uncle Dave’s family circle. Here he treats them to an after-dinner joke on an eccentric relation. “Well, well, folks, I’m feeling fine,” he begins. Just eat a hearty dinner, and now I’m going to give you something that’s ’round here. An old “Tennessee Jubilee.” But before I sing you the piece, I have a cousin lives down in Rutherford County, Tennessee, she’s a woman. And her brother was telling me about her swapping a dry cow for an old secondhand Ford car last summer, and she learned to run it pretty well in the wheat fields after they got done threshing, and she decided she’d go into the city on Saturday. But she drove out to the highway, and the traffic was so thick, she backed out and decided to go in at night. So when she did drive in, the first thing she done, she run over the signal line. And the traffic officer stopped her, and there she was, and she stuck her head out the window and says, “What’s the matter?” The traffic gentleman says, “Why you haven’t got your dimmers on.” She says, “Lord, lord, I reckon I have, I put on everything mam’ laid out for me to wear ’fore I left home.” And she says, “Who is you anyhow?” He says, “I’m the traffic jam man, mom.” “Well I’m mighty glad you told me, mam’ told me to fetch her a quart [i.e., of jam]. Have it ready for me as I go out, will you please.”

And with that, Uncle Dave—cackling with delight—tears into “an old ‘Tennessee Jubilee,’ ” actually a rowdy version of “Turkey in the Straw.” Midway through the side, guitarist Sid Harkreader objects, “Uncle Dave, you a awful old man to be a-cutting up that a-way.” “Yes, but listen, Bud,” replies Macon, shifting into a defiant rendition of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”3

Musical Traditions Participants did not identify only with one another; they also identified personally with recorded music. And artists regularly discuss these records’ contents— their origin, form, function, and meaning—particularly as these momentarily bond participants. Willie Baker’s preface to “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” (Gennett 6766, 1929)—“Lookee here, mama, what’s the matter?! I know you wouldn’t dare to treat me like that!”—or Stovepipe Johnson’s intro to “Devilish Blues” (Vocalion 1203, 1928)—“Naw, Stovepipe done got devilish”—may appeal to the listener’s conscience or the performer’s state of mind, but they also introduce the basic themes of the songs that follow.

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Topical or thematic cues of this sort abound. Blind Willie McTell introduces “Razor Ball” (Columbia 14551-D, 1930) exhorting himself, “All right, boy, let’s talk about this razor ball.” Brownie McGhee (Blind Boy Fuller #2) begins “Double Trouble” (OKeh 06419, 1941), “Yes I got double trouble; what am I gonna do now? Gonna leave here.” As a bell tolls the hour in the background Ma Rainey laments, “It’s three o’clock in the morning and my man hasn’t come home yet,” elaborating in “Night Time Blues” (Paramount 12303, 1925). Charley Lincoln’s “Jealous Hearted Blues” (Columbia 14305-D, 1927) recalls Willie Baker’s “Mama, Don’t Rush Me”: “Ha, ha, ha! I hate to tell you, mama, but I’m sure here!” Gospel singer Washington Phillips began several sides this way: “What are they doing in heaven today? I don’t know, boy, but it’s my business to stay here and sing about it” (“What Are They Doing In Heaven Today,” Columbia 14404-D, 1928). “The subject of this lecture, ‘Jesus Is My Friend’ ” (“Jesus Is My Friend,” Columbia 14404-D, 1928). “Subject of this song is ‘I Am Born To Preach the Gospel and I Sure Do Love My Job’ ” (“I Am Born To Preach the Gospel,” Columbia 14448-D, 1928). Blind Benny Paris cues “I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me” (Victor V38503, 1928) by declaring, “I’m going to sing a song. And the subject of this song is ‘I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me.’ ” Its reverse, “Hide Me In the Blood of Jesus,” strikes the same note: “I’m going to sing a song. And the subject of this song is ‘Hide Me In the Blood of Jesus.’ ” True, these announcements are probably just what the singers would have said at a church program, or at a special event like a school dedication or closing. But that says it all: the record has now become such an occasion. Other singers expressed different devotions: from the get-go, Lillian Miller lets listeners know “I’m dead drunk this morning, daddy, be yourself !” (“Dead Drunk Blues,” Gennett 6518, 1928). Charley Lincoln is headed in the same direction: “Lord, Lord, I’m getting drunk now sure enough” (“Country Breakdown,” Columbia 14475-D, 1927). (“Soon as I get sober, aw make me drunk again,” he sings in the second verse, “said I’m gonna leave the chicken, said I’m going back to the hen.”) Even these simple thematic cues permitted personal variations. Uncle Dave’s “Farm Relief ” is one such case. J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith (The Howling Wolf) based “Fool’s Blues” (Vocalion 1674, 1931) on a folk proverb, included as a spoken aside. Playing a few bars of guitar, he stops and confides “You know I’m a single-handed fool. And getting old too. Well, they say God takes care of old-folks and fools. So I guess he will. Here I am.” Resuming, he sings, “Some people tell me that God takes care of old folks and fools, / But since I been born

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he must have changed his rule.” Others begin simply quoting their texts. On “Snake Doctor Blues” (Vocalion 1704, 1932) J. D. “Jelly Jaw” Short intones, “I’m a snake doctor man, everybody trying to find out my name; I fly by easy but I fly long, long distant land.” The flip side, “Barefoot Blues,” begins, “Now, mama, let’s get stone barefooted and get drunk and run. ’Cause I’m a hardworking man, you think I’m gonna be your slave for you all my life. And you know how to read and you don’t know how to treat a good man right.” The passages recur verbatim in the songs that follow. Blind Lemon Jefferson and his sometime musical partner Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter seemed especially fond of such thematic cues. Jefferson begins “Maltese Cat Blues” (Paramount 12712, 1928), “Say man, I went out gay-catting last night and my gal threw a party for me. Oh gee, it was tight like that.” Similar comments cue “Balky Mule Blues” (Paramount 12631, 1928), “D B Blues” (Paramount 12712, 1928), and “Oil Well Blues” (Paramount 12771, 1929). Lead Belly also liked the approach. “Packin’ Trunk Blues” (Banner 33359, 1935) is his adaptation of Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues” (Paramount 12474, 1927): “This song was made about a man and a woman,” he begins, “this man want to marry the woman, she didn’t want him. But she married him anyhow, for the money that he had. And she thought she got every dollar he had but she was mistaken. But she got him pretty well bent, he sat there with his head hung down. She walked by and she said ‘Daddy,’ say, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He looked at her and here what he said to her (sings): ‘I’m sitting down here wondering would a matchbox hold my clothes. . . . ’ ”4 Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett treat the title character of “Sal Let Me Chaw Your Rosin” (Columbia 15627-D, 1928) as a personal acquaintance. As Puckett strums his guitar, McMichen declares, “Uh Riley, let’s go down to see old Sal, and see if she won’t give us a cud of that rosin to chew this morning.” “All right,” agrees Puckett, “we’ll go down to the sweet gum tree and find out.” “All right, and we’ll go down and play her a little tune called ‘Sal Let Me Chew Your Rosin Some.’ Let’s go.” But artists also look beyond particular topics to their tradition’s wider dimensions, recast in the present tense. Carson Robison frames a medley of folk-minstrel standards—“Clementine; Camptown Races; Annie Laurie” (Rex 9158, 1936)—by declaring, “Howdy, folks, this is Carson Robison and the Pioneers, still digging up some of the old-time songs. Listen to this one.” Rehearsing a few snatches of “My Darling Clementine,” he suddenly interrupts himself: “And now here’s Miss Pearl Mitchell singing . . . ,” he explains, segueing into Mitchell’s abbreviated “Annie Laurie.” As the record winds to an end Robison

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encourages listeners, “and here’s one you can all sing right with us,” taking the lead on “Camptown Races.” That most listeners knew this well-worn item goes without saying. On “Wreck of the 97,” the Arizona Wranglers’ leader, Loyal “The Sheriff ” Underwood, first introduces the group’s make-believe camp cook, the performer known only as “Hungry”: “Howdy, folks, this is the Sheriff speaking, and presenting Hungry of the Arizona Wranglers singing his own interpretation of ‘The Wreck of the 97.’ Sing it pretty, Hungry.” Underwood assumes listeners have already heard versions aplenty of this ballad (Laws G 2), enough to distinguish Hungry’s “own interpretation.” Given the song’s standing in oral tradition, print, records, and radio, he probably is right.5 The reverse of Ma Rainey’s “Georgia Cake Walk” drama—“ ‘Ma’ Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Paramount 12590, 1927)—evokes another black folk dance. Here, though, Ma appeals directly to listeners and their own experiences: “Now you’ve heard the rest,” she begins, “I’m gon—, I’m gonna show you the best. Ma Rainey’s gonna show you her ‘Black Bottom.’ ” Her sung verses underscore this traditional quality: “Come on and show me your black bottom, / I want to learn that dance.” Other asides help listeners visualize the event they’re now part of. “Aw do it, Ma, do it, honey,” she tells herself, “look out now, Ma, you getting kind of rough there. You better be yourself now, careful, now—not too strong, not too strong, Ma.” Of course, many already knew that black bottom carried not just a double but triple meaning: a generic term for black neighborhoods in Southern cities, it thence lent its name to a black folk dance giving pride of place to the dancer’s backside. Similar is Walter “Buddy Boy” Hawkins’s “A Rag Blues,” where the guitarist informs listeners “This here’s my rag, I brought all the way from Jackson, Mississippi. Some people don’t know what this rag is. I’m the only man can play this here rag, called that ‘A Rag.’” Switching mid-side to another strain, he reorients his audience: “Now lookee here again. That’s what they call that ‘Terrible Rag,’ one we got now. Got off the other rag.” Bill Chitwood’s introduction to the Georgia Yellow Hammers’ “Johnson’s Old Grey Mule” (Victor 20550, 1927) dwells less on the performance than its purported background. “Folks,” Chitwood begins, “this grey mule I’m going to sing to you about’s the one that pulled Johnson up Kennesaw Mountain during the sixties. He’s a good mule yet, and he’s still down in Georgia growing cotton, and I think you’ll agree with me after you hear how he can kick now.” The overall effect recalls the North Carolina Ramblers’ “Bill Mason,” localizing a folk-minstrel standard to the Yellow Hammers’ North Georgia home base: actually, Chitwood refers to Confederate General Joseph Eggleston Johnston,

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Newspaper ad for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Chicago Defender, February 18, 1928, part 1, page 7.

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who dealt the Federals a resounding defeat at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia (June 27, 1864), delaying Sherman’s advance on nearby Atlanta and eventual March to the Sea.6 But in contrast to the detached dialogue in “Bill Mason,” Chitwood appeals to listeners as active co-participants. Fiddlin’ John Powers is even more fanciful on “Old Molly Hair” (OKeh 45268, 1927), informing listeners, “This is Fiddling Powers and Family of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. We are now going to play and sing you an old song that was lost in the building of King Solomon’s Temple and in later years been resurrected, and we call it ‘Old Molly Hair [Hare].’ ”7 Not all such comments are facetious. On “Rye Straw” (Columbia 15521-D, 1929) Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett provide a veritable folklore treatise. “Uh, folks,” commences McMichen as Puckett strums his guitar, “we gonna play you another little tune here, me and old Riley is. Now you know up in St. Louis they call this tune ‘A Lady’s Fancy.’ And around Chicago they call it ‘The Joke on the Puppy.’ But down here in Georgia where we live we just call it plain old ‘Rye Straw,’ and Riley, I just dare you to sing a verse in it.” “Boy, I’m sure gonna sing it!” asserts Puckett. “Well, let your conscience be your guide,” McMichen advises as he takes up his fiddle, “let’s get one more drink and go to town!” By record’s end, even unschooled listeners are active links in the chain of tradition. But Mac assumes some are already well-versed. His exchange with Puckett winks knowingly at one of the tune’s less decorous stanzas: “Dog shit a rye straw, dog shit a fiddle bow, / Dog tore his asshole, trying to shit a grubbing hoe.”8 Boasting aside, Puckett discreetly omits the verse, leaving informed listeners to fill in the blanks. Uncle Dave Macon was often at pains personally to acquaint listeners with Southern tradition. “Run, Nigger, Run” (Vocalion 15032, 1925) remarks the racial cross-pollinations in Southern folksong, bringing listeners into that loop. “Hello folks,” Uncle Dave begins, “raised in the South among the colored folk, and worked in the field and toiled with ’em all the days of my life, I will sing them good old Southern songs. So now I’m gonna sing you a little of ‘Run, Nigger, Run, the Paterole’ll Catch You.’ ” On “Old Dan Tucker” (Vocalion 15033, 1925), Uncle Dave retails his own credentials before moving on to the tradition. “Hello folks, you know I been a-picking and trying to pick a banjo for forty years or more. I used to just play the imitations but now I’m a-gonna give you a little of the variations of ‘Casey Jones.’ ” Playing a couple verses, he stops and announces, “Now folks, I’m a-gonna give you a little of ‘Old Dan Tucker,’ containing more heterolgenius, constipolicy, double-flavor, and unknown quality than usual.” (This last seems to express more of a personal than a traditional

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Southern aesthetic, but Uncle Dave also begins “Comin’ Round the Mountain” [Brunswick 263, 1928] telling listeners “If you ain’t right get right and let your conscience be your guide because I’m gonna play with more heterolgenius, constipolicy, double-flavor, and unknown quality than usual.”) Macon’s “Going Across the Sea” (Vocalion 15192, 1925) demonstrates regional banjo styles. Beginning with a flurry of rapid arpeggios, he stops and tells listeners, “Now folks, that’s what you call banjo picking. Now I’m gonna give you some old-time banjo rapping, that old familiar tune, ‘Going Across the Sea,’ from a-way back yonder.” True to his word, he switches from picking to the rapping (or frailing) technique. “Rise When the Rooster Crows” (Vocalion 15321, 1926) locates itself within a wider regional context. After a brief instrumental interlude Uncle Dave stops and announces: “Now good people, there’s a little of ‘Sweet Golden Daisies.’ Now I’m a-gonna give you something from the land of pork and hominy, punkin and possum, and where whiskey’s made out of corn and women don’t smell like talcum powder. Let’s go, bud.” (That something turns out to be the folk-minstrel favorite “Rise When the Rooster Crows,” where having so risen the singer resolves, “I’s a-going back South, where the sun shines hot, all down where the sugar cane grows.”) For Uncle Dave, Southern folk music seems naturally to have suggested Southern foodways. Listen to “Watermelon Smilin’ on the Vine” (Vocalion 15063, 1925): “Hello folks, I’m feeling right this morning, I had hotcakes, butter, and honey for breakfast. Now I’m a-gonna give you a little of the lonesome ‘Mocking Bird.’ ” After a bit of that well-known tune, he stops and announces, “Now folks, I’m a-coming on down to August. Now I’m a-gonna give you that ‘Watermelon Smiling on the Vine.’ ” Credited to the Dixie Sacred Singers, Macon’s rendition of the hymn “Walking in the Sunlight” (Vocalion 5160, 1927) even more succinctly evokes the preindustrial South’s oral universe and “unscientifical” music. Strumming his banjo, he confesses, “Now people, when it comes to the scientifical parts of music, I know nothing about it, but I can play. And thank God a man who can’t read the Bible can pray.” (Actually, at a recording session the following day, Uncle Dave assured his listeners, “Now people, I just can read and write, but you know’s a whole lot of folks that can’t read and write just natural like me got good sound sense. . . . ” “More Like Your Dad Every Day,” Vocalion 5172, 1927.) Some of the most interesting examples of this sort come from another of the older Southern artists to record, Uncle Jimmy Thompson (1848–1931). Even on record Uncle Jimmy embodies a living link between listeners and his music’s nineteenth-century roots. “Lynchburg” (Vocalion 5456, 1930) proclaims “Hello, folks! This is old Uncle Jimmy Thompson. I’m gonna play you a fine quadrille

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I learned the fourth day of August in eighteen and sixty-six.” “That’s a long time,” interjects Bill Brown, Vocalion’s supervisor for the session. “How old are you, Uncle Jimmy?” “Eighty-two,” answers Thompson, “I’ve got grown grandchildren and great big great grandchildren, running cars and trucks yet, and aplaying the fiddle yet. And I love to look at a pretty woman just as good as I ever did.” There follows Uncle Jimmy’s performance of another nineteenth-century folk-minstrel favorite, magically recapturing the sound of the fourth day of August 1866, interspersed with more of his early recollections. These carry over to the record’s reverse, “Uncle Jimmy’s Favorite Fiddling Pieces.” “Well, I’m gonna play you one of our old-timey pieces that, uh, land, I knew before the Civil War,” Uncle Jimmy announces as the second side begins. “What’s this?” asks Brown. “It’s, uh, ‘Flying Clouds,’ ” replies Thompson. “Oh that’s that lively tune, isn’t it?” prompts Brown. “Aw it’s a good one,” Uncle Jimmy acknowledges, “it just—, it just gets down in people’s heels and they can’t keep from dancing, they have to dance on it.” After Thompson plays the piece, Brown judges, “That’s as peppy as a drink of good whiskey, isn’t it?” “Yeah, it’s all right,” Thompson agrees, “all it lacks is a good set to dance after.”9

Settings While Uncle Jimmy laments his record’s lack of a good dance set, other records would have us believe they are that very setting. If all of the present examples establish immediate personal links between performers and listeners, and if that personal link overlaps (as it might in live community settings) with a traditional content—a real-life folksong—other records would instantly manifest a customary event in its entirety. Instead of simply representing an Alabama breakdown or Chicago rent party, the record itself becomes a rural square dance or urban houserocker. This is the thrust of Roosevelt “The Honeydripper” Sykes’s signature aside: “Well all right then, we’ll have a ball all night long! This is the Drip speaking!” (“You Can’t Fix It Back,” Decca 7622, 1939); “Well all right, let’s have a ball all night long! This is the Drip speaking every time!” (“She’s Got What It Takes,” Decca 7785, 1940); and so forth. Or as George “Bullet” Williams puts it on “Middlin’ Blues” (Paramount 12680, 1928), “I’m giving y’all that Charleston piece, when you want to whup that piano, you want to do that mess around.” The Skillet Lickers’ “Soldier’s Joy” and “Flatwoods” obviously belong in this category. So does Blind Blake’s sidelong monologue “West Coast Blues”

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(Paramount 12387, 1926). “Now we going to the old country rock,” Blake advises as his guitar begins. First thing we do, swing your partner. Promenade. Seesaw to the right. Swing that girl over there with that blue dress on and bring her right on back to me. You need to stop your funny fooling, ’cause it done got sweet to me, ha, ha! Like to made me whoop. Swing that girl right on again. Now people, if you ever heard something that make you feel good, you gonna hear something in a few minutes, but not now. Play that thing, boy. Now here’s something gonna make you feel good. Just listen to that thing. Swing that girl right on again. It done got good to me. Good to the last drop, just like Maxwell House coffee—yass! Just boot that thing. Look out then, better play that thing good, with all these people listening at me, I know it’s good. Yeah, it’s good, I made it good. I’m gonna try to satisfy you if I can. Play that thing, boy. Well now you ain’t got but a few more minutes to get it fixed, and that’ll be all for this evening. Now that’s all.

Much of this recalls the dramatic style, of course, verbally evoking imaginary dancers (“Swing that girl over there with that blue dress on and bring her right on back to me”). But Blake continually breaks that stylized frame by appealing directly to listeners (Now people, if you ever heard something that make you feel good, you gonna hear something in a few minutes . . . I’m gonna try to satisfy you if I can”). Whether or not he expected those listeners physically to dance, he keys the act of record listening itself as a personally engaging mental dance. Or compare Jane Lucas and the Hokum Boys’ “Hip Shakin’ Strut” (Champion 16237, 1930) to the same group’s “Hokum Stomp,” discussed earlier. “Hokum Stomp” epitomizes the closed set of the dramatic approach; by contrast, “Hip Shakin’ Strut” begins with Lucas appealing to all within hearing: “Come on here now and get in this hip shaking contest here ’cause it’s gonna be tight.” “Let’s all of us pull off our shoes and have a spanking good time,” agrees Georgia Tom Dorsey. “Aw, get hot now.” “Yes, get hotter than that,” adds Lucas, “come on girls, now and shake ’em up, shake ’em up. Raise ’em up, let ’em down.” “Lay ’em low,” interjects Dorsey, as Lucas crows, “come on everybody and do something ’cause this is too good to let it waste!” The rest proceeds in like fashion. Some comments conjure fictitious personnel: “Gee, look at that old fat gal. She really shakes a mean hip.” Others number record listeners among that cast: “Come on everybody and let’s do the yip-yap-yallo!” Again, whether or not Lucas and

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“Come on here now and get in this hip shaking contest here ’cause it’s gonna be tight.” Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint. Saturday evening outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. November 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Dorsey expected record listeners literally to pull their shoes off, get into a hipshaking contest, or do the yip-yap-yallo (probably not, but who knows), they at least have raised the possibility, inviting them to think of doing just that. Nor is the listener’s involvement always limited to such particular (mental) acts. If some records account not just for individual songs, topics, or themes but for Southern traditions generally, others expand their imagined settings beyond particular occasions to summon some larger cultural or geographic context, transporting listeners from their isolated seats by the phonograph, through time and space, to the total milieu of the event-in-progress. On “West Coast Blues,” Blind Blake ushers listeners straight into “the old country rock.” “Southern Rag” spends more time getting them out to the country, navigating the coastal inlets and sea islands of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas to the Gullah or Geechee homeland.10 “Now we going on an old Southern rag,” Blake begins. “Way out there in all their cotton fields. Where them people plant all that rice with sugar cane. And peas and so forth grow.” Simulating conversations with the locals (“ ‘Go on, old Geechee. I ain’t studying about you.’ ‘No, I

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know you ain’t a-studying me now. Soon as you get my rice, though, I bet you study me then’ ”) and pitching in with the chores (“I should help . . . pick this cotton. Or either dig potato, either one. I can strip more row of sugar cane than you can strip in ten years!”), he eventually leads listeners to a country ball: “Now we gonna do the dance now, they call the Geechee Dance. I’m gonna give you some music, you call the Geechee Music now.” It may just be a record, but by now the women seem real enough to touch (“I’m gonna grab ’em directly,” Blake insists, “I’m gonna shake ’em every way but loose”). Blake’s “Sea Board Stomp” (Paramount 12583, 1927) is in much the same vein (“Now we going to one of them old sea board stomps. . . . ”). So is William Moore’s “Old Country Rock” (Paramount 12761, 1928), which escorts listeners down the Rappahannock River to Barber Bill’s adopted hometown. “Come on, Bill, let’s take ’em for an old country rock,” he begins. “Let’s go back down on the Rappahannock, down Tappahanock [Virginia] way. Whup it, Bill, while everybody rocks.” On “Tallapoosa Bound” (Vocalion 5430, 1930), John Dilleshaw informs his audience they are “going back to Tallapoosa,” a northwest Georgia community near his native Paulding County on the Georgia-Alabama line. “Don’t like these flatwoods,” Dilly muses, “I love the tall pines and the red hills.” His description of Tallapoosa’s topography is entirely accurate; he may be exaggerating just a little when he assures listeners residents “have a breakdown every other night.” The Swamp Rooters was one of half a dozen group names used by Atlanta fiddlers Lowe Stokes and Bert Layne, in this case for two sides cut in November 1930. One was a tune Stokes learned as “Down to the Wildwood to Shoot the Buffalo.” Whether for brevity or as a personal tribute, the issued version (Brunswick 556, 1930) was rechristened “Citaco” after a nearby community.11 “All right, boys,” Layne begins, “let’s get out of these swamps and go back to old Citaco.” Shouting encouragement—“Man, don’t that sound good?!” “How ’bout you boys going home with me tonight?” “No place like Citaco!”—he at one point enthuses, “Man, I wish Pa was here to hear that,” then “we’ll have a big dance at Citaco tomorrow night!” Even a passing aside can trigger this frame. Bill Gaither’s intro to “Naptown Stomp” (Decca 7179, 1935)—“Well so long, old gal, I’m gonna leave you this morning; I’m going back to Naptown [Indianapolis], I’m tired of your lowdown ways”—might best be classed as a topical cue. (“Well I’m going back to Naptown and I’m going back to stay,” runs the first verse, “then you know by that I’m tired of your lowdown ways.”) But it too directs listeners to Gaither’s home base. Midway through “Three Women Blues” (Victor V38001, 1928) Atlantan

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Willie McTell sighs, “Aw, play it, Mister So-and-So. Lord, come get your black angel, ’fore I melt down in Atlanta.” As “Don’t You Leave Me Here” (Gennett 6106, 1927) begins Papa Harvey Hull tells his accompanists (Long “Cleve” Reed and Sunny Wilson), “All right, boys, let’s go back home.” “Don’t You Leave Me Here” turns out to be the piece more often titled “Alabama Bound,” but the comment seems purely rhetorical: home for these performers was northwest Mississippi, just south of Memphis. Other records reverse the equation: instead of taking the audience back home, they bring “back home” into the studio and thence to their public. This is the crux of Buddy Boy Hawkins’s aside on “Snatch It Back Blues”: “Listen here people, these my blues, I brought ’em all the way from Birmingham.” Though it goes to greater lengths, “L & N Rag” (Vocalion 5463, 1930) by Alex Hood and His Railroad Boys is cut from the same cloth. With fiddler Emory Mills taking the instrumental lead, banjoist Hood and Vocalion A&R man Bill Brown give listeners the lowdown on Hood’s hometown of Corbin, a railroad hub in eastern Kentucky. “Old Alex Hood and his Railroad Boys, playing that ‘L & N Rag,’ ” exclaims Brown as they begin. “Yeah boy,” chimes Hood, “they just down from Corbin.” “That’s a good place to be away from, Corbin,” adds Brown. “All right, step on it there now, Alex,” Hood tells himself. Apparently thinking better of his previous statement, Brown backpedals: “When I say away from Corbin, I mean it’s a pretty good town after all. We like it, whether the rest of you folks do or not.” As Emory Mills fiddles on, Brown and Hood plug the hamlet’s lifelines to the outside world, the L & N “and that old Southland too.” (“Corbin Slide”—the reverse of this, Hood’s only record—also pays tribute to his band’s hometown.) Of course, these artists did not believe they were literally transporting their listeners through time and space, any more than they thought a record’s other dimensions indistinguishable from its live counterparts. Rather, in cueing records as interpersonal proxies they created a set of conventions as artificial in their own way as any dramatic devices. Artful or artistic might be the better term. Much as recording artists found it difficult to dramatize communitybased music-making without imagining that all within hearing would take an active part in these events—hence the dramatic format’s vicarious pull on record listeners—they found it almost impossible to imagine their unseen listeners (or the mere act of record listening) without invoking the activities, persons, and places defining their own formative musical experiences. But a record could be its very own setting too.

Chapter Five

A Speci al P rayer on the Man T hat’s A-Catching the R ecord

A

tlanta, Georgia, the third of November, 1926. The Seventh Day Adventist Choir is having church—in a recording studio. In most respects, “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks We Stand” (Columbia 14178-D) is of a kind with hundreds of other church service records. Not so the benediction bestowed at its outset on the studio engineer recording the session. As he sets his machine in motion, an unidentified congregant announces the group is “holding service by the use of hymn: ‘On Jordan’s Stormy Bank I Stand.’ Before we sing this song, we’ll ask the Brother to lead us in a word of prayer. While he pray, all us pray with him that the holy spirit may come in that we have a spiritual Bro—, revival. Brother Hubbard lead us in prayer.” Answering his calling, Hubbard intones, “Oh mighty and everlasting, thou art God. I want to ask thee this evening for a special prayer on the man that’s a-catching the record for you.” “And oh Jesus,” Hubbard continues, “make him a man of God. Hold him in your merciful hand. Amen.” Only then, having brought their technical assistance into the fold, does the choir proceed with their hymn. As trifling as it might seem, this “special prayer on the man that’s a-catching [recording] the record” marks a major epiphany, an epochal rebirth of humanity’s musical spirit. Not quite otherworldly, the record has nevertheless achieved a new level of conceptual autonomy, less an interpersonal accessory than an analogue, less an analogue than a counterpart—an equal partner in Southern music and song. If live performance remains a point of reference—or at least a point of departure—it is only as a measure of that equal footing.

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Consider how the foregoing item transfigures absolutely the basic components of the musical event: its setting, its participants, even the musical tradition itself. Gone is any illusion of any earthly existence beyond the here-and-now. For this record, the setting is just that: a record, understood as both process—a creative act particular to the medium and its natural habitat, the recording studio—and product—a physical object “catching” that process in the interaction of a spinning disc, a vibrating stylus, and a near-animate groove. The participants are now recording artists and record listeners, the former including not just musicians and singers (Brother Hubbard and his congregation do command the most attention) but also technicians (lest we forget, Hubbard reminds us of the engineer’s presence), even support staff (A&R men, pressing plant operators, shipping clerks, record wholesalers and retailers), whose own artistry looms ever larger. The record listeners are now assigned wholly, peculiarly to that role: no longer vicarious or near-enough participants in any tradition apart from the present, they have become record listeners, record buyers, record consumers—period. Even the musical tradition has been redefined as a record, understood not just as a physical object and its three-minute time-span but as an instantaneous meeting of imaginative minds, a momentary union of cultural beings transcending the mundane boundaries of product and process to achieve the idea of art: a prayer, a hymn, a ceremony, a transcendent reality absolutely in tune with itself. That this experience might unfold wholly within an electronic milieu was a novelty difficult to grasp today, when we take this self-fulfilling media experience as much for granted as early-twentieth-century Southerners did their oral traditions. That these real-world traditions had for centuries been tempered by literary experiences (hymnals, prayer books, the Bible itself) offered one model for relating folksongs to phonographs. Still, we can now scarcely imagine how remarkable it was when, for the first time in human history, such imaginings were realized wholly within an electronic microcosm unlike anything before. How amazing that Southerners instantly naturalized this format as its own state of being, learning to live some of their most profound moments wholly within a new world revolving 78 times a minute.

The Recorded Setting The frequent blurring of the dramatic and direct approaches to cueing records reflects their common preoccupation with conjoining living folksongs and

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records. Whether as a stage for reenacting live performances, as an acceptable substitute, or as both at once, the record’s blueprint is live music. But sometimes records are social settings unto themselves, commensurate with (if not wholly independent of) community-based music-making: a distinct form of communication familiar enough to attain self-sufficiency and to permit selfreference. The emphasis may still be on the medium linking artist and audience, but rather than making real-world comparisons, performers reference other records. Of course, even as a parallel universe the phonograph suggests some realworld comparisons. If the record-as-record is an imaginary realm, it is not wholly so. It possesses its own time and space continuum, for instance. While spoken prefaces serve various functions, the most obvious may be simply to signal the start of a record. As a class, they carry this connotation even when they are mainly intended for some other purpose (say, dramatic exposition or directly engaging one’s listeners). In some cases, though, the act of marking a record’s beginning seems the main intent. We have already let pass without comment many examples of such boundary maintenance—for example, the signature “hellos” some artists employed, a sort of conventional sign-on framing the format’s peculiar dimensions and the speaker’s habitual activities therein. For Clayton McMichen’s customary greeting—“Well, folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers”—the answer to the question exactly where again? would be (in part): on yet another of this group’s extraordinarily popular 78s. Similar is John Carson’s standard sign-on to his Bluebird sides: “This is old Fiddlin’ John himself, now, with Moonshine Kate. Look out, here she comes.” Gene Wiggins observes that “ ‘She’ was not Kate [John’s daughter Rosa Lee Carson], as some have thought. ‘She’ was the music, the performance, the ideas, the cussedness—everything about to assault the listener.”1 We might add—as frequent listeners would infer—that “she” was the recorded music, the recorded performance, “she” was yet another of Fiddlin’ John and Moonshine Kate’s wonderful recorded melees. Other records mark their other boundary, the end of the side. Sometimes Uncle Dave Macon inserts his trademark “Hot dog!” at the beginning of a side, sometimes at the end as a parting shot.2 Again, we have already encountered this idea. Blind Blake’s “Southern Rag” concludes with the announcement “You better get that thing fixed just like this now ’cause, um, I’m gonna stop,” while on “West Coat Blues,” he warns “Well now, you ain’t got but a few more minutes to get it fixed, and that’ll be all for this evening,” then, just as the record ends, “Well that’s all.”

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Usually uttered just as or before the music stops, often abruptly cut off as the side runs out, these outros may self-consciously reference what has gone before, usually by simply restating the title, topic, or theme. Blind Lemon Jefferson finishes “Lonesome House Blues” (Paramount 12593, 1927) by exclaiming “ ‘Lonesome House,’ folks.” He concludes “Lock Step Blues” (Paramount 12679, 1928) “ ‘Lock Step Blues,’ people. Aw-haw.” Of a kind are the parting shots on Blind Willie McTell’s “Bell Street Lightnin’ ” (Vocalion unissued, 1933) (“Aw that Bell Street whiskey’s bad, boy”) and the Mississippi Sheiks’ “He Calls That Religion” (Paramount 13142, 1932) (“Oh yes, he calls that religion”). Blind Blake wraps up “Slippery Rag” by stating, “now this here’s the last rag now. My, my, my,” while Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Salty Dog” (Paramount 12399, 1926) ends with the singer plugging himself: “Papa Charlie done sung this song!” Other examples take a more generic cast, ringing as formulaic leave-takings or simple statements of fact: “Leaving now, son!” (Beale Street Sheiks, “Beale Town Bound”); “All right then!” (Bumble Bee Slim, “Hard Rocks in My Bed,” Vocalion 03328, 1936); “I can’t stay here much longer!” (Burnett and Rutherford, “Billy in the Low Ground,” Columbia 15209-D, 1927); “That’s enough!” (Pearl Dickson, “Little Rock Blues,” Columbia 14286-D, 1927); “Tah-tah, Smoky’s gone!” (Smoky Harrison, “Iggly Oggly Blues,” Paramount 12920, 1929); and so forth.3 Though it is hardly religious in topic or tone, Alberta Hunter’s “He’s Got a Punch Like Joe Louis” (Juke Box 510, 1946) ends with a mock benediction: “Aw, make us thankful for what we’re about to receive.” “Get the ‘L’ Down the Road” (Brunswick 7067, 1929) by Bill Johnson’s Louisiana Jug Band begins and ends with Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon announcing, “Plenty hokum now!” Smoky Harrison’s “St. Peter’s Blues—Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 12936, 1929) marks both sides of the record, beginning and end. “Here’s Old Sweet Papa Smoky once more!” he announces at the start of “Part 1”; then as it ends, “Sweet Papa Smoke’s gone!” Flipping the record, listeners are greeted, “Here’s Old Sweet Papa Smoke on this end, St. Peter’s Special”; as “Part 2” runs out, “Gone, mama!” Occasionally this convention intrudes on dramas. Too Tight Henry Castle finishes his “Charleston Contest” by announcing, “Now listen children [the record listeners? the imaginary dancers? both?], if y’all ain’t got that old lucky number yet, it’s too bad now ’cause I’m going to stop” (which he immediately does). As the Hokum Boys wind up “Hip Shakin’ Strut” Georgia Tom remarks, “Going now,” to which Jane Lucas responds, “Oh yes? I’d like to get the last shake there” (and there the shaking ends). Their variety notwithstanding—some are obviously deliberate selfcommentaries, carefully thought out in advance, others were probably just

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Blind Willie McTell recording in an Atlanta, Ga. hotel room. November 1940. John A. and Alan Lomax Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. A rare photo of a prewar artist actually recording, albeit for folklorists (John A. and Ruby Lomax) rather than a commercial label. The results can be heard on Blind Willie McTell 1940: Complete Library of Congress Records in Chronological Order, RST Records CD BDCD-6001, 1995.

impromptu signals to accompanists that a piece was about to end—these outros all serve the same basic purpose: clocking the expiration of the three minutes or so bounding a 78 r.p.m. side as a musical event. Of course, one of the hallmarks of this particular event is its repeatability, whether this involves replaying a given side, flipping the record over to spin its reverse, or selecting and playing another disc. Performers were well aware that their audience’s involvement did not necessarily end with any individual side. Often they registered this recognition. What else could Willie McTell be thinking when he ends “Experience Blues” (Columbia 14642-D, 1931) declaring, “stand by if you want to hear it again”? Or as he puts it on “Rough Alley Blues,” “stand by, people, if you wants to know it all.”4 If only as a practical matter, this understanding informs the many records dividing a single performance or composition between a disc’s alternate sides, usually explicitly identified as “Parts 1 and 2” (for example, Smoky Harrison’s “St. Peter’s Blues—Parts 1 and 2”). In a subtler move, a record’s two sides may be thematically linked or juxtaposed. Hound Head Henry’s “Crying Blues”/ “Laughing Blues” (Vocalion 1210, 1928) opts for contrast. He opens the first side, “Crying Blues,” commiserating with his pianist, Cow Cow Davenport: “Cow Cow, old Hound has got the blues this morning. My gal left me long about four t.m. [sic] this morning. Boy, she sure did treat me mean.” “Yes sir, I’m gonna tell you about it too,” he pronounces as he breaks into song, interspersed with conspicuous crying throughout. The flip side, “Laughing Blues,” begins with a

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burst of forced laughter: “Ha ha ha ha ha. Boy, I just sitting here thinking about that old gal [laughter]. What a dumb baby she is [laughter]. Yeah, she thought she ’as making a clown out of me [laughter]. I wasn’t doing nothing but just giving her my money, that’s all. Huh? [laughter] I’m gonna tell you about her now [laughter]. Here’s what I tell her. . . . ” And Henry continues to chortle as he sings. Even more striking is Blind Lemon Jefferson’s coupling “Christmas Eve Blues”/“Happy New Year Blues” (Paramount 12692, 1928). The first side describes the singer’s abandonment by his lover “the day before Christmas.” The second side relates a more satisfying New Year’s Eve celebration. Jefferson’s spoken intros and outros toggle the two. As side one begins he declares, “Oh mama, this is going to be a hard winter. Look how it’s snowing. Baby, won’t you hear me moan?” Just as he finishes his song and the side runs out he exclaims, “Christmas Eve Blues, folks.” Flipping the record, listeners are greeted, “A happy New Year, folks, to each and everybody.” At this side’s end, Jefferson returns full circle to his first topic: “Hurry up with that Santa Claus,” he begs, “bring it on around here.” In the idiom of the day, “that Santa Claus” may refer to a gift or drink. But many listeners would indeed “bring it on around” by flipping the record and replaying “Christmas Eve Blues.” Other records tie the listening experience even more closely to the format’s material dimensions—for instance, Jefferson’s “Hot Dogs”/“Weary Dogs Blues” (Paramount 12943, 1927). Reaching the end of side one, listeners are instructed, “All right, folks, turn over the record. Let me tell you all about these weary dogs of mine.” Having complied, they are immediately greeted, “Yes folks, these is my weary dogs,” followed by Jefferson’s musical tribute to his weary dogs (feet). (“Look out there, man, don’t let that dog bite me!” he pleads just as this side ends.) Of course, this gambit also has precedent in the broadside tradition—recall R. H. Brooks’s broadsheet version of “The New Market Wreck,” with its printed notation “You’ll see a picture of the wreck / Just over on the back.”5 It is replayed on record after record. Itinerant broadside and record peddler Blind Dick Burnett opens “Going Around the World”/“Going Across the Sea” (Gennett unissued, 1929) by telling listeners, “Now folks, I’m going to start ’round the world on this side, and on the other side we’ll go across the sea.” “Going across the sea,” he reminds them as side two begins. Buddy Burton ends “Ham-Fatchet Blues—Part 1” (Paramount 12625, 1928) by instructing, “Now if you wanna hear some ham-fatchet more just turn this record on that other ham-fatchet side” (i.e., “Ham-Fatchet Blues—Part 2”). Frank Hutchison offers a tongue-in-cheek

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introduction to “Johnny and Jane—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45361, 1929), intoning, “Now all right, boys, I’m gonna sing this beautiful little song entitled to all, ‘Bring back my heart and take my liver / Pears and peaches may leave you, but old Aunt Jane will stay forever.’ ” “Johnny and Jane” is really a tale of marital discord: “He run her up a hillside, a-run her through the ditches,” runs the first side’s final verse, “And he run old Jane right out of her britches, / John won’t allow no low down hanging around.” Here Hutchison stops and tells listeners, “We’ll finish the race on the other side.” Reaching side two, listeners are again greeted by Hutchison: “All right, boys, we’ll go ahead now with ‘Johnny and Jane.’ ” Roy Brown incorporates the ploy into the musical text of “Butcher Pete— Parts 1 and 2” (DeLuxe 3301, 1950), describing a maniac who indefatigably “chops all the women’s meat” with his “big long knife.” “That Butcher Pete is the craziest man,” Brown sings in side one’s final stanza, “tried to chop down the wind and the rain, / Just hacks on anything he can get, / Say, turn this record over, you ain’t heard nothing yet!” On the whole, “Old Virginia Reel—Parts 1 and 2” by Fiddlin’ Powers and Family is a fairly conventional square dance drama, the first part being devoted to the preliminaries, the second part to the dance itself. “Folks, we are going to have a real old-time square dance,” explains the master of ceremonies (most likely banjoist Charlie Powers) as side one begins. “And while the crowd is gather­ ing, everybody getting their partners, we will have a little rehearsal by Fiddling Powers and family.” One minute and fifty seconds into the first side, the emcee suddenly declares, “stop the music and everybody keep their feet quiet. On the other side we will finish it up.” The speaker clearly mistimed his announcement, as there follows an awkward pause—with, one assumes, the engineer frantically signaling the performers to proceed. The skit resumes until, at the obligatory three-minute mark, another band member (probably harmonica player John L. “Steamboat” Porter) announces, “All right, boys, get ready, the dance is next,” with the emcee blurting just as the side ends, “Everybody save the fiddler a dram, and on the other side we will give you a real old Virginia Reel.” Side two commences with the emcee instructing, “All right, boys, everybody to their places like the horses to the traces,” followed by a mock square dance. Uncle Dave Macon does a better job of timing on “Tom and Jerry” (Vocalion 5165, 1927). “Now boys,” he begins, “I’m playing the first half of this piece especially for the benefit of Mr. Henry Huddleston of Rutherford County, Tennessee. Let her go now.” At this point Uncle Dave and his Fruit Jar Drinkers— fiddlers Kirk McGee and Mazy Todd, guitarist Sam McGee, and Macon on

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banjo—launch into “Tom and Jerry,” with Todd providing dance calls. Halfway (almost to the second) through the side, the music suddenly stops. “This is the last half now, boys,” Macon declares, “partners to your places and straighten up your faces. Back from the wall and balance you all. Let’s go!” The music and dance calls resume. In these instances performers explore the record’s physical or temporal dimensions—the end product of the recording process—but in other cases they comment on that process itself. Here the event’s setting is expanded to include not just a 78 r.p.m. sound disc but recording sessions or studios as well. Sometimes performers simply divulge their session’s physical location. Recorded in New York City on April 13, 1925, Dave Macon’s “All-Go-Hungry Hash House” (Vocalion 15076) begins with the Tennessean declaring, “Hello, folks, I’m in New York and from the country, but you can’t tell me roasting ears ain’t corn.” Fifty-six seconds into “Governor Al Smith” (Brunswick 263)— recorded in Chicago on July 26, 1928—Uncle Dave suddenly stops and exclaims “Hot dog! In Chicago just from Tennessee and here’s what the people say,” breaking back into song. Others could not resist teasing listeners, employing the phonograph’s sight-unseen quality as a kind of cloaking device. On “Knoxville Blues” (Vocalion 15326), Sam McGee from Tennessee greets listeners “Hello, folks. Talk about hot air and wind, I’m gonna give you some for real now. I’m right in the Windsor Hotel, Knoxville, Tennessee. Let’s go.” Actually the session (April 17, 1926) took place not in Knoxville—a major early country music and sometime recording center—but in New York City. (One might gather as much from McGee’s mid-performance digression on riding the subway: “Well people, I took a ride on the underground car yesterday. . . . ”)6 Lead Belly was more forthright when he visited Gotham to cut “Pig Meat Papa” (ARC 6-04-55), clueing listeners, “in New York City, what I’m talking about!” (the session took place there on March 25, 1935). Another Southerner making that trip was West Virginia’s Frank Hutchison, who produced eight sides in OKeh’s Union Square Hotel studio on July 9, 1929. Midway through “K.C. Blues” (OKeh 45452)—actually an instrumental version of “John Henry,” played in the traditional slide or “knife style”—Hutchison pauses to declare “All right, boys, this is Frank Hutchison, sitting back in the Union Square Hotel and just a-getting right on good red liquor. All right, Frank, step on it.” Some records comment still more particularly on the studio setting or a session’s immediate circumstances. Charlie Poole’s “Honeysuckle” (Columbia 15615) was also recorded in a New York City highrise (January 23, 1930). The side begins with one of the North Carolina Ramblers’ trademark vignettes, a sort of

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phonograph-specific counterpart to their depiction of domestic music-making on “Shootin’ Creek.” As the record rolls Roy Harvey declares, “Well boys, I’d like to have a tune around here but I just come up on that elevator and whoo-ee I hate to ride them things. Well there’s old Slim.” “Hi, Roy,” replies fiddler Odell Smith. “Hello, Slim,” Harvey responds, “how about having a tune around here?” “Suits me.” “Well put down that yo-yo and grab up that fiddle and let’s go. What’ll we play?” “Why don’t we play, uh, ‘Honeysuckle’?” “Let’s play ‘Honeysuckle!’ ” “ ‘Honeysuckle.’ ” “That’s all right,” Harvey agrees, “let’s go.” At his landmark session in New Orleans on August 10, 1935, barrelhouse piano great Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery was joined by several of the tradition’s other luminaries, including Jesse “Monkey Joe” Coleman. On Montgomery’s “Pleading Blues” (Bluebird B6140) Coleman, resting in the wings after taking his own turn at the piano, assays his surroundings, at one point interjecting in the background, “play that piano, Mr. Brother, play it a long time. Look at old Walter Vinson over there with that great big old steel guitar! Bear down on it hard and heavy, Walter. Done give old Monkey Joe the blues. Look at old Harry standing back there [lazing]. He’s coming up next!” The last mentioned is Mississippi pianist Harry Chatmon (Carter), who did in fact record next. Chatmon’s associate, guitarist Walter Vinson (a.k.a. Walter Jacobs, Vincent or Vincson), was also there, accompanying Montgomery and Coleman “with that great big old steel guitar” (like many period bluesmen, Vinson did indeed play a metal-bodied resonator guitar). The mention of “the man that’s a-catching the record” on the Seventh Day Adventist Choir’s “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” also belongs with these examples. Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan seems to have been particularly taken with the recording process. Born at Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1908, he was recommended by Bill Broonzy to A&R man Lester Melrose, who personally traveled to Mississippi to bring McClennan back to Chicago.7 On November 22, 1939, McClennan entered RCA’s Studio A and cut the first eight of the forty-one sides he would record for Bluebird. The opening title was “You Can Mistreat Me Here” (Bluebird B8347). Obviously sensing the moment as a watershed in his musical career, McClennan paused in the third stanza to remind himself, “Take your time and play it right for you’re in Chicago.” (References to Chicago pervade the day’s selections, recurring on “Cotton Patch Blues” and “Baby, Don’t You Want to Go”—both issued on Bluebird B8408—and “Baby, Please Don’t Tell On Me,” Bluebird B8444.) Midway through the session, he paused again to reflect on its progress, interjecting after the first line of “Brown Skin Girl,” “Take your time and make this one right, ’cause it’s the best one you got” (Bluebird

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B8444). (Later, on “Baby, Don’t You Want To Go,” McClennan again exhorted himself to “Take your time now and make this one right.” He provided a similar introduction for 1941’s “Deep Blue Sea Blues,” Bluebird B9005: “I wants to make this one right now. This is the best one I got.”) With seven titles already in the can, McClennan finished his first record date with “Baby, Please Don’t Tell On Me” (Bluebird B8444), prefaced by his observation “Now get all this here, it’s the last one you got now. When you play these blues, you ain’t got to play no more, now, just get on like you like it. These your own blues, you making now. Yeah. You know this what your wife like, yes, yes, yes.” Throughout the performance, he reminded himself “You don’t need to hurry now, just take your time and play this one right ’cause you ain’t got to play none other after this.” McClennan may have directed Melrose to his friend and musical associate, Robert Petway, who also recorded in Chicago for Bluebird. The two were certainly in the studio together in February 20, 1942—the final session for both, as it turned out. (McClennan reportedly died a homeless alcoholic in Chicago in the late 1950s or early 1960s; Petway apparently returned to Mississippi and drifted into obscurity.) On Petway’s “Boogie Woogie Woman” (Bluebird B8987), the two exchange verses and banter. More interesting is “In the Evening” (Bluebird B9008), where Petway slips an aside to McClennan into his first verse: “We gonna sure, Tom, take our time. You know we gonna do it, ain’t we partner?” The second stanza refers directly to the session’s circumstances: This man forgot me last night, picked me up this morning so soon, Spoken: I’m talking at the man [McClennan? Melrose?] looking good at me now. He forgot me last night, he picked me up this morning so soon, Well he told me, “Look now, man, somebody sure gonna have your room.” This kind of inside joke actually became something of a studio convention. Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman), another Bluebird artist and Melrose protégé, slipped allusions both to Melrose and the studio setting into “Old Taylor” (Bluebird B8903, 1940). The song’s title refers to a popular brand of whiskey (“I love to sing that good Old Taylor blues, / When we want a drink, I swear we just can’t lose”). Its second verse proclaims: Now you see Mr. Melrose standing in the floor, Aw see that man that’s standing in the floor, You going to give us a little drink, now just before he goes.

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It was common practice for A&R men like Melrose to ply artists with alcohol before or during a session. Presumably his charges were drinking Old Taylor on this occasion (Chicago, April 1, 1941). While some of these references must have been opaque to listeners, others were clearly intended to bring them in on the joke. Lucille Bogan’s magnificently obscene “Shave ’Em Dry” (1935) features among its verses the declaration, Now if fucking was a thing that would take me to heaven, I’d be fucking in the studio till the clock strikes eleven. Ahh, daddy, daddy, shave ’em dry. I would fuck you, baby, honey, I’d make you cry.8 Of course, all of this meant getting records into listeners’ hands; as personal interactions, records also embodied commercial transactions. Uncle Dave Macon obviously knew that most stores allowed customers to listen to records before buying: he begins “The Gal That Got Stuck on Everything She Said” (Brunswick 266, 1928) declaring “Now folks, buy this record: it’s worth the money. And besides you’ll please the young lady or the gentleman who is selling it. Ha ha, I tell you, I’m right, now I’m gonna give you a good one!”

Record Participants Even on record, Macon remained on intimate terms with his listeners. Midway through “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 4 (Visit at the Old Maid’s),” he pauses and declares, “Now before I go any further, I want to give you young men, if there’s any listening to this record, a description for kissing your girls. Now you approach her face-to-face. Then, her lovely cheeks in the palm of your hands embrace. Then lip-to-lip and gum-to-gum—oh Lord! Yum, yum, yum!” Uncle Dave was an incorrigible cut-up, true, but his records have personalities all their own. But then, every old-time record had a personality all its own. Obviously all records implicitly acknowledge that listeners are, in reality, record listeners, and performers are recording artists. This is so even when singers consciously liken a record, say, to an Alabama square dance or Delta juke joint. Explicitly instructing listeners to flip a 78 and play the other side dispenses completely with any such illusion. So does slipping in a description of its studio setting. Yet even these gambits refuse to reduce participants to remote producers and passive consumers; rather, even as wholly self-contained events,

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old-time records reaffirm a close personal identification between artists and listeners. On some sides that identification references their routine cooperation in oral traditions. Here it assumes their regular co-participation in records that themselves derive from this public domain, and that are now themselves an integral part of that tradition’s day-to-day operations, even at the community level. Not that these exchanges acquire nothing of the medium’s unique character. And the door swings both ways: as records come more and more to stand on their own, personal relations increasingly depend on records. Inevitably, Uncle Dave provides the perfect example. Greeting listeners with his trademark “Hot dog!” he informs them that “Arcade Blues” (Vocalion 15440, 1926) is “sung especially for Mr. Charlie Keyes and Mr. Hyde, in the arcade who will play your records on both sides.” But Uncle Dave was not alone (Uncle Dave never seemed to be alone). Tommy McClennan was obviously very proud of his records. He even begins “Whiskey Head Man” (Bluebird B8760, 1940) by referring back to his first big hit, “Whiskey Head Woman” (Bluebird B8373, 1939). “This is Tom McClennan,” he informs listeners, “the one that put out ‘The Whiskey Headed Woman Blues.’ Instead of putting out ‘The Whiskey Headed Woman Blues,’ I’m gonna put out ‘He’s a Whiskey Headed Man,’ just like myself and all the rest of you whiskey headed men.” Still, even as they demarcate his life on records, McClennan’s comments also underscore his real-life ties to his listeners: dedicated to the “rest of the whiskey headed men” in his audience, “Whiskey Head Man” celebrates the dissolute blues lifestyle and the rowdy venues that proved Tommy’s downfall. Now every time I see this man he at some whiskey joint, Slipping ’round that back door begging for one more half a pint He’s a whiskey-headed man and he stays drunk all the time Just as sure if he don’t stop drinking I believe he going to lose his mind. The many recorded tributes to recently deceased recording artists epitomized this new parallel reality. In some cases, the eulogists (and no doubt many listeners) personally knew the subjects; in others, they were acquainted only through records. Either way, singers assumed their own listeners know those records as well. I have found no direct evidence the much-admired singer/guitarist Lizzie “Memphis Minnie” Douglas (1897–1973) ever met her musical forebear, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939), the “Mother of the Blues.” Given Douglas’s wide contacts it would not be surprising if they had met, but her “Ma Rainey”

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(OKeh 05811, 1940) makes mention only of Rainey’s renown as a professional entertainer and recording artist. Then again, even if Minnie knew Ma from records alone, “Ma Rainey” expresses a filial affection befitting Ma’s nickname. Recorded six months almost to the day (June 27, 1940) after Rainey’s death (December 22, 1939), the side begins with Minnie “thinking about Ma Rainey, wondering where could Ma Rainey be / I been looking for her, even been to old Tennessee.” Subsequent verses accurately recount Rainey’s life and career: “She was born in Georgia, traveled all over this world / And she’s the best blues singer, peoples, I ever heard.” The third stanza refers to Rainey’s first record, “Bo-Weavil Blues” (Paramount 12080, 1923), the hit parlaying her fame as a traveling tent-show attraction into a successful recording career: “When she [Rainey] made ‘Bo-Weavil Blues,’ I was living way down the line,” sings Minnie, “every time I hear that record, I just couldn’t keep from crying.” Minnie’s own record ends with its author claiming direct descent from the Mother of the Blues: “People, it sure look lonesome since Ma Rainey been gone / But she left little Minnie to carry the good works on.” Brownie McGhee’s “Death of Blind Boy Fuller” (OKeh 06265, 1941) lays claim to another departed giant of recorded blues, Piedmont singer/guitarist Fulton “Blind Boy Fuller” Allen (1908–1941). “Well he [Fuller] called me to his bedside one morning, and the clock was striking four,” McGhee sings, “ ‘Brownie, take my guitar and carry my business on, I won’t stay here no more.’ ” Despite their stylistic affinities and mutual acquaintances, the personal connection between Fuller and McGhee was tenuous. Rather, their relation was consciously crafted on record by Kinston, North Carolina, shopkeeper and A&R man J. B. Long, who represented both singers. Becoming McGhee’s manager around the time of Fuller’s death, Long determined thus to replace his best-selling artist, underscoring McGhee’s musical resemblance to Fuller with song selections and instrumentation (guitar, washboard, harmonica) recalling Fuller’s enormously popular records. Long saw to it that McGhee’s very first release (OKeh 05785, 1941) featured a song by McGhee on one side (“Picking My Tomatoes”) and a previously unreleased title by Fuller (“Night Rambling Woman”) on the other. He even credited most of McGhee’s early releases—including “Death of Blind Boy Fuller”—to Blind Boy Fuller No. 2. One exception was “I Want to See Jesus”/“Done What My Lord Said” (OKeh 06399, 1941), where Long billed McGhee as “Brother George,” a pseudonym previously used for Fuller’s sacred releases. Although McGhee was reportedly less than pleased with these machinations, they could only have confirmed listeners’ sense that recording artists constituted a community akin to their own, a musical family in which the dying

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Blind Boy had in fact asked Brownie to take his guitar and carry his business on.9 McGhee’s personal commitment to Fuller’s memory ostensibly knew no bounds: “all of you women of Blind Boy’s,” he volunteers in the final verse, “I’ll do my best, I’ll do my best, carry Blind Boy Fuller’s business on.” As the side ends he hastily imparts, “Goodbye, Blind Boy.” Amos “Bumble Bee Slim” Easton and “Little Bill” Gaither similarly eulogized their idol and mentor, the Tennessee-born, Indianapolis-based singer and pianist Leroy Carr (1905–1935), one of the best-selling blues artists of the 1920s and ’30s. Carr’s sudden death at the height of that success (nephritis from acute alcoholism) badly shook friends and admirers like Easton, whose “The Death of Leroy Carr (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr)” (Decca 7098, 1935) gives an hour-by-hour account of the artist’s final two days. “Now people, I’m going to tell you, as near as I can,” he begins, “about the death of Leroy Carr, well he was my closest friend.” Later the same month (July 1935), Easton recorded the two-sided “My Old Pal Blues”/“Last Respects” (Decca 7127), both also “Dedicated to the Mem­ ory of Leroy Carr.” Recounting Carr’s funeral, “My Old Pal” ends with Easton lamenting “he’s done singing and playing, you’ll never hear his voice no more / He was a real good pal, and I miss him everywhere I go.” The sentiment seems strangely out of synch with the flip side’s first verse: “Just remember him [Carr], people, he’s now going to come no more / You can hear him singing, most any place you go.” Moreover, Easton assures listeners, “he’s been singing and playing, ever since nineteen and twenty-eight / He was always on time, and he was never late.” The year 1928 marks the start not of Carr’s music-making but of his record-making. The following verse is even more explicit about the source of his immortality—“Just keep his records, to remember him by / When you think of him, just hang your head and cry”—while the next stanza names two of Carr’s best-known titles, “How Long—How Long Blues” (Vocalion 1191, 1928, his first release and biggest hit) and “Mean Mistreater Mama” (Vocalion 02657, 1934): “Remember his ‘How Long Blues,’ and his ‘Mean Mistreater’ too / Play them over and over again, and he will always be with you.” Cut five years later, Bill Gaither’s “Life of Leroy Carr” (OKeh 05770, 1940) proceeds to Carr only after citing Easton’s earlier tributes. “Bumble Bee Slim has told you,” Gaither begins, “about the death of his closest friend / But I’m going to tell you, from the beginning to the end.” He does just that, recounting Carr’s life, with special reference to the musical genre where he would one day make his mark, finally arriving at the records constituting his lasting legacy. Of

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these he also mentions “How Long,” as well as “Prison Bound Blues” (Vocalion 1241, 1928). Leroy was born in Nashville, down in dear old Tennessee, Leroy was born in Nashville, down in dear old Tennessee, In the Smoky Mountains, right close by the Santa Fe. Leroy came into the world, in nineteen hundred and five, Leroy came into the world, in nineteen hundred and five, He was only seven years old, when the blues arrived.10 In nineteen twenty-eight, he made the “How Long” and “Prison Bound,” In nineteen twenty-eight, he made the “How Long” and “Prison Bound,” He had a lots of luck and success, and the cash came rolling ’round. So many women hung around, to hear the poor boy sing, So many women hung around, to hear the poor boy sing, He would spend his money, because money did not mean a thing. That Easton and Gaither both modeled their styles directly on Carr and his records would hardly be lost on devoted blues listeners. (Many would also appreciate a subtler touch in Gaither’s tribute, where he underscores his references to Carr’s records by quoting a signature guitar figure from Carr’s constant accompanist, Francis “Scrapper” Blackwell.) But even the uninitiated might make the connection: in the same vein as Brownie McGhee’s “Blind Boy No. 2” billing, Easton was identified on some copies of “The Death of Leroy Carr” as “Leroy Carr’s Buddy.” Gaither—who shared Carr’s Indianapolis hometown— was identified on all of his records simply as “Leroy’s Buddy.” The first rural bluesman to record with any great success, Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897–1929) was in the prewar pantheon every bit the equal of Rainey, Fuller, or Carr; he also received one of the most interesting of all recorded tributes. Issued soon after his death, this item (Paramount 12945, 1930) featured on one side a musical homage—“Wasn’t It Sad About Lemon” by the Louisville, Kentucky, duo of Walter and Byrd (“Washboard Walter” Taylor and John Byrd)—on the other, a sermon by Rev. Emmett Dickinson. Dickinson’s “Death of Blind Lemon” deserves quotation in full. “You’ll find my text in 1 Corinthians,” Dickinson solemnly intones.

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Fifteenth Chapter, Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Verses, reads as follows: “It was born a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. And it is so written that ‘The first man, Adam, was made a living soul’; and the last, Adam, was made a quickening spirit.”11 My friends, Blind Lemon Jefferson is dead, and the world today is in mourning over this loss. Though we feel that our loss is heaven’s gain, big men, educated men, and great men, when they pass on to their eternal home in the sky command our reverence. But when a man that we truly love for the kindness and inspiration they have given us in our innermost hearts pass on to their rewards, we feel that there is a vacancy in our hearts that will never be replaced. Let us pause a moment and look at the life of our beloved Lemon Jefferson, who—, who was born blind. It is in many respects like that of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like him until the age of thirty, he was unknown. And also like him, in a short space of a little over three years, his name and work were known in every home. Again I refer to our text: I believe that the Lord in Blind Lemon Jefferson had sown a natural body, and will raise it a spiritual body. When I was informed of Lemon’s death, I thought of our Lord Jesus Christ, as he passed down the Jericho Road and saw a man who was born blind. And his disciple said, “Master, who did sin? Did this man or his parents? See, he is a man born blind.” And Christ answered, “Neither did this man or his parents sin, but that I may be manifested in him.” My—, uh, Lemon Jefferson was born blind and was cut off from all the good things of life that you and I enjoy; he truly had a cross to bear. How many of us today are crying to the Lord about our crosses we are to bear? “Oh Lord, this is too hard for me. Oh Lord, I have a pain here or an ache there. And oh Lord, my wife is miserable to me.” Did Lemon cry that he was being abused? He did not. As Lemon died with the Lord, so did he live.

The record’s reverse, Walter and Byrd’s “Wasn’t It Sad About Lemon,” pales a bit beside Dickinson’s striking analogy. (Like Christ, Jefferson was in fact around thirty when chroniclers began recording his inspired ministrations for posterity; at the time of his death three or four years later those records may not have been quite as common in Southern homes as the Bible, but they were certainly among the most widely disseminated of all old-time oeuvres.) Much of “Wasn’t It Sad” deals matter-of-factly with the story that Jefferson froze to death in a Chicago blizzard. (“Blind Lemon was born in Texas, a state we all know well,” the opening stanza relates, “was in the streets of Chicago, was where poor Lemon fell.”) Walter and Byrd do refer to Jefferson’s music-making,

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of course, at one point averring, “The most of the songs that Lemon sung, they were heartbreakers / Now Lemon done did his duty, and gone on to his maker.” They also make more particular references to his records, possibly the sole source of their acquaintance. The second verse—“Lemon had a mule born in Texas, schooled in Tennessee, / Never no more will Lemon, plough the fool out of me”—alludes to one of Lemon’s earliest recorded titles, “Got the Blues” (Paramount 12354, 1926), with its famous opening stanza “Well the blues come to Texas loping like a mule / You take a high brown woman, man, she’s hard to fool,” closely followed by the statement “I was raised in Texas, schooled in Tennessee.” More direct is Walter and Byrd’s recommendation: “a song you ought to hear Lemon sing, before he passed away / Was a song he was fixing to make, ‘See Is My Grave Kept Clean.’ ” While thematically apt, the flourish does not quite square with the facts. At the time of his death, Jefferson had twice made “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” once in October 1927 (Paramount 12585), then again the following year (Paramount 12608, 1928). On “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” (Paramount 13125, 1932), King Solomon Hill mourns the loss of his friend and sometime traveling companion to “that cruel man that you call Death.” (In keeping with old-time tradition, Hill was on another release—“Whoopee Blues”/“Down On My Bended Knee,” Paramount 13116, 1932—billed as “Blind Lemon’s Buddy.”) On the same subject, Lead Belly’s spoken preface to “My Friend Blind Lemon” (ARC unissued, 1935) also testifies to a very real friendship: “Here’s a song I composed about my friend Blind Lemon. We run together for so many years in Dallas.” The piece that follows, though, is a generic blues of no particular relevance to Jefferson. Bessie Smith was mourned by Booker T. Washington on “Death of Bessie Smith” (Bluebird B8352, 1939). Other blues tributes to departed recording artists included Shorty Bob Parker’s “Death of Slim Green” (Decca 7470, 1938) and Willie (Long Time) Smith’s “My Buddy Doctor Clayton” (Columbia 37990, 1947). Immediately after his death, Charlie Poole was also eulogized in several songs, though none were released at the time. West Virginia singer Bernice Coleman tried to record one such composition, “Charlie Poole,” for Columbia in October 1931, but it was rejected by the label. Raymond Chaney, a banjo player from Poole’s hometown of Spray, North Carolina, wrote another tribute titled “Memories of Charlie Poole.” It was eventually recorded in 1937 for ARC by Claude Casey, but also went unreleased. The best known of the Poole tributes was “The Life and Death of Charlie Poole” by Poole’s friend and fellow recording artist Walter “Kid” Smith. Composed just after Poole’s passing, the

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song was to have been first performed for his widow, but the performance was interrupted midway when both the audience and musicians broke down. Smith later published and circulated the piece as a broadside, which also featured an advertisement for Smith’s Victor releases. His fifth verse plugged Charlie’s records as well: “You’ve often heard his records, played on your phonograph, / Some of them would make you cry, and some would make you laugh.” Smith’s song was soon taken up by artists as well known as the Carter Family. It also passed into oral tradition, and has been collected by folklorists. But it did not appear on a commercial release until the early 1970s, when it was recorded for the tiny Mart label by Ted Prillaman and the Virginia Ramblers.12 However, no pre–World War II recording artist inspired as many recorded eulogies as Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933), the much-beloved “Father of Country Music” (a.k.a. the “Singing Brakeman” or “Blue Yodeler”). When Rodgers died in May 1933 following a protracted battle with tuberculosis, the outpouring of grief from record buyers was matched by commemorative record releases from his peers in the craft. Like the foregoing items, these tended to mix fairly generic if genuinely heartfelt expressions of loss with biographical sketches of varying detail or accuracy, including more than a few pointed references to Rodgers’s standing as one of the first giants of the American recording industry. The earliest of these recorded tributes was a two-parter from Gene Autry, who within a month of Rodgers’s death cut “The Life of Jimmie Rodgers”/“The Death of Jimmie Rodgers” (Vocalion 5504, 1933). It was fitting that Autry (1907–1998) should be at the forefront. Although he is today remembered as one of Hollywood’s greatest singing cowboys, “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy” began his career as an unabashed Rodgers imitator, whether simply covering his idol’s catalogue or performing new material in Rodgers’s style.13 Autry’s early memorial was soon merely one among many. That October, Texan W. Lee O’Daniel and the Lightcrust Doughboys produced “Memories of Jimmy [sic] Rodgers” (Vocalion 02605, 1933). By November Autry himself was back in the studio to record another tribute, “Good Luck Old Pal (Till We Meet Bye and Bye)” (Conqueror 8246, 1933). Bradley Kincaid (1895–1989) was another artist moved to pay homage, his “Jimmie Rodgers’ Life” and “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers” (Bluebird B-5377, 1934) being different songs from the similar Autry titles. According to Kincaid, they were created on the spur of the moment at a February 1934 session. As he recalled, “ ‘The Death of Jimmie Rodgers’ and also ‘The Life of Jimmie Rodgers’ [‘Jimmie Rodgers’ Life’] were two songs I wrote the tunes for. Bob Miller was a publisher in New York, and

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he came over to Victor Studios one day when I was doing recordings, and he had these words—Jimmie had just died—and he had no tunes. So, I sat down and fooled with it for a little while, and pretty soon I made up a tune, and we recorded it, and the same way with [‘Jimmie Rodgers’ Life’].”14 Actually, “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers” simply adapts the tune of “The Red River Valley” to Miller’s lyrics. These address Rodgers in heaven, sorrowing at his loss but being consoled that “on records we’ll hear you forever, / You sing songs that we cherish so.” Memphis-born Bob Miller was more than a mere publisher, of course, ranking as one of country music’s first superstar songwriters: besides his work as an A&R director, music publisher, and recording artist in his own right, he amassed more than seven thousand composer credits, among them standards like “ ’Leven Cent Cotton, Forty Cent Meat,” “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” and “Twenty-One Years” (Laws E 16). He had a special knack for precipitous topical compositions: his Rodgers titles included yet another item that Kincaid cut at this same session, “Mrs. Rodgers’ Lament” (Bluebird B-5423, 1934). Listener response to the releases was presumably favorable, as Kincaid was back in the studio in early May, this time to cover Autry’s first coupling (Bradley Kincaid, “The Life of Jimmie Rodgers”/“The Death of Jimmie Rodgers,” Bluebird B-5486, 1934). Texan Ernest Tubb’s later career as an exponent of the postwar honkytonk sound has also sometimes obscured his early fascination with Rodgers’s style. Tubb’s first recording session was even arranged by Rodgers’s widow as a memorial to her late husband, while the first titles Tubb recorded that day—“The Last Thoughts of Jimmie Rodgers”/“The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers” (Bluebird B-6693, 1936)—were composed by Mrs. Rodgers’s sister, Elsie McWilliams, author of many of Rodgers’s own most popular titles. At the same date, Tubb (1914–1984) accompanied Mrs. Rodgers on her personal lament, “We Miss Him When the Evening Shadows Fall” (Bluebird B-6698, 1936). The following year, Mrs. Rodgers and Elsie McWilliams produced a second recorded elegy for Jimmie, “My Rainbow Trail Keeps Winding On” (Bluebird B-7339, 1937). Without doubt, though, the best-received of the Rodgers tribute records— at least judging from the sheer number of covers—was Dwight Butcher’s “When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye” (Crown 3516, 1933). This is also the item paying greatest attention to Rodgers the recording artist, and to his recorded repertoire.

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There’s an old guitar that’s lonely, Since the master’s gone away, But he’s singing to the angels, Way up in heaven today. He left a blues song for the brakeman, And to the kiddies a lullaby. To all sweethearts he left a love song, When Jimmie Rodgers said goodbye. He left a yodel for the cowboy, They sing it now with tear-dimmed eyes, And he left every prairie lonely, When Jimmie Rodgers said goodbye. Here the song lapses into a more conventional elegy, but even this brief passage evokes a broad swath of the Rodgers catalog, beginning with “The Brakeman’s Blues” (Victor 21291, 1928). The “lullaby” reference brings immediately to mind the Singing Brakeman’s recorded debut, “Sleep Baby Sleep” (Victor 20864, 1927). But Rodgers was curiously fond of the lullaby genre, later recording “Lullaby Yodel” (Victor 21636, 1928); “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep” (Victor 23721, 1932); and “Prairie Lullaby” (Victor 23781, 1933). Similarly, sweethearts might favor any of Rodgers’s many love songs, though Butcher may have been thinking of the flip side of “Sleep Baby Sleep,” “The Soldier’s Sweetheart.” Wholly unmistakable, though, is the passage’s parting echo of Rodgers’s “Yodeling Cowboy” (Victor 22271, 1929). Tennessean Dwight Butcher was another young performer groomed as a successor to Rodgers, in this case by none other than Ralph Peer, the Victor A&R representative who launched and directed Rodgers’s own recording career. (Butcher shared the credit for “When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye” with Lou Herscher, a Tin Pan Alley veteran who like Butcher had composed for Rodgers himself.) Recorded within a month of Rodgers’s death, Butcher’s offering inspired immediate covers from Gene Autry (Conqueror 8246, 1933, backed by Autry’s own “Good Luck Old Pal”); Kenneth Houchins (Champion, 16793, 1934, also coupled with Autry’s “Good Luck Old Pal”); and the father-and-son team of Asher and Little Jimmie Sizemore, who recast it as “Little Jimmie’s Goodbye to Jimmie Rodgers” (Bluebird B-5445, 1934).

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The subsequent history of “When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye” testifies both to Rodgers’s lasting impact and to the tenacity of the tribute-record concept, which flourishes to the present. (One recent example: in 1997, as the first release on his Egyptian label, Bob Dylan compiled The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute, Egyptian/Columbia CD CK 67676, featuring contemporary reinterpretations of Rodgers’s songs by Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Willie Nelson, and others.)15 Early in 1953 there appeared two other notable remakes of Butcher’s title, released in time for the twentieth anniversary of Rodgers’s death. On February 24, Ernest Tubb cut a version, issued with a new rendition of “The Last Thoughts of Jimmie Rodgers” (Decca 28696). Eleven days earlier Jimmie Rodgers devotee (and Ernest Tubb protégé) Hank Snow (1914–1999), another doyen of postwar country music, had also redone “When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye.” Snow’s release (Victor 5221) additionally brought before the public his living tribute to the “Father of Country Music”: it was recorded as a duet with his own son, Jimmie Rodgers Snow. Hank Snow knew Jimmie Rodgers through records alone. Yet within the context of Snow’s own life and career, it is difficult to interpret his naming of his own son for the “Father of Country Music” as expressing anything other than a true sense of kinship. The childhood recollections of African American singer/guitarist John Jackson (1924-2002) similarly testify to the intense identification Rodgers’s records inspired. As Jackson told Nick Spitzer, “We [his family] didn’t have much money, but we had nearly all of Jimmie Rodgers’s records. When I heard Jimmie Rodgers had died so young, I cried all night. And the next morning when I saw his picture in the papers, I realized for the first time that he was a white man.”16 Jackson had naturally assumed the man he knew from the records was just like himself and his own family.

The Recorded Tradition Even when conceived as events unto themselves—as distinct musical experiences completely independent of live performance—old-time records remained on a personal footing, suggesting a circle of near-enough family and friends. Notice, for example, how they perpetuated the custom of fictive kinship—of respectfully or affectionately addressing all older adults of an otherwise unspecified relation as uncle and aunt, as in Uncle Dave Macon or Uncle Jimmy Thompson. (Aunt Idy Harper was another popular old-time artist, as

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was her husband Uncle Juney.) Within the old-time community, epithets like the Father of Country Music or the Mother of the Blues were not casual metaphors any more than their bearers were inaccessible demigods. For persons like Memphis Minnie, to know Ma Rainey’s records was to know Ma Rainey personally, and on these most intimate of terms. For persons like Hank Snow, naming a son for Jimmie Rodgers seemed as natural as naming a son for his grandfather, one’s own father.17 Moreover, just as recording artists sometimes appealed to oral tradition, they elsewhere referred to the recorded tradition—the records themselves, their own contacts and life histories. But this parallel stream involved more than the mere circumstantial facts of repeated transmission or multiple existence: it also expressed the deeper bonds typifying folksongs. Tommy McClennan’s “Whiskey Head Man” is once more instructive: “This is Tom McClennan, the one that put out ‘The Whiskey Headed Woman Blues.’ Instead of putting out ‘The Whiskey Headed Woman Blues,’ I’m gonna put out ‘He’s a Whiskey Headed Man,’ just like myself and all the rest of you whiskey headed men.” No less than for folksongs, to participate in this chain meant identifying with other tradition bearers, their backgrounds and outlooks. Recorded memorials eulogize not just departed recording artists but their records as well. Other times, artists cite their own earlier work. Lightnin’ Hopkins introduces “Big Mama Jump” (Gold Star 3131, 1947) by exclaiming, “This ain’t ‘The Little Mama Boogie’ but it’s the same as. I’m gonna get it for you now, Jack. . . . ” He refers to his earlier duet with pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith, “Little Mama Boogie” (Aladdin 166, 1946). Clayton McMichen begins the Skillet Lickers’ “Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia” (Columbia 15516-D, 1929) by exhorting guitarist Riley Puckett “Well Riley, let’s play that old tune we played a long time ago on that ‘Fiddler Convention’ record, you know, that ‘Hell Broke Loose in Georgia.’ Let’s go to town.” He opens “Liberty” (Columbia 15334-D, 1928) by declaring “Well folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers. Yes, that’s Riley over here by me with the big guitar. Yes, that’s Gid with that wild fiddle. Here’s Fate over here with that mean banjo. So we’re gonna play you the tune that you [the listeners] been calling for, ‘Liberty’ off of the ‘Corn Licker Still,’ and Lord help us to get right.” McMichen refers, respectively, to “A Fiddler’s Convention in Georgia—Part 2” (Columbia 15140-D, 1927) and “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia—Part 4” (Columbia 15258-D, 1928), two of the group’s earlier successes. Blind Lemon Jefferson begins “That Black Snake Moan No. 2” (Paramount 12756, 1929) by declaring “Well folks, Lemon is yet looking for his black snake mama,” a nod to a couple of his earlier releases: “That Black Snake Moan”

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(OKeh 8455, 1927) and “Black Snake Dream Blues” (Paramount 12510, 1927). Actually, Jefferson’s “Black Snake” series was itself partly inspired by an earlier record, Victoria Spivey’s “Black Snake Blues” (OKeh 8338, 1926). Spivey also produced several sequels: “Garter Snake Blues” (OKeh 8517, 1927), “New Blacksnake Blues—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 8626, 1928), “Moaning the Blues” (Victor V38546, 1929), “Black Snake Swing” (Decca 7023, 1936). Lest listeners miss the connection, she begins “Moaning the Blues” by singing, “Now you talk about the ‘Black Snake Blues,’ well you haven’t heard no moaning yet.” “Black Snake Swing” opens with an unidentified member of Spivey’s “Hallelujah Boys” cautioning “Mama, here is that snake again!” Replies Spivey, “Man, take him on away!” “Yes, ma’am, here it is.” (On the concluding break, Spivey again interjects, “Yeah, now get that black snake on out of here,” then, just as the side ends, “Take him when you go!”) The “Black Snake” sides illustrate another facet of the recorded tradition: the recorded sequel or answer record. While contemporary audiences take such media trends for granted, the concept of a record inspired by another record was once as novel as records themselves. Southerners took to the practice immediately. Bob Miller’s “Twenty-One Years” made sufficient inroads in oral tradition to qualify for G. Malcolm Laws’s canon of Native American Balladry. More impressive by far was its lifespan on records, where this title and its various sequels, answers, and parodies—“Twenty-One Years—Part 2,” “The Answer to Twenty-One Years,” “New Answer to Twenty-One Years,” “Woman’s Answer to Twenty-One Years,” “New Twenty-One Years,” and so forth —eventually appeared on over a hundred old-time releases.18 This was no isolated case. Leroy Carr returned repeatedly to his first and biggest hit, “How Long—How Long Blues.”19 With its incessant refrain, “I’m gonna move to Kansas City / I’m gonna move, baby, now honey, where they don’t allow you,” Jim Jackson’s “Kansas City Blues—Parts 1 and 2” (Vocalion 1144, 1927) in short order spawned both “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues— Parts 3 and 4” (Vocalion 1155, 1928) and the same singer’s “I’m Gonna Move To Louisiana—Parts 1 and 2” (Victor 21671, 1928). It also prompted a sly recorded cross-reference from Ma Rainey. Her “Leaving This Morning” (Paramount 12902, 1928) borrows Jackson’s verse pattern and melody, with the refrain, “I’m leaving this morning / I’m going to Kansas City, to bring Jim Jackson home.” On a par with “Twenty-One Years” was Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s “It’s Tight Like That,” by some accounts the all-time best-selling prewar race record. Between late October 1928 and mid-January 1929, the song’s originators— pianist Thomas A. “Georgia Tom” Dorsey and guitarist Hudson “Tampa Red”

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Newspaper ad for “Black Snake Moan No. 2.” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1929, part 1, page 7.

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Woodbridge—figured in at least four different “Tight Like That” recordings for two different labels, besides producing “It’s Tight Like That No. 2” and “It’s Tight Like That No. 3.”20 Inspiring countless recorded covers and imitations, the piece became a veritable national sensation. As the peripatetic bluesman Big Joe Williams recalled, “ ‘Tight Like That’ went just about to the four corners of the United States. Went through both races, white and black. You’d hear little kids mumblin’ it everywhere you went.”21 By December 1928 Georgia Tom and Tampa Red had themselves already produced a similar-sounding piece for yet another label—“Selling That Stuff ” (Paramount 12714)—its authors disguised as the Hokum Boys. But they also frequently reprised the “Tight Like That” theme, which even inspired a flurry of recorded sermons playing on its catch phrase: Rev. Emmett Dickinson’s “Sermon On Tight Like That” (Paramount 12925, 1929), Rev. J. M. Gates’s “These Hard Times Are Tight Like That” (OKeh 8850, 1930), Rev. A. W. Nix’s “It Was Tight Like That” (Vocalion 1505, 1930). These put the fad to God’s work, with no hint of the original’s risqué subtext. Less numerous though still fairly common were recorded samplers. These were typically multipart dramas showcasing several of a label’s artists, usually plugging their latest releases. The basic idea is, of course, identical to the broadside medley. Paramount’s two-part “Hometown Skiffle” (Paramount 12886, 1929) was identified on its label as a “Descriptive Novelty: Featuring Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Will Ezell, Charlie Spand, The Hokum Boys, Papa Charlie Jackson”—all best-selling Paramount artists. In some Paramount catalogs, the “Skiffle” was even credited to “The Paramount All Stars.” Recalling many houseparty dramas, it self-consciously adapts their format to the world of phonograph records—specifically, to the world of Paramount Records, the source not only of the skit’s cast but most of its content. As side one begins, an unidentified pianist (possibly “Hokum Boy” Georgia Tom Dorsey) plays and master of ceremonies Alex Hill greets listeners, “Hello, folks, we’re gathered here to do the ‘Hometown Skiffle.’ Everybody shake that thing!” With that, Hill launches into an abbreviated version of “Shake That Thing,” an earlier release by Paramount artist and “Skiffle” cast member Papa Charlie Jackson. Actually, Hill refashions Jackson’s record as the “Skiffle” theme: “All our home folks have come to town / We’re getting ready to break ’em down, / We gonna shake that thing . . . ” Two verses in, he abruptly exclaims: Stop! Don’t play another note, brother, ain’t that something. All our home folks are here now and we gonna have some fun. Well I’ll be, look who’s

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coming in the door! Old Will Ezell and Papa Charlie Jackson. And here’s Charlie Spand from Detroit. Well what you know about this—here’s Blind Blake, now I know we gonna raise a ruckus! Hey Ezell, come on over here and play one of those fast rags. Everybody dance.

“Hello, folks, the barrelhouse man, he’s still barrelhousing,” acknowledges Louisiana-bred, Chicago-based pianist Will Ezell, obliging Hill with an excerpt from his “Mixed Up Rag” (Paramount 12688, 1928). He also plays to the barrelhouse illusion, interjecting, “Landlady, bring us another jug!” Having put in his plug, Ezell yields the stage to one of Paramount’s most prolific artists, ragtime guitar virtuoso Blind Arthur Blake. “Well here’s Mr. Blake himself,” Blake announces over one of his inimitable rags, “I wanna bust another jug!” As side one winds down, Hill hurriedly inserts, “Don’t go away, folks, there’s more to come,” with Blake agreeing “Don’t leave, nobody, I’m gonna play it again.” The guitar figure opening the second side is, however, wholly distinct from Blake’s sound, instead quoting another inimitable prewar stylist, Blind Lemon Jefferson. “Now folks, you can guess who this is,” Hill jibes, “that’ll get [identify] him.” The skit’s creators seem reasonably confident of this. Although he’s named on the record’s label, Jefferson is never actually mentioned in the skit, nor does he speak. Their confidence was probably well-placed: Jefferson’s fortyodd Paramount releases—almost exactly the same total as Blake’s—made him one of the true giants of country blues.22 Otherwise, the second part of “Skiffle” proceeds much as the first: Hill next gathers the Hokum Boys for one of their “Tight Like That” knockoffs, “Selling That Stuff ” (Paramount 12714, 1928). He then calls on “Mr. Charlie Spand himself, from Detroit” to “play one of those old blues for us.” The pianist complies with a snippet of his “Soon This Morning Blues” (Paramount 12790, 1929). Finally, he brings on Papa Charlie Jackson, “the composer of ‘Shake That Thing’ ” (Paramount 12281, 1925). Jackson manages to shake out only a single verse, however, before being interrupted by an insistent pounding. “Who is that?” demands Hill. “Police officers,” an unidentified voice gruffly replies, “open this door before I kick it down!” At this, the second side fades out with Hill bidding listeners “See you in jail, see you in jail.” Paramount was not the only label to plug itself this way. Similar was OKeh’s multidisc “The Medicine Show—A Revue in Six Acts,” each “act” filling one 78 r.p.m. side. Recorded in Atlanta on September 24 and 25, 1929, it features OKeh artists Fiddlin’ John Carson and Moonshine Kate, Frank Hutchison, Narmour and Smith, Emmett Miller, Bud Blue, and the Black Brothers. Martin Malloy serves as “the Doctor” and master of ceremonies. On one level, the series re-

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creates with remarkable accuracy a traditional medicine show, a venue most of the featured artists knew firsthand. In another sense, however, it is simply the audio version of OKeh’s catalog. In “Act 3,” for example, the Doctor brings to the stage Mississippi fiddler W. T. “Willie” Narmour and his partner, guitarist S. W. “Shell” Smith, telling the crowd, “Now that famous team, Narmour and Smith will play ‘Charleston Number Two,’ their latest and greatest OKeh recording.” On the flip side (“Act 4”), he introduces Frank Hutchison by asking “What are you going to play, Frank?” to which Hutchison replies, ‘Why I guess I’ll play you ‘Johnny and Jane,’ one of my latest recordings.” The references are to W. F. Narmour and S. W. Smith, “Charleston No. 2” (OKeh 45377, 1929), and Frank Hutchison, “Johnny and Jane” (OKeh 45361, 1929). But similar plugs occur throughout the “Revue.” Other samplers included “The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas” and its companion, “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family.” “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree—Parts 1 and 2” features Tampa Red and Georgia Tom and Speckled Red as its guests: they open the “Jamboree” with yet another adaptation of “It’s Tight Like That.” While some old-time releases would impose the real world on records, others take records as their own reality, a self-regulating universe constituting a viable standard of musical communication, even in live settings. That Southerners routinely (re)introduced material from records into the public domain is evidence of this view. Even more revealing is the tendency of performers “to use a record as a ‘frame’ and fill it with new content,” an approach as common in live performances as on answer records.23 Sometimes singers merely re-create or elaborate a record’s musical content. Sometimes, however, they actually frame live performances as if they were records. The much-touted ability of some artists to perform a song “just like the record” (whether their own or another’s) may involve more than simply rehearsing its text and tune. Often, it entails the re-creation of the record experience, the reenactment of a distinct musical event retaining that shape even in live settings. The best example from my own fieldwork may be Houston singer/guitarist Ashton Savoy, an admirer and, later, friend and associate of the city’s greatest bluesman, Sam “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins (1912–1982). Born near Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1928, Savoy grew up in a Creole community dominated by the region’s French traditions; he himself gravitated to the blues, however, inspired partly by local performers (he was most impressed by an Opelousas street singer called “Crippled Bob”) but mainly by records. Besides Hopkins, he most often named Blind Lemon Jefferson, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Muddy Waters, John

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Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed as his key influences. In fact, throughout his own career, Savoy has regarded Hopkins’s 1947 hit “Short Haired Woman” (Gold Star 3131) as his (Savoy’s) theme song. With its unforgettable opening couplet—“I don’t want no woman, if her hair ain’t no longer than mine / Yes, you know she ain’t good for nothing but trouble, that’s keep you buying rats [artificial hair extensions] all the time”—the record sold well throughout the South, prompting at least one recorded answer, Willie B. Huff ’s “Beggar Man Blues” (Rhythm 1770, 1954) (“I don’t want no man,” she begins, “if his money ain’t no longer than mine”).24 Savoy himself was publicly identified with the piece at least by 1958, when he made his own first records in Lake Charles. Among these was “Baby, Baby” (Kry 100, 1958), a verbal duel with Houston-born singer-pianist Katie Webster. In response to Savoy’s sung “Hello, baby, it’s so good to see you now / I been looking for you, baby, but didn’t have no luck somehow,” Webster scornfully exclaims “Yeah, I know how you been looking for me alright. You think I didn’t see you and Penelope sitting down there in the Den. Yeah! Talking ’bout you don’t want no woman if her hair ain’t no longer than yours. Well on her, you sure couldn’t see the hair for the head!” Savoy eventually made his own way to Houston, where “Short Haired Woman” provided his personal introduction to his hero-of-record. As he recalled, I’d be playing around Third Ward, that’s how, how I started learning how, see. That first time I seen Lightnin’ Hopkins, I was playing at Shady DriveIn, right down on Simpson, and Lightnin’ Hopkins came in there one night. I was doing a number by Lightnin’ Hopkins, uh, “Short Hair Woman,” that was one of his top, that was one of his old records then. I think that one of his best records he made then, was back then, “Short Hair Woman.” And he come up there standing right over me, and I was playing and he come up. So he asked me, he said, “Hey, you want me to do something?” I said, “Well, man, I don’t know. Can you play?” I told him—, he said, “Yeah, I do a little playing.” And I just took my guitar and handed it to him. And then, boy, and he went to rattling and—, at the “Short Hair Woman,” and playing it just like it was supposed to go, just like it was the record. So and everybody—, I didn’t know it, they had a few people that known him in there but I didn’t know who it was, you know. And when he got through playing that, now, I heard somebody said, “Lightnin’, why don’t you play another some so-andso.” That’s when I found out who Lightnin’ was, ’cause I didn’t even know who he was. Sure did. And, man, he got on my guitar, I didn’t want for him

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Ashton Savoy, Houston, Texas, 1995. Photo by James Fraher. Courtesy James Fraher/Roger Wood.

to get off then. Shit! Boy, he went to playing and going. And that’s when I knew him then. I mean, I didn’t know who he was. Never seen the man before till that night.25

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s Savoy was still regularly re-creating this and other Hopkins’s records in Houston area clubs—complete with Hopkins’s signature asides: “Come on, Lightnin’,” “Play it, Lightnin’,” and so forth. Savoy is not alone: other community-based bluesmen trace their live performances to popular records through such comments: “Play it, Tampa Red,” “Play it, play it, Muddy Waters,” “This is Mr. Roosevelt Sykes what’s playing.”26 The symmetry is perfect: while some recorded asides dramatize live music, these live

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asides dramatize records—and sometimes at length: in the 1960s David Evans recorded bluesman Roosevelt Holts re-creating “Hometown Skiffle.”27 There is even a long-standing practice among Southern blacks of referring to any song or performance—recorded or not—as a record or a side. So the comment “I’m gonna make a record on that” may express an intention to compose or arrange a new song; to learn or perform an existing piece, maybe from a record, maybe not; or actually to record an item. Or it may suggest all three at once, as these endeavors are closely interrelated, especially at present, when the ultimate goal of the first two activities (to compose and perform) is usually the last (to record). Nonetheless, one still encounters performers who have by their account “made a record on a song” that has never been recorded. As late as the 1980s and ’90s, I constantly encountered this usage—well-documented at earlier times and other places—both among Houston-area bluesmen like Savoy and older singers in rural East Texas.28 Of course, by the 1920s Southerners had already begun to redefine live performances through records. To some, that may still have seemed a topsy-turvy reality. Perhaps—but things could get even weirder.

Chapter Six

I Ought t o Be Rec ord ing Ri gh t Now

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n April 22, 1938, John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes arrived in Decca’s New York City studio, most likely coming by train directly from West Tennessee, where he was born in 1904 near Ripley, just north of Memphis on the Illinois Central railroad line. Estes cut eight titles that day, last among them “Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)” (Decca 7491, 1938). “Special Agent” describes an encounter between an unpaid rail passenger and a railroad bull, one of the irregular police officers employed by the lines to eject tramps from trains. “Now when I left old Ripley, the weather was kind of cool,” Estes begins. Unfortunately, just as he swings aboard “that Night Express,” the singer is surprised by a vigilant bull. “I couldn’t hear that special agent, when he come tipping over the top.” In real life, Estes hoboed frequently (he may not have paid his fare to New York), so his song may be based on an actual incident. He fibs a little, though, ending the piece with an unusual plea: “Special agent, special agent, put me off close to some town, / Now I got to do some recording, and I ought to be recording right now.” Re-creating records in live settings is not quite a contradiction in terms, but it’s pretty close. Denying on a record that you are recording presents an unmistakable paradox. All of the previous examples acknowledge the peculiar qualities of oldtime records as musical events, particularly compared to live performances or oral traditions. But they all also imagine a certain compatibility between phonographs and folksongs, whether by dramatizing live performances or oral traditions; by embracing records as acceptable stand-ins for real folksongs; 125

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or by framing them as self-contained musical events on a par with their live counterparts. Other records take a very different approach, foregrounding the antithetical qualities of phonographs and folksongs through expressions that would make ordinary sense in live settings, but that become strangely ironic or incongruous, even self-contradictory, when uttered on a record—for example, “Now I got to do some recording, and I ought to be recording right now.” Rather than reconciling folksongs and phonographs, then, many old-time records actually celebrate their incompatibility, discovering in that contrast a marvelous fund of perceptual dislocation or semantic disjunction. These items own up to an undeniable fact: despite its eminently human character—its constant reminders of the warmest conceivable personal relations—the old-time record is after all a thing, and a pretty odd thing at that: a shellac disc, holed at the center with a gaudy paper label, produced, purchased, and consumed like any other fashionable commodity. But unlike some such curiosities, the old-time record plunges participants into an existential quandary—especially participants accustomed to thinking of music as a natural outgrowth of their closest personal acquaintances and most familiar routines. Revolving 78 times a minute on a mechanical player, its grooved surfaces whispering to a vibrating stylus, this commodity/oddity reproduces through an inanimate speaker sound waves from a disembodied if recognizably nonmechanical, fully animate player/speaker (the recording artist). In so doing, it embodies a state of being— recording—irreconcilably opposed to the condition—not recording—of a record listener, or a live performer, or an in-transit railroad tramp. It is tempting to view this record-as-paradox idea as most closely related to the notion of records as self-contained events. Obviously, it too is emphatically self-referential, but with a major difference: rather than treating records as organic if distinct components of Southern tradition, this approach goes out of its way to highlight the format’s strangeness. At times, in fact, this frame enlists techniques from all of the other approaches, but always to different effect. Many items upend the direct approach, appealing to listeners not as a sign of the phonograph’s personable qualities—its potential as a folksingerby-proxy—but to remind them of its perplexities. Others suggest the dramatic approach, but with twists whose subtlety belies their fantastic effects: there is a world of difference between pretending on a record to be at a barn dance, and pretending on a record not to be on a record. Thus, while the record-as-paradox idea implicates other approaches to recorded performance, it does so only to undermine them. Some items recall both dramatizations of offstage activities (“Practice Night with the Skillet

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Lickers,” for example) and expositions of recording sessions in progress (for instance, Memphis Slim’s “Old Taylor”). When, however, recording artists pretend they are preparing to record, they contradict the plain truth that they are doing just that. There may be no better example than Clarence “Pine Top” Smith’s “Jump Steady Blues” (take B, Brunswick 80009, 1929; the nearly identical take A was issued on Vocalion 1298). As the record begins, A&R man/session supervisor Mayo Williams queries, “Well hello there, Pine Top, what are you doing sitting around here with your head hung down looking so sad?” “I just thinking about all these piano players going around here making big money playing on these here records,” replies Smith. “Well why don’t you play on some of these records?” suggests Williams. “There’s a good idea, boy,” Pine Top suddenly brightens, “I believe I’ll start rehearsing right now!” Following a furious boogie woogie solo the pianist demands, “How is that?” “Aw boy, that ought to get it,” Williams agrees as the side runs out. There may be no better example, but there are plenty of others. The title of Buell Kazee’s “A Mountain Boy Makes His First Record—Parts 1 and 2” (Brunswick 338, 1929) says it all. Charlie Poole and his coterie—Roy Harvey, Lonnie Austin, Odell Smith, and Lucy Terry—took up the joke on their four-part “A Trip to New York” (Brunswick 324 and 325, 1929), playing a bunch of rubes on their first trip to the big city to make records. By “Part 3: In New York,” they have reached their destination. Riding up the studio elevator, Roy Harvey marvels “here’s the place where we gonna make the record now,” just as they are greeted by an imaginary A&R man: “Uh, good morning, boys, I see you’re all here.” “Yeah, we’re right here, ready,” agrees Harvey. “Well have you ever made any records before?” “Uh, nothing, only jail records is all,” Harvey confesses. That’s pretty rich from one of the most prolific recording artists of the 1920s. “Well, gather in around the mike now,” the rep tells them, “we’re ready for a tryout.” “All right, get up close there, Slim, now,” Harvey directs. “Now boys, hold yourself ready and let’s go. Gonna play, uh, ‘Thirty Days in Jail’ for a tryout.” The studio manager likes what he hears. “Well boys, that’s a good test. Let’s make a record of it now.” “All right,” Harvey consents, “well, we’ll be ready now just in about a minute.” Actually, they are ready as soon as listeners flip the record to play “Part 4: In the Studio.” After Harvey leads the group in “No Room for a Tramp” their new

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boss tells them: “Well boys, that finishes the job. You’ve made a fine bunch of records, and I’ll assure you we’ll have you back up again before long.” “I thank you,” Harvey replies as the end of the side cuts him off. I’m guessing that as soon as it did, the real-life studio erupted in absolute hilarity. Like many Southern artists, the Skillet Lickers’ recording career was temporarily interrupted by the Depression. By 1934, the situation had brightened enough for Victor to re-contact the group for one final session. Among the resulting sides was a skit, “Prosperity and Politics—Parts 1 and 2” (Bluebird B-5446, 1934), taking those very circumstances as its subject. Set at an imaginary country store, “Prosperity and Politics” intersperses musical snippets with a lively discussion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the improved economic outlook, moderated by Atlanta radio personality, singer, and music promoter Dan Hornsby. There is also quite a bit of excitement concerning a letter the storekeeper (mandolinist Ted Hawkins) has been holding for fiddler Gid Tanner. “What does it say, Gid?” asks Hornsby. “Is it anything about a job for the Skillet Lickers?” “I’d say it is!” responds Tanner, “Yes sir-ee. The Victor people wants us to ’cord some more Graphophone records—I believe they want ’em to sell good too!” Harlem-born Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller moved mainly in cosmopolitan jazz/pop circles, seldom getting closer to downhome blues than the socalled classic (or vaudeville) style, and then mainly as an accompanist to female stage singers. Still, his “Reefer Song” (Jolly Roger 2002, 1943) deserves mention for setting a record after the session. “Hey cats, it’s four o’clock in the morning,” he declares at the outset, “I just left the studio, here we are in Harlem—everybody’s here but the police, and they’ll be here any minute!” John Estes’s “Special Agent” is a similar case. So is Dinah Washington’s “Record Ban Blues” (Mercury M 20622, 1947), which takes as its subject the second of the two Petrillo bans. These were the strikes (1942–44, 1948) called by American Federation of Musicians president James Caesar Petrillo, who, convinced that competition from home phonographs, jukeboxes, and records on radio was idling musicians, ordered union members to stop recording, forcing most studios to close and seriously disrupting the industry. (Characterizing the phonograph record as “the number one scab,” Petrillo personified the medium in a manner reminiscent of many recording artists.)1 Washington managed to cut her title just hours before the second ban went into effect on January 1, 1948. “Talked to a lyric writer,” she sang, “he was trying to put a song across.” Asked when she will record again, she can only reply, “Petrillo’s the boss.” Thereby afflicted by “the record ban blues,” Washington finds herself “paying some awful

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[union] dues” (pun obviously intended), which she then details, beginning with this, her “last recording date.” “So don’t ask me when I’ll record again,” she concludes, “Because only Petrillo knows / I’ve got the record ban blues. . . . ” Not all recorded paradoxes go to these lengths. On “Gillum’s Windy Blues” (Bluebird B7563, 1938), William “Jazz” Gillum achieves the same effect with just his opening verse: “I don’t need no Victrola, no radio in my home,” his recording announces, “when I want music, I can make my own.” Elsewhere artists break character by deliberately undermining the dramatic approach’s willing suspension of disbelief. Carson Robison’s rural background was conspicuous in his command of the folk idiom and his records’ warm reception among country folk. A number of his compositions even entered oral tradition. Yet he was also in the forefront of those early country artists sometimes termed “citybillies” for their cosmopolitan leanings. Like most of this clique, Robison worked mainly in his adopted home of New York City or even in London, catering not just to the country market but also to urban popular trends. It was in London that he and his Pioneers recorded “Goin’ To Have A Big Time To-night” (Perfect 12484, 1932). Overall, the side is a fairly conventional square dance drama, with Robison evoking the scene through his running commentary (“All right, everybody on the floor and get your partners for a quadrille. Come on you young folks back there and quit making eyes at each other”) and traditional dance calls (“First couple on the left, salute your partners. Swing your lady and balance all. Three hands around and do-si-do. Promenade and back to your places. Come on, you cowboys, rattle them spurs and whoop ’em up”). At the side’s end, however, he suddenly proposes “Say, boys, let’s pack up and go down and listen to Mantovani’s tango band, will you?” (“All right, let’s go,” agrees one band member. “Sure, suits me,” adds another.) Robison refers, of course, to one of urban pop’s true giants, the violinist, pianist, composer, and conductor Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (1905–1980), whose résumé included pre–World War II residencies at several London venues. He may well have been playing just down the street at the very moment of Robison’s recording: as of that date he and his “tango band” (the Tipica Orchestra) were engaged in their celebrated lunchtime broadcasts from Piccadilly’s Monseigneur Restaurant. Recorded paradoxes may also underscore the 78’s practical dimensions— its time limits, physical or technical attributes, commercial qualities, and so forth. But these cases substitute self-parody for mere self-reference. Instead of boundary-marking—circumscribing a record’s three minutes or so by signaling its beginning or end—some items engage in boundary-breaking. Overall, The Skillet Lickers’ “Taking the Census—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15549-D, 1930)

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is of a kind with the group’s other dramas—not least in the errant, chronically flustered city slicker played by Dan Hornsby. Here, though, Hornsby’s character (a census taker) finds his subjects abuzz over another urbanite’s visit. Clayton McMichen informs him: The other day, this—, one of them city dudes come up here and heard Jim and Bud over here fiddling, and he decided he wanted ’em to come down there to Atlanta and make some of them talking machine records, and I allowed as how I’d have ’em to take the stock out and put ’em in the pasture and get their fiddle and their banjo and get out here and get their stuff fixed up so they’d know what they’s gonna do when they get down there.

At length Hornsby’s character departs, having extracted some dubious statistics (and the obligatory drink of moonshine), and the boys resume their rehearsal. “Well boys, let’s go on now with this here practicing,” McMichen directs, adding, “remember that man said to get your tunes down to three minutes.” No sooner have they begun than they are abruptly cut off by the end of the side. While most sound recordings understandably emphasize their aural dimensions, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Blue Bird Blues” (Bluebird B7098, 1937) plays on the graphic qualities of the Bluebird company’s label, prominently displaying a bright blue bird. In Williamson’s song that blue logo comes to life as the expressly blue singer’s surrogate, entrusted with a message to his real-life spouse (and sometime co-composer), Lacey Belle, then back home in Jackson, Mississippi. “Now bluebird, bluebird, please take this letter down south for me,” the singer begins. “Now you can tell my baby I’m up here in St. Louis [his residence at the time—the session took place in Aurora, Illinois], aw but I’m just as blue as I can be.” The singer’s directions are quite particular: “Now bluebird when you get to Jackson, I want you to fly down on Shannon Street / Where that I don’t want you to stop flying until you find Miss Lacey Belle for me.” So too is the message: when the bluebird finds Miss Lacey Belle, he is “to please give her my best regard” and “tell her that I’m up here in St. Louis, but these times is awful doggone hard.” He seems to anticipate every possible complication: “Now bluebird, she may not be at home but please knock on her door,” suggesting “she may be right across the street, visiting her next door neighbor you know.” He must have expected others to get the point: anyone putting a Bluebird disc on a record machine could hardly miss the bluebird on the label.

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Williamson’s bluebird found one receptive listener, incidentally. Five years later, in February 1942 Tommy McClennan rerecorded the song for the Bluebird label, the very last song at what turned out to be his very last recording session. The first couple of verses of McClennan’s “Bluebird Blues” (Bluebird B9037, 1942) are straight from Sonny Boy’s release, even retaining his wife’s name; by record’s end, however, McClennan seems to be anticipating abandonment not by Lacey Belle Williamson but by his own lucky bluebird: “Bluebird, bluebird wonder where you been so long,” he entreats before finishing with “I’m gonna sing this time, ain’t gonna sing ’em [the blues] no more.” With the uncertainty created just two months earlier by Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war, McClennan had good cause to wonder at his future prospects. As it turned out, Bluebird never did get back in touch, and Tommy McClennan vanished into obscurity. That a bluebird flying circles at 78 r.p.m. could serve as a winged messenger between St. Louis and central Mississippi via Chicago’s South Side—small wonder records seemed an existential contradiction. The effect is not unlike pretending not to be recording while recording, or observing a record’s time limit only in its breach. Or consider the self-denial of Robert Johnson’s “Phonograph Blues” (ARC unissued, 1936): “Beatrice, she got a phonograph, but it won’t say a lonesome word / What evil have I done, what evil has the poor girl heard?” In this case the phonograph’s alleged dysfunction—contradicted by the fact that the record is saying more than a few words—becomes a metaphor for sexual impotence: “We played it on the sofa,” the singer at one point laments, “and we played it ’side the wall / But my needles have got rusty, and it will not play at all.” “Phonograph Blues” was not the only disc personifying recorded intercourse in this fashion, expounding the other activities suggested by needles set snugly in gyrating grooves, spindles inserted tightly through exposed center holes, or spring-wound motors excited by hand cranks. Others included Cliff Carlisle’s “That Nasty Swing” (Bluebird B-6631, 1936) (“Wind my motor, honey, I’ve got a double spring / Place the needle in that hole and do that nasty swing”); the Memphis Jug Band’s “Lindberg Hop” (Victor 21740, 1928) (“She asked me for a bottle of Gayola / I say, ‘Mama, let me play it on your Victrola / Then I’ll do that Lindyberg with you’ ”); or “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You” (Decca 5149, 1935) by Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies (“I’ll be glad when you dead you rascal you,” Brown assures his romantic rival, “Oh I’ll be tickled to death when you leave this earth you dog / You bought my wife a Coca Cola / Thought you’s gonna play on her Victrola / Oh you dog, you dirty rascal you”). On “Let Me Play Your Vendor” (Bluebird B8967, 1941),

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A jukebox near a trailer camp in Childersburg, Alabama. May 1941. Photo by Jack Delano. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Washboard Sam lusts after a personified jukebox (“Now let me play your Seeburg [a popular jukebox make], yes, mama, one more time / Just let me play your vendor [jukebox], your music sure sound good to me”). Onie Wheeler’s “(I’m Gonna) Jump Right Out of This Jukebox” (Sun 315, 1959) takes the jukebox’s point of view.2 Some records humanize phonographs to—well, to humanize them. These items personify record players only to highlight their humanoid strangeness. Others do the same by acknowledging the phonograph’s impersonal qualities, suggesting comparisons to other media or modern technologies. J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith introduces “Howling Wolf Blues—No. 1” (Vocalion 1558, 1930) in terms usually reserved for written correspondence. “Well here I am, got the blues about little old Victoria—the Howling Wolf,” he informs listeners, “guess I’ll drop her a few lines.” True, Smith proceeds to demonstrate how one drops a few unwritten lines (eighteen to be exact, arranged in six conventional threeline stanzas). But listeners are left with the impression of a record masquerading as a letter.

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Not surprisingly, there are also many references to the radio, whose disembodied nature echoes the phonograph, even allowing the illusion that one is the other. Bud Landress introduces the Georgia Yellowhammers’ “G Rag” (Victor 21195, 1927) with a facetious impersonation of a radio announcer: “Well, folks, this is the Georgia Yellowhammers from the PDQ station just now getting right. All right, boys, let’s go from here.” Walter Taylor’s “Broadcasting Blues” (Gennett 7157, 1930) recasts the radio as a human emotion. “I woke up this morning,” he begins, “with broadcasting on my mind / I dreamed of these blues, we were moaning over the line.” His remaining verses alternate between more conventional blues couplets (“These broadcasting blues, I swear is worrying my mind / I can’t eat for sleeping and I can’t laugh for crying”) and musings on the miracle of modern media (“In the year of eighteen hundred and ninety-nine / We didn’t even get music over the radio line”). The Carter Family’s “Heaven’s Radio” (OKeh 05931, 1940) answers a higher calling: “There’s a wonderful invention, it’s called the radio,” runs the first verse, “You can hear it everywhere you chance to go / But the static in the air sometimes makes it hard to hear / But it is not so with heaven’s radio.” “Heaven’s radio,” listeners learn, is prayer. Ten years later this piece was successfully rerecorded by Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks (Columbia 20732, 1950). Admittedly, it is unclear whether all of these records entail intentional paradoxes, other cases being even more doubtful. Some of these expressions were clearly contrived for records; others ring as generalized creations or generic conventions, equally amenable to live settings.3 And sometimes it is clearly a matter of degrees not absolutes. Lacking firsthand testimony, a performer’s intent is always a matter of speculation, listener responses all the more so. Then again, common sense can be remarkably persuasive. To suggest that a record like “Heaven’s Radio” involves a lesser degree of ironic intent than, say, John Estes’s “Special Agent” seems entirely reasonable. Ironic intent may even be the wrong description altogether—yet one wonders whether the Carters and their listeners were wholly oblivious to the irony of a phonograph record proclaiming the imperfections of manmade media and worldly technologies relative to purely spiritual channels and ritual agencies. I seriously doubt it, especially given the pervasiveness of recorded paradoxes whose conscious intent is beyond question. So while it strikes me as unlikely that A. P. Carter composed “Heaven’s Radio” as an express commentary on the vagaries of mass media, I think it just as unlikely that no one remarked the song’s affinity to such a well-established pattern. That the Carters also featured this song on their radio broadcasts suggests this irony was sometimes inescapable.

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On one level, these items merely confirm what historical studies have long demonstrated: that the phonograph was inextricably bound to other lines of transmission—oral, written, and broadcast. Yet aside from disseminating songs through time and space, these alternative channels also influenced split-second perceptions of records as musical events, coloring their instantaneous transmission and reception, momentarily registering the tradition’s overall complexity. Different media may be compatible, sometimes almost interchangeable, but there are contradictions as well; after all, letters are not really records, any more than records are radios, any more than any of these are really folksongs. Occasionally, old-time records even disguise themselves as other vehicles. Blind Lemon Jefferson introduces “D B Blues” (Paramount 12712, 1928) by announcing, “Oh here come Lemon in that new Ford sedan. Oh listen to the motor roll.” Train songs—pieces imitating or describing the progress of railroad trains, usually well-known named or numbered locomotives or lines—are a fixture in Southern tradition. Most recorded instances tamely graft preexisting forms onto a new medium.4 Some artists, however, boldly recast the record itself as a railroad train, creating fictitious lines (usually named for the artists) with running imitations of railroad conductors. “Brownie Special” (Decca 5174, 1935) by Fort Worth–based Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies is a good example. “All aboard the Brownie Limited,” Brown announces as the record pulls out. “This train leaves Fort Worth all cocked and primed and’s headed for all points south. Don’t forget your packages, suitcases, umbrellas, and babies.” The Limited’s named stops include Waco, Belton, Austin, and San Antonio, all cities south of Fort Worth where the Brownies (and their records) were well known. The shouted itinerary on Texan Adolph Hofner’s “Gulf Coast Special” (Columbia unissued, 1942) also includes his band’s usual tour stops (Corpus Christi, Galveston, San Antonio, Houston). Real-life hobo Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas routes “Railroadin’ Some” (Vocalion 1443, 1929) through his habitual East Texas haunts up to Chicago, where the side was recorded. Similar are Captain Appleblossom’s “Time Table Blues” (OKeh 45373, 1929) and Jimmie Davis’s “The Davis Limited” (Victor 23601, 1931). Even familiar traditional pieces might be rerouted along these lines. Grayson and Whitter’s “Train 45” (Gennett 6320, 1927) transports the performers back home from the site of their recording session. “Train 45, leaving terminal station, Atlanta, Georgia,” guitarist Henry Whitter announces as the side begins. Midway through he demands of his partner, “Where you going to, Mr. G. B.?” “I’m a-going to Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee,” replies fiddler G. B. Grayson,

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naming his longtime residence. “Where you going, Henry?” “I’m going to Warrensville, North Carolina,” responds Whitter, his own residence at the time. G. B. Grayson, incidentally, also gave “Going Down the Lee Highway” (Victor 23565) to Southern tradition. Recorded in Memphis in September 1929, the piece immediately became a fiddler’s favorite. Reportedly, Grayson composed it while traveling in Whitter’s Model T Ford from East Tennessee to the session on U.S. 11, known to locals as the Lee Highway.5 Their running commentary re-creates the experience. “I’m going downtown,” Grayson exclaims, “see that girl of mine, have a big time!” “Tell ’em, boy, tell ’em,” injects Whitter. “Right on down Fifth Avenue,” Grayson continues. “Wise man born to die anyhow,” Whitter adds, “Whee-hoo! Right on down the Lee Highway.” “I’m making 60 [miles per hour],” Grayson marvels. “Prettiest girl in the world,” prompts Whitter. “Yeah, she’s a-waiting for me down on the corner,” Grayson agrees, “and me a-sitting here fiddling!” While these items recall monologues like Blind Blake’s “Southern Rag” or John Dilleshaw’s “Tallapoosa Bound,” there is a key difference. “Southern Rag” and “Tallapoosa Bound” evoke particular locales through dramatic contrivances that ignore their technological format. (“Now we going on an old Southern rag. Way out there in all their cotton fields. Where them people plant all that rice with sugar cane.”) Here, that format is foregrounded as a vehicle—literally—for transporting participants through time and space. (“All aboard the Brownie Limited. This train leaves Fort Worth cocked and primed . . . and’s headed for all points south.”) But do these items represent deliberate paradoxes? Deliberate, obviously— and on that score, these performers have to be credited with a certain playful intent. To treat a phonograph record as something it is not, as something to which it is closely related but from which it is radically different—I refuse to believe these creative geniuses were unaware of the jokes they were playing. It is inconceivable that they and their listeners failed to appreciate that railroads and motor cars functioned much like phonographs, tied not just to epochal transformations in Southern life, but serving magically to transport musicians across incredible distances at previously unimaginable speeds. In many ways, the relation could not be clearer: after all, most Southern musicians could and did make records thanks only to the railroad lines and motor cars offering speedy access to relatively remote recording sites. This is precisely the point of Grayson and Whitter’s “Train 45” and “Lee Highway.” And their listeners received those records via these same delivery vehicles.

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On the other hand, these artists and their audiences obviously realized that phonograph records are not really railroad locomotives or Ford sedans. Still, framing a record as if it were fit an established pattern, ingeniously registering the new complexities and novel contradictions the phonograph introduced into their lives. And here, for these persons, lay the sound recording’s unmistakable character as an existential paradox. In a milieu where musical performance had always been a by-product of one’s very being, a mere coincidence of one’s ordinary existence, nothing could seem more oxymoronic than a thing—a rotating disc—that presumed to encapsulate the five senses, all four dimensions, and a world of experience within a single plane. Four centuries after Columbus, Americans on a voyage of discovery had found another New World. And this one was definitely flat. In accommodating phonographs to their everyday lives, early-twentiethcentury Southerners imagined at least four possible relations between old-time records and traditional music. Whether in close alternation or even in concert, old-time records were regarded 1). as arbitrary selections from oral traditions— mere dramatizations or reports of live performances; 2). as organic extensions of community events—bona fide instances of folk music or song; 3). as selfcontained social occasions—aesthetic experiences distinct from, yet ultimately grounded in folksinging; and 4). as musical events so distinct from folksinging that they presented an existential paradox—albeit one underscoring the considerable overlap between folksongs and phonographs. Taken together, I believe these four basic views reveal much (though certainly not all) of how people once experienced old-time records as musical events. As for the claim that these views were widespread, even general among early-twentieth-century Southerners, we have just considered in varying detail several hundred individual 78 r.p.m. sides, gathered from a direct examination of several thousand individual old-time releases. It would be possible to pad this total considerably—for example, by providing a more detailed inventory of recorded sermons, which in Paul Oliver’s expert reckoning alone numbered around 750.6 Of course, the same could be done with answer records, recorded sequels, or out-and-out covers (easily as numerous as recorded sermons); or of other materials covered only in brief or mentioned only in passing. At this point that would be little more than padding; then again, I am certain there are many other relevant examples, especially since I’m constantly finding new ones. But while these continue to delight, they seldom surprise: it has been quite some time since I have found a specimen I cannot instantly place within

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the present scheme. All that said, then, these materials seem to support two basic conclusions: 1) that cues like this were remarkably common on old-time records and 2) that the present arrangement does reflect a certain Southern consensus on how to experience old-time records as musical events. This seems almost predictable considering that these or similar ideas about folk music and media were crucial to the oral traditions and broadsides that birthed old-time records; circumstantially, there is every reason to expect they would be adapted to those productions. And these notions remained a key frame of reference when these prewar trends exploded in the postwar era in an array of media-based popular styles—country and western, urban blues, gospel, R&B, rock and roll—that truly revolutionized world music. That these ideas continued to shape postwar records bolsters the argument that they were from the outset fundamental to the Southern take on records as musical events. There was, however, a revealing shift. Throughout the prewar era, Southerners still listened to phonographs mainly in relation to folksongs, even when they heard them as counterexamples or complete contradictions. In the postwar period, the values were reversed. Not only did recording artists and record listeners increasingly regard a record as a self-contained, selfregulating universe: more and more, live performances came to reflect this perceived reality. True, as late as the 1960s one hears recorded commentaries or mini-dramas that would not have seemed out of place in the twenties or thirties. But that is the point: increasingly, this sort of thinking was an anachronism. Although its soundtrack is unmistakable sixties soul funk, the spoken introduction to Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up” (Ovide 228, 1967) would have suited a hokum blues thirty years before: “Hi everybody, I’m Archie Bell with the Drells of Houston, Texas. We don’t only sing, but we dance just as good as we want. In Houston, we just started a new dance called the Tighten Up. This is the music we tighten up with.” As someone who was avidly listening to radio in Houston when this record was a local sensation, I can testify that Bell’s introduction was nothing if not novel—though it was also a big part of the record’s local appeal. Cut in Chicago in 1966, Detroit Junior’s “The Way I Feel” (USA 814) was a bit of a musical throwback as well, hinting at its author’s downhome credentials. Emery “Detroit Junior” Williams was born near Forrest City in the Arkansas Delta in 1931, moving as a child first to Memphis, then to Southern Illinois, Detroit, and eventually Chicago. Most of his sixties recordings feature a full band in the Chicago blues mold. “The Way I Feel” is backed by just his piano,

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re-creating an intimate nightclub setting in time-tested fashion. “OK fellows,” Williams announces at the start, “all the band can take a smoke now, everybody take a break—just leave the piano and myself up here. I’m gonna play this by myself, just the piano and myself, just the way I feel.” (“As I play this blues it makes me think about some of my used-to-be’s,” he continues, proceeding to enumerate the “fine girls in [his] life—some good, some bad. . . . I can see ’em all sitting out there in the house tonight, you know.”) The period around 1960 even saw a national fashion for records re-creating a noisy party atmosphere, heralded by Ray Charles’s massive hit “What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2)” (Atlantic 2031, 1959). Fostering the illusion of a live event—complete with “canned” audiences, scripted dialogues, and sound effects—these releases recall many old-time dramas. Gone, though, are their real-world tethers, the understanding that they selectively re-create customary observances deeply rooted in established traditions, local communities, and everyday lives. Instead, these postwar vignettes buy into the record’s illusion as its sole reality: they represent nothing if not a national media fad, existing nowhere but the electronic otherworld.7 Thus while the idea that records are social occasions persisted into the postwar period, this social reality was completely reordered. Rarely did it extend much beyond the medium itself; still more rarely did it suggest any musical community absent a record. Rather, the media experience was now entirely its own end. If in the prewar South records were heard as novel accessories to live performances, in the postwar era they came to be taken for granted as primary forms of expression, as preeminent musical events, as fundamental social experiences. This only makes sense at a time when average persons were less likely to sit and sing together than sit and listen to records or radio together, when the songs neighbors shared more likely came from hit records than their community’s oral traditions. It also makes perfect sense in an era when ever fewer people remembered a time without recorded music, when all music was live. And it makes sense, too, that the frameworks translating most successfully from the prewar to the postwar era were those celebrating the record’s unique reality, its autonomy or primacy as a musical venue. The period immediately following World War II has actually been called the “Golden Age of the Answer Record,” elevating this self-promotional ploy from an occasional novelty to a going concern. Every major hit now seemed to spawn a recorded answer. Ironically, the practice was killed by this same media savvy, as performers and producers grew better versed in copyright laws and intellectual property safeguards.8 Not so with tribute records memorializing departed recording art-

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ists and their records: this custom flourished through the postwar years to the present.9 Overall, the idea of records-rooted-in-records evolved from novel gambit to structural principle. There actually began to appear records composed entirely of the titles of other records. Even more than answers, these namedropping records unapologetically ride the coattails of other releases. Jimmy Martin’s “Grand Ole Opry Song” (Decca DL 4016, 1956), for instance, enumerates the cast of country music’s premier radio program by listing their signature songs—which is to say their biggest records. Martin’s own record opens with the time-tested broadside come-all-ye: “Come and listen to my story if you will I’m gonna tell / About a gang of fellows from down at Nashville / First I’ll start with old Red Foley doing his ‘Chattanooga Shoe’ / We can’t forget Hank Williams with his good old ‘Lovesick Blues.’ ” In addition to Red Foley’s “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy” (Decca 46205, 1949) and Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues” (MGM 10352, 1948), Martin name-drops Williams’s “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (MGM 10560, 1949); Roy Acuff ’s “Night Train to Memphis” (OKeh 6693, 1942); Jimmy Dickens’s “Take An Old Cold ’Tater (And Wait)” (Columbia 20548, 1949); Bill Monroe’s “Blue Grass Breakdown” (Columbia 4879, 1947); Ernest Tubb’s “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right” (Decca 46061, 1947); Cowboy Copas’s “Tragic Romance” (King, 1946) and “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered” (King 658, 1948); Lonzo and Oscar’s “Poppin’ Bubblegum” (RCA 20-2765); George Morgan’s “Candy Kisses” (Columbia 20547, 1949); Bradley Kincaid’s “The Blue Tail Fly” (Varsity T1015, 1949); and “Bringing in the Georgia Mail” (RCA, 1950) by Charlie Monroe and His Kentucky Partners. He also slips in references to Opry cast members Cousin Minnie Pearl, Rod Brasfield, Lazy Jim Day, Uncle Dave Macon, Sam and Kirk McGee, Judge George D. Hay, Stringbean, Hank Snow, and Fiddlin’ Chubby Wise. Ten years later, soul singer Arthur Conley performed a similar service for that genre. His “Sweet Soul Music” (Atco 6463, 1967) plugs Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Going to A GoGo” (Tamla 54127, 1965); Lou Rawls’s “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” (Capitol 5709, 1966); Sam and Dave’s “Hold On! I’m Comin’ ” (Stax 189, 1966); Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” (Atlantic 2365, 1966); and Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” (Volt 138, 1966), with an honorable mention to James Brown (“he’s the king of ’em all, y’all”). But the decade bookended by Martin’s and Conley’s releases saw a slew of similar items. There even developed a distinct name-dropping subtype, concocting a preposterous storyline by stringing together titles or catch phrases from other releases. One of the more obscure instances is also one of the most revealing.

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Don Covay’s “Believe It Not” (Sue 709, 1958) opens with a snatch of dramatic exposition, setting the record at—of all places—a DJ convention, one of the record industry trade shows that, beginning in the 1950s, were regularly staged for the broadcasters who screened, programmed, and played the latest releases—and who in the postwar period assumed a major role in American music. Over a conversational hubbub evoking a crowded reception, Covay declares “Hey Peggy, there’s the cat that made ‘Chantilly Lace,’ talking to all of the disc jockeys”—a reference to J. P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson’s “Chantilly Lace” (Mercury 71343, 1958), then topping the charts. Thereupon Covay swings into his own bid for the charts, invoking in the first verse alone Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop” (ABC-Paramount 45-9871, 1958); Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” (Coral 61885, 1957); Teresa Brewer’s “The Hula Hoop Song” (Coral 9-62033, 1958); “Bertha Lou,” a hit for both Dorsey Burnette (Surf SR5019-45, 1957) and Clint Miller (ABC-Paramount 45-9878, 1957); Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (Specialty 561, 1955) and “Good Golly Miss Molly” (Specialty 624, 1956); Chuck Berry’s “Carol” (Chess 1700, 1958); the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” (Atco 6116, 1958); and the Everly Brothers’ “Bird Dog” (Cadence 1350, 1958). Among just the better-known items mentioned in the remaining verses are Larry Williams’s “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” (Specialty 626, 1958); Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” (MGM K12651, 1958); Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (Specialty 572, 1956) and “Ooh! My Soul” (Specialty 633, 1957); The Diamonds’ “The Stroll” (Mercury 71242, 1958); Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin” (Class 229, 1958); Bobby Freeman’s “Betty Lou Got a New Pair of Shoes” (Josie 841, 1958); and Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” (Atco 6117, 1958). In Covay’s convoluted tale, these records assume a life of their own, becoming actual persons, places, and events (“I went out to the hop with Peggy Sue / Doing the hula hoop there with Bertha Lou . . . Good Golly Miss Molly was doing the bop / To ‘Yakety Yak’ at the record hop . . . I turned right around, I looked it right in the face / The Purple People Eater was a-rocking the place . . . Old Betty Lou wore her new pair of shoes / Believe it or not . . . ”) Covay failed in this early bid for DJs’ attention, but he went on to become a major figure in 1960s soul music. A similar idea underpins so-called “break-in” records, which began appearing in the 1950s with the advent of magnetic tape technology. Splicing bits of several records into humorous monologues or dialogues—usually mock interviews or news reports—these releases can actually be traced to a single source: Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman’s “The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 and 2)” (Luniverse 101, 1956), whose success spawned a host of sequels, answers, and

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imitations from Buchanan and Goodman and others (Goodman himself was still charting with the gimmick in the 1970s). It also set the tried-and-true pattern for these later releases. But listeners experiencing “The Flying Saucer” for the first time might also think they were merely rehearing another record: it opens with the first two bars of Nappy Brown’s “Open Up That Door (And Walk Right in My Heart)” (Savoy 1187, 1956), suddenly cut-off as an imaginary DJ (Buchanan) announces “We interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin. The reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real!” “Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal,” comes the prerecorded reply, as a snippet from the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” (Mercury 70753X45, 1955) just as suddenly breaks in. For their own record’s remainder, Buchanan and Goodman pretend to interview average citizens, eyewitnesses, even the spaceman himself, the answers all being provided by other current hits (Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti,” Fats Domino’s “Poor Me,” Imperial 5369, 1955, Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” RCA 47-6420, 1956, and so on). While Buchanan and Goodman deserve their due, one obvious ingredient in their formula’s success—and one obvious source of their inspiration—was recorded music’s increasing tendency toward selfreference. Though primarily a mainstream pop-novelty phenomenon, there were also country, blues, and R&B break-ins—for instance, Steve Soul’s “A Talk with the News” (King 6216, 1969), “Steve Soul” really being none other than the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. Don Covay’s “Believe It or Not” sets some of its unlikely action “at the record hop,” possibly a circumstantial detail, possibly a nod to any of several records—Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” Andy Martin’s “Record Hop Tonight” (Chancellor C-1010, 1957), Tom Scott’s “Record Hop” (Hep 2140, 1958), Shorty Sergent’s “Record Hop” (Jet 45-501, 1958)—then celebrating a relatively new cultural event (not unlike the DJ convention). Geared toward adolescents, the 1950s record hop was simply a public dance with the music provided by a DJ spinning the latest hit records—another practice that has long since lost its novelty.10 Tellingly, when during this era records do reference live musical events, these are generally events where records hold center stage, if only in live recital. But then, after 1950 live performances were increasingly rehearsals of records, whether this meant professional recording artists touring to promote their latest releases, or semiprofessional hopefuls re-creating hit records by others, as now demanded in venues ranging from small-town youth dances to inner-city dives.

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Clearly the live-to-recorded ratio was undergoing a sea change, and not just on mainstream pop records geared to national markets and industrywide trends. The shift was just as obvious in Southern vernacular styles, even as these were increasingly relegated to independent labels catering to regional audiences and ethnic enclaves. Nowhere are personal identification or a sense of community more essential than in religious music. Still, the hundreds of prewar records re-creating church services, sermons, and congregational singing testify to the ease with which Southerners adapted their sacred traditions to mass media. Although in the prewar era these productions remained preoccupied with re-creating personal experiences and community-based traditions, they certainly demonstrated gospel’s media potential. That potential was fully realized after the war when gospel emerged as a major field of recorded music, self-consciously registering that reorientation in its new compositions, production values, and performance venues. Prewar sacred recordings made concessions to the phonograph’s unique properties, but most shared the real-life orientation of old-time records generally, ever mindful of live performance as their ultimate touchstone. By emending their depiction of traditional worship to acknowledge “the man that’s acatching the record,” the Seventh Day Adventists also acknowledged that in 1926 singing folk hymns on records still seemed a little odd—but not that odd anymore. After all, there were plenty of stranger things than just singing folksongs on records—say, singing an answer to another record, or pretending to be a record when singing in person, or denying (contrary to fact) that you are singing on a record at all. Taken as their own standard, records could even be more real than real life. These and every other conceivable refraction of the live/recorded equation were becoming less strange with each passing day. By 1950 this new skewed reality was the norm—even in church. “Let’s Go Out to the Programs” (Peacock 1722, 1953) by the black gospel group the Dixie Hummingbirds celebrates what was then a relatively new sacred tradition, concerts—or programs—consisting of several popular touring recording acts: “Preaching and praying, if you wanna hear singing, good old gospel singing / Go out to the programs, whenever they’re in your town / Well you talk about singing, praise the Lord, shouting all around / Go out to the programs, whenever they’re in your town.” Their religious functions notwithstanding, these concerts were largely intended to promote the artists’ latest record releases (or their radio spots, songbooks, or corporate sponsors). Basically, gospel programs were a variant of the package tour concept, a marketing approach that, while not unknown before World War II, came into its own in the 1940s and 1950s.

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The Hummingbirds’ “Let’s Go Out to the Programs” re-creates the experience on record, showcasing several current gospel hits—the Soul Stirrers’ “Jesus Gave Me Water” (Specialty 802, 1951), the Blind Boys’ “Our Father” (Peacock 1550, 1950), the Pilgrim Travelers’ “Mother Bowed” (Specialty 315, 1948), the Bells of Joy’s “Let’s Talk About Jesus” (Peacock 1584, 1951), the Hummingbirds’ own “Trouble in My Way” (Peacock 1705, 1952)—with stylized introductions from a canned emcee and note-perfect imitations of each group’s style. More precisely, “Let’s Go Out to the Programs” perfectly imitates on record several well-known gospel records—or rather perfectly imitates on record live imitations of several well-known gospel records. The ploy proved so popular that the Hummingbirds eventually cut a sequel, “Let’s Go Out to the Programs No. 2” (Peacock 1788, 1959), updating the original with recorded imitations of a halfdozen discs released in the interim. The popular white gospel group the Oak Ridge Quartet also borrowed the idea, sampling the white gospel catalogue on their “Go Out to the Program” (Skylite 5982).11 The man a-catching the record was no longer just a supporting cast member: he was center stage. During this era there even emerged whole new genres of recorded music practically defined by this sort of recorded self-examination. Originating in the late 1930s around the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, honky-tonk quickly spread to Southern California, where thousands of Southwesterners fleeing the Dust Bowl had settled, soon joined by thousands more stationed at area military bases or lured by West Coast war industries. Abetted by records, radio, jukeboxes, and touring bar bands, honky-tonk was by 1950 country music’s dominant style. Fittingly, it took its name—and much of its subject matter—from the rough taverns or honky-tonks frequented by these newly industrialized rural folk. Musically, it reflected the same technoeconomic transformations, not only in its reliance on commercial media but in amplified instruments like the electric steel guitar, which with the fiddle provided its musical backbone. The barroom jukebox was not merely honky-tonk’s chief outlet: it was also a fixture—almost a character—in honky-tonk songs. In a perfect marriage of content and context, the classic honky-tonk topic is the smoky honky-tonk where the displaced and disaffected gather to drink and forget or commit infidelities, while a jukebox plays songs about a smoky saloon where the displaced and disaffected gather to drink and forget or commit infidelities, while a jukebox plays. . . . The archetypal honky-tonk record is Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life (I Didn’t Know God Made Honky-tonk Angels)” (Capitol 1942, 1951), addressed to a faithless lover who, refusing to communicate by letter or phone, can only be reached through the jukebox in her honky-tonk

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refuge: “You wouldn’t read my letter if I wrote you / You asked me not to call you on the phone / But there’s something I’m wanting to tell you / So I wrote it in the words of this song.” Thompson’s record prompted a recorded answer rivaling its own popularity, Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honkytonk Angels” (Decca 28232, 1952): “As I sit here tonight the jukebox playing / The tune about the ‘Wild Side of Life’ / As I listen to the words you are saying / It brings memories when I was a trustful wife.” Rock and roll, the black/white hybrid that in the postwar period eclipsed all other varieties of Southern sound, not only came into being through records: many early rock and roll records are about nothing so much as rock and roll records. Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” (Chess 1626, 1956) is one among dozens: a hit record about writing a letter to a local radio DJ to request a hit record, suggesting by association a girl dancing to a jukebox’s hit record (“long as she got a dime, the music won’t never stop”). Maybe she’s dancing to “Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl Perkins, Sun 234, 1955), a then-current rock and roll dance record actually named by Berry’s then-current rock and roll dance record. Or maybe she’s dancing to the very rock and roll dance record describing her dancing to a rock and roll dance record, a paradox befitting a genre where hit records are common topics for hit records. That World War II marked a watershed in Southern music—and especially in commercially recorded Southern music—is universally recognized. That the 1950s witnessed a complete transformation of virtually every facet of this music—from its sound and social commentary to matters of business and technology—is exhaustively documented. Less well-remarked are the changes not just in how Southerners produced and consumed records, not just in how those records sounded, not just in their media formats or underlying messages, but in how Southerners thought about records as musical events, as routine occurrences in most people’s everyday lives. In some respects these changes paralleled national or global trends. More often, they anticipated them. If the twentieth-century South led the world in any area of art and culture, it was in recorded music, as demonstrated by the global celebrity of blues, rock and roll, country music, gospel, and soul. Considering the role they played in the development of world music and culture during the post–World War II period, it is not too far-fetched to attribute to Southern records a formative influence in worldwide attitudes about mass media. Consider just the evidence from Liverpool, England, actually not that unlikely a source. As England’s second largest port, Liverpool’s close ties to the American South date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its pivotal

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role in the transatlantic slave and cotton trades. Other imports and exports reflected the city’s long fascination with Southern music. In the nineteenth century, Liverpool not only welcomed American minstrel troupes but produced a few homegrown contenders. One was John “Jack” Lennon, who achieved no little celebrity with his staged imitations of African American folksongs, even touring the States with Robertson’s Kentucky Minstrels in the 1890s. And yes, he was the grandfather of that other John Lennon, the one who later took the world by storm with his imitations of American R&B records.12 In the twentieth century, the vogue for New Orleans jazz—whether from abroad or played by locals—paved the way for skiffle, an urban revival craze featuring arrangements of American folksongs from Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and other folk stars of the day, backed by guitars and homemade instruments like the tea chest bass. Skiffle then gave way to the Beat Boom or Mersey Beat (after Liverpool’s River Mersey). The last catapulted Liverpool back to the center of international commerce on February 7, 1964, when the Beatles arrived in New York City, launching rock’s British Invasion. The irony of the British Invasion was that it sampled and synthesized an array of Southern roots styles—rock and roll, blues, country, R&B, soul, gospel—then injected the results back into an American musical mainstream considerably less interested in the homegrown product. Although they surpassed all their peers, the Beatles were initially typical of the British beat groups. After a tentative start as a skiffle group (the Quarry Men), they morphed into a rock and roll bar band covering American records. Some of these later turned up on the Beatles’ own first recordings; others more or less directly inspired their original compositions.13 One enduring favorite was Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” given pride of place on the group’s second album (With the Beatles, Parlophone LP PCS 3045, 1963) as side two’s opening track. Unlike most of the Beatles’ hits, “Roll Over Beethoven” was sung not by John Lennon or Paul McCartney but by lead guitarist George Harrison. Although he was born and raised in Liverpool, Harrison’s early inspirations might not have been that different had he been from Mississippi. He later recalled “the first music I remember hearing, as guitar oriented music, was Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman.”14 Overall, the Beatles’ affection for Southern roots music was genuine, their familiarity encyclopedic, its influence enduring. That the Beatles so often imbued their own records with the brand of playful self-reflection found on “Roll Over Beethoven” was one source of their brilliance. Along with Bob Dylan—their only artistic rival in the rock canon—they had by the late 1960s established rock as a form of serious music with their

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increasingly artful and self-conscious manipulations of the rock and roll idiom. They had also, of course, established a new standard of international success, not just through their outstanding musicianship and songcraft but through their understanding of the creative possibilities of the recorded medium itself, again gleaned from American roots music. It was, after all, precisely the playful self-reflection of records like “Roll Over Beethoven” that defined what is taken by many not just as the Beatles’ crowning moment but as the greatest rock album of all time: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone LP PCS 7027, 1967). The key to Sgt. Pepper’s impact was the Beatles’ genius for tailoring their musical message to its medium, in this case, the twelve-inch 33 1/3 r.p.m. microgroove LP. Although it had been around since the late 1940s, the long-playing album was in the pre-Pepper’s period underutilized outside of classical music and jazz. Pop music hewed to the 78 or 45 r.p.m. single and the Top Forty AM radio format geared to these two-and-a-half-to-three-minute performances. Though pop was routinely issued on LPs, these were generally mere collections of singles—usually, a couple of hit singles and an assortment of single-length filler tracks. In the creative foment of the British Invasion and its aftermath, the single’s constraints became increasingly evident. The LP’s capacity for more ambitious musical statements offered one obvious solution, with the Beatles leading the way. In so doing, they forever realigned the live-to-recorded ratio in the world’s musical sensibilities. In their case, of course, the growing musical sophistication and greater awareness of the modern multitrack studio’s creative possibilities then typifying rock generally were compounded by their global celebrity and the stress of constantly touring to mass hysteria. For some time they had been recording music they simply could not reproduce in concert, simultaneously releasing albums conceived from beginning to end as unified statements. With Sgt. Pepper’s the group passed through the looking glass completely, forsaking live performance altogether in favor of the studio’s alternate reality. Yet with their acute sense of the ironic, the Beatles deliberately framed this, the first modern studio album as a live performance. Sgt. Pepper’s begins with the sounds of a milling crowd and a tuning orchestra, the very offstage activities excluded from studio productions. On Pepper’s, these continually intrude on songs whose singers are as ethereal as their audience. Ethereal but not faceless: this audience is pictured crowded around the Beatles—decked out as the mythological Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—on the album’s sleeve, a collage of pop culture icons from the twentieth century and before, including

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wax models of the Beatles themselves in their earlier Fab Four incarnation. Also present are Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Mae West, Marlon Brando, Edgar Allan Poe, W. C. Fields, William Burroughs, Dion, Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, and three score others. It is debatable whether the Beatles’ single-handedly mapped pop’s future or simply spearheaded emerging trends. Most reasonably, it was some of both. But there is no question that Pepper’s appeared to worldwide acclaim at a pivotal moment in recorded music, or that it is singularly emblematic of that moment. For instance, only in the aftermath of this—for symbolic if not practical purposes the first true studio album—did the now familiar convention of the live album acquire its special significance. Granted, live recordings appeared in the pre-Pepper’s era. But these held less meaning at a time when people just assumed musicians played live. The current concept of the live album—a record made outside the studio’s controlled environment—draws its particular import from the now equally familiar concept of the studio group (who do not or cannot play outside the studio) and the studio album (whose creation depends absolutely on multitrack wizardry). But then it is a poorly kept secret that many so-called live albums are subsequently sweetened—recorded in concert, then taken into the studio and overdubbed to smooth the rough edges. There is quite a difference between the drama of Sgt. Pepper’s and, say, Chumber, Coker, and Rice’s “Alabama Square Dance.” “Alabama Square Dance” is a rear window on a world where most music was—like everything else— homemade, a by-product of a preindustrial community’s daily routine. Sgt. Pepper’s is a crystal ball on a milieu where most music originates wholly outside the average person’s daily routine, finding its source (and often its subjects) in a self-perpetuating entertainment industry. It is impossible not to see Pepper’s as a harbinger of pop music’s evolution from its time to the present, when self-mythologizing artists and self-proclaimed stars, self-propelled media trends and self-promoting pop culture references, self-serving media events and self-fulfilling virtual experiences—all laced with playful self-denunciation or self-conscious irony—characterize so much music. But while there is quite a difference between Sgt. Pepper’s and “Alabama Square Dance,” so too there is a crucial link—however faint—between them; as the culmination of the postwar trends old-time records nurtured, Pepper’s reveals those records’ continued relevance—however subtle—to the way people still experience recorded music. And then there is that constant exception living honestly outside the law. Bob Dylan’s own approach to recording is as famously original as his music. Throughout his career he has insisted on performing live in the studio without

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first rehearsing his accompanists, allowing little or no overdubbing, issuing first takes complete with mistakes, altering songs and arrangements in midperformance, cutting and mixing on the fly to the dismay of state-of-the-art audiophiles, striving always to be in his own moment—all in flagrant disregard of passing fads in pop record production. The results are as definitive as they are different from the manicured Pepper’s approach, setting a standard of postmodern art wholly in the ragged-but-right spirit—though obviously not in the vanished tradition—of old-time records. That Dylan’s words and music so often reference those records leaves no doubt about their contribution. That his influence over rock has been inestimable—as great or greater than the Beatles’—offers another hint of their continuing influence.15 Indeed, Dylan’s sketchbook approach to recording—coupled with his audience’s demand for any and every unreleased scrap of his mercurial art—is at the root of the subterranean record industry labeled the bootleg. Referring not to illicit medicinals mixed up in the cellar but to illegal pressings of unissued recordings, the bootleg archetype was first distilled in the home recordings now known as Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Though it too has preindustrial precedents, the format is obviously yet another forecast of the sound recording’s postmodern climate. Dylan’s response was hilariously typical: in 1991 he initiated his own official Bootleg Series.16 But what of those premodern communities and their records? Illustrating how old-time records were keyed as musical events, the hundreds of examples we have just considered do suggest that these records were often perceived in ways quite like preindustrial folksongs. At other times, though, they seemed a world apart from oral traditions—and music was the measure of that, too. For these records also intimate how, as artistic creations, old-time records symbolically expressed the epochal changes their medium epitomized, the very changes eventually obliterating the South’s traditional song. If only in brief, any understanding of how Southerners understood old-time records requires delving a bit deeper into these, the symbolic dimensions of folksongs and phonographs. For that, we head back to the mountains and a mere three dozen releases from another group of bootleggers.

Chapter Seven

A Corn Li cker Sti ll in Geor g ia

R

“

emember, brother,” crows Clayton McMichen, “our fiddling is just exactly like our licker—high, wide, and handsome.” McMichen is addressing Atlanta radio promoter, singer, and Columbia Records A&R man Dan Hornsby, at that moment playing Tom Sly, an Atlanta bootlegger seeking booze for his gin mill. McMichen is playing himself (but so, arguably, is Hornsby): Clayton McMichen, champion fiddler and Skillet Licker, the group’s chief spokesman on their immensely popular fourteenpart dramatic series “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia.” That title’s pun on the name of Georgia’s preeminent old-time fiddle band confirms that, if only in word play, the Skillet Lickers’ downhome music is indeed like moonshine. So are their fiddle records, since in the idiom of the day, “canned corn” connoted both. Their friend and contemporary John Carson made this same point. A few years before, his own groundbreaking records were heralded in an Atlanta Journal article (June 15, 1923) reporting that “ ‘canned music’ recorded by local musicians will be made for the first time in Atlanta.” When Carson’s initial releases proved successful beyond all expectations—almost single-handedly launching the country-music industry—Fiddlin’ John quipped to Atlanta A&R man Polk Brockman, “I’ll have to quit making moonshine and start making records.”1 That the Corn Licker skits ranked among the best-selling of all old-time records is beyond dispute. Their artistic character is tougher to place, conflating folksongs and fiddling, regional humor, and medicine show farce, tempered by commercial media hype and the techniques of radio theater, then filtered, 149

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1928 Columbia Records catalogue featuring the Skillet Lickers and two of their stars, Riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen. John Edwards Memorial Foundation/Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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with more than a little self-conscious irony, through outsiders’ stereotypes of fiddle-playing, gun-toting, moonshine-’stilling hillbillies. The same might be said of hillbilly records as a whole, of course. As a matter of fact, it was said, and quite often: in themselves old-time records constantly remark the contradiction inherent in the very idea of commercially processed folk music. We have already met the Skillet Lickers through just such recorded commentaries, as no old-time artists offered more—or more pointed—discussion of this quandary. It should come as no surprise, then, that McMichen’s quip about fiddling lickers is no idle wordplay: whatever else they may be about—making moonshine, for instance—the Corn Licker skits are also very much about making old-time records. Nor is it particularly surprising that their authors would be preoccupied with the curious collaboration of folksongs and phonographs. While all of the Skillet Lickers were well-known local entertainers before recording, the group as such was really an illusion promoted mainly by their records, which concealed a loose, shifting personnel more typical of their community’s casual, ad hoc ensembles than the world of show business professionals. As fiddler and sometime Skillet Licker Bill Shore recalled, “so far as Gid [Tanner] was concerned, anyone who played with him was a Skillet Licker—even John Carson.”2 Not only did they suggest more unity or stability than ever really existed: Skillet Licker records also concealed—but just barely—no little personal and musical friction. In fact, the labels on most of those records never read just “The Skillet Lickers.” Instead, they enumerated the key players in this ongoing drama: “Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers with Riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen.” With banjoist Fate Norris, these three are now popularly regarded as the Skillet Lickers, a latter-day label that is nonetheless more than merely convenient: together, Tanner, Puckett, McMichen, and Norris encapsulate nearly the entire vocational and avocational range of old-time music—and with it the tension they and their musical epoch embodied. That uneasy alliance is even the subject of one of their skits, introducing the fiddle tune “Nancy Rollin” (Columbia 15382-D, 1928). The record begins with that tried-and-true contrivance, the knock at the door. “Ah there’s somebody at the door,” responds McMichen, “let me see who that is.” Hello there, Riley! Well, I declare, yes. Gid and all of you, ain’t it? Say, uh, we—, I just had a little argument of what you fellows done. Uh, I wonder, what’s your trade anyhow? Ri le y P uck e t t : Man, I pick a guitar. M cM i che n :

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Pick a guitar, boy, that’s a good trade, ain’t it? Gid, what’s your trade? I play the fiddle and raise cotton and corn and taters too! M cM i che n : Sure enough. Boy, you got an eye for business raising something to eat, hadn’t you? Gid—, uh, Fate, what’s your trade? F a t e No r r i s : Man, I’m a drunkard by trade but the company I’m working for now is out of materials. Say, what’s your trade, Mac? M cM i che n : Man, I ain’t got no trade. I play the fiddle a little once in a while, and I wouldn’t hit a lick at a rattlesnake if he’s trying to bite me. I’d just play him a tune, he’d coil up and run on off. Say, let’s play a little tune anyhow, being as we’re all here together. Let’s play that tune they call “Nancy Rollin.” P uc k e t t : All right, let her roll. M cM i che n : All right, we’ll let her roll. All of you are in good tune, I guess? M cM i che n :

G i d Ta n n e r :

And with that, the Skillet Lickers let her roll. James Gideon Tanner was born June 6, 1885, at Thomas Bridge, Georgia, later moving to Lawrenceville, then Atlanta, and finally to Dacula. He began fiddling at fourteen, but always regarded himself first and foremost as a farmer. Along with “cotton and corn and taters,” he raised chickens, his chief occupation until shortly before his death in 1960. Even so, he was a well-known local entertainer long before records, a frequent victor at regional fiddle contests and a familiar attraction on the streets of Atlanta. Years later his son Gordon, himself a fiddler who appeared on later Skillet Licker recordings, recalled many a Saturday morning when it was too wet to plow, riding with his dad in a wagon to Atlanta. Gid would take along his fiddle and some merchant would be sure to ask for a tune or two. Gid would play out in front of the store; a crowd quickly would begin to gather and somebody would pass the hat. Often the crowd would extend so far into the street that they completely blocked the trolley tracks. The police would come around and yell “Gid! Put up that fiddle!” and break up the crowd. Gordon said that the police used to scare him, but his father would just laugh and sneak around the corner to the next store and the whole show would begin again.3

Nearly forty when he made his first records, Tanner’s repertoire consisted mainly of fiddle tunes, nineteenth-century folksongs, and folk minstrel standards, with a smattering of British ballads or other oddities. But when he did sing instead of just fiddling, he usually sang something funny. As his friend Smokey Joe Miller remembered, Tanner “was a live wire and a natural-born

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Gid Tanner. “A live wire and a natural-born comedian.” John Edwards Memorial Foundation/Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

comedian. Everything he did was funny, and it ’most always was ad lib, too. . . . He was just as great a personality off stage as he was on. When you’d come to know him one time, you knew Gid Tanner. . . . He was always ready to make music and have a good time.”4 S. Lafayette “Fate” Norris could be called the silent Skillet Licker—his biography is patchy, his banjo often practically inaudible—but he was apparently of a kind with his friend Tanner. Residing successively at Norcross, Resaca, and Summerville, Georgia, he was probably a few years older than Gid, also regularly performing on the streets of Atlanta, sometimes with Tanner or others, sometimes as a one-man band. Besides nineteenth-century banjo songs, he too loved minstrelsy. He even sometimes performed in blackface, interspersing music and comedy, with Tanner as his straight man. While Mac plays that part on “Nancy Rollin,” Norris remains wholly in character, his retort (“I’m a drunkard by trade . . . ”) being a stock minstrel gag.5 Tanner and Norris differed from most part-time pickers mainly in their excellence and extroversion. George Riley Puckett was one of that singular class of professional musicians in the pre-phonograph South, the blind street singer. As he tells McMichen on “Nancy Rollin,” he did indeed “pick a guitar” for a living. Born on May 7, 1894, near Alpharetta, Georgia, he was blinded as an infant by the mistreatment of a minor eye infection. Taking up music, he learned to play piano, mandolin, and violin as well as banjo and guitar, the two instruments featured on his records. He was also an exceptional—and exceptionally

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versatile—singer. Even McMichen, who in later years had little good to say about Puckett, acknowledged his singing as the key to the Skillet Lickers’ success. According to Frank Walker, the Columbia executive responsible for formally organizing the group, when you got the singer, he was a rarity, and generally speaking, you hung onto him. A chap like that was capable of doing a song written by somebody else—a Riley Puckett. He would sit there and listen when someone would tell him a story—the words. He’d get the words pretty much settled in his mind and then he’d maybe have an idea of a melody which they would try to hum to him, and from it he built it. He was a creator without vision, you see, but with tremendous “vision!”6

Notwithstanding Puckett’s other talents (he was an adept carpenter and telegrapher, even building his own crystal radio set), music was always his primary livelihood. Long before and even after making records, he performed incessantly at house parties and picnics, in concerts, or on public thoroughfares like Atlanta’s famed Decatur Street, the scene he describes on “The Darkey’s Wail.” Many remembered him as introverted and moody, generally disagreeable and difficult, but he reportedly had a special rapport with Gid Tanner, by all accounts his complete opposite. Gid’s son Gordon recalled that, throughout their long association, he never heard Puckett and his father exchange a harsh word.7 When Puckett died of blood poisoning from an untreated boil on July 13, 1946, Gid and Gordon were pallbearers.8 Puckett may have pursued music as a means of support mainly due to his disability, but Clayton McMichen (a.k.a. “Mac” or “Pappy”) was driven by personal inclination and professional ambition. Born in Allatoona, Georgia, on January 26, 1900, he moved with his family to Atlanta in 1913, not long after he had begun learning to fiddle from his uncles and father. It was from them that he remembered first hearing most of the traditional tunes he would later record. While still a teenager he began placing at the fiddlers’ contests where he later would earn considerable distinction, sharing the stage with the perennial winners in the senior division, Gid Tanner and John Carson. As a youth McMichen worked as an auto mechanic. However, like many musicians of his generation, he was acutely aware of the greater career opportunities afforded by the incipient music industry, and especially by records and radio. Throughout his life he tried to bridge the gap between the traditional appeal of old-time music and the commercial potential of popular sound. In

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this too he was partly inspired by his father, who had some formal training. “My dad was one of these sophisticated Irish violin-players, and he’s the one I learned all this fancy fiddling from,” McMichen acknowledged, recalling how his dad would occasionally even be called upon to play “them Viennese waltzes and stuff like that” for “the longhaired dancers . . . uptown at the hotel.”9 Apparently, though, his father’s classical background was only an indirect influence. “Me, I just learned his fiddlin’ tunes,” Mac later conceded.10 But he also insisted that the intricate multipart fiddling of the “sweet” bands he fronted before, during, and after his tenure as a Skillet Licker (The McMichen-Layne String Orchestra was one) was inspired in part by his admiration of symphonic music. Still more enticing were the hot jazz and pop he heard on records and radio, which he also consciously strove to incorporate into the string band format. Given those inclinations, McMichen was at times impatient with the more traditional Tanner and Norris, later even insisting “I didn’t like playin’ with Gid and Fate, because they just was about 30 years behind us [himself, Bert Layne, Lowe Stokes, and others in their circle], or 40 in the music business.”11 Ironically, the greatest impediment to his musical goals—not to mention his major incentive for remaining a Skillet Licker—was his record company’s desire to cash in on the country-music market. McMichen’s attempts to prod the Skillet Lickers into “going modern” were routinely preempted by Columbia’s Frank Walker, who insisted they play what Mac scornfully termed “swamp opera.” On one occasion, he recalled, Walker even admonished him, “It’s awful easy, Mac, to play too good.”12 Fiddler Lowe Stokes, for practical if not nominal purposes a full-fledged Skillet Licker, remembered another session in New York where Walker put his foot down when Stokes and McMichen tried to record some pop tunes. “If I want violinists I can just stick my head out the window and whistle,” Walker told them. “I didn’t bring you guys all the way up here from Georgia to play violin music.”13 McMichen recalled Walker making the same point in reverse when Walker brought Columbia’s field unit to Georgia to record hillbilly fiddling: “He [Walker] told me, he says, ‘Mac, I’m gon’ tell you something. I wonder why you think that we bring all this equipment, comin’ down here from New York to Atlanta, to git this music you fellows play, instead of just gettin’ them fellows up there in New York to play it [the popular music McMichen wanted to record] and be done with it?’ ”14 Shortly after his separation from the Skillet Lickers, McMichen vented his frustrations in “I’m Gonna Learn to Swing” (Decca 5614, 1938), characterizing the Skillet Lickers’ brand of swamp opera with another pejorative for folk fiddling: corn.

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Can’t get nothing from old-time fiddling, I’m gonna learn to swing. Ain’t gonna waste my time a-whittling, It don’t mean a thing. Gonna sell my farm and move to town, Buy me a horn and toot around. “Hi-De-Ho” is what I’ll play, With a razz-ma-tazz in a swinging way. Get me a job in a big band, I’m gonna learn to swing. I don’t give a heck about corny fiddling, It’s driving me insane. I ain’t no mule, I don’t like corn, I’m a swinger, man, with a brand new horn. I don’t get nothing from corny fiddling, I’m gonna learn to swing. McMichen’s declaration that fiddling “ain’t no trade” conveys these same rancorous sentiments. But McMichen eventually had to admit that Walker was right. All in all, his attempts to move musically uptown fared quite poorly, while the Skillet Lickers’ downhome discs were consistent best sellers. Years afterwards, replying to a radio listener who wrote to ask why his groups played “them silly old tunes,” McMichen dryly observed, “I notice in my thirty-five years of show business that there’s five hundred pairs of overalls sold to every one tuxedo suit. That’s why I stick to swamp opera.”15 In his later years McMichen lived near Louisville, Kentucky, working as a welder. Although his recording career ended with World War II, he continued to make personal appearances and radio broadcasts almost until his death on January 4, 1970, even turning up at revival venues like the Newport Folk Festival. During this period, McMichen expressed no little bitterness about his experiences as a Skillet Licker. Curiously, he remained friends with Gid Tanner, with whom his musical differences were most pronounced. Riley Puckett, on the other hand, seemed always an object of scorn, despite—or perhaps because of—Puckett’s own penchant for “going modern.” By late 1923 to early 1924, the major recording companies were scrambling to sign hillbillies, having been caught off guard by OKeh’s inadvertent, wholly astounding success with their first old-time release, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s coupling of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” (OKeh 4890, 1923). In February of

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1924 Frank Walker made some test recordings in Atlanta of Carson’s friend and contemporary Gid Tanner, inviting him to New York for further sessions the following month. Told he could bring one other musician, Tanner persuaded a certain “blind boy,” Riley Puckett, who had also recorded during Columbia’s Atlanta excursion, to make the trip. A few weeks later, recalled Gordon Tanner, he was listening to the two on the “little grindin’ Victrola” with which his father returned.16 These, then, were the first records by the future Skillet Lickers, or a fraction thereof. Officially, that name and the personnel most often associated with it first came together in April 1926, when McMichen and Norris joined Tanner and Puckett at a Columbia session in Atlanta. Actually, the name had been around for some time: like their music, it is merely the group’s personal take on a traditional theme, a classic example of self-deprecatory Southern humor. Lickskillet or Lick Skillet is a fairly common Southern place name—Gene Wiggins found no fewer than five in Georgia alone. As Wiggins slyly observes, “Anyone so hungry as to lick a skillet obviously is what we now call ‘disadvantaged.’ ”17 Musicians in particular appreciated the jibe. A Georgia newspaper identified John Carson as a member of “the Simp Phony orchestry from Lickskillet” appearing at the 1914 Atlanta fiddlers’ convention, possibly the prototype of a later “Lickskillet Orchestra.”18 McMichen’s first group, which began broadcasting over Atlanta’s WSB in September 1922 and which occasionally included Puckett, was alternately billed as The Hometown Boys’ String Band or The Lick the Skillet Band. This was the immediate forerunner of the most famous Skillet Lickers, identified on their first records as “Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers with Riley Puckett,” though Mac’s name was subsequently added at his insistence.19 Whether the identity between the group’s name and the phonetic spelling of liquor appearing beside it on their most successful records—the Corn Licker series—originated intentionally or coincidentally, I simply cannot say. But neither can I believe that the resemblance went unremarked, either by the musicians, their listeners, or their corporate sponsors, especially since the Skillet Lickers’ Corn Licker skits presuppose a self-evident connection between fiddlers and illicitly distilled spirits—between, that is, Lickers and liquors—often revealed in direct statements like McMichen’s opening aside.20 As the Skillet Lickers, Tanner, Puckett, McMichen, and Norris—in various combinations or with friends like mandolinist Ted “Ezra” Hawkins or fiddlers Lowe Stokes and Bert Layne—recorded for Columbia between 1926 and 1931. During these years, the same roster recorded under their individual or other

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group names, so that Columbia releases credited to Gid Tanner and (George) Riley Puckett, Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett, Gid Tanner and His Georgia Boys, Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men, Fate Norris and His Playboys, The Georgia Organ Grinders, and so on are often Skillet Licker recordings in all but name. (Several spin-off groups also appeared with similar overlapping memberships, Lowe Stokes and His Pot Lickers, the Monroe County Bottle Tippers, and Arthur Tanner and His Corn Shuckers being just three.) With Hawkins and Gid’s son Gordon on second fiddle, Tanner and Puckett used the Skillet Licker billing for one final session for Bluebird in 1934. Following this last date, Gid went back to raising chickens and “cotton and corn and taters too,” reverting to being a part-time local musician. Puckett continued touring and recording, occasionally performing with his old friend Tanner when his itinerary brought him back to Gwinnett County. McMichen was by now pursuing his own career in Tennessee but also visited the old group’s patriarch on return trips to Georgia. Fate Norris remained in the state but dropped out of Gid’s immediate circle when he moved too far away. Gordon Tanner and his son Phil revived the monicker in 1968, performing as the Junior Skillet Lickers or the Skillet Lickers II. But the group that made the name famous had disbanded by the mid-1930s, less than a decade after its formation—allowing here that the notion of disbanding implies more stability and formality than ever existed. Despite their success as recording artists, the Skillet Lickers, like most Southern string bands, proved a casual and circumstantial grouping, periodically (and in the end permanently) sundered by the more mundane demands of livelihood and the era’s changing musical tastes. But while their career manifested little group solidarity or musical consensus, it did yield the copious documentation lacking for most Southerners who spent their lives performing in such ensembles: over the course of two decades, the group’s three principals alone—Tanner, Puckett, and McMichen—appeared on over seven hundred releases, an output matched by few of their contemporaries. Predictably, these records reflect the individual members’ differing backgrounds and diverse tastes, matters discussed at length by others (see n. 2). As for the skits outselling all of their other releases, these began in 1927. Accounts vary, but clearly their creation was to some degree collaborative, involving both the group members and their media handlers. McMichen and his brother-inlaw Bert Layne both claimed that they (McMichen and Layne) came up with the original ideas and most of the content, these then being scripted by Wilbur C. “Bill” Brown, another Columbia A&R representative who, like Hornsby, acted in the plays.21 Frank Walker credited himself and Hornsby with the scripting

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and most of the ideas besides, nevertheless acknowledging some contribution from the band. Mike Seeger asked, “Who wrote those skits that they [the Skillet Lickers] did, like The Fiddlers’ Convention [the first of their dramas]?” Well, the Fiddlers’ Convention. I had a young man who was with a radio station in Atlanta, Dan Hornsby. He is now dead. He became quite popular, one of my very best friends. Dan worked with me for years and years and years. Dan and I would sit down when we were doing nothing else and would gather material for these skits. Then we would rehearse as best we could with the boys. Much of it was done naturally, with only just an outline for them to do. S e eg e r : What was the musicians’ part in making up these skits would you say? W al k e r : Not to any great extent. The skits were made up from things they let drop. Then we would sit, Dan and I, and read it to them, and if we got a laugh here or a laugh there, we knew that it was pretty good. From that we worked on it and got the general feeling of it. In Riley’s case, he couldn’t see, so he couldn’t read. He only learned from the hearing of our voices. At times we had people who couldn’t read even though they had excellent eyesight. So it became going over and over until they became familiar with it, almost a party to them without an audience, because of course we didn’t allow any audience. S e eg e r : Did these records sell fairly well? W al k e r : Tremendously. In the hundreds of thousands. S e eg e r : Did they outsell the musical discs? Walker: Yes, yes, because they [record buyers] looked for them. They were just waiting until you could bring out another one of those and we didn’t issue them out too often.22 W al k e r :

These accounts are not necessarily at odds, nor do they rule out other possibilities. In fact, there is general agreement that Hornsby, Walker, and Brown served mainly to organize and script the skits, with the Skillet Lickers contributing the core content (whether some, most, or all). Without discounting McMichen’s and Layne’s recollections, the dramas themselves suggest that other group members—particularly Gid Tanner, Fate Norris, and Lowe Stokes—also contributed to their content, besides lending their long experience at play-acting. And there is no reason to suppose Walker, Hornsby, and Brown’s contributions cramped the Skillet Lickers’ style. These men may have been confirmed urbanites, but they proved remarkably adept at meshing with the Skillet Lickers’ milieu, especially Hornsby and Brown, native Georgians who, alone or together, acted in virtually all of the skits and whose accomplishments

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as A&R reps underscored their empathy for Southern music and music makers, Hornsby being an established performer in his own right. Even Frank Walker—not just an urbanite but a Yankee to boot—was a farm boy by birth, having grown up playing harmonica in a rural dance band in his native New York State; in later interviews, McMichen actually credited him with playing on some Skillet Licker sides.23 Granted, then, the Skillet Lickers’ recorded dramas may have been somewhat novel—they were even classified in the Columbia catalogue as “Entertaining Novelty Records.” And their precise authorship is something of mystery. Still, there is no reason to suppose that their take on the world was anyone’s but the Skillet Lickers’—which is to say there’s no reason to suppose that their worldview is anything but Southern. The reactions of Southern record buyers only bolster that supposition. During their career the Skillet Lickers produced nearly two dozen of these two-part skits, each part comprising one side of a 78 disc. Frank Walker by no means exaggerated their popularity. The first such recording, “A Fiddlers’ Convention in Georgia—Parts 1 and 2,” was released in May 1927 and sold nearly 75,000 copies, an extraordinary total by the day’s standards. Even so, that figure was exceeded a few months later by the first two parts of the Corn Licker series, with an astounding 113,000 in sales—probably the single best-selling item in Columbia’s renowned 15000-D hillbilly series.24 Thereafter, the Skillet Lickers regularly included these vignettes in their biannual sessions for Columbia, typically featuring Hornsby (sometimes under the pseudonym Tom Dorsey) and Brown, occasionally introducing other of their Atlanta associates (most notably singers Hugh Cross and Oscar Ford). Also with Hornsby, Gid and the regrouped Skillet Lickers recorded a pair of dramas at their 1934 date for Bluebird, replete with topical references to the Depression and Roosevelt’s nascent New Deal.25 Moreover, if the Skillet Lickers’ dramas were something of a novelty, they were not completely so. This may explain both how the group so ably crafted so many of these skits and why Southern record buyers so readily embraced them. For consumers, the skits’ familiarity was probably a bigger selling point than any entertaining novelty. For the Skillet Lickers, they were barely removed from the pre-phonograph venues where band members honed their dramatic skills: street-corner theatrics, tent circuses and vaudeville revues, minstrel and medicine shows—entrepreneurial formats likewise combining oral tradition and modern media, rural folk music and urban popular entertainment, communal reaffirmation and commercial transaction. Long before the Skillet Lick-

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Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee. October 1935. “Before and after World War I, Tennessee was thicker with physic operas than Georgia because Georgia had cracked down on them.” Photo by Ben Shahn. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. (Pictured are the doctor, blackface clown, and Indian.)

ers, Gid Tanner and Fate Norris were performing minstrel routines for tips on the streets of Atlanta; long after the group’s dissolution, Riley Puckett was still touring the South with his own tent show. Clayton McMichen too sometimes worked as a blackface clown with traveling troupes. He later remembered:

I worked medicine shows as late as 1936. I rebuilt me a Dodge Northeast generator of a thousand watts and bought a little motor for lights and the loudspeaker. We called the medicine shows “the kerosene circuit” [after the torches used to light nighttime shows] or “the physic operas.” People had tired feet and you had to be funny. I was raised on one password, “Sold out, Doc!” The medicine to fight neuralgia and rheumatism cost a dollar a bottle and we really sold it. We’d take in three or four hundred dollars [a night]. We traveled in a Model T and carried a hammer and saw to build a platform. Before and after World War I, Tennessee was thicker with physic operas than Georgia because Georgia had cracked down on them.26

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The other Skillet Lickers all also had some firsthand experience with medicine shows, put to good use in their recorded skits. One of these (Columbia 15482-D, 1929) was even titled “Kickapoo Medicine Show” after the most famous sponsor of “physic operas,” the much-imitated Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.27 Its novel medium aside, “Kickapoo Medicine Show” finds the Skillet Lickers re-creating long-familiar roles—witness Fate Norris’s take on Sam or Sambo, the traditional blackface clown—assisted by their friend Hugh Cross as the doctor. The sketch opens to the strains of “Flop Eared Mule” and Doc Cross’s declaration “Well, well, that sure sounds good to me.” I knew if I came down here at this fiddlers’ convention, I could find some good talent for my medicine show. There’s old Clayton McMichen over there. Hello, Mac! M cM i che n : Hello, Hugh! How you do, old boy? C r oss: All right. Listen, Mac, I got a medicine show up the street here known as “The Famous Kickapoo Remedy Company.” M cM i che n : Um hm. C r oss: I need some musicians up there, might get you boys to go up and play for me. What about it? M cM i che n : Sure, we’d be glad to, Hugh. What you got to drink up there besides that medicine? C r oss: Oh well now, let’s don’t talk about that now. M cM i che n : Ah well, you pay us a little something, I guess? C r oss: Sure, let’s not bring that up, I’m sure I can please you all right. There’s Riley Puckett over there. Hello, Riley! P uc k e t t : Hello, Doc! C r oss: How you feeling today? P uc k e t t : Oh just fine! C r oss: Might get you to go up and play for me, what about it? R i le y : Sure, be glad to! C r oss: And here’s Gid Tanner, Gid what about you? Ta n n e r : Yes sir, I can go, I think we can get you a crowd around that place! C r oss: Sure! And here’s old Fate Norris. No r r i s : Yeah! C r oss: Say, Fate, aren’t you a good blackface comedian? No r r i s : Yeah, that’s my line, Doc! C r oss: All right, get your makeup on, I’m gonna use you in a few minutes. No r r i s : Good! C r oss: And here’s Lowe Stokes. Hello, Lowe! C r oss:

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Hello there, Mr. Cross. How you feeling today? S t o k es : I feel very fine! C ross: Got that old fiddle going all right? S t o k es : Yes sir, I got her in tune! C ross: All right, I want you boys now to get right up on the platform here, and whoop ’em up once, give ’em a hot number, we’re gonna get a good crowd up, let’s go, boys. [band plays “Dance All Night With a Bottle in Your Hand”] C ross: Well hello there, Sam! N o r r is : Hello, Doc! C ross: That’s a nice-looking guitar you got there, I notice you’re using catgut strings on it. N o r r is : Oh-oh, Doc, you oughtn’t to say “catgut strings” here ’fore all these folks. C ross: Oh well then, pardon me. What kind of strings are they? N o r r is : They’s kitten bowels. [laughter] M cM i che n : Say, Doc, say you know me and my gal is coming across the street this morning, and she got tickled about something and lay right down there and died! C ross: What?! You don’t mean to tell me the girl died? What was the matter with her? M cM i che n : Eh, well, well, I tell you, Doc. I bought her a pair of these here cotton bloomers this morning, you know? And they had so many boll weevils in ’em that they tickled her to death! [laughter] N o r r is : Say, Doc! C ross: Yes sir, what’s the matter now, Sam? N o r r is : You know you saved my life the other day? C ross: Why no, I didn’t know anything about that! How’d that come about? N o r r is : You know, when I sent for you and you didn’t come! [laughter] C ross: All right now, folks, gather right up close in front, I got the Skillet Lickers here and they gonna entertain you with a hot number. Let’s go, boys. [band plays “Alabama Gals”; side one ends] [side two begins; band plays “Bully of the Town”] C ross: Ladies and gentlemen, this remedy that I am introducing to you this afternoon is known to the world as the Famous Kickapoo Tonic. Before the remedy was placed upon the market, it was fairly tested and proven to be one of the greatest remedies that was ever placed before the American public. We highly recommend this remedy for symptoms of sluggish liver, bilious blood, headache, bad breath, pain or burning in the stomach, dark around the eyes, pain around the head and across the kidneys, constipation, loss of appetite, and a bad feeling on rising in the morning, tired muscles, lumbago, and neuralgia. Each and every bottle is absolutely guaranteed. After S t o k es : C ross:

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you have tried one bottle, if you don’t find it to be just as I have represented, bring it back and we’ll cheerfully refund your money. I’m going to give you about one minute to buy while the boys play a number. We’re going to pass the medicine out among you. Here we go, boys. S t o k es : Say, I believe it’s a fake don’t you?! [band plays “I Don’t Love Nobody”; commotion and crowd noises] No r r i s : Say, Doc! C r oss: Yes sir, what’s the matter now? No r r i s : That sure is good medicine, what you got up there. C r oss: Sure, I know it is. No r r i s : Yeah, good for horses too! C r oss: Yes sir! No r r i s : Yeah, I give my old horse a dose of it last week, boy, it’s fine. C r oss: Well, I’m sure it cured him, didn’t it? No r r i s : I don’t know, we ain’t caught him yet! [laughter] P uc k e t t : Say, Doc! C r oss: Yes sir, what’s the matter now? P uc k e t t : I remember when Ma and Pa was first married, we lived in town, was ’long about Christmas time and all of us children hung up our stockings. C r oss: Uh huh? P uc k e t t : And Ma, she hung up hers too. C r oss: Uh huh? P uc k e t t : Pa, he hung up his socks and the board of health made him take ’em down. [laughter] C r oss: Now folks, we got about a half a minute left to buy the remedy while the boys play another number, we’re gonna give you one more chance, let’s go, boys. [band plays “I Don’t Love Nobody”] C r oss: Now friends, we’re going to close the show for tonight. If you will come back tomorrow night, I’m going to have the boys play for you one of their latest little ballads entitled “We Named Our Old Cow ‘Georgia,’ Because She’s Always Dry.” [side two ends]

This particular item’s debt to physic operas is self-evident. As a whole, though, the Skillet Licker dramas are really canned versions of the kerosene circuit, combining traditional music and song with folk humor, minstrel farce, and the medicine show’s own legacy, all within an entrepreneurial format. If they were staged by Columbia Records and its A&R reps rather than patent cure manufacturers and their itinerant jobbers, that only again confirms how

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phonographs cooperated with (or simply co-opted) preexisting folk/popular hybrids. Hugh Cross was hardly unique in combining the role of corporate pitchman and popular performer, nor was promoting canned corn all that different from pitching bottled snake oil.28 This, anyway, was the view expressed on record by the Skillet Lickers themselves, who left almost as much recorded commentary on the slippery transactions of folksongs and phonographs as they did recorded music. The two were sometimes one and the same. In this too, “Kickapoo Medicine Show” exemplifies their dramas. Recalibrating pre-phonograph traditions at 78 r.p.m., it simultaneously describes that very process, reaffirming some now familiar ideas about old-time records as musical events. Take the notion that old-time records may squarely report or represent traditional music-making and its typical settings. Anyone interested in physic operas as musical events can ask no better depiction than “Kickapoo Medicine Show”—except perhaps for OKeh’s “The Medicine Show—A Revue in Six Acts” (OKeh 45380/ 45391/45413, 1929), where Skillet Licker pal John Carson and some of his label mates reenact their own experiences on the kerosene circuit. (And I mean this literally: since there do not seem to be any contemporaneous field recordings of medicine shows, these commercial releases may well be the only sound portraits of this institution in its heyday.) But the same is true of the group’s many other re-creations of customary occasions and community events, including a fiddler’s convention and its concluding square dance (“A Fiddler’s Convention in Georgia—Parts 1–4”; this is also the occasion that opens their “Medicine Show”); a county fair (“A Day at the County Fair,” also featuring a fiddling contest); a gig at an Atlanta speakeasy (“A Night in a Blind Tiger,” featuring—you guessed it—a fiddling contest); even a payday busking at a general store (“Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain,” no contest). Alongside such relatively formal public events, they often portrayed domestic settings and casual music-making (“Taking the Census,” “Prohibition—Yes or No,” “Prosperity and Politics,” “Practice Night With the Skillet Lickers,” the last two also set in a general store), as well as subsistence activities where music, while optional, was almost expected (“Hog Killing Day,” “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain,” and “A Bee Hunt on Hill For Sartin Creek”). Many of the same or similar occasions crop up throughout the Corn Licker series, which takes as its own topic one Southern tradition where the line between subsistence activity and sociability virtually disappeared. It was only a short step (and sometimes no step at all) between the more mundane aspects of distilling and distributing corn liquor (an illegal but in this milieu

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essential economic activity) and the conviviality typifying old-time music—in person or on record. As Charles Wolfe discovered, “a Skillet Lickers recording session was a free-wheeling affair, with the record company thoughtfully providing a bathtub full of bootleg gin (with a tin dipper hanging on the side) to keep things lively.”29 Undisputed masters of the recorded drama, the Skillet Lickers were unsurpassed too in that dramatic hallmark, the telling detail, with an uncanny knack for those small touches bringing a drama to life. Even as generalized archetypes—a speakeasy, a county fair, a fiddlers’ convention in Georgia—their settings and subjects ring true to life. More often, they unmistakably register real-world locations, real-enough occasions, or real-life experiences. Wolfe also reports that “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain” “paid tribute to the long rambling mountain in northeast Alabama; the Skillet Lickers often played show dates on the mountain, and their most devoted fans lived there. According to Mac and Lowe, the band in fact often traveled like shown in this skit, and often played in such stores for ‘collection’ wages.”30 The real Fate Norris was just as he is depicted in “Kickapoo Medicine Show,” well known in and around Atlanta as “a good black-face comedian.” We have already encountered many similar cases (recall “The Darkey’s Wail”); we soon will find many more. At the heart of these events, the music itself is never less than what one would expect—as the skits also make plain. Its traditional character may be mainly a matter of inference: “Kickapoo Medicine Show,” for instance, subtly yet accurately illustrates just how folk music and musicians were incorporated into such traveling troupes. Or it may be explicitly remarked, sometimes at astonishing length—Mac’s treatise on the form and distribution of “Rye Straw” wins the prize here—sometimes simply in offhand references to the public domain, as in Mac’s suggestion “Let’s play that little tune they call ‘Peas and Cornbread’ ” (“Corn Licker Still—Part 8”); or Ted Hawkins’ recollection “We used to give that old ‘Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia’ fits” (“Prosperity and Politics—Part 1”); or Puckett’s exclamation “Let’s play that ‘Billy in the Lowground,’ that’s a good tune,” to which Lowe Stokes enthusiastically assents, “That’s a good tune, Riley, we’ll play that” (“Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain—Part 1”). One way or another, listeners are constantly reminded that these are the sounds of the South. But these skits did more than just represent traditional music-making. They also appealed directly to record listeners personally acquainted with such activities and occasions, enlisting their own knowledge and experience, inviting them to participate actively in a recorded event modeled on those traditions. This was another common approach to old-time records that the Skillet Lick-

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ers championed. Granted, the group’s full-blown dramas may suggest vicarious identification more than active participation. But even these occasionally break frame, reaching out directly to listeners, including them in the record’s unfolding action. When at the beginning of “A Fiddler’s Convention in Georgia,” Mac announces “Well folks, we’re here this afternoon to find out who’s the best fiddler in the South,” he may (mainly) be imagining a hypothetical crowd at a recreated event. Yet it is hard not to hear a personal appeal to record listeners as well, especially since so many other Skillet Licker releases are cued just that way. Case in point: “A Fiddler’s Convention” echoes Mac’s standard greeting, epitomizing this direct approach: “Well folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers.” Even from a set stage, the greeting sounds much the same, dramatic distance be damned. So this same “hello” could serve two or more purposes. McMichen employs it again on “Liberty” (Columbia 15334-D, 1928), but here too there is a key difference. “Well folks,” comes the familiar voice, “here we are again, the Skillet Lickers. Yes, that’s Riley over here by me with the big guitar. Yes, that’s Gid with that wild fiddle. Here’s Fate over here with that mean banjo. So we’re gonna play you the tune that you [the listeners] been calling for, ‘Liberty’ off of the ‘Corn Licker Still,’ and Lord help us to get right.” Referencing the tradition, acknowledging his listeners and their active role, Mac simultaneously expresses another widely held view of records as events: that while they may represent or even manifest folksong performances, old-time records were also a world unto themselves. Cross-references like this (“ ‘Liberty’ [Columbia 15334-D] off of the ‘Corn Licker Still’ [Part 4, Columbia 15258-D]”) often define that parallel dimension. They are also a defining feature of Skillet Licker dramas, which were among the earliest and most successful recorded samplers, intended to promote (or preview) the band’s other releases. Like Mac’s familiar greeting, tune identifications could thus serve dual functions, indexing both the Skillet Lickers’ traditional repertoire and Columbia’s catalogue of best-selling Skillet Licker records. And dramas could reenact realms beyond the real world. Even as they vividly re-create a broad swath of Southern tradition, even if they are sometimes much like folksongs themselves, the three-dozen-odd musical selections in the Corn Licker series simultaneously sample more than twenty past or future Columbia releases by the Skillet Lickers and its members, most of them advertised by title. The other dramas feature comparable proportions of the band’s recorded output.31 Occasionally, this self-conscious quality rises to the level of deliberate paradox. Recorded during the band’s brief reunion in 1934, “Prosperity and Politics” takes as its subject that very reunion—expressly for the purpose of traveling to

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San Antonio, Texas to record for Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary. Transported to a country store in Georgia, listeners actually witness Gid receiving the letter inviting the band to make the record then in progress. “What does it [the letter] say, Gid?” asks Dan Hornsby, “is it anything about a job for the Skillet Lickers?” “I’d say it is!” Tanner exclaims, “Yes sir-ee. The Victor people wants us to ’cord some more Graphophone records—I believe they want ’em to sell good too!” “Well that shows you, boys,” Puckett interjects, “business is picking up if Victor wants us to record some more records. The reason why we haven’t recorded sooner is because the people didn’t have the money to spend for ’em, and that shows you that business is picking up considerably.”32 Even in overview, the Skillet Licker plays suggest an extended commentary on the act of recording itself. Like old-time records generally, they are obviously preoccupied with the complex relations of folksongs and phonographs; like old-time records generally, they constantly discuss these relations in a shared language, a set of highly self-conscious, conventional cues, allowing countless shades of meaning, communicating on many levels at once. Indeed, their present-tense functions aside, these cues might themselves be read historically, as an insiders’ account of old-time records, traced from their roots in the prephonograph South’s downhome-folk/uptown-pop continuum; through their growth as a dynamic extension of those traditions; to their ascendancy as a new standard of musical performance, a topsy-turvy reality in which canned music could be as real as the real thing. From this perspective, “Kickapoo Medicine Show” reveals not just how folk music and musicians were incorporated into traveling shows, but how these traveling shows were then translated into records. From this vantage, the Corn Licker skits really are as much about making Skillet Licker records as ’stilling corn licker. Nor is this just a matter of the records’ external histories—their own place on the trip from folk tradition to recorded sound—or their self-conscious keying of this relation. Rather, this self-referential character is fundamental to the skits’ internal logic—their basic imagery, narrative plotting, and dramatic technique, as expressed through a traditional idiom for discussing the downhome and uptown, the raw and refined, the homegrown and store-bought, rural folk music and urban popular sound. This tradition is best known through “The Arkansas Traveler,” easily the most popular folk play in the pre-phonograph South—and the unmistakable template for the Skillet Licker plays. Given its currency, it would have been amazing if they had not known it. As it turns out, Tanner and Puckett cut a version on their second trip to New York (“The Arkansaw Traveler,” Columbia

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15017-D, 1924). Four years later in Atlanta, McMichen and Hornsby recorded their own “Original Arkansas Traveler—Part 1 and 2” (Columbia 15253-D, 1928). Both exemplify the play’s basic form: somewhere in Arkansas, a lost traveler is drawn to a squalid shack by a fiddling squatter, endlessly repeating the first strain of the tune also titled “The Arkansas Traveler.” The stranger’s requests for directions and accommodations are continually rebuffed—until, that is, he reveals his own abilities as a fiddler. Credited to Clayton McMichen and Dan Hornsby, “The Original Arkansas Traveler” aptly casts Mac as the wisecracking fiddler, Hornsby as the stranded pilgrim. Now, Trail! Trail! You get back in this house here! [dog whimpers] Come in here, I say, and lay down! What’s the matter with you anyhow? H o r nsb y : Hello, stranger. M cM i che n [cautiously]: Hello. H o r nsb y : Say, could you tell me where this road goes? M cM i che n : I been living here twenty-odd years, and it ain’t never went nowhere yet. H o r nsb y : Well I mean does it go to Little Rock?! M cM i che n : I don’t know about Little Rock, but they’s a hell of a big one right down there in the hollow. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : Say stranger, why don’t you cover your house? M cM i che n : Well when it’s raining, it’s too wet to cover it, and when it ain’t a-raining, it don’t need covering. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : Is it very healthy in these swamps? M cM i che n : Well I reckon it’s healthy enough that can’t nothing live here a whole season but two bullfrogs, that is, providing one of ’em’s a doctor so he can feed the other one quinine. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : Your corn looks awful yellow to me. M cM i che n : Well that’s nothing unusual, I planted the yellow corn. [plays first part of the tune] H o r nsb y : It don’t look like you’ll get but half a crop. M cM i che n : Well hell, that’s all I’m expecting, we’re farming on the halves. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : You’re not very far from a fool, are you? M cM i che n : No, just about three steps between us is all I see. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : What’s the matter with your foot? M cM i che n : Well five fellows wagered me the other day that I couldn’t shoulder ten bushel of buckshot. M cM i che n [play s f ir s t pa rt o f tu ne; do g barks]:

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Whew! That’s quite a load. Did you shoulder ten bushel? Well I didn’t exactly shoulder ten. I shouldered five and I mired up in the flintrock over my shoetops and the boys had to pick me out. And while they’s a-picking me out, they stuck the pick through one of my corns and that’s the results of it. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : Say, are squirrels very plentiful in this country? M c M iche n : Uh they plentiful enough, I reckon, just this morning I went down here and went a-squirrel hunting. I jumped a squirrel and I treed him up here in a tree and up in this tree there’s a hole, and so this squirrel run in there and all of a sudden, the tree commenced bulging out and bulging in, just like it was a-breathing and so I took a shot at this particular place and the gosh durn tree split and the squirrels got their toes hung in there and I caught eighty-one squirrels in one tree! [plays first part of tune] [side one ends—side two begins] H o r nsb y : What are the chances of me spending the night here? M c M iche n : Uh you can’t stay here, sir. H o r nsb y : What are your objections? I’m perfectly harmless. M c M iche n : Uh well, we don’t take in no strangers, just here the other day, Sal took in a stranger here and the next morning we got up and looked in the smokehouse and there’s three hams and a middling of meat gone. H o r nsb y : You don’t think I’d steal a ham, do you? M c M iche n : Well your face don’t look none too good to. [plays first part of tune] H o r nsb y : Why don’t you play the rest of that tune? M c M iche n : Now I don’t figure there’s a man a-living that could do that. H o r nsb y : Well let me have your fiddle, I’ll show you how the rest of it goes. M c M iche n : All right, sir. Here’s the fiddle, help yourself, sir. [Lowe Stokes plucks strings, plays second part of tune.] M c M iche n : Sal! Ruby! John! Andy! Mattie! Come out here and hear this city slicker play this fiddle! He knows the rest of this “Arkansas Traveler”! Say, play that again, stranger, and let the family hear how well you do play a fiddle. [Stokes plays second part of tune] That’s mighty good. Sal, I expect you better go in the kitchen and fix supper now, I think this stranger’s pretty hungry. And John, you go down to the barn and fetch that jug of licker up here, I expect he wants a little toddy before he eats his supper. S t o k e s [ i n falsetto]: Mac, tell the gentleman to come on to supper now, supper’s ready, come on in and get ready for supper. M c M iche n : Well stranger, I guess we better go in and get our supper now. What might be your name? H o r nsb y : Dan Hornsby’s my name. What is yours? H o r nsb y :

M c M iche n :

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Uh, Clayton McMichen is my name. Very glad to know you, sir. M cM i che n : I’m tolerable glad to meet you, sir. Now then, we’ll go on in and have our supper, just sit down up there at the end and you’re minding to eat the grub up from the wife and children, just help yourself, sir. H o r nsb y : Mac, haven’t you any knives or forks? M cM i che n : No, we don’t use ’em up in this neck of the woods. H o r nsb y : Well, how do you do? M cM i che n : Tolerable well, thank you, how are you sir? Now then, we’ve finished supper, why, let’s go in and see if we can’t play that tune together, I like mighty well the way you play it, sir. H o r nsb y : All right, let’s try it out. M cM i che n : All right, here we go. [McMichen and Stokes play both parts of the tune together] M cM i che n : Well good night, Mr. Hornsby. H o r nsb y : Good night, Mac. [side two ends] M cM i che n : H o r nsb y :

As an instance of the type, McMichen and Hornsby’s “Original Arkansas Traveler” is certainly representative, though its claim to originality is as dubious as most. Not that there is any shortage of contenders. The leading candidate seems to be Colonel Sanford C. “Sandy” Faulkner (1803–1874), a fiddling Arkansas politician who claimed to have created the play after an encounter with a wisecracking squatter during the 1840 state political campaign. Also in the running is concert violinist, music teacher, and dance fiddler Signor Marie de los Angelos José Tosso (a.k.a. Joe Tasso) (1802–1886). Born in Mexico of Italian parents, Tosso settled in the Cincinnati area around 1827, plying his trade throughout the region. Like Faulkner he was especially renowned for his renditions of “The Traveler,” also allegedly based on an actual experience; for the record, Tosso’s grandson doubted his grandfather “ever claimed authorship [of the play] without winking one eye.”33 Then there’s Mose Case (1824?–?), a black singer and guitarist from near Louisville, Kentucky. After serving in the Mexican War (1846–48), he wound up in Buffalo, New York, where he published the skit both as sheet music—Arkansas Traveler by Mose Case (1862)—and in a pair of much-traveled songbooks: the War Songster and The Arkansas Traveller’s Songster (both 1863). Case’s case may be the shakiest of the three, but it still outweighs the posthumous—and wholly implausible—attribution to Edward Payson Washbourne (1831–1860), the Arkansas artist who indisputably produced the most famous and frequently imitated of the skit’s pictorial renderings.34

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Arkansas Traveller: scene in the backwoods of Arkansas. Lithograph by Currier and Ives, 1870, after Edward Payson Washburn. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Admittedly, Sanford, Tosso, or Case could have created the skit. Most likely, they just popularized its now familiar form. While there is no conclusive evidence the dialogue existed as such before the late 1850s, many of its individual jokes appear in American subliterary sources from the 1830s on, some in much earlier European materials; most were subsequently collected from oral tradition.35 As for the tune, no less an authority than Vance Randolph judged this “by all odds the most famous fiddle tune in the rural South,” observing “no fiddlers’ contest is ever held without it.”36 It has remained remarkably stable since at least 1847, when it first appeared in print. By contrast, the dialogue—a string of jokes expanded or contracted at will—is subject to endless variation. Usually acted by two or more persons, it is sometimes “talked and fiddled” by one.37 It is also performed as a cante-fable or even a prose narrative.38 Or it may be sung altogether.39 Performance venues also spanned the folk/popular and rural/urban divides. Sometimes we are told only that the informant “was accustomed to hearing it in her youth” or the like.40 Other descriptions are more particular. According to legend, Colonel Faulkner first told the story at “a grand banquet . . . given in

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the famous ‘bar-room’ which used to stand near the Anthony House” in Little Rock, habitually re-creating it thereafter, most famously at a gubernatorial dinner in New Orleans.41 Apparently Professor Tosso profited handsomely from performing this, his signature piece at fairs and circuses throughout the Midwest and upper South, reportedly building an estate near Covington, Kentucky, entirely with the proceeds.42 Accounts also survive of renditions in the 1850s at The Golden Fleece, an Ohio tavern renowned for perennially hosting the play; at a “rural entertainment” in Texas around 1860, where “two Negro musicians, a violinist and a banjo player, ‘performed’ the story as a skit while they played the music and called the forms for a square dance”; as a “free show” at a refreshment stand in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1890s; or merely “as the writer [Ira Ford] heard it acted out many years ago at a school exhibition.”43 From about 1858 it frequently appeared on broadsides or as sheet music, or in songbooks or popular periodicals, also inspiring a pictorial tradition. Adapted from Washbourne’s famous paintings, Currier and Ives’s massed-produced lithographs were once almost as common as the skit itself.44 The folk drama was even incorporated into a stage play, Kit the Arkansas Traveler, which filled Northeastern theaters from 1869 to the turn of the century.45 And, of course, “The Arkansas Traveler” regularly appeared on records, beginning around the turn of the century with the cylinders of vaudevillians Len Spencer and Steve Porter (Spencer was particularly associated with the piece, rerecording it several times between 1900 and 1910). It was later routinely revisited by old-time artists, including (besides the Skillet Lickers) Earl Johnson and His Clodhoppers (OKeh 45156, 1927), Jilson Setters (J. W. Day) (Victor 21635, 1928), the Tennessee Ramblers (Brunswick 225, 1931), and J. D. Weaver (OKeh 45016, 1925). In the 1950s bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers released a version as “How Far to Little Rock” (King 5306, 1959), followed by “Still Trying to Get to Little Rock” (King 5629, 1962). Around the same time the skit entered the folksong revival through interpretations by the likes of Oscar Brand and the New Lost City Ramblers; as recently as 1993, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman introduced a whole new generation to the play through their award-winning album Not For Kids Only. Recordings of the tune alone are innumerable, the Skillet Lickers’ “New Arkansaw Traveller” (Columbia 15623-D, 1930) being but one.46 Even discounting their kindred depictions of fiddle-playing, whiskey’stilling hillbillies, “The Arkansas Traveler” is thus very much the direct ancestor of the “Corn Licker Still.” Blending old-time fiddling, folk humor, and pop culture castoffs, straddling diverse venues, media, and milieus, “The Traveler” and “Corn

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Licker Still” plays register opposite ends of a social—and musical—revolution, describing an agrarian society—and a musical tradition—in the throes of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization generally. They reveal how Southerners themselves straddled divergent social and musical worlds. Nor is music a mere ornament; rather, both “The Traveler” and the “Corn Licker” skits self-consciously cite old-time fiddling as the ultimate expression of this balancing act. I should say old-time fiddling records; for if the creators of “The Trav­ eler” could not quite foresee old-time records, they knew something like them was coming down the pike. And if Skillet Licker records are really about making Skillet Licker records, it is because their authors completed that trip, arriving at the studio with a regional dialect for saying just that. Oddly, published interpretations of “The Arkansas Traveler” tend to ignore fiddling’s crucial place in the play, focusing instead on its ties to broader trends in American folk humor, regional literature, and popular culture.47 A classic of the type, Gene Bluestein’s “ ‘The Arkansas Traveler’ and the Strategy of American Humor” locates the source of the folk play’s humor in the juxtaposition— “as old as the city mouse–country mouse fables of antiquity”—between “the city and civilization” and “the country and nature.” “The city slicker lost in the backwoods is prepared for the silly answers he receives to his questions. Indeed, it is exactly what he expects from a ‘dumb farmer.’ ” For his part, “the squatter knows that the traveler considers him a backwoods barbarian,” acting “the role of an ignorant rustic” and “taking advantage of the traveler’s gullibility as well as his prejudices.” “The series of puns and corny jokes,” Bluestein concludes, “is only humorous if the listener knows the farmer is turning the tables on his adversary,” adopting “a pose of innocence and naïveté that reverses the roles, making the city slicker the butt of the joke.”48 Overall, this view offers little cause for quarrel—just considerable room for qualification. The received wisdom that “The Arkansas Traveler” champions a rural outlook, or that its characters embody the antithesis of town and country does not quite fit the play’s particulars. Granted, Southerners have habitually engaged in this sort of self-deprecation—for instance, by representing themselves as hillbillies, crackers, skillet lickers, or the like—whether to gull outsiders or as an in-group joke. Certainly, too, the drama’s currency among country folk implies no little sympathy with a rural viewpoint. Yet even among rural folk much of the play’s humor derives from its hyperbolic description of the squatter’s appalling conduct and absolute squalor. And one wonders whether the urban performers and audiences playing so prominent a role in its tradition were themselves merely unwitting butts of this humor. Obviously the play sati-

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rizes the affectations and self-importance of city folk; but does this really represent unreflective arrogance? Or does it simply show that urbanites can also laugh at themselves, playing to stereotypes just like their country cousins? Seeking either a rural or urban viewpoint thus presents a quandary much like the traveler’s, leaving one stranded between town and country. And that is precisely the point. Ultimately, “The Arkansas Traveler” is less concerned with resolving this dilemma than with celebrating, even exacerbating it. Far from siding with either hillbilly or city slicker, it expresses their uneasy alliance. For most tradition bearers—performers and audiences alike—this may have been as much an internal as an external conflict. Even during the play’s heyday few Southerners were altogether cosmopolitan or completely provincial. From the beginning, the performers associated most closely with “The Traveler”—Sandy Faulkner, Joe Tasso, Mose Chase—themselves traveled constantly between backwoods and city. This is even truer of their latter-day counterparts—for instance, Clayton McMichen and Dan Hornsby, both city dwellers with decidedly uptown aspirations, neither very far removed from the rural milieu. Or consider Mac’s friend and foil, Gid Tanner, a lifelong rustic, self-avowedly downhome to the bone, yet himself no stranger to the streets of Atlanta. Like McMichen, Hornsby seems to have preferred uptown pop to swamp opera. He found some success there too, but routinely fell back on exploiting Southern folk music to earn an urban living. Jewish, classically trained but from the South, he very much fit the neither/nor pattern of citybilly artists like Carson Robison, Vernon Dalhart, or Bob Miller. Some said his nickname “Cheerful Dan” reflected his constant good humor in the face of career frustrations.49 McMichen appeared anything but cheerful about being bogged down, thirty years behind the times, with backwoodsmen like Tanner and their corny fiddling. That he himself excelled at the style suggests his disdain was somewhat overstated. It is not hard, then, to imagine how someone like Clayton McMichen identified with “The Arkansas Traveler,” a debate on the difficulty, indeed the near impossibility of traveling between town and country. How, for instance, might he hear the ubiquitous exchange about the road linking the squatter’s country shack to the big city, a road that in his estimation really goes nowhere?50 Other versions enumerate impediments of indefinite quantity and quality blocking the Traveler from his distant goal. How long will it take me to get to the next tavern? S qua t t e r : Well, you’ll not get thar at all, if you stand thar foolin’ with me all night! Tr av el e r :

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T r a v el e r : S q ua t t e r :

T r a v el e r :

Well, how far do you call it to the next tavern? I reckon it’s upwards of some distance!51

Can I stay all night? Yes, you can stay right where you air, out in the road.

S q ua t t e r :

T r a v el e r :

How do they cross the river ahead? The ducks all swim across.52

S q ua t t e r :

Or, Which is the way to the Red River Crossing? I’ve lived here twenty years, and never knowed it to have no crossin’. T r a v el e r : I mean is it very deep? S q ua t t e r : Water all the way to the bottom.53 T r a v el e r :

S q ua t t e r :

T r a v el e r :

How far is it to the forks in the road? I’ve been livin’ here nigh on twenty year, and no road ain’t forked yet.

S q ua t t e r :

Or, S q ua t t e r :

It don’t fork at all, but it splits up like the devil.

Sometimes the characters come not just to personify but literally to embody this gap between town and country. So the squatter estimates the distance to Little Rock as “three lengths of a fool,” telling the traveler, “if you don’t believe me lay down and measure it yourself.”54 Then again, he may acknowledge that he and his visitor are not as far apart as appearances suggest—even while keeping his distance. “Say, mister,” runs another of the traveler’s standard lines, “there’s not much difference between you and a fool, is there?” “No,” the squatter retorts, “just the fence and part of the road.” In most texts, the climactic rapprochement leads only to a fantastic description of the impassable road ahead. My friend, can’t you tell me about the road I’m to travel tomorrow? S q ua t t e r : Tomorrow! Stranger, you won’t get out’n these diggins for six weeks. But when you gits so you kin start, you see that big sloo over thar? Well, you have to git T r a v el e r [af t e r abo ut t wo h ou r s o f fidd l in g]:

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crost that; then you take the road up the bank, and in about a mile you’ll come to a two acre and a half corn-patch; the corn’s mitely in the weeds but you needn’t mind that, jist ride on. About a mile and a half, or two miles, from that you’ll come to the damndest swamp you ever struck in all your travels; it’s boggy enuff to mire a saddleblanket. Thar’s a fust-rate road about six feet under thar.55 Tr av el e r : How am I to get at it? S qua t t e r : You can’t get at it nary a time, till the weather stiffens down some. Well, about a mile beyant, you come to a place whar thur’s two roads. You kin take the right-hand ef you want to; you’ll foller it a mile or so, and you’ll find it’s run out. You’ll then have to come back and try the left; when you get about two miles on that, you may know you are wrong, fur thar ain’t any road thar. You’ll then think you are mighty lucky ef you kin find the way back to my house, whar you kin come and play that tune as long as you please.

Such images had a literal basis: traveling between town and country during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fraught with physical hardships and practical difficulties. But their fanciful, figurative qualities are unmistakable too. These exemplify the puns and corny jokes allowing the squatter to respond to the traveler’s questions while still refusing to answer. Nor does the play’s elasticity allow the insertion of just any gag. Even when some versions descend to “the level of silliness,”56 discarding the frame-story for a seemingly random string of hokum, the sense of this nonsense remains remarkably consistent. Infinitely variable, the play’s jokes are nonetheless all of a kind, consistently depicting an imperfect state of refinement—an imperfect accommodation, that is, of town and country—whether conceived as an absence or overabundance of that quality. In these figures, the backwoods and city, the downhome and refined, culture and nature become inseparable, but in ways foregrounding their inherent incompatibilities: hence the confusion of Little Rock, the state’s principal city, with a boulder in the wildwood; or the roof that admits the elements; or the swamp where even frogs need medical degrees to survive.57 Mac’s bullfrogs exemplify the most common signifier of this incomplete transition between culture and nature: an image conflating or confounding humans with animals (or vegetables or minerals). The squatter embodies his own lowly status with a posture more appropriate to frogs than humans—not unlike, say, facetiously equating the traveler with ducks at a ford. Another commonplace reminds us that potatoes are not animate beings: “How did your potatoes turn out here last year?” “They didn’t turn out at all; we dug ’em out.”

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The squatter’s defense of his straggling crop confuses nature’s ravages with human intent: the corn is yellow because he planted yellow corn; he will get only half a crop because he is sharecropping or “farming on the halves.”58 When the traveler comments, “fine lot of shoats [pigs] I see you got out here,” the squatter explains, “Yes, but fever and ague has been so bad around here they shook off their tails”—not quite their natural order. When he asks, “What do you raise here?” (meaning crops), the squatter replies, “I have been here nigh on forty years and the most I’ve raised has been children, chills, and the devil,” or “I never have raised anything but children and hound dogs.” These offspring are indeed a little like hound dogs, or at least a little less than human. Asked, “How many children have you?” the squatter responds, “Sal, roll a punkin under the bed and scair ’em out and we’ll see.” Told “you got two fine boys there,” he allows, “Yes, but we got to roll ’em in sand every night to keep them from slipping out of bed and got to run ’em down with the hounds to get their clothes on them.” “Two fine daughters I see you got,” the traveler adds. “Yes,” the squatter replies, “we got to soak ’em in spring water to make them hold cabbage and leaf, Ha! Ha!” Another exchange likens the traveler himself to a hound. Well, have you got any spirits here? We shore have. Sal seen a big white ’un down by the holler gum last night— skeered her damn near to death. [fiddles] T r a v el e r : You mistake my meaning. Have you any liquor? S q ua t t e r : Naw, we ain’t. The old hound got in the shanty, and lapped it all up out of the pot. [fiddles] T r a v el e r : I don’t mean pot-liquor, I mean corn liquor. Have you got any whiskey? S q ua t t e r : Naw. I drinked the last of it this mornin’. [fiddles]59 T r a v el e r :

S q ua t t e r :

Over the course of the play the traveler is in fact paired with various critters. “Old woman,” the squatter demands of his wife, “what’s this man goin’ to sleep on? It’s awful cold to-night.” “There’s a sheepskin under the bed and a goatskin in the closet,” she replies. “If he can’t sleep on that let him freeze and go to the devil.” “Why that old hound of ourn couldn’t sleep on that,” chides the squatter. “We’ll make a shake-down on the floor and ye [the traveler] kin kiver with the door,” he offers, the door being “the bed frame of a cart-body, now covered with bear-skins, and hung upon two wooden hinges.”60 But then, the traveler truly is a strange beast, a practitioner of the hightoned Presbyterian faith. When he asks the squatter’s wife, “Any [other] Presby-

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terians around here?” she responds, “There’s one right up there on the wall. My husband skins everything he shoots.”61 The conflict of high church and backwoods fundamentalism is thus another expression of rustic literal-mindedness, real or pretended. A Texas text tells of “a Presbyterian home missionary [who] came to a cabin and engaged a woman in conversation.” “Are there any Presbyterians in this country?” he asked. “Now, I jest couldn’t say about that,” replied the woman. “These woods is full of all kinds of varmints, but I ain’t paid much attention to ’em. My husband, he’s out with the dogs now. If he was here, he’d know. He keeps his hides on the south wall of the cabin. You might go around there and see if he’s got any Presbyterian hides nailed up. I know he’s got foxes and bars and painters, and I know if there’s any Presbyterians in this country, he’s caught some of ’em before now.” “My good woman, you seem to be in the dark.” “Yes, I been after my husband for months to saw me out a winder.” “You don’t understand. Have you any religious convictions?” “Naw, nor my ole man neither. He was tried once for hog-stealing but he warnt convicted.”62

There are stranger creatures than Presbyterians afoot, however, the squatter’s livestock being one case in point. Say uh, what’s become of that horse you used to drive? S qua t t e r : Well he got so thin that when the circus came to town I painted him and sold him for a giraffe. S qua t t e r ’s w i fe : How’s that for high? S qua t t e r : Aw haw haw haw. [fiddles] Tr av el e r : You don’t want to buy a good horse, do you? S qua t t e r : Well, how good? Tr av el e r : Goes ten miles without stopping. S qua t t e r : Guess not, it’s only seven miles to town, I’d have to walk back three every time I went there. Aw haw haw haw. [fiddles]63 Tr av el e r :

Say, uh, down the road I saw a horse with a broken leg. Now why don’t you kill him? People generally kill a horse with a broken leg. S qua t t e r : Well I swan, around here we generally kill a horse with a shotgun. Aw haw haw haw! [fiddles]64 Tr av el e r :

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I wish you’d head that steer. Head the devil! Look’s like he’s got a head on. T r a v el e r : I didn’t mean that. I meant turn him. S q ua t t e r : Looks to me like the hairy side’s out. T r a v el e r : I didn’t mean that, I meant stop him. S q ua t t e r : I’ve got no stopper for him. T r a v el e r :

S q ua t t e r :

Or, Well, speak to her, fool. S q ua t t e r : Good morning, cow.65 T r a v el e r :

Most of these jokes are commonplaces, but more personal touches reflect this same logic. McMichen and Hornsby’s “Original Arkansas Traveler” is unique for incorporating two well-known tall tales, “The Wonderful Hunt” and “The Strong Man.” The fit is perfect, because these similarly confuse culture and nature. In Mac’s squirrel-hunting yarn, a breathing tree cooperates with the hunter’s prey to do his job for him. In the shouldering-the-buckshot bit, a man with superhuman strength literally merges with nature: sinking into the earth, he’s then extracted like harvesting corn or quarrying stone.66 Often the squatter explicitly identifies himself with some natural feature: asked how long he has lived at his present abode he responds, “D’ye see that mountain [or that big tree] thar? Well, that was there when I come here,” or “Well it [the mountain] was a hell of a hole in the ground when I come here.”67 It is not only the squatter who is confused, of course. Out of his element, the civilized stranger practically is reduced to a fur-bearing critter. But what hope has he in an environment where cultivated learning is ignorance—and ignorance knowledge? “You’re not very smart, are you?” the traveler sneers in one well-traveled exchange. “Nope,” replies the squatter, “but then I ain’t lost.”68 Finally warming to the stranger, the squatter’s attempts at civility only reveal his complete lack thereof. When his guest recoils at the primitive table setting—“Haven’t you any knives or forks? Well, how do you do?”—he misinterprets it as a courtesy: “Toler’ble well, how are you, sir?”69 Or he inventories a silver service hardly suited to polite company. “Till,” he tells his son, “you drive ole Bose [the dog] out’n the bread tray, then climb up in the loft and git the rag that’s got the sugar tied in it. Dick, carry the gentleman’s hoss round under the shed, give him some fodder and corn, as much as he can eat.” “Dad, thar ain’t knives enuff for to sot the table,” Till objects. “Whar’s big butch, little butch, ole

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case, cob-handle, granny’s knife, and the one I handled yesterday?” the squatter demands. “That’s nuf to sot any gentleman’s table without you’ve lost um.” None of this befits a would-be innkeeper, of course. For his part, the traveler seems most perturbed by his host’s inability to satisfy his repeated requests for corn liquor. What do you do for a living here? Keep tavern and sell whisky. Tr av el e r : Well, I told you I wanted some whisky. S qua t t e r : Stranger, I bought a bar’l more’n a week ago. You see, me and Sal went shars. After we got it here, we only had a bit betweenst us, and Sal she didn’t want to use hern fust, nor me mine. You see I had a spiggin in one end, and she in t’other. So she takes a drink out’n my end, and pays me the bit for it; then I take one out’n hern, and give her’n the bit. Well, we’s getting long fust rate, till Tick, durned skulking skunk, he born a hole in the bottom to suck at, and the next time I went to buy a drink, they won’t none thar. Tr av el e r :

S qua t t e r :

Finally seated at the table, the guest is offered a quintessential store-bought commodity—then rebuked for accepting. “Will you have coffee for supper?” asks the squatter. “Yes, sir.” “I’ll be hanged if you do tho’, we don’t have nothin’ that way here, but grub hyson; and I reckon it’s might good with sweetnin’.” Grub hyson is wild sassafras tea—hardly the eminently civilized beverage urbanites expect. “Our supper is ready now,” runs another version, “won’t you have some with us?” “If you please.” “What will you take, coffee or tea?” “A cup of tea please.” “Sal,” the squatter bellows, “git the grubbin’ hoe, and go dig some sassafras, quick!”70 An Alabama text is the soul of fastidiousness: “Hey, Sal, get the churn cloth and clean this baby’s nose. I do despise nastiness.” In the Ozarks, the “youngun’s ass” needs wiping.71 The debate between town and country extends even to the verbal structure of the play’s corny jokes. Its most common trope is the pun, which exploits linguistic ambiguities to confuse distinct, even incompatible expressions and ideas. A dialogue within a dialogue, this interplay of double meanings brilliantly underscores the skit’s figurative confusion, comically blurring the traveler’s stiffly proper diction and the squatter’s exaggerated backwoods dialect. There is, of course, another conversation in the play. The squatter repeats the first part of the tune until he receives the answer he’s after: the tune’s second strain. Instantly he reverses his tack, answering the questions he previously

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The turn of the tune: traveller playing the “Arkansas Traveller.” Lithograph by Currier and Ives, 1870, after Edward Payson Washburn. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

dismissed, granting the traveler’s requests for corn liquor and food, offering the accommodations the traveler previously sought in vain. So the turn of the tune is also a turning of tables. In some versions, having discovered the traveler knows the second part, “the Squatter becomes interested and begins plying questions to the stranger: where he comes from, who he is, where he is going, where he got that tune, what is the name of it, who made, and everything of that kind; to all of which the stranger replies with as much imperturbability as is possible, and in the same style as he had been replied to when he came; that is, he gave answers as short as might be, and then ended by playing the tune, always and only the second part.”72 But even when the squatter’s questions remain entirely musical, and the traveler’s purely verbal, the symmetry is perfect: squatter and traveler face off, each questioning the other in turn, each entreating in vain until fiddle music orchestrates their harmonious cooperation. McMichen and Hornsby’s first side exemplifies this conventional sequence: traveler’s question (verbal query) : squatter’s rebuff (punning non-answer) :: squatter’s question (the first part of the tune) : traveler’s rebuff (silence). And fiddle music is the key. How, after all, does one reconcile the pat notion of a hillbilly besting a nosy foreigner with the plain fact that the traveler

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is himself a master old-time fiddler, in most cases acknowledged by the squatter as his superior?73 Dramatizing the ambivalent yet mutually dependent nature of urban/rural relations, “The Arkansas Traveler” actually reaches a much more interesting conclusion: if the relations of town and country are oftentimes discordant, old-time music is one place where the two are perfectly in tune. And if the conflicts—external or internal—experienced by displaced Southerners— urban or rural—can be debilitating, fiddling (like corn liquor) is one constant source of continuity and comfort. On various levels, “The Arkansas Traveler” rehearses the dealings of rural folk music and urban popular styles—the very process, that is, producing “The Arkansas Traveler.” City slickers were not the only ones who traveled, of course, as the tune’s own path between backwoods and city shows. And sometimes at the turn of the tune the squatter himself exclaims, “Gee, stranger, can you play the rest of that tune? I’ve been down to New Orleans and I heard that at the theatre, and I’ve been at work at it ever since I got back, trying to get the last part of it,” or “I heerd that tune in New Orleans five year’ ago, and I’ve been tryin’ to play it ever sense, but I kin only git the first part of it.”74 So the squatter knows the way to the city after all, having been there himself. But if he had only sat still, that big city theatre might have come to him. “Once upon a time when Arkansas was thinly populated,” one version begins, with towns wide apart and far between, there was a show or a circus in a certain town. After the show they tore down their tents and loaded tents and all their accoutrements on wagons to move to another town. At that time there were no railroads or trains. Then when all were ready to move the violinists or musicians got on their horses and rode ahead to find another town to pitch their tents, and one of those violinists got lost from the rest and rode out a byroad several miles. Then he heard a fiddle off from the road in a small clearing, where lived an old squatter who had been to the show that day and he was very busy playing part of a tune he had memorized.75

Naturally, the violinist teaches the fiddler the rest of the tune. But he must have come away with something himself too. “That’s all there is to the story,” another version concludes. “But it stands to reason that the traveler got out to the big road some way and told the folks what happened at the old-timer’s place. Because if he didn’t, how would every jackleg fiddler in the country know all about it?”76 How else indeed? For this is exactly how the piece spread. Little Rock’s Sandy Faulkner reportedly played it to great acclaim on one of his own trips

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down to New Orleans. Joe Tasso reputedly did the same as a traveling circus performer. Exceptionally well-remembered, they were hardly unique. Mose Case and his version also got out to the big road some way. Or do these accounts just project traditional fictions on the real world? At this distance, it is hard to say which; I would wager it was some of both. Anyway, the squatter’s fiddle is no mere stage prop, instead lending its own voice to the dialogue. That tale and tune share a title describing their travels suggests such a deeper connection. And the tune does read just like the text, a marvelous quality offhandedly noted in Ira Ford’s Traditional Music in America (1940). Concerning this “Arkansawer seated in front of his cabin home, playing the ‘coarse’ part of ‘Arkansaw Traveler,’ ” Ford explains: “nearly all old fiddle tunes have but two parts, designated by old-time fiddlers as the ‘coarse’ and the ‘fine.’ The coarse [or first] part represents that movement played principally on the D and G [or lowest] strings. The fine [or second] part is that which is played on the A and E [or highest] strings.”77 The etymology is obscure; maybe it reflects the similar connotations of coarse and low on the one hand and fine and high on the other, maybe the thickness of the strings (the lower strings being heavier and wound, the higher lighter and unwound). The distinction, however, is widely observed.78 It is also metaphorically consistent with the play’s downhome/uptown debate, which assigns the tune’s coarse and fine parts to, respectively, the squatter (representative of nature, the coarse, and the low) and the traveler (the embodiment of culture, the fine, and the high).79 So in the end the traveler secures food and lodging, the squatter the second part of his tune. The traveler is nourished (somewhat), the squatter enlightened (somewhat). Their reconciliation, however, is tentative at best. If the squatter recoups more than mere scorn for feeding the stranger, he is still just that: a squatter, despised and destitute, crouched at the bottom of the social order, incapable of completing the transition between nature and culture. And while the traveler satisfies his basic needs, he is still a city slicker stuck in the middle of nowhere, having lost his bearings and instincts, unable to complete the transition between culture and nature. Given their predicament, the best either can hope for is that the traveler will find his way back to the squatter’s, where they can fiddle together indefinitely, orchestrating a meaningful dialogue between coarse and fine in place of their previous cacophony. If the traveler can overcome the insurmountable obstacles ahead, the squatter concludes, “you’ll think you are mighty lucky ef you kin find your way back to my house, whar you kin come and play that tune as long as you please.”80 And framing both tale and tune, the cooperation of rural and urban musicians in their creation provides a real-world counterpoint to this duet. If “The

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Illicit distillation of liquors—Southern mode of making whisky—(sketched by A. W. Thompson). Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1867, page 773.

Arkansas Traveler” is a fanciful allegory on the commerce of town and country, it is accordingly also a parable on its own making. In October 1927 the Skillet Lickers convened in Atlanta to record the first of their fourteen-part “Corn Licker Still in Georgia” series. Its premise is simple: at home in the mountains, the boys are confronted with a corn surplus and cash deficit, an imbalance easily righted in Atlanta, where Prohibition has put canned corn at a premium. As Part 1 opens, the group is running off a batch of liquor when they are startled by “Slim,” an Atlanta bootlegger played by Lowe Stokes. Hey, hey, who’s that coming through the gap down there? Who is that fellow? You know him? [car horn] Ah it’s old Slim, isn’t it. Hello there, Slim! S t o k es : Hello, Mac. How are you? M cM i che n : Oh just fine, boy. When d’you get up? S t o k es : Just now got in, Mac. M cM i che n :

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Aw that’s fine business, that’s— S t o k es : Look like you got a bunch of good music around here. M cM i che n : Yeah, I got lots of it. Here’s a bunch of my boys I got hired around here, good string band too. Fine, yeah. S t o k es : What d’you get for your stuff, Mac? M cM i che n : Oh I’m getting—, you want the best, I guess? S t o k es : Best you got, yeah. M cM i che n : Well I can give you some sweet mash for two-and-a-half a gallon, I can give you sugar licker for two dollars, that is, if you got your own cans with you. S t o k es [ laughi ng ]: You a little high, ain’t you, Mac? M cM i che n : Uh high nothing, you fellows get twenty-two pints to a gallon down there in Atlanta and, uh, and want me to, uh, to give you my licker, don’t you? That’s a—, that’s a good un. S t o k es [ laughi ng ]: Pretty good for you, Mac. How about filling up—, filling me up. M cM i che n :

Mac’s crack on the middleman’s markup concludes the haggling, and some of the boys fill Slim’s cans while the rest fiddle “Black-Eyed Susie.” They’re interrupted by another city slicker, however, the Sheriff from Gainesville (Bill Brown). Getting the drop (“All right, you boys, stick ’em up there. We got you covered”), Brown grills McMichen on their operation before pronouncing, “Well, I’m sorry but we’ll have to bust you up and take you down to Gainesville.” But Mac saves the day, plying him with fiddling and corn. “Well, that is pretty good licker, I’ll admit that,” Brown concedes as the Skillet Lickers fiddle their first big hit, “Pass Around the Bottle” (Columbia 15074D, 1926). (“Well, they’re fiddling fools, all right, aren’t they?” he allows between gulps.) Laden with several cans of liquor, the Sheriff relents and exits. There ends the first two-sided “Corn Licker” release. Relieved after “a close shave” (“That guy like to carried us to jail!”), the band returns to fiddling and moonshining. But as they once more await Slim’s arrival, they are surprised by another unexpected visitor from the city. Standing lookout, McMichen sounds the alarm: “Whoop! That ain’t Slim, boys, that ain’t Slim at all! Hand me that rifle, over there, that’s that Bill Brown. Whoop! Stop there! Don’t come no closer!” McMichen now interrogates Brown at gunpoint, but the intruder allays his fears (“I haven’t got any gun,” he assures him), even coaxing a tune out of the band before stating his business. (“What’s your proposition?” demands McMichen. “Well, I’d like to have a little music first, then I can talk a whole lot better,” Brown counters.) Serenaded with “Little Brown Jug,” Brown suggests an alliance. The moonshiners jump at the chance,

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especially given Brown’s Atlanta connections. (“I know where we can place five hundred gallons next week,” he boasts to Mac as the boys fiddle “Liberty” and the second release, “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia—Parts 3 and 4,” concludes.) They put their plan into action in the next installment (“Parts 5 and 6”). But their new partner’s constant requests for fiddling interfere with the work, portending troubles to come. “Here, here. What’re you fellows gonna do, just play music all the time down here or you gonna work?!” McMichen demands when he finds his crew fiddling instead of minding the still. “Now Gid, you know we got work to do around here. What’s the matter with you anyhow?!” “Well, Brown, he wanted us to play a tune or two and we got it for him,” Tanner protests. “Brown, hell!” Mac exclaims in disgust, “Brown ain’t a-running this place, I’m running it myself and if you gonna work for me, I want you to work and put that lousy fiddle up. That’s all you’ve done since we took him in, is seesaw, see-saw on that lousy fiddle!” The group’s new go-between proves treacherous indeed. Headed for the city with a load of liquor, Brown betrays them to the authorities—and then schemes to bid on their confiscated car at auction, bringing “Part 6” to a close. As “Part 7” begins, the boys are carried down to “the Tower of Atlanta.” Here, they’re remanded first to the jailhouse “kangaroo court,” then brought before its legitimate counterpart for sentencing. (Their various tormentors are all portrayed by the ever-versatile Dan Hornsby.) Come on back, boys, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the gang. Fresh meat, boys! S t o k es : What does that mean here? M cM i che n : Just stick around, you’ll find out what it is. H o r nsb y [ n ow as an in mate]: Welcome to our jail, boys, you’re just in time for kangaroo court. N o r r is : I didn’t know they had court in jail. H o r nsb y : Well, we do and I’m the judge. The rest of you guys talk when you’re talked to. Order in the court! You’re charged with breaking in jail and you’re guilty. What’s your name? M cM i che n : Uh Clayton McMichen’s my name, sir. H o r nsb y : Well, Mac, you’re sentenced to keep all cigarette butts off the floor. M cM i che n : Thank you. H o r nsb y : What’s your name? S t o k es : Lowe Stokes is my name. H o r nsb y [ d el i v e r i ng t h e p ri s oner s to t h e At lant a jail]:

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I fine you one dollar and a package of cigarettes. Well, I ain’t got no darn cigarettes, I’ll give you a pack of this old chewing tobacco if you want to. H o r nsb y : Wise boy, ain’t you? For that crack give him a couple of licks. [sound of blows and howling from Stokes] I see all you boys have got instruments. Can you play ’em? S t o k es : Yes sir, we can play ’em a little bit. H o r nsb y : Let’s hear a little then. [band plays “There’s No Place Like Home,” concluding with all singing “There’s no place like home.”] M cM i che n : Man, don’t play that thing, that’s too sad. H o r nsb y : Well, if you boys feel that blue, we’ll suspend all sentences. Court dismissed. P uc k e t t : I’m never gonna make another drop of corn long as I live. S t o k es : I won’t never drink none. Ta n n e r : Goodbye booze. H o r nsb y [ r e v e rtin g to t h e ro l e o f S heri ff]: Come on, boys, the judge is waiting to see you all. M cM i che n : Um won’t be long now. H o r nsb y : Here they are, your honor. [then, in a stentorian tone] You’re charged with making and transporting licker over a public highway. Are you guilty? M cM i che n : I guess so. They caught us with the licker. H o r nsb y : Well, I’m going to be easy on you boys, going to give you twelve months and a thousand dollars each. M cM i che n : Man, I sure am glad you didn’t get hard with us. No r r i s : I thought he’s going to be easy with us boys. H o r nsb y : Twelve months and a thousand dollars each. Next case! [“Part 7” ends] H o r nsb y : S t o k es :

So the Skillet Lickers head to the chain gang and a year’s hard labor on the big road and rock pile. But once again their fiddling rescues them. Delighted by “that little tune they call ‘Peas and Cornbread’ ” (a.k.a. “Rocky Pallet”), the warden (Hornsby again) declares, “Well, you boys certainly can fiddle, it’s a shame you have to be in the gang. Hold on! Who’s this coming?” I’ve got an order from the sheriff to let these men go on parole. The judge says on account of so many letters coming in to him in regards to the character of these boys and how they miss the Skillet Lickers at all the big dances, and as it is their first offense, you can get out on probation provided you promise that you will not try to make or sell any more licker. What do you think about it? [expressions of relief from all]

H o r nsb y [ n ow in a ne w ro l e]:

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Take the chains off of these boys. Now you boys go home and remember, don’t make any more corn licker. N o r r is : Never no more. M cM i che n : Uh we’re through for good. N o r r is : I’m good—, done. M cM i che n : Say boys, I got a little snort up here hid in the stump that the warden gave me the other day, let’s go up there and drink it up and play “Pass Around the Bottle and We’ll All Take a Drink.” [“Part 8” ends] B r ow n :

Which they do. After another close shave, the group returns to the homeplace to rethink their enterprise. Well fellows, here we are back in the mountains and they sure do look good to me, makes me wanna hear a little music. Lowe, how about playing that little tune “Back Home in the Mountains”? Pa said he ain’t heard no tunes since we all been in the chain gang. S t o k es : All right, let’s go. [band plays “Flatwoods”] S t o k es : Well boys, this old mountain air sure do feel good to me after being in the chain gang so long. Tan n e r : Make me feel like drinking some more good old corn licker. P uck e t t : You remember what that man said about making licker, don’t you? M cM i che n : Yeah, I remember what he said about making licker all right, but we got about five or six hundred bushels of corn out yonder in the crib that’s going to ruin if we don’t do something with it and it’s a shame to let it lay out there and rot. Tan n e r : Oh boy, let’s make some more good old corn whiskey out of it. M cM i che n : That’s what I say, let’s make about five or six hundred gallons for our own use—and course if somebody comes down to buy some, we can’t help that, you know. [“Part 9”] M cM i che n :

The band agrees, and after they “play another little piece,” Mac hatches his plan. I tell you fellows, I’ve thought this thing out from every angle and our trouble is, is always taking somebody in that we don’t know something about, and from now on, I’m gonna be ruler of the roost around here and we gonna make and sell our licker personal from now on. (Yeah, that’s fine! That’s fine, boy!) S t o k es : I don’t think there’s no use to try to farm no how as long as Prohibition’s in effect. M cM i che n :

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What’s the use in trying to sell corn for two dollars a bushel in the ear when you can get twenty dollars for a can? M cM i che n : That’s what I think about it. My idea is just go down to Atlanta there to start and running us a chicken house, and sell fried chicken, have good old-fashioned dance music, and probably handle a little stuff on the side and we can clean up that a-way. [“Part 9”] P uc k e t t :

So Mac eliminates the middleman and moves the operation to Atlanta, setting up the Hen Cackle Inn. Or as its sign announces “ ‘A Home of Good Fried Chicken, Old-Fashioned Dance Music,’ and that big question mark up there, all of you know what that mean, don’t you?” The Hen Cackle is an immediate success, the mayor himself reserving a table for the opening. Too great a success: as the first night crowd grows to unmanageable proportions, a brawl erupts, a gasoline lantern spills, and the building burns. Once again, the band is left with only their fiddles and the homestead in the mountains. “Well, one good thing about it,” concludes Mac. “We’ve still got the farm left, and got the pot, cap, and condenser up there and we go up there and be careful we can make seventy-five or a hundred gallon to the acre.” Here ends “Part 10.” Disheartened, the Skillet Lickers pitch a party back at McMichen’s (“Part 11 and 12”). Inevitably, they are interrupted by a city slicker seeking room and board; with a perverse twist, his taste for corny fiddling and corn liquor once more helps them elude the law. [rapping on the door] M cM i che n [ d runken l y]:

Wait a minute, wait, let’s see who’s—, well, what do you

want?! Well, I’m a lightning rod salesman and I’s coming up the road and saw the light, thought I could spend the night here. M cM i che n : Well, we don’t need no lightning rod, and we ain’t got no extra beds neither so, uh, well, come on in though. H o r nsb y : Thanks very much. Say, I heard you fellows playing those fiddles coming up the road; you sure can play ’em. How about playing me a tune? M cM i che n : All right, give him a little tune, Lowe. S t o k es : We’ll get him a little tune. [band plays “Chinese Breakdown”] H o r nsb y : Well that’s fine. When the Chief sent me up here, he didn’t tell me you could fiddle like that. M cM i che n [ sudden l y s ober]: The Chief  ?! Boys, here this thing that you’re looking at’s a revenue officer, we ought to kill him. H o r nsb y :

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I think so too. Let me have a sock at him, Mac, will you. Now buddy, you’ve come all the way up here now and—, was sent up here, and we wasn’t a-bothering you at all, a-hunting trouble and licker and now you’ve found it and you gonna drink a whole quart without stopping. H o r nsb y : Say, I can’t drink a quart of licker! M cM i che n : Well, you gonna drink this one whether you can or not. S t o k es : Give him that old licker over there, that old scorched licker out of the white bottle, don’t give him that charred licker. [gulping noises] H o r nsb y : Say, that’s all I can drink of that stuff! M cM i che n : Well, we usually take a shot at a fellow like you but I’m gonna give you a chance and I’m gonna see just how fast you can hotfoot it down the road now. H o r nsb y : I’m gone, fellows! P uck e t t : Man, if that fellow keeps a-running that way I’ll bet he’ll be in Atlanta in two hours. M cM i che n : Well, I think we’ll have better luck from now on, boys. [“Part 12” ends] S t o k es :

M cM i che n :

And the Skillet Lickers’ luck does improve in the next and final installment (“Part 13 and 14”). Climbing the mountain, another stranger (Dan Hornsby, of course) introduces himself to Mac: “My name’s Tom Sly and I run a night club in the city. A friend of yours by the name of Dorsey told me you could fix me up with some good licker [an inside joke: Dorsey was a pseudonym that Hornsby sometimes used on records]. I’m ready to take your full supply at your own price if it’s agreeable,” Sly tells Mac, assuring him, “don’t worry about getting caught, because I’ve got plenty of protection.” “By the way,” he adds, “what are all these instruments for? Do you fellows play ’em?” “I should say we do, brother!” Mac confirms. “Well, how about a little tune?” “Fine!” McMichen agrees. “All right boys, let’s give him a little tune, and remember, brother, our fiddling is just exactly like our licker—high, wide, and handsome.” This time their trust is well placed. Paid off for delivering their load, McMichen parlays their $300 earnings into a small fortune at Sly’s backroom roulette table. “You might as well go home,” Sly tells them, “the bank’s busted.” “Well doggone, I hate that,” consoles Mac. “Well boys, we got more money than we ever had in our lives, and Gid, here’s where you can get your sandwich breaks in.” “Oh yes sir, I’m hungry!” Tanner pants. “I want to have some of them sandwiches that cost five dollars apiece!” “I don’t blame you,” Mac agrees, “and we can get ma and the kids and all of us some new shoes and stockings too.” “Yeah boy!” adds Stokes. “Well, see you again,” bids Mac as the fourteenth and final side fades out.

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So ends the “Corn Licker Still in Georgia” saga. The year was 1930. On record, the Skillet Lickers were headed back to the mountains with “more money than [they’d] ever had in [their] lives.” For the record, the banks were indeed busted, the deepening Depression squeezing Southern farmers who had never dreamed things could get worse. It would soon also end the so-called Golden Age of old-time records—and with it the original Skillet Lickers. There are plainly many resemblances between “The Arkansas Traveler” and “A Corn Licker Still.” Indeed, this is true not just of the “Corn Licker” skits but of all the Skillet Lickers’ recorded dramas. Some of the most obvious similarities—the theme of the city slicker in the country, the blend of old-time fiddling and cornball humor—might not alone establish a direct connection. Other more particular touches do. And some of the most important parallels are not immediately obvious at all. That band members also recorded two separate versions of the folk play certainly encourages the argument for some connection. It is, of course, another thing to argue that the Skillet Licker plays can only be understood as updated versions of “The Arkansas Traveler,” that they selfconsciously adapt its take on old-time fiddling as the very soul of the South to the age of the phonograph. That is exactly what I intend to argue. Consider the theme of the city slicker in the mountains or its corollary, the hillbilly in the city, the most common premises for the Skillet Licker plays. Of their twenty two-part skits, five revolve around the first motif, eight the latter.81 They alternate in the final “Corn Licker” installment (“Parts 13 and 14”), the first side featuring a visit to the mountains by Atlanta’s Tom Sly, the reverse a trip to Sly’s place in Atlanta. In three other items—“Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store,” “Prosperity and Politics,” and “Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers”—the hillbillies and city slickers meet in the middle—or rather at the middleman’s establishment, the general store linking town and country. (In “Prosperity and Politics” Tanner and Hornsby also take time to discuss Gid’s most recent trip to Atlanta.) Only the three re-creations of rural subsistence activities—“Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain,” “Hog Killing Day,” and “A Bee Hunt on Hill for Sartin Creek”—lack one or the other theme, but share other significant features with those that include them. The resemblances to “The Traveler” run deeper. The most common scene in the Skillet Licker plays is a battle of wits between city slicker and hick, couched in the style of slippery repartee found in “The Traveler.” Employing the same confused imagery, the skits sometimes employ the very same images. In “Prohibition—Yes or No” the boys are visited by an urban temperance crusader,

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played by Hornsby. Stumped by Mac’s dissembling, Hornsby finally blurts, “I can tell right now that you’re not a prohibitionist.” “A what?!” McMichen demands. A prohibitionist! Are there any prohibitionists in this part of the country? M cM i che n : Prohibitionists? Prohibitionists? Let me see. What is a prohibitionist, anyhow? B e r t La y n e : Doggoned if I know. M cM i che n : I never heard tell of a prohibitionist in my life, mister, and I do more hunting and trapping in this neighborhood than anybody and I’ve got all my last year’s catch down there on the barn: if you can find a prohibitionist among ’em, I’d sure be glad to see it. H o r nsb y :

This motif does not appear in the recordings of “The Arkansas Traveler” play by either McMichen and Hornsby or Tanner and Puckett. Clearly they were better acquainted with its tradition than even their own renditions reveal. “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain—Parts 1 and 2” is likewise instructive. The first side faithfully re-creates a busking at “Hopkins’ General Store,” where the Skillet Lickers arrive tired and hungry, announced by the clattering of McMichen’s “old Ford.” “Look up there, what a crowd, boys,” Tanner declares as they pull up to the store, “let’s make some music here and take a collection—get enough to get our dinner I ’spect!” The band proceeds to do just that, passing the hat to square up the bill on a feast of store-bought delicacies (canned peaches, pork and beans, baloney, cheese and crackers, sardines). Side two opens with the approach of a city slicker in a “new model Chevrolet Six.” (Dan Hornsby plays the storekeeper Hopkins; Jim, the city fellow, probably is played by Hugh Cross.) Well, well, well. Say, look at that guy coming down the road up yonder, he’s just the devil a-beating tan bark. I bet he’s making ninety mile an hour. What kind of car is that?! Oscar F o r d : Well boys, I bet you my drink out of that half a gallon fruit jar that it’s one of these new model Chevrolet Sixes. Nothing else could make that speed on these roads. H o r nsb y : Well fellows, here’s Jim the soap salesman, and a doggoned good one too. I been expecting him to come by. How are you, Jim? J im : Fine, thanks. Hello, boys! (Hello!) Hello, Jeremiah, how’ve you been? H o r nsb y : Oh, pretty fair. M cM i che n :

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That’s great. Anything new happen since I was here last month? Well, I made a little change in my store. I got in granulated sugar and kerosene oil anytime the fellows want it, and my stock’s changed just a little bit, got a new litter of pigs by that old sow of mine and that old bald-faced yearling had a calf. But the hardest luck I’ve had is when that gal of mine married that fellow that eat so much, and I got another mouth to feed! [laughter] M cM i che n : Say, what kind of soap you selling, neighbor? J im : Every kind. Soft soap and hard soap and just plain soap. M cM i che n : Any good? J im : I’ll say so! It’s guaranteed to clean anything but a dirty character! [laughter] M cM i che n : Aw, you would get a break like that! Well, sorry but you about two days late. We always take our bath on Saturday whether we need it or not. [laughter] G i d : Doggoned if it ain’t mighty early for boll weevil but look out there, Lowe, there’s one there fixing to crawl in your fiddle! S t o k es [ so u n d of bl o w]: I’ll kill that son-of-a-gun. H o r nsb y : Well I tell you, fellows, a boll weevil ain’t near as crazy as you think he is, and I came down to open up the store this morning, there’s one over there on my ledger with a pencil and paper taking down the names and addresses of everybody that contracted for cotton seed and guano [a common fertilizer] for this fall’s crop! [laughter] M cM i che n : Pretty clever, pretty clever. Well, Lowe, this salesman seems to be a good fellow, let’s play him that little tune of ours “Soap Suds Over the Fence.” S t o k es : All right, Riley, let’s go! (band plays) M cM i che n : You don’t get music like that in town, brother! J im : No sir! M cM i che n : What kind of boat’s that you got setting out there? J im : That’s the fastest car in this county. M cM i che n : Yeah? How fast does it run? J im : Well it’ll run about sixty miles an hour in second speed. M cM i che n : That ain’t nothing. You see that old Brahma bull over there? J im : Yes sir. M cM i che n : Other day a yellow jacket stung him on the hind leg and he got a-started around that haystack and run so doggoned fast, he gots his tail in his mouth and like to choked hisself to death before we could stop him! [laughter] J im : That’s a good one. Say, uh, did you hear anything about the, uh, fellow up in Knoxville that had trouble with his wife? M cM i che n : Don’t believe I did, no sir. J im :

H o r nsb y :

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Well, he went down to the parson and asked him what he should do about it and the parson said, “All you’ve gotta do is whip her with the word of God.” M cM i che n : Yeah. J im : And the next morning they got him in jail for killing her. So the parson came down to see him and said, “What happened?” and he said, “I did just as you told me to.” Said, “I put the old family Bible in a gunny sack and beat her over the head.” [laughter] S t o k es : Riley, give him a drink out of your bottle! P uck e t t : All right. H o r nsb y : I tell you, Jim, you better give me about a hundred bars of that yellow soap. J im : All right, I’ll do that and I guess I better be running along because I got to get down to Bear Wallow before dark. H o r nsb y : Say, Mac, you better tell him about those roads down that a-way. M cM i che n : Yeah brother, you ain’t traveled over no crooked roads, say, you know just the other night I drove down there in that old Ford of mine and it’s so doggoned crookeded [sic] I run my battery down blowing at my own taillight! [laughter] H o r nsb y : Well so long, Jim. J im : Goodbye, boys! (Goodbye!) M cM i che n : A good fellow at that, ain’t he, Jeremiah? J im :

All of this vividly recalls “The Arkansas Traveler.” The convoluted bull with automotive capabilities is (like Mac’s “tired old Ford”) a paradox befitting the folk play. The same holds for the boll-weevil-as-furnishing-merchant (another obvious confusion of culture and nature); the ignoramus who takes the pastor’s comments too literally, with calamitous results (the gist of some hides-on-thebarn variants); and the concluding description of the impossible road awaiting the city visitor (identical to the end of “The Traveler”).82 Any of the Skillet Licker plays could make the point. Similar anomalies fill “Kickapoo Medicine Show”: for example, catgut guitar strings called kitten bowels in polite company; store-bought cotton bloomers infested with boll weevils; a doctor fit for horses but not for men; stockings hardly suited to Christmas in town. In fact, over these two-score 78 r.p.m. sides the Skillet Lickers actually expanded the folk play’s vocabulary, depicting town and country not just in one isolated confrontation, but each on its own terms, and in greater detail. The rural milieu emerges most fully in “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain,” “Hog Killing Day,” and “A Bee Hunt on Hill for Sartin Creek.” Other sides fill out the picture. Endowed with natural bounty, the mountains are still a fickle provider, bare subsistence being a natural by-product of self-sufficiency. This is literally a land of milk and honey. (“Boy, honey sure is good with hot biscuits!”

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exults Puckett as the boys head for a bee tree “down in the woods.” “Yeah a little butter mixed in with it, it’s fine,” adds Tanner.) But cows go dry (“Kickapoo Medicine Show”) and honey bees sting (during their bee hunt, Tanner is “swarmed half to death,” exiting the woods “blowed plumb up there, look like [he] been froze and spewed up”). Country folk butcher their own livestock, but only in season, when “it’s awful cold and frosty around here,” “the wind’s in the right place,” and the animals are ready, “kidneys nearly covered up with fat!” Hopefully that day arrives before the fresh meat “give out” (as it nearly has on “Hog Killing Day”). Hillbillies grow “cotton and corn and taters” (“Boy, you got an eye for business raising something to eat, hadn’t you?” McMichen approvingly tells Tanner on “Nancy Rollin”) and hunt wild game (“Whoo I do love possum and taters!” Gid exclaims, as he leads the others on a “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain”). But possums share their habitat with skunks (again, Tanner is the victim); a surplus of corn may just rot in the crib (“Corn Licker Still—Part 9”); the tenant’s share of the cotton hardly ever covers his furnishing bill (there’s no better metaphor than that bookkeeping boll weevil); and the seasonal cycle inevitably includes lean times (the band reaches Hopkins’s store on the verge of starvation, not having eaten “since yesterday morning”). The kin group is both an economic engine and social safety net, a marked contrast to the city’s Darwinian capitalism. Then again, large families are also a burden, more hands to help being more mouths to feed. (As Jeremiah Hopkins complains, since his daughter married “that fellow that eat so much,” he is struggling to fatten more than his stock.) Inevitably the delicate balance of nature, its overabundance and undersupply, drives hill folk to the city, or city folk to the mountains, which they presume to improve—or scheme to exploit. Such meddlesome watchdogs and opportunistic parasites—some officially empowered, others self-appointed—are urban hallmarks. The strong-arm interrogation, official inquisition, and sanctimonious catechism are their answer to the cracker’s cornball dissembling. Similar are the commercial transaction and its conversational gambits: the haggle, the pitch, the swindle or con. Big-city life only accelerates and intensifies the rural boom-and-bust cycle, upping the stakes considerably. Going without supper or a bed for the night is one thing; going broke or to jail is another. The roulette wheel in Tom Sly’s backroom sums up this urban milieu. So does the carnival midway on “A Day at the County Fair,” down where “everything look bright” and there is no shortage of opportunities to “waste money on foolishness”: ball-throwing and bell-ringing contests, shell games, and girlie shows. But losing one’s dime to a slick-talking carney barker is nothing next to being taken

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by a corrupt cop, a double-dealing bootlegger, a jailhouse bully, or a pitiless judge. These characters are increasingly common even in the mountains, where the wayward traveler of earlier years has swelled to a parade. Most of these city slickers are not merely passing through, either. Rather, they are making their marks and setting down stakes, the harbingers of irreversible urban expansion: census takers and revenue agents; merchants and traveling salesmen; prohibitionists and peace officers; barkeepers and bootlegging racketeers. Against all odds, even the Republican party feels emboldened to campaign in these opposition strongholds—with predictable results. “You know, since the [1932 presidential] election [in which Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated his Republican rival] Republicans been awful scarce down South,” remarks Hornsby as the reunited Skillet Lickers discuss “Prosperity and Politics” (1934). The other day a fellow drove up to Old Man Johnson’s cabin down on Goose Creek. You know Old Man Johnson, don’t you, fellows? P uck e t t : Yeah! Tan n e r : Yeah sure do. He’s trapping too! H o r nsb y : Yeah you know, he don’t beat the devil around the stump at all; he just tells you what he thinks. Fellow says, “Can I find a Republican around here anywhere?” Old Man Johnson said, “I’ve been living in these mountains about all my life and I’ve done a right smart of hunting and trapping and got lots of hides tacked up on the side of the barn, but if I ever killed one of them animals I don’t know nothing about, but you sure welcome to go out there and see if you can find one anyway.” H o r nsb y :

The passage perfectly illustrates how the Skillet Lickers adapted older idioms to new realities. So do their several portrayals of furnishing stores, the postbellum counterparts of the primitive crossroads commissary caricatured in “The Arkansas Traveler.” Between the 1860s and World War II the general store emerged as the most important social and economic institution in the rural South, a tangible symbol of its complete transformation. The immediate cause was the enactment of crop lien laws, allowing merchants to advance goods and services with crops as security. This became the basis of the sharecropping system, intended to restore the region’s fortunes—and especially King Cotton—as production passed from large planters and slave labor to cash-poor small farmers and landless tenants. That the system served to indenture these unskilled workers (both black and

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white) and bind (or rather bond) them to the land was arguably an unintended consequence. It was a consequence nonetheless. Small wonder that the general store loomed so large, especially compared to its antebellum counterparts. (Though exaggerated, the squatter’s poorly stocked frontier road stop is not wholly unrealistic.) Rural communities now sprang up around stores, as they previously had around courthouses, churches, crossroads, ports, or ferries. The chief attraction was working capital (mainly food and farming supplies advanced against crops), but their all-purpose character is captured by the sign at Sand Mountain, advertising “Jeremiah Hopkins’s General Store—Groceries, Talcum Powders, Hamstrings, and Ford Parts.” If Hopkins’s store was like the real ones, it also served as doctor’s office, hospital, and pharmacy: after food, patent medicines tended to be the bestselling items. His under-the-counter traffic in corn liquor reflected another common arrangement. The store was also where people gathered to exchange news and gossip, whittle and yarn, chew, dip, and drink, pitch horseshoes and play checkers—and make music. Fraternal groups, political organizations, and women’s auxiliaries met there. In the absence of church houses, so did worshipers. The major link to the outside world, the store was the post office, freight depot, and gas station. It often housed the community’s only telephone. With goods from Northern and Western manufacturers, traveling salesmen like Jim brought news and new ideas. The store also occupied a peculiar place in the rural South’s biracial class system. Open to all, it was one of the few settings where blacks and whites, or poor whites and gentry, interacted on relatively familiar terms—or at all. The band’s cordial bull session with “Judge Bailey” in Ted Hawkins’s store (“Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers”) is a far cry from the courtroom scene in “A Corn Licker Still.”83 And, of course, after 1920 the general store was essential to the production and consumption of old-time records. Besides stocking records and record players, merchants often steered record companies to local talent, or local talent to labels. In fact, most early A&R men began as storekeepers, and it is at Ted Hawkins’s store that Gid receives the long-awaited letter from “the Victor people” inviting the Skillet Lickers “to ’cord some more graphophone records.” Between them, “Prosperity and Politics,” “Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers,” and “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain” touch on virtually all of these factors, from crop liens and postal service to checker games, whittling, cracker-barrel philosophy—and the band’s records. This also explains why the furnishing merchant suddenly acquired such symbolic power. Emerging as a crucial intermediary between raw and refined,

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General store, Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina. November 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

producers and consumers, local economies and world markets, he was likely also the local landlord, gin owner, miller, smithy, banker, postmaster, depot agent, constable, political boss, and more. More than anyone, storekeepers personified the altered relations of town and country, coarse and fine, low and high. In the nineteenth century the wayward traveler could stand for the urban crowd, the squatter for the backwoods milieu. The turn-of-the-century furnishing merchant was at once both and neither, neither quite of the country nor wholly of the town. He had become, in a word, the middleman, who himself produces nothing but access, from farm to market, market to farm, but at a considerable markup, literally playing both ends against the middle. When one bootlegger complains, “You a little high, ain’t you, Mac?” McMichen comes straight to the point: “High nothing, you fellows get twenty-two pints to a gallon down there in Atlanta and, uh, and want me to, uh, to give you my licker, don’t you?” And the mountains are now infested with this kind of parasite. It is not just that the lone traveler has swelled to a flood, or that his kind are now permanent

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fixtures. Unlike the isolated straggler seeking a night’s food and lodging just for himself, these city slickers are middlemen, almost to a person. Nor were the Skillet Lickers alone in adapting “The Arkansas Traveler” figurative style to these new realities. Some of the era’s best-known creations speak the same language. A bookkeeping boll weevil would not be out of place in “The Arkansas Traveler,” but he might also find a home in “The Ballad of the Boll Weevil” (Laws I 17). Originating soon after the pest entered the U.S. from Mexico around the turn of the century, a staple in oral tradition and on old-time records, this item likens the weevil to the human parasites similarly afflicting sharecroppers—chief among them the merchant. Its imagery—“the merchant got half the cotton, / The boll weevil got the rest, / Didn’t leave the farmer’s wife but one old cotton dress, / And it’s full of holes, it’s full of holes”84—very much anticipates the Skillet Lickers’ approach: recall Norris’s joke about his girl being tickled to death by the boll weevils in her cotton bloomers (“Kickapoo Medicine Show”). Then there’s “ ’Leven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat” by Memphis native Bob Miller, one of the most popular compositions of the old-time era, successfully recorded repeatedly by Miller and others. It even entered oral tradition. But then, Miller probably based his title on an older folksong, merely reformatted for records.85 Its hook (“eleven cent cotton and forty cent meat”) boils the lopsided ratio of raw-and-refined down to its essence, prompting a string of incongruities similarly confusing high and low, coarse and fine, homegrown and store-bought: “Now funny how prices make such a range, / The poor old farmer is always shortchanged, / Forty cent meat and eleven cent cotton, / Makes a fellow mad when he’s treated so rotten. / We fatten up our hogs, take ’em into town, / All we get is six cents a pound, / Very next day, we buy it right back, / At forty cents a pound in a paper sack.” “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia” restates the paradox thus: “What’s the use in trying to sell corn for two dollars a bushel in the ear when you can get twenty dollars for a can?” Even then it is the middleman who profits, managing twenty-two pints retail for every gallon (eight pints) of wholesale canned corn. Of course, the “Corn Licker” skits are not just about corn, any more than “ ’Leven Cent Cotton” is just about cotton. Rather, these staples were merely the most tangible tokens of a larger dilemma, a figurative universe in which cotton and corn were interchangeable. The Skillet Lickers see no reason not to go to bootlegging when corn sells for two dollars in a bushel but twenty in a can. On “Price of Cotton Blues” (Victor 23507, 1930) a near neighbor, Tennessean Austin Allen, quips, “You know, I guess I’ll go to bootlegging, brother, I

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can’t raise cotton. Can’t get nothing for it when you raise it.” If the ties between cheap cotton and canned corn now seem obscure, keep in mind that four cent cotton was at the time another name for moonshine. It was also the title of a fiddle song on the subject, recorded and released by both the Skillet Lickers (“Four Cent Cotton,” Columbia 15746, 1931) and Lowe Stokes and His Pot Lickers (“Four Cent Cotton,” Brunswick 549, 1930). As Puckett sings on the Skillet Licker side: Going down the road, whooping and a-hollering, I been drunk on four cent cotton. Woke up this morning feeling kind of rotten, I been drunk on four cent cotton. Times is getting hard, they’re getting kind of rotten, Everybody’s selling four cent cotton. In the South, obscenely low crop prices naturally suggested the disproportionate rewards of illegal ’stilling.86 Although cotton figures in the Skillet Lickers plays, for them, corn best distills this raw/refined paradox. When a temperance crusader (Hornsby) appears, intending “to make a talk on Prohibition and the evils of strong drink,” he receives a lecture instead. “There’s no use talking, brother,” Mac tells him, “you can’t prohibit nothing from doing something it don’t want to, even a cow. You put her in a pasture next to a field of corn, she’ll get into that field of corn in spite of the dickens.” “If you use the right tactics you can control her,” suggests Hornsby. “I don’t know about the right tactics,” McMichen responds, contrasting natural essences and epidermal legalities in the now familiar fashion: “We’ve used everything from a hickory maul to a pole axe and she still gets in the corn.” Or as he also tells Hornsby, “You slick-britches politicians is always getting up some kind of new-fangle to make life more miserable than what it is, and you call that pro-high-bition law a thing for the good of mankind, just taking all his privileges away. I don’t call that very good.” Mac also suspects that, under the skin, the prohibitionist is more like his cow than he’ll admit: “you might’ve voted the dry ticket all your life,” he tells him, “but from the looks of your nose, you’ve drank on the wet ticket all your life,” underscoring the point by comparing the prohibitionist’s hide to the pelts on the barn (“Prohibition —Yes or No”).

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Such officious hypocrites crowd the plays, typically exposed by their affinity for corn liquor. Sheriffs and revenuers can always be bribed with booze (“Corn Licker Still—Part 2,” “Taking the Census”). The mayor of Atlanta frequents speakeasies, as do his police (“Corn Licker Still—Part 10,” “Night in a Blind Tiger”). Convicted of bootlegging, the Skillet Lickers are remanded to a whiskey-guzzling warden (“Corn Licker Still—Parts 7 and 8”), who then supplies them with illegal corn. (“Say, boys,” McMichen announces as they’re released, “I got a little snort hid up here in the stump that the warden gave me the other day, let’s go up there and drink it up and play ‘Pass Around the Bottle and We’ll All Take a Drink.’ ”) Small wonder the skits dwell on the gulf between true justice and legal technicalities. When Puckett laments, “there’s no justice. We all go out and try to sell our licker and make an honest living, look like some kind of hard luck happens to us some way,” McMichen doesn’t mince words. “Boy,” he declares, “I ain’t a-hunting justice myself. This bunch had justice we be all out yonder in the federal penitentiary doing ninety-nine years” (“Corn Licker Still—Part 11”). Even when they are intended to help not hinder rural folk, manmade laws are simply incompatible with the natural order, producing ridiculous outcomes. “Prosperity and Politics” ostensibly celebrates New Deal policies benefiting the farmer. “Well gang, we sure are getting action in Washington nowadays,” Dan Hornsby declares. “You know, I was about to lose my place with that mortgage I had on it and I was worried to death, but I heard Mr. Roosevelt say on the radio that we didn’t have to worry if anybody tried to take our home away, why, he’d give us some help so I called him up on the telephone about it.” “He didn’t come down and see you, did he?” Tanner marvels. “No,” replies Hornsby, “he didn’t come down himself but he sent one of the men over to see me and he figured out a way and I still got my farm too!”87 But taken to their (il)logical conclusions, such programs are wholly unnatural. “Well Riley, how’s your cotton this year, you gonna get a good crop?” Hornsby asks. Yeah, I guess I will, Tom, I plowed it all up. You plowed it up?! Well boy, that don’t sound good to me, that looks crazy, you lost all the time you used in planting it and the money you spent for the seeds. R i le y : Time and money, why I didn’t lose anything, the government paid me for plowing it up, that’s the help they’re giving to the farmers now. H o r nsb y : Well that’s what I call helping things along, you know, we used to get a lot of promises but we never did get much help. R i le y :

H o r nsb y :

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Let me tell you, you know that a man over there close to me, he plowed up all of his cotton and part of his corn, went to plow up his pea vines. You know, I had to go over there and stop him, he’s fixing to kill his mules. Thought all this farming’s done over with, trying to get all the money from the government that he could. [laughter] H o r nsb y : You know, Gid, some fellows ain’t got no sense nohow; no matter how much they get, they just wanna be a hog and get all of it. Tan n e r :

Prohibition also acted as a backhanded crop subsidy—as Stokes pronounces, “I don’t see no use to try to farm nohow as long as Prohibition is in effect”—though for Southerners corn liquor had always been a legitimate byproduct of farming. The premium added by the Volstead Act hardly compensated for its object of “taking all [mankind’s] privileges away.” Informed by Hornsby “we’ve had Prohibition for the last fifteen years,” McMichen retorts, “Well we ain’t never heard nothing about it up here on this mountain. We been making and selling licker for the last sixty years and we expect to continue doing the same thing for the next sixty, only in a double capacity and drinking four times as much” (“Prohibition—Yes or No”). The tradition was older than that, of course. Pot stills—and the belief they ranked among the Rights of Man—came to the United States with Mac’s Irish ancestors. Beginning with the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), Southerners treated as tyranny any effort to tax, regulate, or prohibit their operation. Unlike Prohibition-era gangsters, they regarded their battles with “revenuers” as just another rural/urban conflict pitting unalienable birthrights against bureaucratic meddling. Kentucky moonshiner and musician Jim Couch spoke for many when he told Leonard Roberts, “I’s a law-abiding man in ever’thing else, [but I] had a fambly, had to eat and pay taxes.”88 Not that city slickers wholly opposed moonshine: like corny fiddling, corn in the can could even reconcile town and country. The thirsty traveler may openly disparage the sharecropper’s straggling corn on the ear and the lowly status it confers. (“Your corn looks awful yellow to me,” he scoffs when denied whiskey, “it doesn’t look like you’ll get but half a crop.” “That’s all I’m expecting,” the squatter replies, “we’re farming on the halves.”) But he values mightily the distilled variety: his primary object is a shot of corn liquor, which he obtains only after working a similar transformation on the squatter’s fiddling, improving his raw product —the tune’s coarse strain—with a high counterpoint. At its best, then, fiddling is indeed like corn liquor—high, wide, and handsome. And liquor and fiddling truly are interchangeable. Surveying the Hen

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Cackle Inn Hornsby comments, “Well, Mac, you’ve got a mighty nice place here to have a good time, good eats and good music, but I ain’t no camel.” “No, and brother, this ain’t no desert neither,” Mac responds, producing a shot of moonshine (“Corn Licker Still—Part 10”). When a passing policeman (Hornsby again) invades another speakeasy, the boys enlist him as a judge in their fiddling contest. “Would you like to have a drink, officer, before we start?” asks Mac. “No! I don’t want licker, I want fiddling,” replies Hornsby (“Night in a Blind Tiger”). Any quality once imputed to fiddling elsewhere defines moonshine. When fiddling alerts the law to the still’s location, a bribe of corn liquor offers the only hope of reprieve; when the boys are sent to the chain gang for ’stilling corn, their fiddling sets them free. And then there is that wonderfully corny pun: who better than Georgia’s kings of corny fiddling, the Skillet Lickers, to run “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia”? And what better than the Skillet Lickers’ downhome fiddling or homemade corn to symbolize the urban/rural tug of war? Hillbillies travel to the city only to sell corn or fiddle; city slickers scale the mountains looking for the same. And it is the band’s music that invariably discloses their still (“Say,” runs the standard opening, “I heard you fellows playing those fiddles coming up the road . . . ”). In one skit, it attracts a wholly new kind of middleman: the record company talent scout. If all the plays implicitly update “The Arkansas Traveler” to the age of the phonograph, “Taking the Census—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15549-D, 1930)” leaves no doubt. Part 1 begins as usual, with the hillbillies’ incessant fiddling being once more interrupted by an inquisitive stranger. “Hey, fellows, hey!” Mac growls, as the Skillet Lickers at full hue suddenly grind to a halt. I see a fellow coming down through the gap down yonder, look like one of them city slickers, toting a handbag that’ll weight fifty pound, look like he’s coming up here. He gets up here, now don’t forget and let your pa do the talking now. Ta n n e r : Whooo, ain’t he a-high, I bet that fool’s hip pockets is six foot from the ground. H o r nsb y : Hello! [barking] M cM i che n : Lay down here, Rouser. Hush! Lay down here, I say. H o r nsb y : Say, is anybody at home? M cM i che n : Well, come in and see for yourself, and who are you and what you want? H o r nsb y : I represent the United States Government. P uc k e t t : Good God! What’ve we done now?! Ta n n e r : Get that hog rifle there, and shoot him down. M cM i che n :

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Ain’t no use to get the hog rifle, it ain’t loaded, get that old butt-loader shotgun on him there. H o r nsb y : Now now, hold on a minute, fellows. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sent here by the government of the United States to take the nineteen-and-thirty census. Tan n e r : You come to the wrong place now. H o r nsb y : Well, how’s that? Tan n e r : ’Cause ain’t got much sense up here. Come up here and get what senses we got, I don’t know what we will do. H o r nsb y : Well, it’s plain to see you don’t understand what I’m trying to get at. All I want to do is to ask you a few simple questions. M cM i che n : Well, we don’t usually talk to strangers up here. We know our racket and know what we gonna do. You be careful about the questions you ask and don’t ask too many of ’em and sit down over there and keep quiet till we get this fiddling over, why, we’ll try to fix you up. H o r nsb y : Well, that’s all right with me, but haven’t you fellows got anything to do but play music all the time? M cM i che n : Yes, we make a little corn and taters and cotton and tobacco and one thing and another up here but, uh, here the other day, this—, one of them city dudes come up here and heard Jim and Bud over here fiddling, and he decided he wanted ’em to come down there to Atlanta and make some of them talking machine records, and I allowed as how I’d have ’em to take the stock out and put ’em in the pasture and get their fiddle and their banjo and get out here and get their stuff fixed up so they’d know what they’s gonna do when they get down there. L a y n e : Yes, we uns, pa, we—, we got to practice up on them there pieces, we don’t care nothing that—, ’bout that old city dude. Come on, Bud, let’s us practice up. H o r nsb y : All right, all right, that’s all right, that’s all right. Go ahead now, finish your tune and get it over with! L a y n e : All right, Bud, let’s go! [band plays] H o r nsb y : Well, now that’s over with, I want you to pay attention to these questions. [side one ends; side two begins] H o r nsb y : Is this your usual place of abode? M cM i che n : Uh, do you mean this is where I live at? H o r nsb y : Yeah, that’s right. M cM i che n : Well, this is where me and ma and all the young uns eat and sleep at. H o r nsb y : What is your relationship to the family? M cM i che n : Well, I sure ain’t their mammy. H o r nsb y : What is your age? M cM i che n : Uhh, three hundred and ninety-seven. S t o k es :

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What kind of an answer is that? Well, that’s just how old we all is put together. [laughter] H o r nsb y : Well, well, well. That’s not a bad crack at that. Have you ever attended school? M cM i che n : Uh yes, I went through the blue-back speller and a few other books they had down there. H o r nsb y : Are you able to read? M cM i che n : Well, you just give me ten—, give me a five dollar bill and see if I give you, uh, change for a twenty. H o r nsb y : How many children have you? M cM i che n : Well that, brother, I just don’t know. Uh, Ma! Bring all them young uns in here. [crying, baby talk, falsetto: What do you want, Pa?] There they are. My job to raise ’em, you wanted—, want ’em counted, count ’em. H o r nsb y : Do you own a radio? M cM i che n : No, we—, I don’t own no radio! You don’t get nothing over it but some guy talking about coffee and some fellow selling insurance and another’n a-selling soap and you only get music over a radio occasionally. You never get it like this. [band plays] H o r nsb y : That’s sure good music. I don’t believe I ever heard anything like that on the radio. M cM i che n : Very seldom, very seldom, there’s only two sure places to get music like this, and that’s right here in this cabin and on a phonograph record. H o r nsb y : What do you do for a living? M cM i che n : Well, we farm a little bit and we make, oh, a little licker, about two or three hundred gallons occasionally. H o r nsb y : Oh say, I’m sorry you said anything about making licker because I really should report that to the revenue branch of the government, and then you’d be in for lots of trouble. S t o k es [ i n falsetto]: Pa, you oughtn’t to said nothing about that, that sure will give you trouble. Ta n n e r : Sure will, it played the wild ends. S t o k es [ i n fals etto]: Pa, you pay the dickens then. H o r nsb y : I tell you what I’ll do about it though. It was a long, hot walk up here from the depot, and I guess I got a little dust in my throat. Maybe a little of that corn you make would clear it out. How about it? M cM i che n : Um-hm, I thought you’d say that ’fore you left anyhow. Uh, Hiram! Go down there to the woodshed and bring that demijohn up here and give the gentleman a drink. H o r nsb y :

M cM i che n :

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All right, Pa. That’s fine, fellows. I guess I’m not going to have room on this paper to put down anything besides the fact that you boys are farmers and fiddlers. Well, so long, I’ll see you in about ten years. S t o k es : I bet you a cord of wood you’ll be back here ’fore Saturday night after another drink of pa’s good licker. M cM i che n : Goodbye. Well boys, let’s go on now with this here practicing—remember that man said to get your tunes down to three minutes. S t o k es : All right, Bud. [band plays, music stops abruptly as side two ends] S t o k es :

H o r nsb y :

Here are all the hallmarks of “The Arkansas Traveler”: the thirsty city slicker asking too many questions and getting precious few answers; the fiddling hillbilly cleverly rebuffing his inquisitive visitor; the corny puns, non sequiturs, and oxymorons confounding high-toned jargon and bookish formalities with forthright speech and plain common sense. (As Gid jibes the census taker, “Come up here and get what senses we got, I don’t know what we will do.”) But this confusion is no more frivolous than nonsensical, its material basis in the real-life tussle of town and country being painfully clear. (Questioned on his own book-learning, Mac pointedly warns “you just give me a five dollar bill and see if I give you change for a twenty.”) The scales are balanced only by the inevitable shot of canned corn. (“I guess I’m not going to have room on this paper to put down anything besides the fact that you boys are farmers and fiddlers,” Hornsby agreeably concludes.) But within this new recorded reality, the inescapable link between corny fiddling and canned corn suggests an entirely new concoction: canned corny fiddling. “Taking the Census” adds yet another role to the cast of intrusive city slickers: the record company talent scout. Most listeners might not know that these were being played by one and the same person: that Dan Hornsby, the make-believe census taker, was also Dan Hornsby, the real-life A&R rep, “one of them city dudes” who really did come up to the mountains looking for hillbilly fiddlers “to come down to Atlanta and make talking machine records.” He was in fact playing that role for the record then in progress, supervising the session for “Taking the Census.” But neither could listeners miss the unsurpassed irony of a hillbilly record so explicitly about making hillbilly records. For even as it takes its cue from “The Arkansas Traveler,” “Taking the Census” simultaneously casts old-time fiddling’s travels from backwoods to city in a newer idiom, an idiom specifically created to frame the tangled relations of folksongs and phonographs. Whether, that is, as mere reports on folk music; as

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near-enough equivalents; as their own self-contained universe; or as existential paradoxes, old-time records thereby embodied the very contradiction in terms defining “The Arkansas Traveler.” So the Skillet Licker plays really are about playing Skillet Licker records. From another perspective, substitute phonograph for town, folksong for country, and they really do translate an older musical conversation about musicmaking to a new century. This unlocks their symbolism. This traces their history. This explains how people experienced them in the moment as musical events. For in momentarily reconciling the homemade and store-bought, old-time records were like other kinds of canned corn. Fiddling for another city slicker (Jim, the traveling salesman) selling soap (the only thing you get from a radio), Mac declares “you don’t get music like that in town, brother!” (“Jeremiah Hopkins Store”). That was not entirely true, as record listeners in town realized in an instant. In fact, as Mac tells the census taker, “There’s only two sure places to get music like this, and that’s right here in this cabin and on a phonograph record.” Maybe folksongs and phonographs were not so different. Yet, at the very moment Mac repeats the record man’s instructions “to get your tunes down to three minutes,” this particular record’s three minutes expire, silencing their fiddles. Apparently fiddling in a mountain cabin and on a phonograph record were not quite the same. But the exasperating relations of raw and refined had not changed at all. Some things had altered, of course. Nowadays, any backwoods fiddler could go down to the city and make records. And all city slickers—not just record men but bootleggers, soap salesmen, census takers, and others (middlemen all)—were really just media shills. The 1930 census really did for the first time ask whether respondents owned radios.89 In the same way nineteenth-century travelers naturally suggested the oral traditions linking town and country, later architects of urban sprawl invariably evoked the modern technologies shortening the trip. In an Alabama joke with a familiar ring, a black washerwoman demands of a white visitor, “whut yo’ doin’ hyeah now? Can’t cullud folkes git nowhere in de worl’ dat you white folkes don’t come a-meddlin’ an’ a-nosin’?” When he explains, “Madame, I have simply come to take your census, that’s all,” she responds, “Dat’s all? Well, I reckon dat is all! ’Fore de Gawd o’ Jacob, whut mo’ could you do nex’ after dat? You done made dem radios jes so you kin hear evahthing de Negro say—you done made dem airy-planes jes’ so you can watch de Negro all de time—you done made dem ’lect’ic lights jes’ so you kin see de Negro as good in de night as you kin in de daytime: an’ now, ’fore de Lawd, hyeah you come to take de Negro’s senses ’way from him!”90

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The Skillet Lickers were not the first to record this bit, incidentally; “Uncle Josh Takes the Census” (Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 4277, 1921) by Uncle Josh Weathersby (Cal Stewart) sounds very familiar. “There was a Swede family in our township,” one gag begins, “and I went there first. There wasn’t anyone at home, only Mrs. Petersen, so I told her I had come to get the census. She said ‘Ole, he don’t been home and I don’t know where he keep that thar census. I think he don’t got some. Do-ska look in barn or in woodshed. When did Ole get them census?’ ” He does no better with Mandy Perkins, an old maid, or her Irish neighbor, Mrs. Maloney, who actually chases him home, where “Nancy [Mrs. Weathersby] says she hopes I got some good common sense if I didn’t get the census.” So, too, as updated versions of “The Arkansas Traveler”—as roadmaps for experiencing old-time records as musical events—the Skillet Licker plays are also the story of the band and their era. With this realignment of urban/rural relations, fiddlers came ever more to embody the Southern dilemma. Moving incessantly between town and country, they enjoyed singular opportunities, but their music’s traditional character perversely impeded those same possibilities. His musical successes notwithstanding, Gid Tanner never gave up the homeplace, contenting himself with traveling to fiddle on the streets of Atlanta when it was too wet to plow. Despite his best efforts, Clayton McMichen could never pursue music as his sole profession, even after decades as a major recording artist and radio star. He ended his own days as a welder. If the phonograph record enabled the Skillet Lickers to visit an audience beyond the wildest imaginings of previous generations of Southern fiddlers, the hillbilly record radically restricted that listenership. As Mac discovered to his lasting chagrin, New York violinists waxed hot jazz for mass consumption; Georgia fiddlers canned corn for folks downhome. Times were changing, but the trip between backwoods and city still seemed a near impossibility, even for fiddlers. It was almost a contradiction in terms—not unlike, say, “Familiar Tunes—Old and New,” the Columbia Record Corporation’s category for its Skillet Licker releases.91 But if the Skillet Lickers eventually disintegrated under these pressures, those same contradictions were, ironically, also the secret of their success. At their best, Skillet Lickers records precariously balanced the coarse (epitomized by Tanner) and the fine (what Mac wanted), crafting timeless art from the common-as-dirt dilemmas of the prewar South. In this sense too Skillet Lickers records are very much an account of their own making, are very much about old-time records as they were lived. They are also, of course, enduring portraits of their makers, but especially of Clayton McMichen, who despite his aversion

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to corny fiddling, despite his affection for symphony orchestras, found himself relegated to the role of a miserable squatter, fiddling endlessly in a dismal swamp where even frogs were out of their element. Years later, Mac dressed his feelings in that very idiom, dismissing his music as a ludicrous compromise of coarse and fine. If the wisecrack recalls “The Arkansas Traveler,” it is no less worthy of his old band’s “Entertaining Novelty Records.” Certainly it is worth repeating. “I notice in my thirty-five years of show business,” McMichen sniped to a fan, “that there’s 500 pairs of overalls sold to every one tuxedo suit. That’s why I stick to swamp opera.” Instead of “swamp opera” Mac might just as well have said corn.

Coda Well folks, here we are again

Bob Dylan has an amazing talent for re-creating himself. That is, after all, how he became Bob Dylan. In the new millennium the man once known as Robert Allen Zimmerman briefly took a new name: Jack Fate, the fallen rock legend at the center of the motion picture Masked and Anonymous.1 But Jack Fate may as well be Bob Dylan, who has always been as much an imaginary creation as any of his songs. Released from prison, Fate journeys through a hellish postrevolutionary landscape—what director Larry Charles describes as a “mythological Third-World America”—to perform at an enigmatic benefit concert.2 Along the way he finds this fractured society’s murderous inhabitants less a threat than an obtuse, obnoxious journalist, who hounds him in a series of scenes hilariously recalling Dylan’s own legendary sparring with the press. The odds may be against him, but Fate has a secret weapon: Blind Lemon Jefferson’s guitar, “one of the guitars that started it all, . . . the one that played ‘Match Box Blues.’” At movie’s end, Jack Fate is led back to prison in handcuffs, framed for bludgeoning a pushy journalist to death with Blind Lemon’s axe. No motion picture could ever sum up Bob Dylan’s incredible music. But Masked and Anonymous ain’t half bad. It is a new millennium. It hardly seems possible that it was just fifty-odd years ago that this book’s subject—the 78 r.p.m. phonograph disc—was relegated to the ever-growing realm of obsolete music technologies. Or has it really been that long? Both, it would seem. For as both dusty relics and timeless art, these records are with us still. Bob Dylan has helped see to that. Four decades ago his first record (Bob Dylan, Columbia LP CL 1779, 1962) ended with Blind 211

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Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Paramount 12585, 1927, Paramount 12608, 1928). In the twenty-first century he is still carrying Blind Lemon’s guitar, the one that played “Match Box Blues” (OKeh 8455, 1927, Paramount 12474, 1927). (Actually, I first heard that one from the Beatles.3) Of course, one of the main points of this book is that Bob Dylan (a.k.a. Blind Boy Grunt) is not Blind Lemon Jefferson.4 Or as he has said, “Everybody knows that I’m not a folksinger.” But another major point is that I really only know Blind Lemon’s own records secondhand, whether through Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or other interpreters. Not all of these intermediaries are so obvious as such; but they have just as profoundly influenced how I hear. While I have spent the past thirty years obsessively accumulating thousands of old-time records, I own less than a half dozen actual 78s, and as far as I remember I have never actually played any of these. Overall, my direct experience with 78 r.p.m. phonograph discs is pretty limited, and then pretty telling. For instance, I have childhood memories of listening to my grandparents’ old Hank Williams 78s on the gigantic console that still sat in their living room. But this is memorable mainly because these were even then (the early 1960s) curious antiques, their actual operation only an occasional novelty. Ordinarily, the record player was mere furniture, and country music at Grandma and Grandpa’s house meant watching Porter Wagoner, the Buck Owens Ranch Show, or Hee Haw on their color TV, or tuning in Nashville, Paducah, or Memphis on the portable radio by the breakfast room table. Except for a few recordings transferred directly from archived 78s to audio cassette tapes, this book’s first draft—completed as part of a doctoral dissertation in December 1990—was wholly beholden to the 33 1/3 r.p.m. longplaying microgroove phonograph album, the format that, beginning in the 1950s, revived old-time records. Over the next four decades hundreds of these prewar relics were reissued on LP, primarily by small specialty labels, occasionally by the corporate descendants or executors of the firms producing the originals. In the early 1970s, the reissue LP became my own window on old-time music, beginning with Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers, that Skillet Lickers collection, and the Smoky Mountain Ballads anthology. Around the same time I got Hank Williams’s old 78s on LP. After that, I bought every reissue I could find and afford. Not that these were the only sorts of albums I bought—not by a long shot. Around the time I began listening to 78s at 33 1/3, the LP finally replaced the 45 single and its broadcast equivalent—singles-oriented Top Forty AM radio—as the dominant format in American popular music. It was within

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this medium—the post–Sgt. Pepper’s 33 1/3 long player and its broadcast counterpart, album-oriented rock (AOR) FM radio—that I truly came of age as a record listener. Ironically, my dissertation’s completion coincided with the release in late 1990 of Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings on compact disc. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (Columbia CD C2K 46222, 1990) was packaged as a two-CD box set, with a 48-page booklet featuring commentaries from blues researcher Stephen LaVere and rock superstars Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, plus song texts and a slew of historical photographs, including LaVere’s two most coveted finds: the only known likenesses of Johnson. Released in September 1990, the album immediately shot to the middle of Billboard ’s Top 200 Pop Album chart. By January 1991 it had sold half a million copies—an unprecedented and frankly astounding achievement for any reissue of prewar race records—earning a Gold Record and winning a Grammy as Best Historical Recording of 1990. Before the end of 1994, its sales had reached one million. There had already been a trickle of digital race and hillbilly reissues, but the Johnson box opened the floodgates. Granting my many personal failings, the glacial pace of revision between the dissertation and this book resulted partly from the sudden availability of thousands more old-time records on CD. More recently, digitally reprocessed 78s have become available in ever-increasing numbers on the Internet. I have learned to listen to these, too. Yet after all this effort, I still wonder whether I really have learned to listen like an early-twentieth-century Southerner. I seriously doubt it. I have to: given the basic assumptions of this book, it only stands to reason that the way I hear old-time records has been colored by all of these circumstances, and by the innumerable other profound contrasts between my generation and pre–World War II Southerners. I still cannot listen to Blind Lemon Jefferson without also hearing Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The fact is, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But maybe I can now hear Dylan better? He’s still at it, anyway. On August 29, 2006, just as I was finally wrapping up this book, he released Modern Times (Columbia CD 82876 87606 2). That makes nearly fifty albums now and still counting. Don’t let the title fool you: Modern Times is really another oldtime sampler. Among its tracks, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” updates an old Delta theme, first recorded by Hambone Willie Newbern (“Roll and Tumble Blues,” OKeh 8679, 1929), later remade by Robert Johnson as “If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day” (ARC unissued, 1936) and “Traveling Riverside Blues” (ARC unissued, 1937). “The Levee’s Gonna Break” revisits a classic Kansas Joe and

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Memphis Minnie 78 (“When the Levee Breaks,” Columbia 14439-D, 1929), also remade by Led Zeppelin on their fourth album (Led Zeppelin, Atlantic LP SD 7208, 1971). “When the Deal Goes Down” nods affectionately at Charlie Poole’s first big hit, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues” (Columbia 15038-D, 1925). And so on. Exactly one week after the album’s release, on September 5, Dylan came to my home. At least he came to Memorial Stadium, home of the Fort Wayne Wizards minor league baseball team, just a mile from my house. After an hour-long rain shower, the sun came out and a rainbow arched over the stage, north to south, followed by a full moon. Seriously. My wife and I—coincidentally married on Bob’s birthday (May 24) in 1980 (coincidence is what this guy is all about)—crowded with some friends on the infield with Dylan and his band on second. It was the closest I have ever personally been to the man. He did not play a single song off the new album, then racing to number one on the charts. So much for the first cardinal rule of rock tours (promote the new record). But he did replay plenty of old-time records. Sort of. Anyway, I recognized quite a few more references than the first time I saw him play live in 1974 on the Before the Flood comeback tour (so-called after the resulting live album, Before the Flood, Asylum LP AB 201, 1974). I wondered if it mattered. Probably—I do think I understand certain aspects of Dylan’s art better today than three decades ago. But I had a very good time on both occasions. All sorts of circles seem to be closing these days.5 Of course, it isn’t just because of Dylan that we don’t hear old-time records as they once sounded. From a purely practical standpoint, the technical differences distinguishing 78 r.p.m. discs, microgroove LPs, and digital technologies guarantee that we hear race and hillbilly discs very differently than did their original listeners. Not only have these new formats created technical standards of audio fidelity unheard of in previous generations, but they have spawned musical aesthetics further distancing contemporary sensibilities from prewar listening experiences. It says something that many reissues are remastered more in accordance with these contemporary aesthetics than the way the records originally sounded. Playing time is a factor too, and more than just a practical consideration. While a 78 r.p.m. disc yoked just a couple of freestanding performances, LPs and CDs accommodate multiple tracks by an artist or artists. With a typical duration of around forty minutes, reissue LPs usually offered a dozen or so tracks. Any worthwhile CD will now feature twice as many or more. (Wonderfully, one American roots music label, Arhoolie, even bills their CD reissues of old 78s as “the New 78s,” meaning 78 minutes.) It was occasionally feasible to reissue an under-recorded artist’s entire output on a single LP.

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Today, a CD or two may be enough for the complete recordings even of prolific old-time artists. The point may seem overly obvious, but reissues thus provide listening experiences radically different from those of the records they reformat. To hear an old-time artist’s entire remastered output—an amalgam of individual sides, recorded successively and released on single 78s, sometimes over a decade or two, some probably not released at all at that time—is a latter-day abstraction of doubtful relevance to the way these records were originally heard. Though intended to illuminate, thematic reissues—which group 78s on common topics, from certain regions or periods, in similar styles, by related artists, from particular labels, and so forth—ironically also obscure how these individual records were perceived. Not that their production and consumption were random, atomistic, or fragmented. But their creation and reception were more personal and particular, more coincidental to the daily rhythms of real lives and living communities than suggested by the reissue’s big-picture approach. This is, after all, one of the things that makes these records special enough to bother reissuing. Or to bother writing about—another notable difference. Compared to prewar record listening, the reissue may be almost as much a literate as an aural experience—even further removed from the way people once experienced oldtime records. Initially, the expanded packaging required by LPs conveniently provided space for the liner notes and brochures that were soon de rigeur. With the advent of CDs, some worried that the new, smaller format would eliminate these annotations. Those fears proved unfounded. In the pattern of the Johnson box, many reissue CDs are elaborately packaged with hefty, sometimes book-length folios featuring artist biographies, song histories, discographies, photos or other graphic memorabilia, and more. Virtually all are accompanied by at least some written exposition. The disc itself may be “enhanced” to provide (via computer) additional audio, video, or graphics.6 Countless books and periodicals also cater to this market. As a result, we can know much more about old-time records than their intended listeners or even the recording artists ever could have. Yet to the extent that race and hillbilly 78s constituted musical events, those persons still understood these records much better than we ever will. Accordingly, and perversely, in our eagerness to listen to old-time 78s we have contrived to ensure we will never really hear them—or certain things about them, anyway. I am as guilty as any of such self-delusion. Having (like so many others) come to Robert Johnson through Bob Dylan, the British Invasion, and

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the folksong revival, I have struggled mightily to conjure the sound he made in his own milieu. Of course, I also marked the dawn of the digital age by both buying the Robert Johnson box set and replacing all of my Bob Dylan and Beatles LPs on CD. Even today, the need to stretch my CD dollars often comes down to a debate over whether to buy another historical reissue of old-time 78s or upgrade some more rock vinyl. Actually, the two are not all that different anymore. At present, the vinyl albums constituting the common musical currency of my own youth are being reissued on CDs resembling nothing so much as compilations of prewar 78s, complete with lengthy annotations and discographies; historical essays; artist commentaries; biographies or obituaries; archival photos and other ephemera; previously unissued tracks and alternate takes—everything one could and would expect from museum pieces. Vinyl itself is now often regarded as a mere collector’s item—a boutique niche, as it is sometimes called. Thus my generation has now lived to see—and hear—the media formats and musical forms through which we learned to listen redefined as antiques, supplanted by new listening (or viewing, or virtual) experiences, many of which may leave us bewildered. Of course, this also embodies a traditional pattern of sorts, replaying the experiences of prewar Southerners in the postwar media revolution. Strangely, this is my best comfort that this book is not wholly deluded—that even though I may never understand what it was like, I do understand just how different it was to listen to 78 r.p.m. records before World War II. My own experiences suggest a sort of twisted analogy: Not only did I grow up listening to 78s on LPs, I grew up listening to 78s as if they were LPs—much the same way that I now listen to CDs as if they were vinyl. (As the true mark of a pre-digital relic, I still insist on buying manufactured CDs rather than just burning or ripping my own.) Somewhere in all this confusion, I must have had a moment or two of clarity. This analogy—that the listening experiences of pre–World War II Southerners are to my own as my listening experiences are to those of successive generations—also reassures me that this study is more than a mere historical exercise, that understanding how the very first generation of record listeners adapted their personal lives to that medium has considerable present relevance. Over the past two decades, communications technologies have again reconfigured relations among Earth’s inhabitants. Directly or indirectly, the epochal shifts characterizing this so-called information age can all ultimately be traced to communications technologies. Such technologies have always been catalysts for profound change, but the pace and extent of that change

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have obviously accelerated beyond anything previously known. The transformation is manifest in all areas of human existence, from the most trivial to the truly momentous, from the most beneficial or benign to the truly monstrous. It is evident in the global contacts that increasingly interconnect the planet; in the global economic systems that pit its increasingly interdependent haves against its increasingly defenseless have-nots; in the global weapons systems that increasingly threaten to blow the place apart. Some might rank massmediated music among the more frivolous byproducts of these upheavals. They would be mistaken. As always, recorded music has been at the forefront of this most far-reaching revolution yet in human communications. I am not sure how reassuring all of this is, but it does argue that recorded music cannot be dismissed as mere entertainment. Is it exaggeration to say that all of the recent innovations in communications technology owe their initial acceptance or general currency to recorded music and popular entertainments? Perhaps. But if so, it is not much of an overstatement—and it may not be an overstatement at all. Over the last quarter century, no single development has had a greater impact on recorded music than digital technology, which has completely reconfigured existing formats while introducing completely new ones: laser discs, Internet streaming or filesharing, MP3s, and miniscule (and still shrinking) digital music players. To turn the statement around, no single factor has done more to introduce average consumers to innovations like laser discs and networked microcomputers than recorded music. Over the last twenty-five years a completely new genre—the music video, transmitted via video cassette tapes, cable or satellite television, digital video discs (DVDs), or networked computers—has passed from novelty to conventionality. For some markets it is now taken for granted as a virtual necessity. As someone who has struggled for years to learn to watch music videos—for the most part unsuccessfully—I am reconciled to the fact that I will never acquire the fluency of persons born after 1980, who grew up assuming that records are watched. But I have accepted this as gracefully as I can, since in my struggles I am constantly reminded of my mother’s periodic lectures on why the radio programs she grew up listening to were so much better than television. Of course, broadcast radio itself is now under assault from cable, satellite, and the Internet. Many broadcasters have already capitulated, switching from recorded music to a talk format, while others are trying to adapt, incorporating these new media into their existing operations (for example, by simulcasting both over the airwaves and on Internet or cable). Whether Internet radio is better or worse than its broadcast predecessors—opinions vary, of

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course—it is definitely not the same, nor are its listenership and their listening experiences. I won’t belabor the point. While the foregoing is all pretty sketchy and anecdotal, it is best left so. The information superhighway said to define the present era is now moving so fast that this discussion will undoubtedly be dated by the time it sees print (another medium undergoing a radical redefinition, albeit with some predictable resistance). But then, whatever the arguments of the reactionary literati, email and hypertext do have the advantage of permitting attachments of recorded music. Anticipating its own obsolescence, this cursory discussion still seems to rest on pretty solid ground. Even the written word now supports its basic thesis: that recorded music is infinitely adaptable, and inestimably important to the development and acceptance of innovations in mass media generally. There is thus every reason to expect that recorded music will continue to play a crucial role in future innovations, even if we cannot predict precisely what these will be. All this might appear to fulfill some fairly dire predictions. More than ever before, developments in recorded music ostensibly validate media guru Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of a Global Village, rendered devoid of cultural variety by its real-time interconnectedness. This is also precisely what folklorist Alan Lomax had in mind when he wrote of cultural grey-out.7 The example of digitized music disseminated over the Internet seems especially pertinent: in current parlance, Global Village (still a byword after all these years) and World Wide Web seem to be roughly synonymous. And the cultural grey areas are only widening. It is thus undeniable that a leveling of musical differences has been one by-product of a technology-driven global consumer culture. Yet beneath the veneer of a single mass-produced, globally disseminated, uniformly consumed multiplatinum musical culture, people continue to make and use sound recordings in ways reflecting local preferences, cultural predispositions, and personal predilections. Sometimes they express these pluralistic impulses through the very technologies seeming least amenable—or most inimical—to such adaptations. Presently, digital technologies and the World Wide Web may be doing as much to create or perpetuate musical boundaries as to eliminate them. Consider the issue of music piracy. The theft of music—which today always means the unauthorized reproduction of recorded music—has lately become the subject of landmark legal cases, congressional hearings and legislative deliberations, even international diplomacy and trade negotiations. The proximate causes are digital technologies: CDs and CD burners, the World Wide Web,

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Internet-based file-sharing programs. Defying some expectations, these have dramatically democratized the means of musical production, reproduction, and distribution. A holdover from the LP era, bootlegging—the unauthorized production of actual sound discs, something that turns out to be infinitely easier with CDs than with 33 1/3 microgroove records—now runs rampant. The combination of digital music and the Internet has proven even more explosive, enabling millions of online users at isolated points on the planet simultaneously, inexpensively to produce perfect copies of any digital sound recording, with or without permission of the copyright holders. Outpacing the business models of music producers—many of whom still seem bent on peddling digital recordings as if they were vinyl LPs—these innovations have lately prompted corporations, their trade associations, and even recording artists to sue individual consumers for unauthorized copying or illegal downloading. Some have vilified entire nations—China being the most common current target—for disregarding Western notions of music ownership or intellectual property. Others bemoan the sheer thoughtlessness of music lovers cheating artists, composers, and publishers of their due. While many would thus reduce the problem to stark legalities—and much of this activity does amount to out-and-out theft—or impute it to egregious ethical lapses—there are plenty of these, too—its overall causes are less clear-cut, more humane, and, frankly, impossible to eradicate, legislate, or litigate. Often it is prompted not by criminal intent or callousness but by profound—and defensible—cultural, generational, or personal differences on the production, consumption, form, function, and meaning of recorded music. It is not too much of an oversimplification to say that the basic conflict is between how corporations have decided to sell recorded music as a consumer commodity—as a thing—and how actual persons in particular communities have decided to experience recorded music in their daily lives. In other words, these parties still approach records as very different sorts of musical events. Record companies remain predictably anxious to preserve the virtual monopoly they achieved during the age of vinyl. Artists benefiting from that system may share their views. But not all musicians regard recent developments as threats. Roger McGuinn, whose fortunes have declined considerably since his 1960s heyday as the leader of the Byrds, allows that some musicians do have “something to worry about (from the Internet) because [they’re] selling millions of CDs, and they’re really well-taken care of by the mainstream record companies. . . . But there are just a handful of artists where that’s the case. I wasn’t as well-treated by the recording labels.”8 As the major record companies

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have grown into huge, profit-driven multinational conglomerates, they have proven increasingly reluctant to sign (or support for more than two unprofitable albums) new performers; to extend favorable terms to any but the most successful artists; to experiment with daring, innovative, or untested performers, styles, or productions; or to release material appealing only to narrow demographics. Many musicians welcome the greater possibilities new technologies afford for reaching listeners directly with recordings expressing their own unfettered artistic visions—while bypassing the corporate middleman. Noting that he’s received no royalties on recent CD reissues of the Byrds’ fifteen albums, from Mr. Tambourine Man (Columbia LP CL-2372, 1965) to Farther Along (Columbia LP KC-31050, 1971), McGuinn insists that the MP3 format and Internet file-sharing “will give me exposure to people who will know where I’ll be and come to my concerts,” currently his major source of income. “It’s an audience that wouldn’t be there otherwise. There are people who heard the Byrds on Napster [a file-sharing site] and bought the CDs. Then they heard me and then came to my concerts.”9 Considering that making records for corporations is not all too different from sharecropping—the middleman generally being the man who gets it all— many artists signed to major labels openly question whether illegal downloaders are really the ones stealing their music, or whether bootlegging might not be their own best option. The disproportionately high retail prices of manufactured CDs—and artists’ disproportionately low share of the returns—support those suspicions. “If you make something for 90 cents, how can you justify to sell it for $9?” asks Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour), leader of the seminal rap group Public Enemy. “I believe that the fan is the most important, and the fan’s been ripped off by the companies pimping technology.”10 “I tell folks all the time,” says D, “record companies sell records, artists have little to do with that process. Artists just make them and are selected to do so. If Mr. Sonybmgemiweauniversal [the combined names or acronyms of the big five record conglomerates] could get $17.00 outta you for Brillo pads [$16.99 was then the standard suggested retail price for CDs] they’d sell them too.”11 Thus for some musicians and music listeners, the independent or unauthorized production, reproduction, and distribution of recorded music have assumed the character of political protest or cultural resistance. Such sentiments seem especially acute when these persons come from groups habitually exploited or excluded by the recording industry and the capitalist consumer economy it champions. Chuck D, an articulate and outspoken African American artist, has repeatedly slammed the recording industry’s current racial poli-

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tics as a holdover from the race record, early rock and roll, and soul music eras—or even as a vestige of slavery. McGuinn, who in July of 2000 actually testified at Senate hearings on regulating music on the Internet, takes a slightly different tack: “Nobody wants to be regulated. It’s un-American.”12 For minority cultures or musical alternatives completely ignored by the industry, independent productions are often the only option, while music theft may seem mere payback for that neglect. Like many earlier forms of so-called piracy, music piracy sometimes has less to do with immutable rights and wrongs or the supposed sanctity and uniformity of international law than the inevitable clash of different cultural systems and values. In a more positive vein, digital technologies, their growing accessibility, and amenability to styles outside the commercial mainstream—including even casual, uniquely personal, one-of-a-kind productions—have spurred an outpouring of indie music in some ways recalling America’s first great age of independent recording. In the immediate postwar period major labels, anxious to capitalize on national markets, lost interest in regional music, black styles in particular. Independent labels rushed in to fill this void, eventually capturing a sizeable portion of the country music market as well. Within this postwar crucible, Southern traditions were reforged in ways forever altering world music. The results—urban blues, bluegrass, country and western, rhythm and blues, gospel, rock and roll, soul—were all closely tied to now-famous independent labels (Sun, Chess, King, Modern, Imperial, Specialty, Four Star, VeeJay, Excello, Nashboro, Atlantic, Stax, Motown, and dozens more) and to then recent technological innovations and evolving media formats. At least in the West, the current indie trend may be more of a pop culture phenomenon, but only because more of the West’s music now falls toward the pop than the folk end of the spectrum. But vernacular music perseveres even in the industrialized West. It is a much different story in the non-Western world, where the parallels to the postwar United States may be most striking. Just listen to the incredible quantity and quality of recorded music recently emerging from the African continent. Whether this new phase’s impact will be comparable to postwar America is an open question. It is difficult to imagine anything ever again revolutionizing music like Elvis Presley’s Sun records. Tellingly, while Elvis drew much of his inspiration from his black neighbors, African musicians today often name Elvis’s records as primary influences. Nigerian recording artist Sunny Okosun remembers, “it all began for me when I watched films: I saw Loving You with Elvis Presley, The Tommy Steele Story and Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo. These were my biggest influences. Then we all started playing

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the guitar. We grew our hair to look like Cliff Richard and Elvis, although we were black.”13 Still, there is no shortage of contemporary recordings whose farflung influences and global impact cannot disguise their local origins—Sunny Okosun’s Nigerian releases being obvious examples. In this they may be more akin to Elvis’s rock and roll than the race and hillbilly records he heard as a child. We obviously have come a long way from Earth’s first generation of recording artists and record listeners. But if we are moving toward a single global musical culture, we are still a ways off. The present diversity of recorded music, the variety of its production and consumption, the different ways real people actually experience it—these all remain apparent to anyone who cares to look, even in the United States. Though quite rare, those marginal survivals of the older canons of preindustrial folksong sometimes reveal tradition bearers’ remarkable ability instantly to assimilate innovations.14 More common are those styles variously termed regional, vernacular, local, roots, ethnic, world, neotraditional, modern, and so forth. Rhythm and blues, bluegrass, gospel, early rock and roll, and the like are a few postwar American instances; contemporary African styles like jújú, mbalax, soukous, and taraab are recent others. Registering the effects on traditional societies of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization generally, these genres are invariably rooted in more conventional folksong traditions. Yet their immediate origins lie largely in sound recordings, even if those records target unique demographics, a true symbiosis of commercial media and distinct cultural traditions. In multicultural societies, the norm for modern nation-states, such vernacular musical styles are now among the most common markers of regional, racial, religious, linguistic, or ethnic identities. Typically, those identities are reflected not just in the recordings’ musical style and lyrical content or in the performers’ backgrounds but in the records themselves and their aesthetics —in a particular community’s ideas about records as musical events.15 That the media themselves increasingly define these genres may thus do as much to promote cultural difference as cultural leveling. For if perceptions of recorded music are influenced not only by cultural factors but by media formats, their internal properties and external histories, then the many different media in world music bode well for local adaptations. It is, after all, conceivable that different communities may hear the same formats differently, or experience different formats in similar ways. As media have proliferated, these variables —the specific conditions under which a given community assimilates a particular format—have expanded proportionally. While the phonograph was global in impact, its major dealings with folk societies occurred—for obvious

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reasons—in the industrialized West. Even there these marginal cultures lagged behind the mainstream, as corporations only belatedly recognized their musical tastes as potential markets. When early phonograph records of ethnic traditions did appear in the non-Western world—in Africa, for example—they were typically another by-product of colonialism, engineered by European labels or foreign proxies exploiting their respective imperial spheres. This must have influenced local perceptions, as would their eventual transfer to local control. Then too, older formats like 78 or 45 r.p.m. singles often lingered in areas like Africa long after 33 1/3 LPs had eclipsed them in the industrialized world. A mass-produced, profit-bound commodity ill-suited to local or regional markets, the LP had a relatively short shelf life. Its obsolescence followed hard on the heels of its delayed introduction—partly because, even before CDs and the demise of LPs, throughout much of the world ethnic recording became the domain of the audiocassette, a relatively inexpensive, eminently portable format that anticipated digital technologies in democratizing sound recordings. In so doing, it generated its own conventions and expectations, differing from community to community.16 As digital technologies become increasingly accessible, less expensive, and more adaptable, many of these cassette cultures are upgrading again, but at variable rates. While practical factors may play a part, there is no ruling out cultural considerations and the plain truth that people become intensely, personally attached to particular recorded formats, their artistic conventions, aesthetic properties, their patterns of production and use—in sum, their purely cultural dimensions. Anyone who experienced even the slightest trauma in the switch from LPs to CDs should understand that. A few people I know still have not come to terms. That some musical cultures have over the past century assimilated half a dozen media formats may partly explain why newer styles seem more likely to look to recorded precedents than oral traditions, or why recorded music now so often takes recorded music itself as its subject, exploring the self-contained or self-contradictory properties of media as their own realities. At present, rap or hip hop may be the most influential pop style globally. The absolute embodiment of media’s unique properties and possibilities, rap is often nothing more or less than recorded music about recorded music. Yet even as it is appropriated by a global consumer culture, it continues to reflect its origins within black America. Drawing on earlier African American oral traditions—for example, the rhymed recitations known as toasts, one the best-documented genres of mid-twentieth-century urban black folklore—in the early stages, rap itself was an oral tradition of sorts.17 From its inception, though, rap has also been

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inseparable from media. Among the genre’s hallmarks, rap recordings may literally be created from earlier recordings through sampling, the technique of digitally isolating components of previous records—a drum beat, bass line, guitar riff, whatever—that are then incorporated into new recorded compositions. It may be understandable, then, that rap has fallen prey to the current fashion for treating mass media as mere extensions of folk traditions. Digital sampling, for instance, is pegged as “an oral tradition, albeit an oral tradition that is perpetuated and promulgated through the electronic media (primarily radio and recordings). . . . As the folk tradition is preserved in a fixed format—in this case the recording process or on tape in a studio—the method most prevalent in rap music is digital sampling. Here we have musical artists taking ‘samples’ of music they know from other artists and incorporating it into their own work. Thus they create the present by building from the past, just like early folk singers and songwriters did.”18 Admittedly, sampling does create something outwardly similar to variation or communal re-creation, and rap suggests other analogies to folk music—for instance, the regional or period styles reflected in terms like Old School, Dirty South, West Coast, and so forth. But these are best understood as latter-day analogies—not unlike, say, the qualities of netlore. And more often than not, rap deliberately reveals itself as anything but an oral tradition, celebrating contemporary media’s self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating qualities, affirming those media as a self-contained, self-regulating reality, taking to its logical extreme the ironic, self-referential stance characterizing many old-time records. If anything, rap maps an urban landscape virtually devoid of music resembling preindustrial folk traditions. That most of its production techniques are, like sampling, wholly particular to media is fitting: rap simultaneously exemplifies, reflects, and expresses the media saturation or bombardment defining its native habitat. If rap has important links to earlier oral traditions, these require considerable qualification. Rap does demonstrate mass media’s continued amenability to cultural expression; perhaps no contemporary style does so better. But its differences with oral traditions are unmistakable. As rappers would discover, U.S. copyright law renders digital sampling a much different affair from the folk practice of re-creating anew from the public domain. No sooner had recorded rap demonstrated its profitability than a series of highly publicized court cases compelled rappers to license samples from the owners of the master recordings, a costly and time-consuming matter causing many to rethink their approach. Many rappers saw these developments as part of another tradition wholly par-

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ticular to records, stretching from the perceived abuses of the race record era, to the predatory white covers of black R&B records in the 1950s, to more recent grievances.19 Once more, Chuck D and Public Enemy offer some especially pointed commentary. Beginning in 1987, Public Enemy and its production team, The Bomb Squad, released a series of innovative and influential albums—Yo! Bum Rush the Show (Def Jam CD 40658, 1987), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam CD 44303, 1988), Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam CD 45413, 1990), Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Black (Def Jam CD 47374, 1991)—that elevated rap and digital sampling to pop art forms. As D and his Bomb Squad partner Hank Shocklee would later allow, this was possible in part because their creative vision and technological sophistication outdistanced copyright law and the legal savvy of the record companies owning the master recordings they sampled.20 The middlemen would eventually catch up. In fact, as PE later discovered, artists may be unable to sample themselves, since they may not own their own masters. In 1998 Public Enemy remixed several of their previous releases for a projected album titled Bring the Noise 2000. But when they made several tracks available as free downloads on their website (www.publicenemy.com), their label, Def Jam, a division of the PolygramUniversal conglomerate, threatened them with legal action for the unauthorized distribution of master recordings owned not by the group but by Universal. D and PE avoided the lawsuit by removing the offending material from their site, but promptly severed their ties with Def Jam. Shortly thereafter they recorded a new album, There’s A Poison Goin’ On . . . , devoted to the politics of the record business. Although the album was eventually released on CD on their own label (Play It Again Sam CD 004, 1999), it was originally also made available in its entirety for free download: for a time, you literally could not buy these songs. From this point on, insisted Chuck D, “physical pressings will be a second priority.”21 The first track from There’s A Poison posted on Public Enemy’s website was “Swindler’s Lust.” Obviously the recent wrangling over the group’s master recordings was still very much on Chuck D’s mind. “A dollar a rhyme but we barely get a dime,” he begins. “If you don’t own the master / Then the master own you.” This incendiary pun on master echoes throughout the track. “What company do I thank?” D at one point demands. “Ain’t this a bitch, heard they owned slaves / And a ship that sank.” In interviews too, Ridenhour has slammed “people that have benefited off the slave trade that still have money today.”22 Some might reasonably argue the recording industry belongs in that camp only

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to the extent that the United States as a whole was built on slave labor. That is to no small extent true. And there is no question that the record business has directly exploited black artists and systemically misappropriated black innovations, from the race record era to the present. This is, as “Swindler’s Lust” puts it, the industry that “stole rock and roll and ain’t gave it back”—hardly an isolated instance. This is for the blues people in the Delta, This is for everybody in the ’50s that didn’t get their money, Little Richard getting half-a-penny a penny, All the super soul singers of the ’60s, All the bands of the ’70s on the outside looking in, All the people that didn’t make a dime off their session playing, And even the rappers in the ’80s and the ’90s, Still trying to get paid for what they put in. If hip hop and digital sampling represent traditions, they are emphatically not oral traditions. Rather, on various levels rap reflects mass media traditions from the old-time era to present. Indeed, even in live performance rap is very much a media production. In one of our epoch’s crowning ironies, consumers today are most likely to encounter phonographs and phonograph records not as musical media but as musical instruments. More ironic still, nothing could more forcefully reveal postmodern media’s capacity to perpetuate preindustrial traditions, but in ways infinitely subtle and supple, wholly unsuspected by most participants. For if, as is often suggested, rappers are the modern American equivalents of West African poet-minstrels, their obvious function as social critics may be less salient—and certainly less interesting—than the “wheels of steel,” the paired phonograph turntables providing rap’s backbone. The immediate origins of the wheels of steel lie in Jamaica and its 1960s sound systems—phonographs wired to large PAs through which DJs played records for public dances.23 To segue seamlessly between records, DJs, who interacted with patrons by improvising verbal raps over the music, added a second turntable. As the raps and record mixing evolved, the original recordings often became unrecognizable, especially after West Indian expatriates introduced sound systems into New York’s black boroughs in the 1960s and ’70s. Eventually the roles of DJs and rappers were split, due largely to the growing demands of turntabling. One of these was the now-standard technique termed

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break beats. By cutting rapidly between the two turntables, the DJ alternately plays short passages from two different records or from two copies of the same record, seamlessly mixing these into a new soundscape. This may be augmented by additional rhythms from a drum machine, or accented by techniques like scratching, rotating a record backward and forward by hand with the stylus in the groove to create a scraping or squealing sound. The wheels of steel epitomize hip hop’s ultra-technological, media-centric, self-referential qualities. Yet they also unmistakably recall traditional African and African American scrapers like the washboard, percussion instruments that are alternately scraped and struck to create the same effect as break beats and scratching.24 The parallels can be arresting, as I realized not too long ago while watching a videotaped name-honoring song performed by three West African jalis (hereditary poet-minstrels) accompanied by a dummbo ensemble, filmed in Bogo, Northern Cameroon, in January 1985. The dummbo is a type of traditional scraper, in this case created by seating a large calabash on a wooden rod. The percussionist slides the gourd back and forth along the rod to produce a scratching or squealing sound, simultaneously drumming on it to keep the beat. In the Cameroon footage, half a dozen dummbo players sit in a public market, their dummbos in motion, mixing back beats and scratching. In front of them, the lead jali chants while his two colleagues dance and sway beside him, rhythmically responding.25 Cut to Los Angeles, the House of Blues, December 1999, one more stop on Public Enemy’s U.S. Poison Tour. Lead rapper Chuck D is rhyming “Do You Wanna Go Our Way???”—another corporate indictment from There’s A Poison—while his two colleagues, Flavor Flav (William Drayton) and Professor Griff (Richard Griff), dance and sway beside him, rhythmically responding. Behind them, DJ Lord (Lord Aswod) works his turntables, mixing break beats and scratching, kicking out the jam of a half dozen dummbos.26 For practical purposes, the phonograph may have retired as a mass medium. As much as ever, its human potential remains on display. And so we are back to phonographs and folksongs. On the threshold of a new era in recorded music, the sound recording’s continued capacity to accommodate cultural expression and cultural difference—to cover the world without smothering its diversity—seems assured. It has been going on for over a century, after all. Again and again, our species has shown its capacity to assimilate ostensibly impersonal media while remaining eminently human. Even now at the stage of virtual saturation, our idiosyncratic genius defies the generalization implied in the notion of mass media. There may be little in recorded music’s

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new incarnations resembling the idealized folk of yore, but there still are folk in there somewhere. As technologized as things have become, the technologies alone are not making this music. And as Big Bill realized, it sure ain’t horses. As to the elusive identities of the records themselves, their chameleonlike qualities and continual self-reinvention, these remain predictably unpredictable, existing in imaginary spaces that are ours alone to define. As Clayton McMichen might say, “Well, folks, here we are again.”

Notes

Prelude: Supposing We Have Us a Little Tune Here 1. The latter-day popularity of “Cripple Creek” was inestimably aided by its inclusion as the first piece in a highly influential banjo tutor by Poole’s most famous successor, fellow North Carolinian Earl Scruggs. Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (New York: Peer International, 1968), 55. 2. Kinney Rorrer, Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole (Danville, Virginia: Published by the author, 1982), 42. 3. Like chasing the dragon, kicking the gong around originally referred to smoking opium (opium, dragons, and gongs all having Asian associations). For American blacks, though, it meant pot-smoking. The phrase was popularized by Cab Calloway’s 1931 hit “Minnie the Moocher” (Brunswick 6074). The streetwise Broonzy actually devoted several pages of his autobiography to his own circle’s vices, confiding, for instance, “I have tried it all but for me it’s alcohol because I started out on moonshine whiskey and marijuana don’t do nothing for me,” while acknowledging “I would rather hire a musician that uses marijuana than one that drinks whiskey.” Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as Told to Yannick Bruynoghe (1955; rev. ed., New York: Oak Publications, 1964), 43, 45. 4. Big Bill Blues, 68–69.

Chapter 1. Learning to Listen 1. Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia LP CL 2328/CS 9128, 1965; the Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Columbia single 43271, 1965, reissued on Mr. Tambourine Man, Columbia LP CL 2372/CS 9172, 1965. Former Byrd Roger McGuinn used “Beatles bounce” to describe his group’s rearrangement at a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 25, 2002. Launched by “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Byrds’ own career plummeted and never fully rebounded when radio stations refused to play their single “Eight Miles High”—one of the earliest “psychedelic” records—because of its alleged drug references (Columbia single 43578, 1966, reissued on Fifth Dimension, Columbia LP CL 2549/CS 9349, 1966). According to Dylan,

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“Mr. Tambourine Man, I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne,” a sometime Dylan accompanist who “had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. . . . ” Cameron Crowe with Bob Dylan, “About the Songs,” booklet for Bob Dylan: Biograph (Columbia CDs C3K 65298, 1985), 50. Of course, this is not what “Mr. Tambourine Man” really is about. 2. Donovan, “Sunshine Superman,” Epic single 5-10045, 1966. Though unknown to me then, this would also be my first remembered hearing of Jimmy Page, the anonymous session musician —and future Led Zeppelin leader—providing the record’s signature electric guitar lick. 3. Led Zeppelin, “Gallows Pole,” Led Zeppelin III, Atlantic LP SD-19128, 1970. The term incremental repetition was coined by American ballad scholar Francis Gummere around 1896. Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad (1907; rpt. Dover Publications, 1959), esp. 90–134; D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 27–29. 4. The authoritative exposition of this oldest stratum of Anglo-American narrative song is, of course, Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (1882–98; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965). I follow standard practice in citing such pieces—the canon now known as the Child ballads —by Child’s titles and numbers, and in also using G. Malcolm Laws’s American Balladry from British Broadsides: A Guide for Students and Collectors of Traditional Song, Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 8 (Philadelphia, 1957), and Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a Bibliographical Syllabus, rev. ed., Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1964). Citations for “Laws” letters “A” through “I”—e.g., “Railroad Bill” (Laws I 13)—are for ballads included in the latter work, “Laws J–Q” for those in the former. The authoritative study of “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Child 95) is Eleanor Long, “The Maid” and “The Hangman”: Myth and Tradition in a Popular Ballad, University of California Folklore Studies no. 21 (Berkeley, 1971); see also Tristram Potter Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, rev. ed., with a Supplement by Roger deV. Renwick, Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 29 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). 5. This is the account given by Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in Paul Kendall, Led Zeppelin in Their Own Words (New York: Delilah Putnam, 1981), 51; Gerlach’s cover of Lead Belly’s “Gallows Pole” appears on Twelve-String Guitar Folk Songs and Blues, Folkways LP 3529, 1962. On Lead Belly’s version, see John Minton, “ ‘Our Goodman’ in Blackface and ‘The Maid’ at the Sookey Jump: Two Afro-American Variants of Child Ballads on Commercial Disc,” JEMF Quarterly 17 (1982): 31–40. 6. Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. Maud Karpeles, rev. ed., 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Sarah Buckner sang for Sharp at Black Mountain on September 14, 18, and 19, 1916. Unfortunately, she does not figure in Sharp’s introduction, or the relevant sections of Maud Karpeles’s Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 140–55. Of the thirteen pieces Sharp printed (English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, I: 208–9; 237, 241, 245, 275–76, 283–84, 321, 353; II: 23, 72, 42, 45–46, 283), six fall into the Child canon, and four are represented in Laws’s American Balladry from British Broadsides. The remaining three are well-known nonnarrative Anglo-American folksongs. 7. The definitive biography of Charlie Poole, his music and musical circle is Kinney Rorrer, Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole. Actually, Poole’s 1926 recording “The Highwayman” (Columbia 15160-D) combines “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Child 95) with the American blues ballad “The Coon Can Game” (Laws I 4). This combination later showed up both

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on other records and in oral tradition, all seemingly due to Poole’s version. See Marina Bokelman, “The Coon Can Game: A Blues Ballad Tradition,” M.A. thesis, Los Angeles: University of California, 1968; Coffin and Renwick, The British Traditional Ballad, 93; Long, “The Maid” and “The Hangman,” 44–45. Two years later, on July 23, 1928, Poole and the Ramblers recorded a second, more typical version of “The Maid,” “Hangman, Hangman, Slack the Rope” (Columbia 15385-D). 8. Here as throughout the book I have tried to avoid the social-scientific jargon often used for such matters in favor of plain but precise language. So a personal interaction is as it says: any situation in which persons communicate or bond. When such a situation occurs regularly enough to be recognized as customary for a particular group or community, it becomes a social occasion, which means it more than likely also expresses something about their culture, their shared values, tastes, behaviors, beliefs, and so on. At their best, these expressions go beyond purely practical or literal communication and rise to the level of art. Thus musical event includes all of these ideas, musical representing the cultural and artistic, event the social, with the degree of personal interaction being a crucial variable distinguishing different sorts of events: a mother singing a child a lullaby obviously involves more personal intimacy than an orchestra performing a symphony, which is one factor separating folksongs from classical music. As the templates through which individuals experience records—the wild cards in the musical-event pack—these and similar terms should suit my purposes with little additional annotation. One more thing: readers might object that I often use the idea of listening for matters relating as much or more to recording artists as record listeners. This is true, but for several reasons. Just as visual artists strive to achieve their visions—what they see—recording artists attempt to capture on record what they hear. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent of vision for the sense of hearing, just as there’s no synonym for recording that conveys active personal involvement the way listening does (machines also record, but only people listen). During the phonograph’s first years especially, old-time artists were themselves learning to listen, refashioning their art for an unfamiliar medium. In so doing, they constantly conveyed their own sense of their listeners, whose role was essential: from this book’s perspective it is only through listening that an inert sound disc becomes a record. All said, then, listening seems a reasonable description for the expressions, impressions, and experiences of all participants, recording artists and record listeners alike. 9. Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), dedication page. 10. Tony Glover, booklet for Duane Allman: An Anthology, Capricorn Records LPs 2CP 0108, 1972, 4. 11. Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia LP CL 1654, 1961); and King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2 (Columbia LP C 30034, 1970). Robert Johnson, “From Four Until Late” (Vocalion 03623, 1937); Cream, “Four Until Late,” Fresh Cream, Atco LP 33206, 1966). Robert Johnson, “Love In Vain” (Vocalion 04630, 1937); the Rolling Stones, “Love in Vain,” Let It Bleed, Decca LP SKL-5025, 1969. Robert Johnson, “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” (Vocalion 04002, 1937); the Rolling Stones, “Stop Breaking Down,” Exile on Main St, Rolling Stones Records LP COC-69100, 1972. Led Zeppelin’s “Lemon Song” (Led Zeppelin III, Atlantic LP SD 19127, 1969) merely borrows one striking verse from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” (ARC unissued, 1937), while Cream’s “Crossroads” (Wheels of Fire, Atco LP SD-2-700, 1968) combines “Traveling Riverside Blues” with Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (Vocalion 03519, 1936). 12. Mark Kemp, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (New York: Free Press, 2004).

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13. The Skillet Lickers: Clayton McMichen, Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett, Fate Norris: Old-Time Tunes, Recorded 1927–1931, County Records LP 506, 1965; Smoky Mountain Ballads: A Rare Collection of Early Folk Recordings, RCA Victor LP LPV-507, 1964. 14. The Skillet Lickers, “On Tanner’s Farm” (Bluebird 5665, 1934). Actually, “Maggie’s Farm” (Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) was inspired by another old-time record of this piece, which flits between folk, old-time, and revival sources: the Bentley Boys, “Down on Penny’s Farm” (Columbia 15565-D, 1929). See also John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (1953; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1970), 216–17; Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (New York: Oak Publications, 1967), 34–35; and Alan Lomax, The Folksongs of North America in the English Language (1960; rpt. Garden City, New York: Dolphin Books, 1975), 286. Notably, one of Dylan’s first recorded compositions was a more transparent rewrite of “Penny’s Farm”: “Hard Times in New York Town,” 1961, issued on Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961–1991, Columbia CDs C3K 65302, 1991. 15. Hosted by country singers Buck Owens and Roy Clark, TV’s Hee Haw (1969–92) was in fact a latter-day outgrowth of the same Southern traditions as the “Corn Licker” skits. Country Music: The Music and the Musicians from the Beginnings to the ’90s, ed. Paul Kingsbury, 2nd. ed. (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation, 1994), 264–65. 16. Sharp himself makes all these basic points, English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, xxv–xxxvii. 17. Sharp, English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, xxv. 18. D. K. Wilgus, “Collecting Musical Folklore and Folksong,” in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 370. On Sharp’s collecting practices and portrayal of Appalachia, see also David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 112–27. 19. Sharp, English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, xxiv. 20. Quoted in an anonymous Time article on Joan Baez and the folksong revival (“Folk Singing: Sybil with Guitar,” November 23, 1962, 60), Broonzy’s quip was prompted when the veteran bluesman suddenly found himself a coffeehouse celebrity at home and abroad in the 1950s, albeit usually recast as a folksinger. 21. Broonzy gives a most entertaining account of his life and music in his autobiography, Big Bill Blues. 22. As terms for pre–World War II recordings, the etymologies of hillbilly and race are admittedly a little more complicated than that. Then as now, “hillbilly” could be either a fighting word when used by outsiders or an in-group joke. As a description for white Southern music, it was commonly used in the prewar period by journalists and academics, though record companies only belatedly adopted it as an alternative to descriptions like “ ‘Old Time Tune’ Records,” “Songs from Dixie,” or “Familiar Tunes—Old and New.” To the extent that recording artists and listeners thought about such things—many did not—their reactions ranged from indifference to hostile resentment. During the same period, the black intelligentsia and middle class adopted race (or the Race) as preferable to colored or Negro. Record labels followed suit, but the term never caught on with the black underclass that made and purchased most race records. Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 21–38; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970); Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Hillbilly Issue, ed. D. K. Wilgus, special issue, Journal

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of American Folklore 78 (1965): 204–28; and Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded CoalMining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 33–61. I generally use hillbilly and race to discuss industry standards and practices or relevant scholarship, to distinguish white records from black, or to contrast prewar items from their postwar counterparts. Most often, I employ the less loaded old-time—which in general usage is more often applied to hillbilly than race records, but which can and will serve for both—or similar alternatives like country, blues, gospel, and so on. Of course, old-time is itself just a convenient latter-day label: in their own time, many of these artists were striving to be up to date. And in specific cases, the goal is always clarity, even at the expense of consistency. Prewar always means pre–World War II, postwar its opposite. 23. This slight seems odd considering that Marshall McLuhan, the patriarch of contemporary mass media studies, opened his ruminations on typographic man and his progeny in the Global Village with the revolutionary oral-formulaic theories of Millman Parry and Albert Lord. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24 (Cambridge, 1960). As it turns out, though, McLuhan was not really interested in oral tradition except as an awkward metaphor for electronic media. Thus, for McLuhan mass media and its by-products—advertising, recorded jazz, whatever—are the “folklore of industrial man.” McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 2 –3; Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). Not that cultural factors like music play any great part in all of this. Instead, media are monolithic forces predetermining human behavior with an almost physiological regularity. (Media are—in one well-known scheme—“hot” or “cold.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2nd ed. [1964; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966], 36–45.) Orality, literacy, and print or electronic media are accordingly reduced to mutually exclusive stages in an invariant sequence—one evolves from “barbarian” to “scribe” to “typographic man” to “global villager”—that obliterates cultural distinctions. Any medium’s content is wholly irrelevant; in that most quoted of all of McLuhan’s catchphrases, “the medium is the message.” McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 7; Understanding Media, 23–35. Today McLuhan’s ideas endure in what Ruth Finnegan terms “the Great Divide theories” of communications technologies. Minor differences aside, these Great Dividers all subscribe to an “implicit or explicit technological determinism” and the “notion of some fundamental divide between two basically different types of society (or of human experience),” generally “referred to as ‘oral’ (or sometimes ‘primitive’) and ‘literate’ (or ‘civilized’).” “If,” runs the logic, “the technology is the same (whether writing, print or networked computers), then the social and cultural results will be the same too,” while “ ‘human factors’, if they enter in at all, are thought of as secondary and arising from the technology.” Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 8, 10, 12. Those better acquainted with real communities than global villages might second Finnegan’s view that “ ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ (and similar terms) are complex and relative notions, and ones which manifest themselves in the real world in a number of overlapping ways.” Ruth Finnegan, “What Is Oral Literature Anyway?: Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material,” in Oral Literature and the Formula, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz and Richard S. Shannon, III (Ann Arbor: Center for the Coördination of Ancient and Modern Studies, University of Michigan, 1976), 143. In fact, while Great Dividers still name-drop Albert Lord and oral-formulaic research, most repeat McLuhan’s errors by swallowing whole the field’s early hypotheses while overlooking its subsequent refinements. Like McLuhan too, these Great Dividers have virtually ignored the sound recording, one of the most

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popular of all modern media. But as record researcher Pekka Gronow once pointedly observed, “the problem [with this medium] is in the message. The message of records is usually music, and communications research does not know how to deal with music.” Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium,” in Popular Music 3: Producers and Markets, ed. Richard Middleton and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 53. For a thorough survey of Great Divide scholarship see Finnegan, Literacy and Orality. Lord’s The Singer of Tales remains the definitive statement of the oral-formulaic method. On advances since then, see John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Unfortunately, other fads in communications research offer recorded folk music even less— just a similar penchant for suspect generalizations: witness the dreary predictability of academic Marxist media theory or the smug solipsism of its close progeny, so-called postmodernism. That some students of traditional music have lately affected these trends—or at least their jargon— reveals more of academic fashions than their amenability to folksong. For thoughtful reviews of these trends see Peter Manuel, Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 7–16; and John D. Dorst, “Postmodernism,” in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Garland, 1996). 24. Francis James Child, quoted in Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides, 68. One has to distinguish here between older oral traditions merely preserved on broadsides—as medieval ballads sometimes were—and later materials originating on broadsides, the case with so-called broadside ballads. Child’s own notions of oral tradition were only circumstantially tied to word-of-mouth transmission. Instead, he saw it mainly as a stylistic trait, the oral style being the medieval ballad’s repetitive, highly formulaic diction, which did differ markedly from the journalistic approach of later broadsides. Thus, even when broadsides passed into oral tradition, they still were not oral in Child’s view. For cogent discussions of the medieval and broadside styles, see Roger deV. Renwick, “Ballad” and “Folksong,” in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. On the broadside’s dominance in American oral tradition, see Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides, 65–66. 25. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 145. 26. D. K. Wilgus and Eleanor R. Long, “The Blues Ballad and the Genesis of Style in Traditional Narrative Song,” in Narrative Folksong: New Directions: Essays in Appreciation of W. Edson Richmond, ed. Carol L. Edwards and Cathleen E. B. Manley (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1985), 437–82; Renwick, “Ballad” and “Folksong,” in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. 27. Josiah H. Combs, Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, ed. D. K. Wilgus, American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 19 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967, originally published as Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis, Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1925), 35, 97, 102–3, original emphasis. 28. Combs, Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, 102, 92; cf. D. K. Wilgus, “Forward,” Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, xvi–xvii. 29. Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925; rpt., Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, 1963), 281–82. 30. Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (1926; rpt., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 22–23, 33–34. 31. Amassed in the 1920s and ’30s, Randolph’s Ozark Folksongs, 4 vols. (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1946–50) is remarkable for its day in sampling the full range of

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Southern song-types, as well as for its annotations, which “were practically unique in their citations of popular printed sources—chapbooks, songsters, magazines, and newspaper columns —and in their awareness of commercial phonograph recordings (‘hillbilly records’) of many traditional items” (“Editor’s Introduction,” in Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, ed. and abr. Norm Cohen, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, vii). Randolph even used old-time records as prompts in his collecting, reporting that one “method of inducing the reluctant ridge-runner to sing is to lure him into your house and play phonograph records of the old songs, by such singers as Al Craver, Vernon Dalhart [both pseudonyms of East Texan Marion Try Slaughter], Riley Puckett, Carl T. Sprague, Harry McClintock, Kelley Harrell, Buell Kazee, Dock Boggs, and Bradley Kincaid” (all major old-time artists) (Ozark Folksongs, vol. I: British Ballads and Songs, 32; also Cohen, “Editor’s Introduction,” xi). Randolph was not entirely alone, of course. During the late 1920s, Abbe Niles perceptively discussed race and hillbilly records in a series of reviews in The Bookman. See David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 89–90. America’s greatest folksong collector, Alan Lomax (1915–2002), was also intimately acquainted with race and hillbilly recordings. From an early date he cited them in his published collections, and in his various activities often sought out artists he knew from old-time records. Moreover, he observed firsthand the everyday role these records played in Southern communities. See, for example, his vivid account of the jukebox in a Mississippi juke joint in the early 1940s: Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Delta, 1993), 37–39. 32. D. K. Wilgus, “A Catalogue of American Folksongs on Commercial Records,” M.A. thesis, Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1947. 33. D. K. Wilgus, “A Note on ‘Songs from Rappahannock County,’ ” Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 320, my emphasis. Wilgus’s subject is MacEdward Leach and Horace P. Beck, “Songs from Rappahannock County, Virginia,” Journal of American Folklore 63 (1950): 257–84. 34. D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” Hillbilly Issue, ed. D. K. Wilgus, special issue, Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 196, 203; see also D. K. Wilgus, AngloAmerican Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 198, 232–35, 283–84, 430; D. K. Wilgus, “Folksong and Folksong Scholarship: Changing Approaches and Attitudes, IV: The Rationalistic Approach,” in A Good Tale and a Bonnie Tune, ed. Mody C. Boatright, Wilson M. Hudson, and Allen Maxwell, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society No. 32 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964), 227–37; and D. K. Wilgus, “The Hillbilly Movement,” in Our Living Traditions: An Introduction to American Folklore, ed. Tristram Potter Coffin (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 263–71. 35. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” 195, original emphasis. 36. See, for example, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (1980; rpt., Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), a singular attempt to reconstruct how European peasants really read broadside literature. 37. D. K. Wilgus, “The Individual Song: ‘Billy the Kid,’ ” Western Folklore 30 (1971): 226–34, exemplifies this approach. 38. Foremost among these was the John Edwards Memorial Foundation at the University of California Los Angeles, which established an old-time archive and library, supported field research, and published monographs, reissue LPs, and a scholarly journal, JEMF Quarterly. Originally housed in the Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA, it is now part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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39. Richard Bauman, “Introduction,” Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971); rpt. in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, ed. Americo Parèdes and Richard Bauman. Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 23 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), v. 40. Roger D. Abrahams, “The Complex Relations of Simple Forms,” 1969; rpt. in Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos. Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 26 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 211, 214, n. 8. 41. Dan Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971); rpt. in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, 3–15. 42. Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” 9, 13, 14. 43. Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” 14. 44. D. K. Wilgus, “ ‘The Text Is the Thing,’ ” Journal of American Folklore 86 (1973): 252. 45. Wilgus, “ ‘The Text Is the Thing,’ ” 247, 251. Unlike the better-known “Little Mary Phagan” (Laws F 20), well documented in both folk and commercial traditions, Wilgus’s subject—“The Little Grave in Georgia”—is known only from two records by North Georgia fiddlers, the earliest (OKeh 45028) cut in 1925 by John Carson, the second (OKeh 45194) recorded two years later by Carson’s friend, neighbor, and bandmate Earl Johnson. On the Phagan-Frank case and its connection to old-time music, see also Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World and the World of His Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 26–45. 46. See, for example, Steven S. Jones, “Slouching Towards Ethnography: The Text/Context Controversy Reconsidered,” Western Folklore 38 (1979): 42–47; Dan Ben-Amos, “The Ceremony of Innocence,” Western Folklore 38 (1979): 47–52; and Steven S. Jones, “Dogmatism in the Contextual Revolution,” Western Folklore 38 (1979): 52–55. 47. In a near-novelistic coincidence, there appeared between Ben-Amos’s definition-incontext and Wilgus’s defense of Mary Phagan’s textual tradition an article by Saundra Keyes titled “ ‘Little Mary Phagan’: A Native American Ballad in Context,” Journal of Country Music 3 (1972): 1–16. Like Wilgus, Keyes extends context well beyond small groups to include generic conventions and textual traditions, media formats, even community attitudes and values. Responding to Keyes, Wilgus heaped still more contexts on poor little Mary’s grave. D. K. Wilgus and Nathan Hurvitz, “ ‘Little Mary Phagan’: Further Notes on a Native American Ballad in Context,” Journal of Country Music 4 (1973): 17–30; also Saundra Keyes, “Ms. Keyes Replies to Wilgus and Hurvitz,” Journal of Country Music 4 (1973): 31. The next year another distinguished old-time record researcher, Charles K. Wolfe (1943–2006), published “Toward a Contextual Approach to Old-Time Music.” The resemblance to Ben-Amos’s title is uncanny. Wolfe lets it pass without mention. As for the “context of hillbilly records,” he suggests “the idea includes the relationship of recording companies and artists; the manner in which the recordings, both in the studio and in the field, were made; the geographical factor operating in field recordings; and the effect of the recording on the folk artist and his community”—also a far cry from what Ben-Amos (and others) meant by “context.” Charles K. Wolfe, “Toward a Contextual Approach to Old-Time Music,” Journal of Country Music 5 (1974): 67. 48. Dan Ben-Amos, “ ‘Context’ in Context,” Western Folklore 52 (1993): 220. 49. Typical is Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter’s Why Don’t Sheep Shrink When It Rains?: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), one in their series of highly entertaining books on the topic. Leapfrogging from oral traditions, pre-electronic scribal materials, broadsides, and then to photocopiers, fax machines, and the Internet in a single

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twenty-three line paragraph (xvii), the editors define folklore by two traits indisputably shared with photocopiers: multiple existence and variation. But then these traits are not unique to folklore, where they are significant mainly as hallmarks of oral transmission. 50. Tim Riley, Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary, updated ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 144–45. 51. Dylan’s devotion to old-time records can only be hinted at here. His famous debt to the mother of all old-time reissues—the Anthology of American Folk Music, 3 vols. (Folkways LPs FA 2951–53, 1952)—is, however, especially revealing. Compiled entirely from old-time 78s by folklorist and avant garde artist Harry Smith (1923–1991), the Anthology became a charter for both the urban folksong revival and rock. Its impact on performers like Dylan was extraordinary. As he put it in a 1998 interview, “I heard that particular record [the Anthology] early on when it was very difficult to find these kind of songs. . . . That’s where the wealth of folk music was, on that particular record. For me, on hearing it, was all these songs to learn. It was the language, the poetic language—it’s all poetry, every single one of those songs, without a doubt.” Serge Kaganski, ‘I’ve got new eyes . . . everything looks far away’: Bob Dylan: The Mojo Interview,” Mojo (February 1998): 64. Throughout his career, Dylan has drawn on the Anthology in his own compositions (to cite just one, “Maggie’s Farm” was inspired by one of its selections, the Bentley Boys’ “Down on Penny’s Farm”; also see n. 14 above). He has also routinely covered its titles (several appear, for example, on two albums of folksongs Dylan released in the 1990s, Good As I Been to You, Columbia CD CK 53200, 1992, and World Gone Wrong, Columbia CD CK 57590, 1993). Given its stature, the Anthology’s release as a CD box set (Smithsonian/Folkways CDs SFW 40090, 1997) became a major event in American music, coinciding with an acclaimed book-length examination of Dylan’s debt to the Anthology by eminent rock critic Greil Marcus: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); reprinted as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador, 2001). (While it is never less than entertaining and insightful, Marcus’s highly subjective approach epitomizes the tendencies described above, inadequately distinguishing between Dylan—a world-class artist whose work is now widely accepted as part of the Western literary canon—and the community-based old-time artists represented on the Anthology.) See also A Booklet of Essays, Appreciations, and Annotations Pertaining to the Anthology of American Folk Music, booklet for Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Harry Smith, 3 vols., Smithsonian/Folkways CDs SFW 40090, 1997; also Ed Sanders, John Cohen, Dick Spottswood, Greil Marcus, and John Fahey, booklet for Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four, Revenant CDs RVN 211, 2000; Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 188–238; and John Cohen, booklet for Jerry Garcia/David Grisman, Shady Grove, Acoustic Disc CD ACD 21, 1996.

Chapter 2. True Relations 1. Of particular interest are the recollections of the A&R (artist and repertoire) men, the record company representatives who located, auditioned, and selected performers, often also arranging and overseeing the recording sessions. See Norm Cohen, “ ‘I’m a Record Man’: Uncle Art Satherly Reminisces,” JEMF Quarterly 8 (1972): 18–21; David Evans, “An Interview with H. C. Speir,” JEMF Quarterly 8 (1972): 117–21; Lester Melrose, “My Life in Recording,” in The American Folk Music Occasional, ed. Chris Strachwitz and Pete Welding (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 59–61; Mike Seeger, “Who Chose These Records?: A Look into the Life, Tastes, and Procedures

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of Frank Walker,” in Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 8–17; Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues, ed. Edward Komara (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 129–49; Charles K. Wolfe, “Ralph Peer at Work: The Victor 1927 Bristol Sessions,” Old Time Music 5 (Summer 1972): 10–15; and Charles Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” JEMF Quarterly 14 (1978): 118–25, 144. Accounts of old-time record listeners are much rarer, Jeff Todd Titon’s “Patterns of Record Purchase and Listening” being truly exceptional in this regard. Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 281–86. Record collectors also provide some anecdotal evidence; see, for example, Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Knocking On Doors for 78s: Buying Race Records in the South,” in Chasing That Devil Music, 10–16; and Marshall Wyatt, booklet for Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s, 1926–1937, Old Hat Records CD 1004, 2002. For the recollections of an individual listener, see John Minton, “The Reverend Lamar Roberts and the Mediation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 3–37. 2. Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House, 1977), 24; cf. also Roger D. Abrahams, “The Complex Relations of Simple Forms.” 3. For example, the joke parody “Q: What do you call a polar bear flying an airplane? A: A pilot” throws listeners for a loop with a literal-minded answer completely out of step with a real joke’s figurative or playful approach. 4. Recently, for example, jokes about banjo players have caught on in bluegrass circles: “Q: What do you call a building full of banjo players? A: A jail.” “Q: What do you do if a banjo player comes to your house? A: Pay him for the pizza.” “Q: How can you tell if a bluegrass stage is level? A: Tobacco juice runs down both sides of the banjo player’s mouth.” “Q: What did the banjo player get on his SAT test? A: Drool.” “Q: What do you call a banjo player in a suit and tie? A: The defendant.” . . . and so on. Typical of such joke cycles, there is now even a joke about banjo player jokes and their traditional patterns: “Q: Why are all banjo player jokes one-liners? A: So the mandolin player can understand them.” 5. Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, vol. 2: Songs of the South and West (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1948), 115. This reported quality is essential to the well-documented distinction between what Carl von Sydow termed active and passive tradition bearers. C. W. von Sydow, “On the Spread of Tradition,” in Selected Papers on Folklore, ed. Laurits Bødker (Copenhagen: Rosenkild and Bagger, 1948), 11–43. 6. Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, vol. 1, 75. Apparently “The Three Crows” was often parodied this way. Compare the version sent to Alton Morris by Mr. R. J. Knight of Palmetto, Florida, who told the editor that “this ballad was sung thus—The leader lined it out and commanded ‘Sing, Brethren, Sing!’ Of course, the lining out of the words took place between each stanza.” Alton C. Morris, Folksongs of Florida (Gainesville : University of Florida Press, 1950), 254. 7. Cf. Richard Bauman, “The Keying of Performance,” Verbal Art as Performance, 15–24. Many of these framing or keying devices also belong to the large body of tradition that Alan Dundes termed metafolklore: that is, folklore about folklore, or folk performers’ exegeses of their own performances. Alan Dundes, “Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism,” The Monist 50 (1966): 505–16. More generally, they involve what anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski described as phatic communication: “messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works, . . . to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.” Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and

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Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 355; also Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” 1923; rpt. in The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 8th ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 315. As one felicitous illustration, consider Barbara Babcock’s example of “the blues singer’s [traditional aside] ‘hear me singing to you’,” which “calls attention to the singer, the audience, and the relationship between them which is made through the channel of singing.” Barbara A. Babcock, “The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative,” 1976; rpt. in Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 67. 8. Unfortunately, collectors failed to note such cues with any consistency during the great age of Southern folksong—Vance Randolph was unusual in this as well—so I have taken the liberty of providing my own illustrations, based on my own acquaintance with the tradition. Their typicality should be obvious to anyone who has, say, spent much time hanging out in the parking lots at bluegrass festivals or fiddlers’ conventions. Just as telling, dozens of nearly identical statements appear on old-time records considered in the following chapters. 9. G. Malcolm Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides, 88–89, 91. 10. “Happy Ship Carpenter.” Sold wholesale and retail by Leonard Deming, Corner of Merchant’s Row and Market Square, Boston. [n.d.] America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress. http://www.memory.loc.gov. 11. These and similar broadside conventions are conveniently inventoried in Charles Welsh and William H. Tillinghast’s Catalogue of English and American Chapbooks and Broadside Ballads in Harvard College Library (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968). 12. Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides, 59–62. 13. “Change for a $10 Bill: An Old Story done up in new dress, and sung to the tune of: Monkey Turned Barber.” H. De Marsan, Publisher of Songs, ballads, toy books, &c. No. 60 Chatham Street, N.Y. [n.d.] America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress. http://www.memory.loc.gov. Cf. Frank Purslow, ed. Marrow Bones: English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner Mss. (London: E.F.D.S. Publications, 1965), 13; Harvey Nicholson, “The Copshawholm Butcher,” The Voice of the People: Vol. 10, Who’s That at My Bed Window: Songs of Love and Amorous Encounters, Topic CD TSCD 660, 1998. 14. Reproduced in Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 193. 15. Charles K. Wolfe, “Man of Constant Sorrow: Richard Burnett’s Story,” pts. 1 and 2, Old Time Music, no. 9 (Summer 1973): 6–9; and no. 10 (Autumn 1973): 5–11. Burnett recalled doing quite a trade with his records too. “I was the first man around here that sold records,” he told Wolfe. “Oh, I sold hundreds o’ them in this county. And you know, everybody around, they’d come for miles and miles to get them records” (pt. 2, 8). 16. Besides Burnett’s autobiographical “Song of the Orphan Boy” (below), Songs Sung by R. D. BURNETT includes “The C. & O Railroad” (Laws G 3), “The Reckless Hobo” (Laws H 2), “The Lost Ship” (a Titanic ballad later recorded by Georgia’s Cofer Brothers and the South Carolinian Dixon Brothers), “The Jolly Butchers,” and “The Farewell Song” (better known as “Man of Constant Sorrow”). 17. Anyone acquainted with broadsides will recognize the typicality of the following items, excerpted from a single source (Roy Palmer, The Oxford Book of Sea Songs, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) selected almost at random: “A Joyful New Ballad”; “Sailors for my Money, a new ditty composed in the praise of sailors and sea affairs, briefly showing the nature of so worthy a calling, and effects of their industry”; “An Excellent New Song, entitled A Hot Engagement

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between a French Privateer and an English Fireship”; “A New Song on the Blanford Privateer”; “A New Song Called the Frolicsome Sea Captain, or Tit for Tat”; “New Sea Song”; “The Greenland Men: An excellent new song composed by 18 Greenland men in the Swan tender’s hold in Leith Roads, June 2nd, 1780”; “The Fishes’ Lamentation: A New Song”; “A New Song on the Total Defeat of the French by Sir Horatio Nelson, near Rosetta, on the first of August last”; and “Second of August: A New Song composed by the wounded Tars at the Siege of Boulogne.” 18. Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and other Ephemera (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1973), 208, 173. The “three yards a penny” refers to a long-song sheet: “a penny sheet approx. 7 1/4” X 20” containing many short songs, sometimes cried [advertised] as ‘three yards a penny’, but actually referring to three columns rather than the overall length” (225). 19. On this and other early broadside constituencies, see Margaret Spufford’s chapter “Direct and Indirect Evidence for Readership of the Chapbooks,” Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (1981; rpt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 45–82. 20. These are traditional advertisements from British bellmen, who “would produce ‘A Copy of Verses’ every Christmas, which [they] would offer to each householder [on their watches] for a small gratuity.” Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature, 118–20. 21. The Oaks and Brooks broadsides are reproduced in Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Number Twenty-Seven,” JEMF Quarterly 9 (Winter 1973): 160–65. See also Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 227–31; and Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 30–32. 22. Charles Hindley, The Life and Times of James Catnach, (Late of Seven Dials), Ballad Monger (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), 41. 23. Wolfe, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” pt. 2, 11. 24. Hindley, The Life and Times of James Catnach, 50, 87–88; Leslie Shepard, John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765–1844, With a Short Account of His Predecessors in the Ballad Trade (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969), 53–54. Cf. also Hindley, 160–61. 25. Hindley, The Life and Times of James Catnach, 369–71. 26. William Moss, Confederate Broadside Poems: An Annotated Descriptive Bibliography Based on the Collection of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University (Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1988), 33. 27. Moss, Confederate Broadside Poems, 117, 156–57. 28. Again, the parenthetical illustrations are my own. Of course, other artistic traditions, genres, or media frame their creations along similar lines; compare, for example, Jonathan Culler’s description of literary vraisemblance [verisimilitude] in his Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 131–60.

Chapter 3. Let’s Get This Dance Started 1. Norm Cohen, booklet for Paramount Old Time Tunes: An Album of Recordings Originally Made in the 1920’s and 1930’s, JEMF LP 103, 4, 19. Throughout, I tend to provide such biographical references only for lesser-known performers like Chumber, Coker and Rice; for well-known artists, citations are usually intended only to support some particular point. Besides individual

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biographies noted elsewhere, I’ve drawn on general works like Sheldon Harris, Blues Who’s Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (1979; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1993); Gerard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1992); Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Encyclopedia of Country Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Edward Komara, ed., Encyclopedia of the Blues, 2 vols.(New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barry McCloud, ed., Definitive Country: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Country Music (New York: Perigree, 1995). These too are cited sparingly. For the records themselves, original releases are given in the text on first mention. Discographical information is taken primarily from Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard W. Rye, Blues and Gospel Records 1890–1943, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Finally, while this study focuses on the prewar era, I have introduced without further comment a few records from the immediate postwar period when these provide obvious continuations of, or interesting comparisons to, prewar trends. 2. Robert Cogswell, “A Discography of Blackface Dialogues,” JEMF Quarterly 15 (1979): 166–79. 3. In this same vein are Andrew and Jim Baxter, “Forty Drops” (Victor V38002, 1928); Herschel Brown, “Barbecue Down In Georgia—Part 2” (OKeh unissued, 1929) and “Home Brew Party” (OKeh 45250, 1928); Burnett and Rutherford, “Ladies on the Steamboat” (Columbia 15209D, 1927); Warren Caplinger’s Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, “Saro” (Brunswick 241, 1928); Bill Chitwood and His Georgia Mountaineers, “Kitty Hill” (OKeh 45162, 1927); Dykes Magic City Trio, “Cotton Eyed Joe” (Brunswick 120, 1927) and “Red Steer” (Vocalion 5181, 1927); Henry Whitter, “Old Jimmy Sutton” (Gennett 6436, 1928); Adolph Hofner and His San Antonians, “Paul Jones (Arkansas Traveler),” (OKeh 06184, 1941); Sid Harkreader and Grady Moore, “Old Joe” (Paramount 3023, 1927); Hatton Brothers, “Wish I Had My Time Again”/“Hook & Line” (Champion 16628, 1933); Jarvis and Justice, “Poor Girl’s Waltz” (Brunswick 333, 1929); Lookout Mountain Revelers, “Barn Dance on the Mountain—Parts 1 and 2” (Broadway 8137, 1928); Uncle Dave Macon, “Sleepy Lou” (Vocalion 5156, 1927); Billy Milton and His One Man Band, “The Old Fashioned Square Dance” (Gennett 6318, 1927); Jack Reedy and His Walker Mountain String Band, “Chinese Breakdown” (Brunswick 221, 1928); Carson Robison, “Goin’ To Have A Big Time To-night” (Perfect 12484, 1932); Watkins Band, “Bob Murphy”/“Gideon” (Victor 21405, 1928); West Virginia Coon Hunters, “Greasy String” (Victor 20862, 1927); Charlie Wilson and His Hayloft Boys, “The Beer Party”/“Ride the Goat Over the Mountain” (Montgomery Ward 8064, 1933); and Charlie Wilson and His Hillbillies, “Shelven Rock”/“Cuttin’ at the Point” (Montgomery Ward 8065, 1932). 4. Leonard Roberts, Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family, Publications of the American Folklore Society, Memoir Series, vol. 61 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), esp. 47–63. Besides the Skillet Lickers’ fourteen-part “Corn Licker Still in Georgia” (see ch. 7), other moonshiner skits include the Monroe County Bottle Tippers, “The Fiddlin’ Bootleggers—Parts 1 and 2” (Gennett 6585, 1928); Seven Foot Dilly, Dan Tucker, Archie Lee, Lowe Stokes, and “Pops” Melvin, “A Bootlegger’s Joint in Atlanta—Parts 1 and 2” (Brunswick 489, 1930); and Fiddlin’ John Carson and Moonshine Kate, “Moonshine Kate”/“John Makes Good Licker” (OKeh 45290, 1928), “John Makes Good Liquor—Parts 3 and 4” (OKeh 45369, 1929), and “Corn Licker and Barbecue—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45415, 1929). 5. Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, 68–69. Other house rent sides include Mozelle Alderson, “Tight in Chicago” (Brunswick 7159, 1930); Cow Cow Davenport, “Mootch Piddle” (Vocalion 1282, 1929);

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Alberta Hunter, “My Castle’s Rockin’ ” (Bluebird B8539, 1940) and “Boogie-Woogie Swing” (Bluebird B8485, 1940); Lil Johnson, “House Rent Scuffle” (Vocalion 1410, 1929); Bill Johnson’s Louisiana Jug Band, “Don’t Drink It In Here” (Brunswick 7067, 1929); and the Dixieland Jug Blowers, “House Rent Rag” (Victor 20420, 1926). All of these records dramatically re-create house parties. Occasionally artists sing descriptions of these or other events discussed here: for instance, Walter Roland, “House Lady Blues” (Banner 32832, 1933), or Doctor Clayton’s Buddy (Sunnyland Slim), “No Whiskey Blues” (Victor 20-2945, 1947). Generally, though, I have ignored such compositions. 6. Cow Cow Davenport, “Chimin’ the Blues”/“Alabama Strut” (Vocalion 1253, 1928); Foster and Harris (Ma Rainey’s Boys), “Crow Jane Alley” (Paramount 12709, 1928); Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Lightnin’s Boogie” (Gold Star 664, 1949); Jack Kelly and His South Memphis Jug Band, “Doctor Medicine” (Vocalion 02585, 1933); Big Maceo (Maceo Merriweather), “Texas Stomp” (Victor 20-2028, 1945) and “Detroit Jump” (Victor 20-2173, 1945); William (Bill) Moore’s “Ragtime Crazy” (Paramount 12648, 1928); Ma Rainey, “Blues the World Forgot—Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 12647, 1927); Frankie Lee Sims, “Wine and Gin Bounce” (Specialty unissued, 1953); Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” (Vocalion 1245, 1928) and “I’m Sober Now” (Vocalion 1266, 1929); Charlie Spand, “Rock and Rye” (OKeh 05699, 1940); Tampa Red, “That’s the Way I Do” (Bluebird B6578, 1936) and “That May Get It Now” (Bluebird B7499, 1938); Myra Taylor, “Tell Your Best Friend Nothing” (Mercury 8027, 1946). 7. Mark Wilson, booklet for Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers: “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records,” Rounder Records LP 1005, 1973, 4; Gene Wiggins, “Popular Music and the Fiddler,” JEMF Quarterly 15 (1979): 146. 8. Marshall and Jean Sterns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968); Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); and Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 9. The 1928 Gennett catalog, for example, identifies nearly a dozen items (including “Richmond Cotillion”) as “Old Time Dance with Calls,” “Barn Dance with Calls,” or “Old Time Barn Dance with Calls.” New Electrobeam Gennett Records of Old Time Tunes (Richmond, Indiana: Gennett Records, 1928); rpt. JEMF Special Series, No. 6 (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, University, 1970), 3, 10, 13, 20. The other relevant titles are Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, “John Brown’s Dream” (reverse of “Richmond Cotillion”); Tommy Dandurand, “Leather Breeches”/“Buffalo Girl” (Gennett 6273); and Uncle Steve Hubbard and His Boys, “Big Town Fling”/“Haste to the Wedding” (Gennett 6088), “Two Step Quadrille”/“Larry O’Gaff ” (Gennett 6101), and “Campbells Are Coming”/“Devils Dream” (Gennett 6121). Other white dancecall records include the Aiken County String Band, “Carolina Stompdown” (OKeh 45153, 1927) and “High Sheriff ” (OKeh 45219, 1927); Dr. Humphrey Bate and His Possum Hunters, “Goin’ UpTown” (Brunswick 232, 1928), “Billy in the Lowground” (Brunswick 239, 1928), “Take Your Foot Out of the Mud and Put It In the Sand” (Brunswick 243, 1928), and “Old Joe” (Brunswick 271, 1928); Herschel Brown and His Washboard Band, “Liberty” (Victor V-40070, 1928); Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, “Little Betty Brown (calls by Derwood Brown)” (Decca 5194, 1935); Fiddlin’ John Carson and His Virginia Reelers, “Cotton Eyed Joe” (OKeh 45122, 1927); Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers, “Sugar in My Coffee” (Crown 3075, 1931); Crook Brothers, “Going Across the Sea” (Victor V-40099, 1928); Dykes’ Magic City Trio, “Tennessee Girls” (Brunswick 120, 1927), “Callahan’s Reel” (Vocalion 5181, 1927), and “Huckleberry Blues” (Brunswick 129, 1927); Freeny’s

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Barn Dance Band, “Mississippi Square Dance—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45533, 1930); Four Virginians, “New Coon In Town” (OKeh 45181, 1927); Fiddler Joe and His Boys, “Turkey in the Straw (The Paul Jones)”/“Arkansaw Traveler (A Quadrille)” (OKeh 45042, 1926); The Hill Billies, “Boatin’ Up Sandy” (Brunswick 182, 1927); Hobbs Brothers, “Turkey in the Straw”/“Hell Among the Yearlings” (Banner S6224, 1928) and “Devil’s Dream”/“Patty on the Turnpike” (Banner S6435, 1929); Frank Hutchison, “Wild Hogs in the Red Brush” (OKeh 45274, 1928); Jimmy Johnson’s String Band, “Step Lively”/“Washington Quadrille” (Champion S-16389, 1931); Judge Sturdy’s Orchestra, “Moselle— Quadrille” (Victor 20102, 1925); Kessinger Brothers, “Hell Among the Yearlings” (Brunswick 235, 1928), “Forked Deer” (Brunswick 247, 1928), “Chicken in the Barnyard”/“Devil’s Dream” (Brunswick 256, 1928), and “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (Brunswick 267, 1928); Leake County Revelers, “Leather Breeches” (Columbia 15149-D, 1927); Lonesome Luke and His Farm Boys, “Wild Hog in the Woods”/“Dogs in the Ash Can” (Champion 16229, 1931) and “Halfway to Arkansas”/“Beaver Valley Breakdown” (Champion 16269, 1931); Dad Massey and His Family, “Durang’s Hornpipe” (Conqueror 8738, 1936); Floyd Ming and His Pep Steppers, “Old Red” (Victor 21294, 1928) and “White Mule”/“Tupelo Blues” (Victor 21534, 1928); Reaves White County Ramblers, “Ten Cent Piece” (Vocalion 5218, 1928) and “Flying Engine” (Vocalion 5247, 1928); Doc Roberts, “Martha Campbell” (Gennett 3152, 1925); Scottdale String Band, “Share ’Em” (OKeh 45256, 1928); The Skillet Lickers, “Molly Put the Kettle On” (Columbia 15746-D, 1931) and “Back Up and Push” (Bluebird B-5562, 1934); Vance’s Tennessee Breakdowners, “Tennessee Breakdown” (OKeh 45151, 1927); and Williamson Brothers and Curry, “The Fun’s All Over” (OKeh 45108, 1927). Black examples include Andrew and Jim Baxter, “Georgia Stomp” (Victor V38002, 1928); Blind Blake, “West Coast Blues” (Paramount 12387, 1926); and Henry Thomas (Ragtime Texas), “Old Country Stomp” (Vocalion 1230, 1928). During this period, similar records emerged from other regional traditions (mainly New England), most notably the many titles from the National Barn Dance Orchestra, Henry Ford’s Old-Time Dance Orchestra, and Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham. See also Phil Jamison, “ ‘Barn Dance with Calls’: Old-Time Southern Square-Dance Calls on 78s: 1920s–early 1930s,” The Old-Time Herald vol. 7, no. 8 (Summer 2001). http://www.oldtimeherald.org/archive/back issues/ volume-7/7-8. 10. In fact, much of what is known about the South Georgia Highballers comes from these two sides. See Tony Russell, “The South Georgia Highballers,” Old Time Music 7 (Winter 1972–73): 20; Tony Russell, Country Music Records; and Pete Welding and Lawrence Cohn, booklet for Roots N’ Blues: The Retrospective 1925–1950, Columbia/Legacy CDs 47911, 1992, 15. 11. Kip Lornell, booklet for Texas: Black Country Dance Music (1927  –1935): Dallas String Band • William McCoy • Will Day • Frenchy’s String Band • Jake Jones and the Gold Front Boys • Carl Davis and Dallas Jamboree Band: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Document Records CD DOCD-5162, 1993; and Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (1969; rpt. Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company, 1982), 50–51. 12. Norm Cohen and Anne Cohen, “The Legendary Jimmie Tarlton,” Sing Out! 16 (September 1966): 18. 13. Sheldon Harris, Blues Who’s Who, 263–64. 14. Bengt Olsson and Tony Russell, “Appendix 1: T. C. Johnson,” in Bengt Olsson, Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 96–97; and Marshall Wyatt, booklet for Violin, Sing the Blues for Me: African-American Fiddlers 1926–1949, Old Hat CD 1002, 1999. 15. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), esp. 105–12; and Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues, 45.

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16. Others are the Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers, “The Fiddler’s Contest” (Conqueror 8103, 1931); Fiddler Joe Brown, Fiddler A. A. Gray, Seven Foot Dilly, “A Fiddler’s Tryout In Georgia—Parts 1 and 2” (Vocalion 5432, 1930); and the Tennessee Ramblers, “A Fiddler’s Contest” (Brunswick 257, 1928). 17. On these traditions see Carolyn Lipson-Walker, “Weddings,” Jay Orr, “Fiddle and Fiddlers’ Conventions,” and Sharon A. Sharp, “Fairs,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 493–95, 1056–57, 1216–18. 18. Kip Lornell, “Happy in the Service of the Lord”: Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 38. 19. Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 145, 160. 20. Elder J. E. Burch, “The Prayer Service” (Victor 21248, 1927); Deacon Leon Davis, “Deacon’s Prayer Service” (OKeh 8527, 1927); Rev. J. F. Forest, “Prayer Meeting and Sermon” (Gennett 6323, 1927); Rev. J. M. Gates, “Sisters’ Prayer Meeting” (OKeh 8452, 1927) and “Rev. Gates’ Song Service” (Bluebird B5755, 1934); Elder Oscar Sanders and Congregation, “Singing with Praise Service” and “Pentecostal Praise Service” (ARC unissued, 1934); Deacon Leon Davis, “Experience Meeting” (OKeh 8527, 1927); Rev. F. W. McGee, “Testifyin’ Meetin’ ” (Victor V38579, 1930); and Rev. P. W. Williams, “Testifying Meeting—Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 12742, 1928). Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 165–66, 182–83. 21. Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 145–46, 153, 162–63, 179–80. 22. For example, the great bluesman Charley Patton, the son of a lay preacher who himself dabbled in preaching, recorded several sacred selections, including a guitaristic re-creation of a total church service (“Prayer of Death—Parts 1 and 2” [Paramount 12799, 1929]) and a dramatic rendition of a favorite sermon based on the Book of Revelation (“You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die” [Paramount 13031, 1929]), which he reportedly delivered from his own deathbed. David Evans, “Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta,” in The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions, Influences and Comparisons: An International Symposium, ed. Robert Sacré (Liège: Presses Universitaires Liège, 1987), 170–71. Similar re-creations from predominantly secular artists include Bessie Smith’s “Moan Mourners” (Columbia 14538-D, 1930); and “Down at the Old Country Church” (Victor 23628, 1931) by hillbilly singer (and later Louisiana governor) Jimmie Davis. 23. Geoffrey C. Ward, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 46. 24. Quoted from, respectively, Long “Cleve” Reed, Little Harvey Hull, Down Home Boys, “Mama You Don’t Know How” (Black Patti 8030, 1927); Blind Willie McTell (as Blind Sammie) on Ruth Day, “Painful Blues” (14642-D, 1931); The Skillet Lickers, “Molly Put the Kettle On” (Columbia 15746-D, 1931); Frank Edwards, “We Got to Get Together” (OKeh 06393, 1941); Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Teddy Bear Blues” (Paramount 12487, 1927); William Harris, “I’m Leaving Town (But I Sho’ Don’t Wanna Go)” (Gennett 6306, 1927); and Willie Harris, “West Side Blues” (Brunswick 7092, 1929). 25. For instance, many of Charley Patton’s records feature such asides from Patton. As David Evans observes, “it appears that Patton was often trying to re-create a sense of context and a live audience in the recording studio,” the result being a “spontaneity and unrehearsed quality . . .

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matched in the recordings of only a few other early blues recording artists.” David Evans, “Charley Patton,” 173–74. But because these seldom involve any clear dramatic or expository intent, few of Patton’s records are included here. Of course, in the natural course of things, an audience—wives, family members, managers, producers, other performers waiting their turns—often was present in the studio, socializing, partying, perhaps even dancing. Patton’s wife Bertha Lee is reputed to have danced at his 1934 session, and Blind Willie McTell’s wife Kate McTell remembered dancing at their joint 1935 session (David Evans, personal communication). These probably were not isolated instances, but again, it is unclear how much of this was consciously intended to re-create live events on record, or whether such factors would register on listeners. Still, it is significant that recording artists’ experiences in the studio were not always all that different from live venues. 26. Typical of such novelty records is “Ma & Pa Poorhouse Blues”/“Big Feeling Blues” (Paramount 12718, 1928), a collaboration between two stage-show veterans, Papa Charlie Jackson and Ma Rainey, who even toured with her own tent show. Both sides suggest conventional stage routines, the first being notable mainly for mentioning Rainey’s tour bus, and Jackson’s “pawned” banjo, which he happens to be playing throughout their opening dialogue. “Hello there, Charlie,” Rainey begins. “Hello, Ma,” replies Jackson, strumming his banjo. “Charlie, where’s that big banjo you had?” “Ma, that big banjo’s in pawn,” Jackson answers, not missing a beat on his instrument. “In pawn?” “Yes ma’am.” “Too bad, Jim.” “Hello, Ma.” “Hello there, Charlie.” “What became of that great big bus you had?” “Goll, somebody stole that bus.” “Stole it?!” “Yeah.” “Umm-mm!” “Charlie, do you know I’m broke.” “Ma, don’t you know I’m broke too.” “I tell you what let’s do.” “What are we gonna do?” “Let’s both go to the poorhouse together.” Right on cue, they break into a musical description of their impoverishment. Its blues structure notwithstanding, the piece’s tone is also more reminiscent of minstrelsy’s bathos than folk blues on the topic. 27. See, for example, Richard Spottswood’s discussion of Ukrainian-born fiddler Pawlo Humeniuk’s two-sided “Ukrainske Wesilia (Ukrainian Wedding),” recorded in New York for Columbia in 1926. Richard Spottswood, “Ethnic and Popular Style in America,” in Folk Music and Modern Sound, ed. William Ferris and Mary Hart (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982), 66. Other of Humeniuk’s village-life vignettes dramatized an Old Country engagement celebration, a wedding dinner, a post-wedding party, a christening, and a garland weaving ceremony, all reissued on Pawlo Humeniuk, “King of the Ukrainian Fiddlers”: New York 1925–1927, the Early Years, Arhoolie CD 7025. 28. Nathan W. Pearson, Jr., Goin’ to Kansas City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 98–100. 29. Karl Gert Zur Heide, Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 38–39. Although I hear “Devil’s Café” as the spot Coleman names, this was not among the Farish Street venues (the Red Circle Hall, Morrison Hall, the Crystal Hall, the Red Castle) Montgomery himself later remembered (Heide, Deep South Piano, 38). 30. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 26–36. 31. Charles K. Wolfe, “Early Country Music in Knoxville: The Brunswick Session and the End of an Era,” Old Time Music 12 (Spring 1974): 20; and Charles K. Wolfe, “The Tennessee Ramblers: Ramblin’ On,” Old Time Music 13 (Summer 1974): 11. 32. Paul Oliver, booklet for Louisiana Blues: Sonny Boy Nelson with Mississippi Matilda and Robert Hill (1936): Complete Recordings in Chronological Order, Wolf CD WSE 109, n.d.

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33. The side is credited to The Georgia Browns. One person who knew McMullen, Willie McTell’s widow Ruth Kate Seabrooks, told Mrs. Anne M. Evans, “I believe he [McMullen] came from Florida.” David Evans, “Kate McTell,” pt. 1, Blues Unlimited 125 (July-August 1977): 11. 34. Other spots McTell regularly busked included legendary Atlanta thoroughfares like Decatur Street and Auburn Avenue, as well as local landmarks like Yates’s Drug Store, the Decatur 81 Theatre, and the Pig ’N’ Whistle barbecue stand. His widow’s firsthand account of these years appears in David Evans, “Kate McTell,” pts. 1, 2, and 3, Blues Unlimited 125 (July–August 1977): 4–12; 126 (September–October 1977): 8–16; and 127 (November–December 1977): 20–22. Harris Street’s social life is, incidentally, also the subject of McTell’s “Georgia Rag” (OKeh 8924, 1931, as Georgia Bill): “Down in Atlanta on Harris Street,” runs its first verse, “That’s where the boys and gals do meet, / Doing that rag, that Georgia rag. / Out in the alley, in the street, / Every little kid that you meet, / Doing that rag, that old Georgia rag.” 35. Steven C. Tracy, Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 1–4, 40–42. The issued version (Decca 7157, 1936) omits this remark but mentions “George Street women” in a verse missing from the test. 36. Harvey and Johnson may well have picked the piece up in West Virginia, but its ultimate source is Sylvester Weaver’s much-imitated “Guitar Rag” (OKeh 8109, 1923). 37. One of the first country bluesmen to record, Spruell was born and raised at Lake Providence, directly on the Mississippi in far northeastern Louisiana, but spent most of his life in Chicago. Tony Russell, “Spruell, Freddie,” in Encyclopedia of the Blues, ed. Edward Komara, vol. 2, 925. 38. “The Old Maid and the Burglar (The Burglar Man)” (Laws H 23) is based on a piece copyrighted in 1887 by E. S. Thilp. To the half-dozen traditional versions listed by Laws in Native American Ballads, add the texts and references in Ray B. Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), 194–95; George List, Singing About It: Folk Song in Southern Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1991), 222–24; and Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 196–98. For other old-time recordings, see the listings for these and other variant titles (“The Burglar and the Old Maid,” “Old Maid’s Last Hope [A Burglar Song]”) in Tony Russell, Country Music Records. 39. For one text and tune of this fiddler’s favorite, with extensive references for both traditional and commercially recorded versions, see Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, ed. Norm Cohen, 399–401. 40. Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 282–87. 41. Harvey and Shirkey and their railroad records are discussed by Norm Cohen in Long Steel Rail, 456–58, 591–95. 42. Karen M. McDearman, “Black Belt,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 567. The definitive ethnography is Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1967). 43. Tony Russell, “Too Tight Henry,” in Encyclopedia of the Blues, ed. Edward Komara, vol. 2, 995. 44. In the South as elsewhere barber shops and beauty parlors were social centers whose functions extended well beyond personal hygiene. On “Barber Bill” Moore, see Bastin, Red River Blues, 300–301.

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45. Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana (1945; rpt. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 1987), 570. 46. Typical are Gordon Tanner’s memories of traveling with his father, the great North Georgia fiddler Gid Tanner, to play on Atlanta’s streets on Saturday mornings when it was too wet to work the fields of their outlying farm. Mark Wilson, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records,” 1. 47. Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (1959; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1975), 122. 48. Gene Wiggins’s Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy (22–26) offers an especially vivid sketch of Decatur Street during this period. On Howell’s meeting with Brown, see Bastin, Red River Blues, 103. His “John Henry” appears on The Legendary Peg Leg Howell, Testament LP T-2204, 1963.

Chapter 4. Here’s One You Can Sing Right with Us 1. In “ ‘Barn Dance with Calls’: Old-Time Southern Square-Dance Calls on 78s,” Phil Jamison reasons, “Usually under three minutes in length, the early 78s are too short for real square dances and in most cases the timing of the calls is off. Even for an experienced caller, correct timing would be hard to achieve in a recording studio without dancers to watch. And even if the calls on these recordings had been clear and well-timed, it is questionable whether dancers would be able to follow calls from outside their own community, since square-dance figures and calls were not formally standardized as they are today. Therefore, it doesn’t appear that the calls were intended for people to dance to, but rather to enhance the rustic image of an ‘old-time barn dance’ that the record companies were marketing.” All true, but people occasionally defy such logic. Of course, during the national square-dance craze of the 1950s and ’60s, people routinely danced to 78s, 45s, and 33 1/3 LPs better suited to that purpose, while the use of recorded music by real-life squaredance callers is commonplace even today. 2. Wolfe, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” pt. 2, 11. 3. Uncle Dave personally addresses similar jokes, anecdotes, or homilies to listeners on “Death of John Henry (Steel Driving Man)”/“On the Dixie Bee Line (In That Henry Ford of Mine)” (Vocalion 15320, 1926); “Poor Sinners, Fare You Well” (Vocalion 15324, 1926); “Wouldn’t Give Me Sugar in My Coffee” (Vocalion 15440, 1926); “Sourwood Mountain Medley” (Vocalion 15443, 1926); “Kissin’ On the Sly” (Vocalion 15452, 1926); “You’ve Been a Good Friend to Me”/ “More Like Your Dad Every Day” (Vocalion 5172, 1927); “I’ll Never Go There Any More (The Bowery)” (Vocalion 5149, 1927); and “Susie Lee” (Vocalion 5380, 1929). 4. Lead Belly employs this same approach on “Alberta” (ARC unissued, 1935); “Baby, Don’t You Love Me No More?” (ARC unissued, 1935); “Death Letter Blues—Parts 1 and 2” (ARC unissued, 1935); “Four Day Worry Blues”/“New Black Snake Moan” (Banner 33360, 1935); “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” (Banner 33359, 1935); “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town” (ARC unissued, 1935); “Ox Drivin’ Blues” (ARC unissued, 1935); “Pig Meat Papa” (ARC 6-04-55, 1935); “Roberta—Parts 1 and 2” (ARC unissued, 1935); “T.B. Woman Blues” (ARC unissued, 1935); and “You Can’t Lose Me, Charlie” (ARC unissued, 1935). This list accounts only for his commercial recordings for the race market, a very small portion of his recorded output. Moreover, most of these monologues are more properly identified with the cante-fable technique Lead Belly routinely employed, whether in live performance, on his race titles, or on later recordings for folklorists and the urban revival.

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Thus it is doubtful that they were contrived specifically for the recorded format, but their effect is similar to more relevant items. 5. In fact, this item’s popularity results largely from its appearance on one of the most famous of all hillbilly records—and one of the best-selling 78s in American history—Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Old 97” (Victor 19427, 1924). Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 197–226. The Wranglers’ version was issued on an unnumbered 78 r.p.m. disc, probably recorded at Freeman Lang Studios, Hollywood, California, in August 1929 and released that October (Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 217). 6. An affine of the “Liza Jane”/“Whoa Mule” complex, “Johnson’s Old Grey Mule” (a.k.a. “Simon Slick”) was frequently printed in late-nineteenth-century songsters, subsequently resurfacing in both oral and old-time traditions. For texts and references, see Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson, eds., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 3: Folk Songs from North Carolina (Durham: Duke University Press, 1952), 566–67; and Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric, 442. Chitwood’s confusion of the song’s Johnson with J. E. Johnston appears unique. Most other old-time recordings instead reflect that large body of instrumental music imitating animal sounds, usually with narrative interpolations. Although these plainly represent pre-existing routines rather than narrative frames created for records specifically, their direct appeals to listeners are of some interest. Typical is “Johnson’s Old Grey Mule” (OKeh 45123, 1927) by another North Georgia fiddler, Earl Johnson, who identifies himself with the title character: “I want to play you a little piece now we call ‘Johnson’s Old Grey Mule,’ ” he begins. “My name’s Johnson, I used to plow one of them things down in the new ground. I’d play this fiddle late at night, and I’d naturally sleep a little late every morning and one of the first things I hear when I’d wake up in the morning, I’d hear something down in the new ground on a dead limb a-cutting up sort of like this. [Here he imitates a woodpecker by rapping on his fiddle.] Then I’d hear something down on the woodpile sort of like this [imitates rooster by roughly bowing fiddle]. I’d hear something down at the pig pen [imitates pig squealing]. Soo-eee. I’d hear something down about at the barn, I’d know my time is coming and [imitates mule braying]. Feed that mule, boy!” (music begins). There are remarkably similar recordings by the Skillet Lickers (“Johnson’s Old Gray Mule,” Columbia 15221-D, 1927, with a spoken introduction and fiddle imitations by Gid Tanner) and J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers (“Johnson’s Old Gray Mule,” Bluebird B5684, 1936, with an introduction and imitations by Mainer). For other folk traditions concerning Joseph Eggleston Johnston and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain—none of which link the general to a mule—see B. A. Botkin, A Civil War Treasury of Tales, Legends, and Folklore (1960; rpt. New York: Promontory Press, 1981), 182–83, 373, 376, 386–89, 461, 500–502. 7. Though his recollections hardly extended to the First Temple’s construction, John Cowan Powers (1877–1953) was, like Uncle Dave Macon and Uncle Jimmy Thompson, among the older Southern recording artists. Charles Wolfe, The Devil’s Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 50–60. 8. Mark Wilson, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records,” 4. 9. While the four record sides Thompson recorded in 1926 and 1930 are priceless, he arguably made a greater contribution to Southern radio, being the first performer to appear on the Grand Ole Opry. Charles Wolfe, The Devil’s Box, 30–49. 10. Geechee or Gullah is a creole dialect spoken by slaves and their descendants on the Atlantic coasts and Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina; the terms also describe this milieu generally. 11. Joe LaRose, “An Interview With Lowe Stokes,” Old Time Music 39 (Spring 1984): 11.

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Chapter 5. A Special Prayer on the Man That’s A-Catching the Record 1. Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, xvii. 2. Macon records featuring this introduction include “Way Down the Old Plank Road” (Vocalion 15321, 1926) (“Hot dog, buddy let’s go!”); “The Cross Eyed Butcher and the Cackling Hen” (Vocalion 15453, 1926) (“Hot dog! Get a-right!”); “Sho’ Fly, Don’t Bother Me” (Vocalion 15448, 1926) (“Hot dog! Gather ’round here!”), plus a couple other examples presented below. “The Gal That Got Stuck on Everything She Said” (Brunswick 266, 1928) and “The New Ford Car” (Vocalion 5261, 1928) both end with Uncle Dave exclaiming “Hot dog!” 3. Similar outros include “Get it out now!” (The Hokum Boys, “Pig Meat Strut,” Champion 16081, 1930); “Too bad, mama, I mean too black bad!” (Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Long Lastin’ Lovin’,” Paramount 12666, 1928); “Be gone, mama, be gone!” (Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Change My Luck Blues,” Paramount 12639, 1928); “Barber Bill knows how to do it!” (William [Bill] Moore, “Barbershop Rag,” Paramount 12613, 1928); “Not long now!” (West Virginia Coon Hunters, “Greasy String,” Victor 20862, 1927); “All Right!” (Bob Wills, “Cowboy Stomp,” Columbia 37988, 1947). 4. Credited, respectively, to Ruth Day and Mary Willis, both stage names for Ruth Mary Willis. McTell appears as her accompanist. 5. Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics: Number Twenty-seven,” 63. 6. Knoxville was the site of some commercial recording during the 1920s and ’30s, but the St. James Hotel appears to have been the preferred location, probably because it also housed radio station WNOX. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues, 302; and Charles K. Wolfe, “Early Country Music in Knoxville,” 20. It bears noting that old-time artists often mention recording locations in actual song texts, but these usually are not as obvious as these out-and-out announcements. Mississippi John Hurt begins “Avalon Blues” (OKeh 8759) by singing “I’m in New York this morning, just about half past nine.” His recording session in fact took place in New York City (December 21, 1928), but it is possible many listeners missed that significance. On the other hand, almost everyone must have been baffled by Skip James’s boast in “22-20 Blues” (Paramount 13066, 1931) that “all the doctors in Wisconsin” will not be able to help his girl once he gets done with her (the side was recorded at Paramount’s Grafton, Wisconsin studio). 7. William Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, 140–44. 8. Bessie Jackson [Lucille Bogan], “Shave ’Em Dry” (ARC unassigned, 1935). Like much obscene material, this item was originally issued, without company credit or release number, as a party record, distributed on an under-the-counter basis. It does not, incidentally, share this or any other stanzas with Bogan’s expurgated version of “Shave ’Em Dry” (Banner 33475), also recorded March 5, 1935. 9. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues, 254–62. 10. In 1912, when Carr would have been seven years old, W. C. Handy published his first blues, the landmark “Memphis Blues, or Mr. Crump.” Its success marked the blues’ arrival in the national consciousness. This may be what Gaither has in mind. For Handy’s own account, see W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (1941; New York: Da Capo, 1991), 106–21, as well as his Blues: An Anthology, historical and critical text by Abbe Niles (1949; New York: Da Capo, 1990), 25–27, 70–73, 207. 11. Or in the Revised Standard Version: “It [the body] is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” 1 Corinthians 15:44–45. John 9:1–41 tells of Christ’s curing of the blind man whose sin the disciples questioned:

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“ ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.’ ” On Dickinson and his preaching style, see Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 179–80; and Tony Russell, booklet for Rev. Emmett Dickinson: Complete Recorded Works 1929–1930 in Chronological Order, Document Records CD DOCD-5441, 1996. Another of his highly original sermons—“Is There Harm In Singing the Blues” (Paramount 12925, 1929)—is transcribed in Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 287–88. 12. Kinney Rorrer, Rambling Blues, 57, 97–98. The Virginia Ramblers recording has been re-issued on Virginia Traditions: Native Virginia Ballads and Songs, Global Village Music CD 1004, 1994. 13. This phase of Autry’s career is surveyed on Gene Autry, Blues Singer 1929–1931: “Booger Rooger Saturday Nite!” Columbia/Legacy CD CK 64987, 1996. 14. Loyal Jones, Radio’s “Kentucky Mountain Boy,” Bradley Kincaid, Rev. ed. (Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Appalachian Center, 1988), 149; also 154, 179–80. 15. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, tribute records marked the passing of such artists as Hank Williams (1923–1952), Johnny Ace (John M. Alexander, Jr.) (1929–1954), Buddy Holly (1936–1959), and Otis Redding (1941–1967). More recently, similar recordings have mourned John Lennon (1940–1980), Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), and Tupac Shakur (1971–1996), among others. But latter-day tributes to old-time artists remain remarkably common. To date, Robert Johnson seems to have received the most, including Eric Clapton, Me and Mr. Johnson, Warner Brothers CD 48423, 2004; John Hammond, Jr., At the Crossroads: The Blues of Robert Johnson, Vanguard CD 79751, 2003; Peter Green Splinter Group, The Robert Johnson Songbook, Artisan CD 100022, 1998; Peter Green and Nigel Watson Splinter Group, Hot Foot Powder, Artisan CD 100828, 2000; Various artists, The Blues of Robert Johnson, Easydisc CD 7029, 1997; Various artists, Dealin’ With the Devil: Songs of Robert Johnson, Cannonball CD 29117, 2000; and Various artists, Hellhound on My Trail: Songs of Robert Johnson, Telarc CD 83521, 2001. 16. Nick Spitzer, “Review of the Jimmie Rodgers CD Collection,” National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, March 12, 1992. http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/archives/asc12/trans.05.html. Jackson’s own music-making (including his many Rodgers covers) is documented on John Jackson: Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down, Arhoolie CD 378, 1992; and John Jackson: Country Blues and Ditties, Arhoolie CD 471, 1999. 17. See also John Minton, “The Reverend Lamar Roberts and the Mediation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 3–37. 18. In his “Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” D. K. Wilgus even used this item to exemplify old-time records as a parallel stream of Southern tradition, counting “29 issues [of ‘Twenty-One Years’] from 13 masters by 12 artists, . . . augmented by the popularity of ‘TwentyOne Years Part 2,’ ‘The Answer to Twenty-One Years,’ ‘New Answer to Twenty-One Years,’ ‘Woman’s Answer to Twenty-One Years,’ ‘New Twenty-One Years,’ ‘After Twenty-One Years,’ ‘The End of Twenty-One Years,’ ‘Last of the Twenty-One Year Prisoner,’ ‘Ninety-Nine Years,’ and ‘Answer to Ninety-Nine Years’ (totaling 88 issues from 23 masters)” (202). Tony Russell’s recent Country Music Records adds considerably to this total—for “Twenty-One Years” alone, he lists 41 releases from 23 masters by 14 artists (this includes the various names under which Bob Miller himself recorded; one master was unreleased at the time). But Wilgus’s preliminary survey was characteristically meticulous and to the point. On this song’s oral tradition, see G. Malcolm Laws, Native American Balladry, 51, n. 35, 184; and Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, ed. Norm Cohen, 156–58.

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19. See also David Evans, Big Road Blues, 124–25. 20. The relevant items are Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, “It’s Tight Like That” (Vocalion 1216, recorded October 24, 1928); Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “It’s Tight Like That” (Vocalion 1228, October 31, 1928); Tampa Red with Georgia Tom, “It’s Tight Like That No. 2” (Vocalion 1244, December 5, 1928); Papa Too Sweet [accompanied by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom], “(Honey) It’s Tight Like That” (OKeh 8651, December 11, 1928); Tampa Red With Georgia Tom, “It’s Tight Like That No. 3” (Vocalion 1418, January 12, 1929); Tampa Red, “The Guitar Wizard,” “It’s Tight Like That” (Vocalion 1258, January 16, 1929). Based on a common figure of speech, Tampa and Tom’s song had its own precedents—for example, Blind Blake’s “Too Tight” (12431), recorded at his second session in October 1926. Blind Lemon Jefferson also earlier composed a song titled “It’s Tight Like That,” which he recorded as “Maltese Cat Blues” (Paramount 12712, 1928). See Luigi Monte and David Evans, “New Songs of Blind Lemon Jefferson,” Journal of Texas Music History 3.2 (Fall 2003): 8–28. 21. Mark A. Humphreys, “Bright Lights, Big City: Urban Blues,” in Nothing But the Blues: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Lawrence Cohn (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 165. 22. Jefferson authority Bob Groom suggests this “is not Blind Lemon playing at all but Blind Blake giving a passable imitation of the Jefferson guitar style.” Possibly Jefferson was ill, incapacitated, or down South during the Chicago session. Another plausible theory for his ghostly presence: given the confusion over the recording date, it could be that Jefferson was already dead, and that “Paramount was keeping the fact quiet.” Bob Groom, booklet for Blind Lemon Jefferson: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, vol. 4: 1929, Document Records CD DOCD5020, 1991. 23. David Evans, Big Road Blues, 124. Evans’s section on “The Influence of Phonograph Records and the Handling of Recorded Sources” (115–31) is the best introduction I know to the multifaceted impact of records on the blues tradition. 24. David Evans, Big Road Blues, 124. 25. From a taped interview with Savoy, Houston, Texas, July 26, 1986. For more on his life and music, see John Minton, “Houston Creoles and Zydeco: The Emergence of an African American Urban Popular Style,” in New Perspectives On the Blues, ed. David Evans, special issue, American Music 14 (1996): 480–526. 26. William Ferris, Blues From the Delta (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), 109. 27. Roosevelt Holts, “Home Town Skiffle,” South Mississippi Blues, Rounder Records LP 2009, 1973. 28. David Evans, Big Road Blues, 116; William Ferris, Jr., “Records and the Delta Blues Tradition,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 14 (1969): 160–62, and Blues from the Delta, 52–53; Archie Green, “Sound Recordings, Use and Challenge,” in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 438; and John Minton, “The Reverend Lamar Roberts,” 25.

Chapter 6. I Ought to Be Recording Right Now 1. On the bans and their impact on blues and country music, see Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: 1877–1977, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books), 278–81; Bill Malone, Country Music U.S.A.: A Fifty Year History, Publications of the American Folklore Society, Memoir Series, vol. 54 (Austin: University of Texas Press), 188–89; Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues, 140–41. On

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Washington and her side, see Billy Vera, “East Coast Blues, What That Is,” booklet for The Mercury Blues ’N’ Rhythm Story 1945–1955, ed. Dick Shurman, Billy Vera, and Jim O’Neal, Mercury Records CD 314 528 292-2, 1996, 55–56. 2. Blind Boy Fuller’s “Piccolo Rag” (OKeh 06437, 1938) and “Red’s Got the Piccolo Blues” (Vocalion 05218, 1939) also refer to jukeboxes—piccolos were small wall-mounted vendors once commonplace in bars and cafés—but their hokum lyrics do not really develop the theme. 3. Consider such expressions as “Hello, Central [addressed to the operator at a central telephone exchange], [what’s] the matter with your line?” or “I’m gonna write a letter, mail it in the air,” blues commonplaces straddling oral tradition, print, and records. When aired through a phonograph record—Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues” (Paramount 12792, 1929) features an instance of the “Hello, Central” verse (first documented in W. C. Handy’s “Hesitation Blues” [1916]), Garfield Akers’s “Cottonfield Blues” (Vocalion 1442, 1929) one use of the “mail it in the air” lines— the effect is certainly ironic, but it seems unlikely that this was the primary intent. So too, the irony of many recorded references to radios seems more circumstantial than deliberate—for instance, Sonny Boy Williamson’s declaration on his “Pontiac Blues” (Trumpet 145, 1951) “we gonna turn up the radio and get music from up North,” or the Memphis Jug Band’s “State of Tennessee Blues” (Victor 21185, 1927), with singer Jennie Clayton’s opening line “I got a voice like a radio, broadcast everywhere.” In its risqué repartee, “Radio Papa (Broadcastin’ Mama)” (OKeh 8911, 1930) by stage veterans Butterbeans and Susie (Joe and Susie Edwards) suggests a preexisting vaudeville routine (or a new routine on that model) rather than a conscious paradox (compare their “Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama,” OKeh 8833, 1930). These doubtful cases could easily be multiplied. Johnny Temple begins “Lead Pencil Blues (It Just Won’t Write)” (Vocalion 03068, 1935) by exclaiming “Lord have mercy, I want to write a letter so bad, I don’t know what to do.” The statement seems more a topical preview than a deliberate frame-breaking, however, since Temple’s song reveals his inability “to write” as a metaphor for sexual impotence: “Lead in my pencil, babe, it’s done gone bad / And it’s the worst old feeling, babe, I’ve ever had.” A literate analogue to Robert Johnson’s “rusty needle” perhaps, but Temple’s record hardly suggests the ironic intent of “Phonograph Blues.” 4. Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 649–51. 5. Joe Wilson, booklet for The Recordings of Grayson and Whitter: Recorded 1928–1930, County Records CD 3517, 1998, 1. 6. Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 145. 7. Granted, these records were sometimes rooted in community settings, but only at a distance. Operating independently out of Norfolk, Virginia, Frank Guida produced some of the most successful instances for his S.P.Q.R. and Legrand labels—“New Orleans” (Legrand 1003, 1960) and “Quarter to Three” (Legrand 1008, 1961) by Gary (U.S.) Bonds and Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy” (S.P.Q.R. 3000, 1963) being the best known. Although his records’ noisy live ambience was carefully contrived in the studio, Guida claimed his approach was inspired by a black congregation near his studio on Church Street in Norfolk: “It was my deliberate attempt to [create a sound on record] as if you were going by Daddy Grace’s House of Prayer at Princess Anne Road and Church Street and hearing all the excitement.” Bill Dahl, booklet for The Very Best of Gary U.S. Bonds, Varèse Sarabande CD VSD-5938, 1998, 4; and booklet for If You Wanna Be Happy: The Best of the Norfolk Sound, Varèse Sarabande CD VSD-302 066 065 2, 1999. Guida may have drawn some inspiration from Norfolk’s House of Prayer, but the records themselves give no hint of this local backdrop, catering instead to a nationwide industry trend, which obviously formed the basis

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of consumers’ reactions. Similar stories surround most other such releases—for example, the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” (Volt 148, 1967), a sizable hit for Memphis’s legendary Stax label. Pieced together in the studio from a jam the group had developed on stage, the single’s finishing touch was provided by Stax staff songwriter David Porter, who came up with the idea of bringing in a bunch of local children, who were hanging around outside the studio, to shout the song’s title and carry on as if there was a party ensuing while the record was being played. “I bought them all Coca-Colas,” recalled Porter, “and I said, ‘Every time I do this you all say “Soul Finger.” ’ ” Rob Bowman, booklet for The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959–1968, Atlantic CDs 7-82218-2, 1991, 31. 8. One tipping point for the answer record was a lawsuit between two of the greatest independent record producers of the immediate postwar era, Don Robey of Houston’s DukePeacock labels and Sam Phillips of Memphis’ Sun Records. The source of their dispute was Rufus Thomas’s “Bear Cat (The Answer to ‘Hound Dog’)” (Sun 181, 1953), a response to Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s famous “Hound Dog” (Peacock 1612, 1952). Robey eventually won a sizable settlement from Phillips for copyright infringement. Although answer records continued to appear for some time, this and other legal precedents had a chilling effect. Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’N’ Roll (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 40–42; Galen Gart and Roy C. Ames, Duke/Peacock Records: An Illustrated History with Discography (Milford, NH: Big Nickel Publications, 1990). 9. Perhaps reflecting the consolidation and expansion of the recording industry, many postwar tribute records honored not just individuals but entire rosters of performers. One popular convention was to depict a reunion of departed stars in heaven. “The Stage (Stars in Heaven)” (Trend 106, 1961) by Waylon Jennings (1937–2002) pays homage to the lives and hit records of Eddie Cochran (Jennings names his “Summertime Blues,” Liberty 55144, 1958), Ritchie Valens (he mentions the two-sided hit “La Bamba” and “Donna,” Del-Fi 4110, 1958), J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson (“Chantilly Lace,” Mercury 71343, 1958), and Buddy Holly (“Oh Boy!” Brunswick 55035, 1957, and “Peggy Sue,” Coral 61885, 1957). Jennings’s tribute is particularly poignant: a protégé of Buddy Holly’s, he was the bass player in Holly’s final touring band, and was originally scheduled to fly on the plane that crashed in February 1959 killing Holly, Valens, and Richardson. Recorded the same year, Tex Ritter’s recitation “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven” (Capitol, 1961) (actually composed by some of Ritter’s Hollywood friends, fellow movie cowboy Eddie Dean and screenwriter, director, and producer Hal Southern) adopts a preemptive approach, eulogizing not just past heroes but several stars then still living. “Last night I dreamed I went to Hillbilly Heaven,” Ritter begins. “And you know who greeted me at the gate? The old cowboy philosopher himself, Will Rogers.” Rogers tours Ritter through Hillbilly Heaven, introducing him to Carson Robison, Jimmie Rodgers, Wiley Post, Hank Williams, and Johnny Horton. “Then I asked him who else he expected within the next, uhh, say a hundred years. He handed me a large book covered with stardust. Will called it The Big Tally Book.” There Ritter reads the names of Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff, Eddie Arnold, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddie Dean, Andy Griffith, and Roy Rogers. When he comes to his own name—“Tex Ritter?!”—he suddenly awakes. “And I’m sorry I did. . . . ” As of this writing, most of these singers—including Ritter (1907–1974)—have gone on to Hillbilly Heaven. Around the same time, Willie Dixon’s “Blues Heaven” performed the same

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service for that genre: first recorded by Koko Taylor (Checker 1135, 1965), it mentions Nat King Cole, Bessie Smith, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Elmore James, Sam Cooke, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. 10. While the record hop as a distinct musical event known by that name is very much a postwar phenomenon, it also had precedents in old-time records. Southerners held less formal record parties beginning in the 1920s, as people brought and played records at house parties, picnics, church, and so forth. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 281–86. 11. Adding another room to its house of mirrors, “Let’s Go Out to the Programs” was reportedly one of the most popular numbers in the Hummingbirds’ live programs during this period. Ray Funk, “Let’s Go Out to the Programs (The Peacock Gospel Years),” in Gart and Ames, Duke/ Peacock Records, 41–42. 12. Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 15–33, gives a great account of Liverpool and Lennon’s family background. On Jack Lennon, see also Lennon.net: The Official Website of the Liverpool Lennons. http://www.lennon.net/ timeline/1940.shtml. 13. William J. Dowlding, Beatlesongs (New York: Fireside, 1989); Kevin Howlett, booklet for The Beatles Live at the BBC, Apple CD CDP 7243 8 31796 2, 1994; Mark Lewisohn, booklet for The Beatles Anthology 1, Apple CD CDP 7243 8 44445 2, 1995; Mark Lewisohn, booklet for The Beatles Anthology 2, Apple CD CDP 7243 8 44448 2, 1996; Mark Lewisohn, booklet for The Beatles Anthology 3, Apple CD CDP 7243 8 34451 2, 1996; Charles Gower Price, “Sources of American Styles in the Music of the Beatles,” American Music 15 (1997): 208–32. 14. The Beatles, The Anthology: Part 1, VHS, directed by Geoff Wonfor (London: Apple, 1996). 15. On Dylan’s approach to recording, see Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960–1994 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); and Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2003). 16. Clinton Heylin, Bootleg! The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). To date, Dylan’s own Bootleg Series has reached seven multidisc volumes: Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961–1991, Columbia CD C3K 65302, 1991; Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert. The Bootleg Series Volume 4, Columbia CD C2K 65759, 1998; Bob Dylan Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue. The Bootleg Series Volume 5, Columbia CD C2K 87047, 2002; Bob Dylan Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall. The Bootleg Series Volume 6, Columbia CD C2K 86882, 2004; and No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. The Bootleg Series Volume 7, Columbia CD C2K 93937, 2005. Apparently, the term bootleg originated for illegal record reissues among jazz collectors in the 1940s. There were bootleg 78s and later 45s and ten- and twelve-inch LPs, occasionally even including early blues and gos­ pel records. These bootlegs, however, featured previously issued material. Today, these would be called pirated records, bootleg now referring to unauthorized releases of unissued live or studio recordings, a practice dating to the late 1960s and the obsessive interest in Dylan and other rock artists.

Chapter 7. A Corn Licker Still in Georgia 1. Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” 209, 210. 2. Charles K. Wolfe, booklet for Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers: “The Kickapoo Medicine Show,” Rounder Records LP 1023, 2. Other basic accounts of the group include Norm Cohen, “The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire,” Hillbilly Issue, ed. D. K.

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Wilgus, special issue, Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 229–44; Norm Cohen, “Clayton McMichen: His Life and Music,” JEMF Quarterly 6 (1975): 117–24; Norm Cohen, “Early Pioneers,” Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 27–34; and Norm Cohen, “Riley Puckett: ‘King of the Hillbillies,’ ” JEMF Quarterly 7 (1976): 175–84; Fred Hoeptner and Bob Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” parts 1–4, Old Time Music 1 (Summer 1971): 8–10; 2 (Autumn 1971): 13–15; 3 (Winter 1971/1972): 14–15; and 4 (Spring 1972): 19–20, 30; Joe LaRose, “An Interview with Lowe Stokes,” Old Time Music 39 (Spring 1984): 6–11; Bert Layne, “A Skillet-Licker’s Memoirs, told to Margaret Riddle,” parts 1 and 2, Old Time Music 14 (Autumn 1974): 5–9; and 15 (Winter 1974/1975): 22–24; Art Rosenbaum, Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 88–112; Charles K. Wolfe, liner notes for A Day at the County Fair: Early Country Comedy Featuring Gid Tanner, Clayton McMichen, Riley Puckett, and Others, Old Homestead Records LP OHCS-145, n.d.; Charles K. Wolfe, with John Larsen, Tony Russell, and Richard Weize, Riley Puckett (1894–1946), Schriften des Archivs für Populäre Musik, Bibliographien and Discographien, 8 (Bremen, 1977); and Mark Wilson, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records.” 3. Mark Wilson, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records,” 1; cf. Rosenbaum, Folk Visions and Voices, 90. 4. Rosenbaum, Folk Visions and Voices, 92, original ellipses. 5. At least this joke was traditional in Fate Norris’s North Georgia circles, sometimes attributed to Land Norris, an intimate of John Carson who, though no relation to Fate, also played banjo and specialized in comic minstrel material. Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 10–11. 6. Mike Seeger, “Who Chose These Records?” 13. 7. Wilson, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records,” 2. 8. Cohen, “Riley Puckett,” 182. 9. Hoeptner and Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” part 1, 8, 9. 10. Hoeptner and Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” part 1, 9. 11. Hoeptner and Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” part 4, 19. 12. Wolfe, “The Kickapoo Medicine Show,” 2. 13. Richard Nevins, liner notes for The North Carolina Ramblers, 1928–1930: Charlie Poole— Posey Rorer—Roy Harvey, Biograph Records LP BLP-6005, 1972. 14. Hoeptner and Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” part 2, 15. 15. Cohen, “Clayton McMichen,” 122. 16. Rosenbaum, Folk Visions and Voices, 90. 17. Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 53. Lickskillet remains a common place name in Georgia and elsewhere. Between them, two current online sources—the USGS GNIS National Mapping Information site, http://geonames.usgs.gov, and Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, http:// vocab.pub.getty.edu—list twenty Lickskillet communities in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee (as elementary math suggests, some states have more than one). Common throughout the same area are Lickskillet School, Lickskillet Creek, Lickskillet Branch, Lickskillet Run, and Lickskillet Hollow. See also Ronald L. Baker, Hoosier Folk Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 185, 256; and Kathy Kemp and Keith Boyer, Welcome to Lickskillet: And Other Crazy Places in the Deep South (Birmingham, Alabama: Crane Hill Publishers, 1996). Other musical tributes crop up as well—for example, Memphis-born bluesman Eddie Shaw’s “Lickskillet, Mississippi,” Home Alone, Wolf CD 120.879, 1995.

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18. Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 52. 19. Cohen, “The Skillet Lickers,” 230. 20. Admittedly, licker is a fairly obvious way phonetically to represent liquor, and as such often appears on other old-time records: for instance, John Carson’s skit “Corn Licker and Barbecue—Parts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45415, 1929). Coincidence may have played a role in the Skillet Licker–corn licker parallel, but I doubt that many missed the fortuitous pun. 21. Hoeptner and Pinson, “Clayton McMichen Talking,” part 3, 14–15; Bert Layne, “A SkilletLicker’s Memoirs,” part 2, 24; Wolfe, A Day at the County Fair. 22. Seeger, “Who Chose These Records?,” 10. On Walker, Hornsby, and Brown, see also Joe DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby,” Bluegrass Unlimited 24 (August 1989): 32–35; and Charles K. Wolfe, “Columbia Records and Old-Time Music,” 119–20. 23. Seeger, “Who Chose These Records?,” 8; Wolfe, “The Kickapoo Medicine Show,” 2. 24. Wolfe, A Day at the County Fair. 25. The original releases in the Corn Licker series were “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia— Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15201-D, 1927); “Parts 3 and 4” (Columbia 15258-D, 1928); “Parts 5 and 6” (Columbia 15366-D, 1928); “Parts 7 and 8” (Columbia 15432-D, 1929); “Parts 9 and 10” (Columbia 15531-D, 1929); “Parts 11 and 12” (Columbia 15618-D, 1930); “Parts 13 and 14” (Columbia 15703-D, 1930). The Skillet Lickers’ other recorded dramas included “A Fiddlers’ Convention in Georgia— Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15140-D, 1927); “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15298-D, 1928); “A Day at the County Fair—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15332-D, 1928); “Hog Killing Day—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15468-D, 1928); “Kickapoo Medicine Show—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15482-D, 1929); “A Night in a Blind Tiger—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15503-D, 1929); “Taking the Census—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15549-D, 1930); “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15598-D, 1930); “Prohibition—Yes or No—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15632-D, 1930); “Fiddlers’ Convention—Parts 3 and 4” (Columbia 15667-D, 1930); “A Bee Hunt on Hill for Sartin Creek—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15700-D, 1930); “Prosperity and Politics—Parts 1 and 2” (Bluebird B-5446, 1934); and “Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers— Parts 1 and 2” (Bluebird B-5559, 1934). This list includes only those recordings given over entirely to the dramatic format and issued under the Skillet Licker name, thereby excluding numerous such items as “The Arkansaw Traveler” (Columbia 15017-D, 1924) by Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett; “The Original Arkansas Traveler—Parts 1 and 2” (Columbia 15253-D, 1928) by Dan Hornsby and Clayton McMichen; or “The Fiddlin’ Bootleggers—Parts 1 and 2” (Gennett 6585, 1928) by the Monroe County Bottle Tippers (erstwhile Skillet Lickers Lowe Stokes, Claude Davis, and Bert Layne). Also omitted, of course, are many partly dramatic releases like “Nancy Rollin.” 26. Wolfe, “The Kickapoo Medicine Show,” 9. McMichen’s “password” refers to the fact that “in most companies salesmen were given only one or two bottles each time they dashed to the stage to replenish their supply of medicine. The air was filled with the cry, ‘All sold out, Doctor!’ and spectators, caught up in the noise and excitement, were convinced that hundreds of bottles were sold for every dozen that changed hands.” Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976), 118. On the practical and symbolic dimensions of the pitchman’s kerosene or gasoline torch, see McNamara, 23–24. Aside from precedents in medicine shows, vaudeville, street theater, and minstrelsy, Southerners were acquainted with this brand of humor from many other sources, including nineteenth century popular literature and the early recordings of regional humorists like Uncle Josh (Cal

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Stewart) (c. 1856–1919) and Len Spencer (1867–1914). Contemporaneously, this same vein was mined by comedians associated with radio barn dances like the Grand Ole Opry: the Duke of Paducah (Benjamin Francis “Whitey” Ford) (1901–1986), Leroy “Lasses” White (1887–1949), Minnie Pearl (Sarah Ophelia Colley) (1912–1996), Stringbean (David Akeman) (1914–1973), Rod Brasfield (1910–1958), and others. Still later, the popular television programs The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71) and Hee Haw (1969–92) carried on the tradition—and perpetuated the media format— combining tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating rural humor with country music. 27. On the Kickapoo companies and their many imitators, see McNamara, Step Right Up, 79–130. 28. Given the split connotations of canned corn, this statement can be understood a couple of ways, and McMichen’s query “What you got to drink up there besides that medicine?” is a bit of a joke: as he well knew, the most common ingredient in the sundry remedies sold by these shows was their “usual strong dose of corn whiskey” (Wolfe, “The Kickapoo Medicine Show,” 9). This was especially true of the potions peddled by small-time itinerants in the South and Midwest, often bottled, like bootleg liquor, in hotel bathtubs. The same can be said of the products even of “reputable” firms, however. The much-guarded recipe for Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, the staple of the original Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, “called for common combinations of roots, herbs, and alcohol,” the last being the major ingredient in most of the Kickapoo Company’s products. Another leading remedy, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, was even more potent, “containing camphor, ammonia, chloroform, sassafras, cloves, and turpentine—and at various times 55 to 70 percent alcohol, which made it a hair-raising tipple when taken internally.” Such products were targeted not only by state and federal authorities but by such groups as “the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Temperance League, which denounced the ‘cheap cocktails’ masquerading as patent medicine.” McNamara, Step Right Up, 84, 70, 162; also 158. All of this is made explicit in another medicine-show drama—“The Medicine Show—Acts 1 and 2” (OKeh 45380, 1929)—this one featuring honorary Skillet Licker John Carson and his daughter Rosa Lee, a.k.a. Moonshine Kate. The six-part “OKeh Medicine Show” opens with John and Kate in a spot-on re-creation of medicine-show humor and its musical accompaniments. They are interrupted mid-performance by “the Doctor,” Martin Malloy, who steps up and announces, “Stop, John, stop! Heh heh. Ahh, that’s solely a sample of what you’ll hear on the inside [of the medicine show tent]. We’re here to entertain you and cure your miseries with that celebrated ‘Dr. Barleycorn’s Famous Sunshine Medicine,’ made and bottled right here in your own hills. And for reasons of Dr. Barleycorn, it is made by the light of the moon, and should be called ‘moonshine.’ But in order that there’ll be no misunderstanding, it is called ‘sunshine,’ and it cures what ails you: headache, corns, toothaches, bunions, fallen hair, grippe. It’ll remove paint and varnish, and it is not a bad drink on a chilly night.” As if to underscore the point, Carson later circulates among the crowd, selling his own liquor, the “best moonshine in the hills, two dollars a can.” The true character of “Dr. Barleycorn’s Famous Sunshine Medicine” is a running gag throughout the series. Introducing another “Medicine Show” act, Frank Hutchison, Malloy inquires, “By the way, Mr. Hutchison, do you know that love makes the world go ’round?” “Sure do,” Hutchison quips, “and a pint of that darn old moonshine you sell will do the same thing.” 29. Wolfe, A Day at the County Fair. An exaggeration perhaps, but some of the gin had probably been in a bathtub at one time. 30. Wolfe, A Day at the County Fair.

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31. Besides “Liberty,” these include “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane” (Columbia 15091-D, 1926); “Pass Around the Bottle and We’ll All Take a Drink” (Columbia 15074-D, 1926); “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” (Columbia 15200-D, 1926); “Little Brown Jug” (Columbia 15232-D, 1927, credited to Riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen); “Cotton-Eyed Joe”/“Black-Eyed Susie” (Columbia 15283-D, 1928); “Home Sweet Home” (Columbia 15288-D, 1928, Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men with Riley Puckett); “Slim Gal” (Columbia 15295-D, 1928, Riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen); “I’m Going Where the Chilly Winds Don’t Blow” (Columbia 15392-D, 1927, Riley Puckett); “Back Up and Push” (Columbia 15394-D, 1929, The Georgia Organ Grinders); “Roll ’Em on the Ground” (Columbia 15435-D, 1929, Fate Norris and His Play Boys); “Flatwoods” (Columbia 15472-D, 1929, renamed “Back Home in the Mountains” for the Corn Licker series); “Rocky Pallet” (Columbia 15516-D, 1929, renamed “Peas and Cornbread”); “Soldier’s Joy” (Columbia 15538-D, 1929); “Nigger in the Woodpile” (Columbia 15562-D, 1930); “Done Gone” (Columbia 15594-D, 1930, Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett); “Leather Breeches” (Columbia 15623-D, 1930); “Broken Down Gambler” (Columbia 15640-D, 1930); “Hen Cackle” or “Cacklin’ Hen and Rooster Too” (Columbia 15303-D, 1928, Columbia 15682-D, 1930); “All Bound Down in Prison” (Columbia 15719-D, 1931, Riley Puckett) One title from the Corn Licker skits, “Possum Up the Gum Stump,” was cut at the Skillet Lickers’ penultimate Columbia date (December 5, 1930) but never released, while another was later recorded by Riley Puckett (“Wednesday Night Waltz,” Bluebird B-5607, 1934). 32. “Prosperity and Politics” suggests other deliberately ironic touches, one recalling Sonny Boy Williamson’s and Tommy McClennan’s “Bluebird Blues.” Among the skit’s musical interludes is a piece Puckett introduces as the “Blue Eagle Rag” (actually a version of “Old Molly Hare”). While he ostensibly refers to the emblem of Roosevelt’s NRA (National Recovery Act)—an outstretched blue eagle—a silhouetted blue bird also appeared on this record’s label, the logo of Victor’s Bluebird division, initiated as part of its own economic recovery. 33. Catherine Marshall Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” in Backwoods to Border, ed. J. Frank Dobie, Mody C. Boatright, and Donald Day, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, no. 18 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1943), 51–52. 34. The development of “The Arkansas Traveler”—and the claims of Faulkner, Tosso, Case, and others—are detailed in Mary D. Hudgins, “Arkansas Traveler—A Multi-Parented Wayfarer,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30 (1971): 145–60; James R. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1943), 186–232; and Catherine Marshall Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 11–60. On Edward Payson Washbourne and the pictorial tradition of the “Traveler,” see Archie Green, “Commercial Music Graphics #67: The Visual Arkansas Traveler,” JEMF Quarterly 21 (1985): 32–46; and George Lankford, “The Arkansas Traveller: The Making of an Icon,” Mid-America Folklore 10 (1982): 16–23. While it is highly unlikely the skit had a single creator, it may be significant that the three leading candidates (Faulkner, Tosso, and Case) were all natives or residents of the area between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. (Though now claimed by Arkansas, Faulkner moved there only in 1829. He was born March 3, 1803, just north of Lexington at Georgetown, Scott County, Kentucky, roughly midway between Louisville and Cincinnati.) 35. Many of these are accordingly found in the standard folktale classifications: Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, 2nd rev. ed., FF Communications, no. 184 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961); Ernest W. Baughman, Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America, Indiana University Folklore

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Series, no. 20 (The Hague, The Netherlands, 1966); and Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, Rev. ed., 6 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58). All type-and-motif references are to these works. 36. Vance Randolph, Ozark Folk Songs, vol. 3: Humorous and Play-Party Songs, 22. 37. Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric, 352–53; also Randolph, Ozark Folk Songs, vol. 3, 22–25; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 37. A 1942 field recording of one such version—performed as a monologue by Mississippi fiddler Sid Hemphill with string band accompaniment—appears on Deep River of Song: Black Appalachia, Rounder CD 11661-1823-2, 1999. 38. Tellingly, Vance Randolph included versions in both Ozark Folk Songs, vol. 3, 22–25, and The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and Other Ozark Folktales (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 114–17. For cante-fable versions see Mellinger Edward Henry, Folk-Songs from the Southern Highlands (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938), 361–62; and Roberts, Sang Branch Settlers, 183–84, 349–50. 39. The most common of these arrangements was published by David Stevens and Victor N. Pierpoint in 1917, setting the gag about the leaky roof to the familiar tune. See Hudgins, “Arkansas Traveler,” 156–59; Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 202–3; Irwin Silber and Fred Silber, Folksinger’s Wordbook (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), 33. 40. Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 36. 41. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 226; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 50–51. 42. Hudgins, “Arkansas Traveler,” 148–49; Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 222–23. 43. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 198–201; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 18–25, 29–30; Waymon Hogue, Back Yonder: An Ozark Chronicle (New York: Minton, Bach, 1932), 163–68; Ira W. Ford, Traditional Music of America (1940; rpt. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, 1965), 188–92. 44. Green, “The Visual Traveler”; Hudgins, “Arkansas Traveler,” 149–54; Lankford, “The Arkansas Traveler”; Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 186–219, 227–30; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 57–60. 45. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 241–54. 46. Tom Paley and Oscar Brand, “The Arkansas Traveler” (Esoteric ES-538, 1955); The New Lost City Ramblers, “The Arkansas Traveller,” The New Lost City Ramblers: 20 Years—Concert Performances, Flying Fish LP FF 102, 1978 (also John Cohen and Mike Seeger, Old-Time String Band Songbook, New York: Oak Publications, 1964, 216–19); Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, “The Arkansas Traveler,” Not For Kids Only, Acoustic Disc CD ACD-9, 1993. On vaudeville and old-time recordings of the skit and instrumental versions of the tune, see also Norm Cohen, booklet for Minstrels and Tunesmiths: The Commercial Roots of Early Country Music, Illustrated with Early Recordings from 1902–1923, JEMF LP-109, 1981, 10–12, 27, 31–32. 47. See, for example, Mody Boatright’s definitive Folk Laughter on the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1949), esp. 47–55. On the skit’s relation to stereotypes of Arkansas specifically, see W. K. McNeil, “ ‘By the Ozark Trail’: The Images of the Ozarks in Popular and Folk Songs,” JEMF Quarterly 21 (1985): 20–30. 48. Gene Bluestein, “ ‘The Arkansas Traveler’ and the Strategy of American Humor,” Western Folklore 20 (1962): 154–56. 49. Joe DePriest, “Cheerful Dan Hornsby.” 50. Motif J1649*(e), Person asks native where the road goes. Reply “No Place.”

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51. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations are from the texts reprinted in Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 186–219, and Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 11–42, who together include almost every version published before 1943, the bulk of the relevant data. I have occasionally made minor emendations for consistency or readability, as well as uniformly identifying the main speakers as the traveler and squatter, the most common of their various titles. 52. Motif J1919.2, Where the Ducks Ford, which first appears in sixteenth-century German sources. 53. Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric, 353. This routine also circulates independently. One variant appears in Uncle Dave Macon’s “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 2 (Around Louisville, Ky.)” (Brunswick 349, 1929). 54. The Stanley Brothers, “How Far to Little Rock,” King 5306, 1959. 55. Motif X1655.2*(b), Good road lies six feet below mud on top of road. See also Jan H. Brunvand, “The Hat-in-Mud Tale,” in The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago, ed. Wilson M. Hudson and Allen Maxwell, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, no. 33 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1966), 103–4. 56. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 189; cf. McNeil, “ ‘By the Ozark Trail,’ ” 22–23. 57. The joke about the leaky roof, which also occurs in sixteenth-century German materials, is Motif J2171.2.1, Does not need roof when it is fair; cannot put it on when it rains. This may in turn derive from Tale Type 81/Motif A2233.2.1, Too cold for hare (dog) to build house in winter, not necessary in summer; must go without house, known from Aesop. Within the skit’s tradition, the Hippocratic frogs seem unique to McMichen and Hornsby’s version, but they also occur independently: cf. Motif J1811.5*(f), In unhealthy country in South bullfrogs say, “Double the dose, double the dose (of quinine)!” The pun on “Little Rock” appears to be particular to “The Traveler.” 58. With the not-far-from-a-fool gag, these jokes, found in virtually all versions of “The Traveler,” also circulate independently. See, e.g., Boatright, Folk Laughter on the American Frontier, 50. 59. Randolph, Ozark Folk Songs, vol. 3, 22–25. 60. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 192. 61. Bluestein, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 156. 62. Mody C. Boatright, “Comic Exempla of the Pioneer Pulpit,” in Coyote Wisdom, ed. J. Frank Dobie, Mody C. Boatright, and Harry Ransom, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, no. 14 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1938), 162–63. See also Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 206–7; and Baughman, Tale Type 1833E, God Died for You, and Motif J1738.6, Backwoods preacher upon questioning householders about religious matters finds them hopelessly ignorant. He remarks that they are living in darkness. The woman responds that she has been trying for years to get her husband to cut a window in the house. 63. Ada Jones and Len Spencer, “Return of the Arkansas Traveler,” Indestructible 3108, 1910. 64. Len Spencer, “The Arkansas Traveler,” Edison Amberol 181, 1909. 65. The Stanley Brothers, “How Far to Little Rock,” and Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric, 353. First documented in 1836 (Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 236), this bit is especially popular in hillbilly versions, figuring in the records of Tanner and Puckett, the Tennessee Ramblers, and J. D. Weaver, as well as black fiddler Sid Hemphill’s 1942 field recording (Deep River of Song: Black Appalachia). 66. Motif X1110, The Wonderful Hunt; Tale Type 1916/Motif X1116, The Breathing Tree; Tale Type 1890A/Motif X1124.3.1, Gunshot splits limb and catches feet of birds; and Motif X1733.1, Man

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lifts heavy load, sinks into solid rock. A few other texts insert tall tales not usually associated with the skit, yet similarly consistent with its categorical confusions. See, for example, the version incorporating Motif X1205.1(b), Snake strikes handle of tool, causes it to swell. Here, the Squatter relates how a rattlesnake, striking at his son, instead bites the handle of the boy’s hoe, which swells to incredible proportions. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 207. 67. Earl Johnson and His Clodhoppers, “Earl Johnson’s Arkansaw Traveler” (OKeh 45156, 1927). 68. Motif X583(a), Lost traveler asks native how he can find his way back to civilization. 69. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 234, and Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 43, give several independent anecdotes based on this motif. 70. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 188, 359, n. 2; Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 4, 250. “Hyson” was originally Chinese for green tea—that is, a raw or uncured variety—grub referring to the method of harvesting the Ozark species (by grubbing). 71. Browne, The Alabama Folk Lyric, 353; Vance Randolph, Pissing in the Snow: And Other Ozark Folktales (New York: Avon Books, 1976), 215–16; also Thomas W. Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise (New York: Macmillan), 42–43. The churn cloth is the strainer (usually a piece of thin, coarse linen) used to separate butter from milk during butter-making. 72. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 200–201; Vineyard “The Arkansas Traveler,” 21–22. Received wisdom notwithstanding, town-and-country tales like this just as often depict urban visitors cleverly rebuffing inquisitive rustics. See Boatright, Folk Laughter on the American Frontier, 47–49. 73. While some would have it that the traveler is a cultural outsider—a Yankee, an Easterner, even a European visitor in the mold of Dickens or De Tocqueville (see, e.g., Bluestein, “The Arkansas Traveler,” esp. 157)—in virtually all versions he is unmistakably a Southerner, distinguished from the squatter only by residence and social class. 74. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 200, 363; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 21. 75. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 205. 76. Randolph, The Devil’s Pretty Daughter, 117. 77. Ford, Traditional Music in America, 189. 78. Besides Ford, see also Linda C. Burman-Hall, “American Traditional Fiddling: Performance Contexts and Techniques,” in Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, ed. Gerard Béhague, Contributions to Intercultural and Comparative Studies, no. 12 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984), 172; and Marion Thede, The Fiddle Book (New York: Oak, 1967), 17–18. 79. As a more general symbol, the “Arkansas Traveler” tune has also been employed in stage shows or, more recently, motion picture, television, and animated cartoon soundtracks to identify hick characters. And the musical confrontation of town and country persists as an American archetype. One might, for instance, see “The Arkansas Traveler” in the famous “Dueling Banjos” sequence in the 1972 film Deliverance (directed by John Boorman, Warner Bros. Pictures), in which a city slicker and hillbilly once more square off in a musical debate. Neil Rosenberg interprets this scene as a metaphor for the musical duels that still regularly occur between individuals of different backgrounds (e.g., rednecks and hippies) in parking lot jam sessions at bluegrass festivals. Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 266–68. Of course, one could also interpret that custom as a present-day extension of “The Traveler.”

262 | Notes

80. Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw, 189; Vineyard, “The Arkansas Traveler,” 29. 81. The city-slicker-in-the-mountains motif figures in “A Corn Licker Still—Parts 1 and 2,” “3 and 4,” and “11 and 12”; “Taking the Census”; and “Prohibition—Yes or No.” By contrast, the band travels to the city in “A Corn Licker Still—Parts 5 and 6,” “7 and 8,” and “9 and 10”; “A Fiddlers’ Convention in Georgia—Parts 1 and 2”; “Fiddlers’ Convention—Parts 3 and 4”; “A Day at the County Fair”; “Kickapoo Medicine Show”; and “A Night in a Blind Tiger.” 82. Cf. also Baughman’s references for Motif X1526, Lie about crooked roads in mountains or hills. 83. Edgar T. Thompson, “Country Store,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 15–18; Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing & Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), esp. 76–83, 154–64, 295–314. 84. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag, 10. 85. There are, for example, parallels on two records by black artists from the general vicinity of Memphis: in “Dry Spell Blues—Part 1” (Paramount 12990, 1930) Son House complained “Pork chops forty-five cents a pound, cotton is only ten,” while that same year Bo Carter and Walter Jacobs lamented, “ten cent cotton and twenty cent meat, how in the world can a poor man eat?” (“Times Is Tight Like That,” OKeh 8858, 1930). It is unclear, though, whether these derive from a common tradition or Miller’s song, which had been out for a couple of years. Similarly, Gene Wiggins reports seeing that piece “in different versions, on microfilm of Gainesville, Georgia newspapers that came out within a year or so of the copyrighting,” but he “cannot say whether the Miller-Dermer song [“ ’Leven Cent Cotton”] had folk roots or whether it became a folksong that developed different versions very rapidly.” “The song finally became very well known,” he continues, “by way of Uncle Dave Macon singing it at the Grand Ole Opry,” but “his melody was rather different from the copyrighted one, and he had words not in that version.” Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 118–19; also Ralph Rinzler and Norm Cohen, Uncle Dave Macon: A Bio-Discography, John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Special Series No. 3 (Los Angeles, 1970), 21. A home recording (c. 1950) of Uncle Dave’s version appears on Laugh Your Blues Away, Rounder LP 1028, 1979. See Tony Russell’s listings in Country Music Records: A Discography for the many prewar recordings of “Eleven Cent” or “’Leven Cent Cotton, Forty Cent Meat,” the most famous being Vernon Dalhart’s versions. For texts, see B. A. Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the American People (New York: Crown, 1944), 877–78; Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest (New York: Dover, 1973), 104–5; and Irwin Silber and Fred Silber, Folksinger’s Wordbook, 117. There were also many rewrites and parodies, including Bob Miller, “Four Cent Tobacco and Forty Cent Meat” (OKeh 45475, 1930, printed in Walter “The Kentucky Wonder Bean” Peterson’s Sensational Collection of Mountain Ballads and Old Time Songs, Chicago: M. M. Cole, 1931, 12–13); Buck Nation, “Twelve Cent Cotton Rollin’ In Wealth” (Decca 5081, 1935); the Almanac Singers, “Fifty Cent Butter and Fifty Cent Meat,” People’s Songs 1/2 (March 1946): 3, later adjusted for inflation to “Eighty Cent Butter!” People’s Songs 1/suppl. to 3 (April-May 1946): 13; and John Carson’s unrecorded “Talmadge Special” (Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, 118). See also “Bob Miller,” People’s Songs 2/1-2 (February-March 1947): 21. Indeed, “ ’Leven Cent Cotton” has become something of an American pop culture icon, surfacing in startling contexts—for instance, as performed by a barbershop quartet at Billy and Valencia Pilgrim’s eighteenth wedding anniversary in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Delacorte, 1969), 151. 86. As one researcher notes, “whiskey making was simple enough for an energetic small farmer. It would also bring him greater economic yield per bushel of corn than other uses,

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perhaps as much as a 300 per cent price increase. Besides, whiskey was easier to get to market, and age improved it.” Carolyn Goldsby Kolb, “Whiskey,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 707. 87. This anecdote belongs to a Depression-era cycle of stories and songs—some apparently founded in fact—recounting how Southern farmers saved their farms from foreclosure through direct appeals to President Roosevelt. Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 96–104. 88. Roberts, Sang Branch Settlers, 56. 89. In fact, all of Hornsby’s questions on “Taking the Census” appeared on the real 1930 census, and in roughly the same order. http://1930census.archives.gov. 90. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, eds., The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), 501. 91. This was Columbia’s official designation for its famous 15000-D series.

Coda: Well Folks, Here We Are Again 1. Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. Spitfire Pictures, 2003. 2. Alan Light, booklet for Music From the Motion Picture Masked and Anonymous, Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax CD CK 90536, 2003. 3. Technically, the Beatles’ “Matchbox” (Long Tall Sally, Parlophone EP GEP 8913, 1964) is taken from a record (Sun 261, 1957) by Memphis rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, who learned the song from his father, who learned it from Jefferson’s record. Like most of their other records, the Beatles cut their version at London’s Abbey Road studios, with their idol Perkins, on tour in England at the time, in the studio looking on. Recorded with Johnny Cash during the sessions that produced Nashville Skyline (Columbia KCS 9825, 1969), Dylan’s own version of Perkins’s version of Blind Lemon’s record appears on one of the better-known Dylan bootlegs, The Dylan/Cash Sessions, Spank CD 106, n.d. 4. In the early 1960s Dylan adopted the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt—poking fun at urban revivalists trying to pass themselves off as authentic bluesmen—for several unofficial recordings eventually issued on Folkways compilations (Various artists, Broadside Ballads Vol. 1, Folkways LP FH-5301, 1964; Various artists, Broadside Reunion, Folkways LP FH-5315, 1972), and for a guest appearance on Dick Fariña and Eric Von Schmidt, Folklore LP 7, 1967. It would later resurface on various bootlegs, most notably an early version of the Basement Tapes: Blind Boy Grunt and The Hawks: The Basement Tapes Vol. 1 and 2, Surprise Bootleg LP A & B, 1967. 5. For the record, Dylan’s set in Fort Wayne on September 5, 2006, featured the following songs, all recasting, in varying proportions, old-time records or American folksongs: “Cat’s in the Well,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” “Girl from the North Country,” “Watching the River Flow,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Masters of War,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “My Back Pages,” “Summer Days,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “All Along the Watchtower.” 6. This is the case with another celebrated CD reissue of a seminal LP reissue of old-time 78s: the Anthology of American Folk Music (see chap. 1, n. 51). As part of its elaborate packaging, one disc has been enhanced with additional audio, plus text, video, and graphics. 7. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; Alan Lomax, “Appeal for Cultural Equity,” 1972; rpt. in Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934–1997, ed. Ronald D. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2005), 285–99.

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8. Charles Cooper, “Roger McGuinn: One Musician’s Take On Napster.” http://www.news .zdnet.com. 9. Charles Cooper, “Roger McGuinn.” 10. Jim Hu, “Rapper Uses Web to Fight Recording Industry,” December 7, 1998. http://www .news.com. 11. “Public Enemy Go To War With MP4,” January 1999. http://www.shutemdown.com. 12. Charles Cooper, “Roger McGuinn.” Fittingly, McGuinn’s testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing Music on the Internet: Is There An Upside to Downloading?, July 11, 2000, has been posted at numerous sites on the Internet (e.g., http://www.kentlaw.edu/islt/ mcguinn.htm). For more on McGuinn’s Internet activities—including his ongoing Folk Den project—visit his own website, http://www.mcguinn.com. 13. Jeremy Marre and Hannah Charlton, Beats of the Heart: Popular Music of the World (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 88. Born Harry Webb in 1940, the English singer Cliff Richard began his career as an unabashed Elvis imitator. 14. For present-day examples from rural East Texas, see John Minton, “The Reverend Lamar Roberts and the Mediation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 3–37; and John Minton, “ ‘The Waterman Train Wreck’: Tracking a Folksong in Deep East Texas,” in Songs About Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss, ed. Archie Green, Special Publications of the Folklore Institute, no. 3 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 37–76. 15. On one such tradition and its relations with various media formats, see John Minton, “Houston Creoles and Zydeco: The Emergence of an African American Urban Popular Style,” in New Perspectives On the Blues, ed. David Evans, special issue, American Music 14 (1996): 480–526; John Minton, “Creole Community and ‘Mass’ Communication: Houston Zydeco as a Mediated Tradition,” Journal of Folklore Research 32 (1995): 1–19; and John Minton, “Zydeco on CD,” Journal of American Folklore 111 (1998): 417–44. 16. See, for example, Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 17. See Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle. . . : Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia, rev. ed. (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970); Roger D. Abrahams, Positively Black (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 45–47; David Evans, “The Toast in Context,” Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977): 129–48; Bruce Jackson, “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); William Labov, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, “Toasts,” 1968; rpt. in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 329–47; Anthony M. Reynolds, “Urban Toasts: A Hustler’s View from L.A.,” Western Folklore 33 (1974): 267–300; and Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman, The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Street Hustler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976). Several of Jackson’s field-recorded toasts may be heard on “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, Rounder Records LP 2014, n.d. 18. Don Cusic, “From Zap to Rap: Digital Sampling, Rap Music, and the Folk Tradition,” Bulletin of the Tennessee Folklore Society 54 (1991): 140, 143. Compare Tricia Rose, “Orality and Technology: Rap Music and Afro-American Cultural Resistance,” Popular Music and Society 13 (1989): 35–45; and Tricia Rose, Black Noise, esp. 86–88.

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19. On the 1950s covers controversy see David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 23–25. 20. Kembrew McLeod, “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An Interview With Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” http://www.stayfreemagazine.org. 21. “Public Enemy to Release Album Free On Net,” January 19, 1999. http://www .shutemdown.com. 22. “Revisiting a Dark Corner of Public Enemy’s Past,” January 31, 1999. http://www .shutemdown.com. 23. On rap’s West Indian connections, see Dick Hebdige, Cut ’N’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (London: Methhuen, 1987), esp. 136–48. 24. Significantly, the washboard itself simply adapts older preindustrial forms to an emerging consumer culture, transferring techniques originally developed on homemade instruments like notched sticks or gourds to a mass-produced commodity. See David Evans, “The Reinterpretation of African Instruments in the United States,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carol Boyce Davies, Ali A. Mazrui, 370–90 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and David Evans, booklet for Good Time Blues: Harmonicas, Kazoos, Washboards and Cow-Bells, Columbia/Legacy CD CK 46780, 1991. 25. The JVC Anthology of World Music and Dance, Volume 17: Middle East and Africa II, VHS, directed by Kunihiko Nakagawa (Tokyo: Victor Company of Japan, 1991). 26. Public Enemy: Live from House of Blues, VHS, directed by Kerry Asmussen (Chatsworth, CA: House of Blues/Image Entertainment, 2001).

Indexes

References to illustrations appear in italics. Record and Song Index “A Rag Blues,” 70, 86 “Abilene,” 12 “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” 83 “Alabama Bound,” 94 “Alabama Gals,” 163 “Alabama Jubilee,” 45 “Alabama Square Dance,” 44–46, 52, 147 “Alabama Strut,” 68 “Alberta,” 247n4 “All Along the Watchtower,” 263n5 “All Bound Down in Prison,” 258n31 “Alley Crap Game, The,” 48 “All-Go-Hungry Hash House,” 102 “Answer to Twenty-One Years, The,” 117 Anthology of American Folk Music, 237n51, 263n6 Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Black, 225 “Arcade Blues,” 106 “Arkansas Traveler, The,” 260n64 “Arkansaw Traveler (A Quadrille),” 243n9 “Arkansaw Traveler, The,” 168, 256n25 “At the Christmas Ball,” 55, 73 “At the Hop,” 140, 141 “Atlanta Strut,” 76 “Avalon Blues,” 249n6

“Baby, Baby,” 122 “Baby, Don’t You Love Me No More?,” 247n4 “Baby, Don’t You Want to Go,” 103–4 “Baby, Please Don’t Tell On Me,” 103–4 “Baby Boogie Woogie,” 51 “Back Door Blues,” 47, 73 “Back Home in the Mountains,” 258n31 “Back Up and Push,” 243n9, 258n31 “Baking Powder Blues,” 48, 72 “Bald Knobber Song, The,” 36 “Balky Mule Blues,” 85 “Ballad of the Boll Weevil, The” (Laws I 17), 200 “Band Rehearsal for Old Settler’s Reunion,” 60 “Baptism at Burning Bush,” 56 “Baptism at the River,” 56 “Baptist World Alliance in Atlanta, Georgia,” 56 “Barbecue Down In Georgia—Part 2,” 241n3 “Barbershop Rag,” 72, 249n3 “Barefoot Blues,” 85 “Barn Dance on the Mountain—Parts 1 and 2,” 241n3 Basement Tapes, The, 148, 237n51, 263n4 “Beale Street Blues,” 3

267

268 | Indexes

“Beale Town Bound,” 65, 98 “Bear Cat (The Answer to ‘Hound Dog’),” 253n8 “Beaver Slide Rag,” 46, 51, 65 “Beaver Valley Breakdown,” 243n9 “Bee Hunt on Hill for Sartin Creek—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 47, 165, 192, 195–96, 256n25 “Beer Party, The,” 241n3 Before the Flood, 214 “Beggar Man Blues,” 122 “Believe It Not,” 140, 141 “Bell Street Lightnin’,” 98 “Bertha Lou,” 140 “Betty Lou Got a New Pair of Shoes,” 140 “Bibb County Grind,” 52 “Bible’s True, The,” 81–82 “Big Feeling Blues,” 245n26 “Big Mama Jump,” 116 “Big Town Fling,” 242n9 “Bill Mason,” 70–71, 86 “Billy in the Low Ground,” 98, 166, 242n9 “Bird Dog,” 140 “Birmingham Rag,” 53 “Black Snake Blues,” 117 “Black Snake Dream Blues,” 117 “Black Snake Swing,” 117 “Black-Eyed Susie,” 186, 258n31 “Blue Bird Blues,” 130–31, 258n32 “Blue Eagle Rag,” 258n32 “Blue Grass Breakdown,” 139 “Blue Grass Twist,” 52 “Blue Suede Shoes,” 144 “Blue Tail Fly, The,” 139 “Bluebird Blues,” 131, 258n32 “Blues Heaven,” 253–54n9 “Blues the World Forgot—Parts 1 and 2,” 64, 242n6 “Boatin’ Up Sandy,” 243n9 Bob Dylan, 211–12 Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, 148, 254n16 “Bob Murphy,” 241n3 “Boogie,” 75 “Boogie Chillen,” 64, 75 “Boogie Woogie Woman,” 104 “Boogie-Woogie Swing,” 51, 74, 242n5

“Bootlegger’s Joint in Atlanta—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 241n4 “Bo-Weavil Blues,” 107 “Brakeman’s Blues, The,” 114 Bring the Noise 2000, 225 “Bringing in the Georgia Mail,” 139 “Broadcasting Blues,” 133 “Broken Down Gambler,” 258n31 “Brown Skin Girl,” 103–4 “Brown Skin Shuffle,” 6, 24, 60, 64 “Brownie Special,” 134 “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” 81 “Buffalo Girl,” 242n9 “Bully of the Town” (Laws I 14), 163 “Burglar Man, The,” 70 “Burial Service, The,” 56 “Burning Bush Sunday School—Parts 1 and 2,” 56 “Butcher Pete—Parts 1 and 2,” 101 “Cacklin’ Hen and Rooster Too,” 258n31 “Callahan’s Reel,” 242n9 “Campbells Are Coming,” 242n9 “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight Mister,” 3 “Candy Kisses,” 139 “Carol,” 140 “Carolina Stompdown,” 242n9 “Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas, The,” 121 “Casey Jones” (Laws G 1), 88 “Cat’s in the Well,” 263n5 “Change for a $10 Bill,” 39 “Change My Luck Blues,” 249n3 “Chantilly Lace,” 140, 253n9 “Chanting Benny,” 40 “Charleston Contest—Parts 1 and 2,” 51, 60, 72, 98 “Charleston No. 2,” 121 “Charlie Poole,” 111 “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy,” 139 “Chicken in the Barnyard,” 243n9 “Chimin’ the Blues,” 242n6 “Chinese Breakdown,” 190, 241n3 “Chittlin’ Supper,” 46, 65

Indexes | 269

“Christmas Eve Blues,” 100 “Citaco,” 93 “Clementine; Camptown Races; Annie Laurie,” 85–86 “Collection Time,” 56 “College Blues,” 59, 63 “Come On Mama,” 49–50 “Comin’ Round the Mountain,” 89 “Coon Can Game, The” (Laws I 4), 230–31n7 “Corn Licker and Barbecue—Parts 1 and 2,” 241n4, 256n20 “Corn Licker Still in Georgia—Parts 1–14, A” 20, 47, 116, 149–210, 256n25, 262n81 “Corn Shuckers Frolic, The,” 47 “Corn Shucking Party In Georgia,” 47 “Cotton Eyed Joe,” 241n3, 242n9, 258n31 “Cotton Patch Blues,” 103 “Cottonfield Blues,” 252n3 “Countin’ the Blues,” 81 “Country Breakdown,” 84 “County Fair—Parts 1 and 2,” 54 “Cowboy Stomp,” 249n3 “Cripple Creek,” 4, 229n1 “Cross Eyed Butcher and the Cackling Hen, The,” 249n2 “Cross Road Blues,” 231n11 “Crossroads,” 19, 231n11 “Crow Jane Alley,” 242n6 “Crying Blues,” 99–100 “Cuttin’ at the Point,” 241n3 “D B Blues,” 85, 133 “Dance All Night With a Bottle in Your Hand,” 163 “Darkey’s Wail, The,” 44, 76, 166 “Darktown Gamblin’—Parts 1 and 2,” 48, 54 “Darling Zelma Lee,” 82 “Davis Limited, The,” 134 “Day at the County Fair—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 54, 165, 197–98, 256n25, 262n81 “Deacon Board Meeting—Parts 1 and 2,” 56 “Deacon’s Prayer Service,” 244n20 “Dead Drunk Blues,” 84 “Dead Man Blues,” 58

“Death Letter Blues—Parts 1 and 2,” 247n4 “Death of Bessie Smith,” 111 “Death of Blind Boy Fuller,” 106–7 “Death of Blind Lemon,” 109–10 “Death of Jimmie Rodgers, The” 112–13 “Death of John Henry (Steel Driving Man),” 247n3 “Death of Leroy Carr, The (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr),” 108 “Death of Slim Green,” 111 “Deep Blue Sea Blues,” 104 “Detroit Jump,” 49, 68–69, 242n6 “Devilish Blues,” 83 “Devil’s Dream,” 242–43n9 “Dixie,” 42, 69 “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” 140 “Do That Shake Dance,” 49 “Do You Wanna Go Our Way,” 227 “Doctor Medicine,” 242n6 “Dogs in the Ash Can,” 243n9 “Done Gone,” 258n31 “Done What My Lord Said,” 107 “Donna,” 253n9 “Don’t Drink It In Here,” 63, 242n5 “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues,” 3, 214 “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” 94 “Double Trouble,” 84 “Down at the Old Country Church,” 244n22 “Down On My Bended Knee,” 111 “Down on Penney’s Farm,” 232n14, 237n51 “Down the Road Apiece,” 60 “Down to the Wildwood to Shoot the Buffalo,” 93 “Dry Bone Shuffle,” 51 “Dry Spell Blues—Part 1,” 262n85 “Dueling Banjos,” 261n79 “Dupree Shake Dance,” 49 “Durang’s Hornpipe,” 243n9 Dylan/Cash Sessions, The, 263n3 “Earl Johnson’s Arkansaw Traveler,” 261n67 “Eight Miles High,” 229–30n1 “Eighty Cent Butter,” 262n85 “Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama,” 252n3

270 | Indexes

“Experience Blues,” 99 “Experience Meeting,” 244n20 “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” 139 “Farewell Song, The,” 239n16 “Farm Relief,” 77, 84 Farther Along, 220 “Fat Fanny Stomp,” 47–48, 74 Fear of a Black Planet, 225 “Fiddler’s Contest, A,” 65, 244n16 “Fiddler’s Contest, The,” 244n16 “Fiddlers’ Convention in Georgia—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 54, 116, 159, 160, 165, 167, 256n25, 262n81 “Fiddlers Convention—Parts 3 and 4,” 54, 165, 256n25, 262n81 “Fiddler’s Tryout In Georgia—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 244n16 “Fiddlin’ Bootleggers—Parts 1 and 2, The,” 241n4, 256n25 “Fifty Cent Butter and Fifty Cent Meat,” 262n85 “Flatwoods,” 77–78, 90, 189, 258n31 “Flop Eared Mule,” 162 “Flying Clouds,” 90 “Flying Engine,” 243n9 “Flying Saucer, The (Parts 1 and 2),” 140 “Fool’s Blues,” 84–85 “Forked Deer,” 243n9 “Forty Drops,” 241n3 “Four Cent Cotton,” 201 “Four Cent Tobacco and Forty Cent Meat,” 262n85 “Four Day Worry Blues,” 247n4 “Franklin Blues, The,” 81 “From Four Until Late,” 19, 231n11 “From Heaven to Earth,” 82 “Funeral Sermon,” 56 “Fun’s All Over, The,” 243n9

“Gallows Pole,” 12–13, 230n5 “Gang of Brown Skin Women,” 81 “Garter Snake Blues,” 117 “Georgia Barbecue At Stone Mountain—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 46–47 “Georgia Bust Down,” 47, 74 “Georgia Cake Walk,” 50, 86 “Georgia Rag,” 246n34 “Georgia Stomp,” 243n9 “Get the ‘L’ Down the Road,” 98 “Gideon,” 241n3 “Gillum’s Windy Blues,” 129 “Gimme a Pigfoot,” 62–63 “Girl from the North Country,” 263n5 “Girl I Left Behind Me, The,” 243n9 “Girl I Left in Sunny Tennessee, The,” 26 “Go Out to the Program,” 143 “Goin’ To Have A Big Time To-night,” 129, 241n3 “Goin’ Up-Town,” 242n9 “Going Across the Sea,” 89, 100, 242n9 “Going Around the World,” 100 “Going Down the Lee Highway,” 135 “Going to A Go-Go,” 139 “Going to Germany,” 67–68 “Going to the County Fair,” 54 Good As I Been to You, 237n51 “Good Golly Miss Molly,” 140 “Good Luck Old Pal (Till We Meet Bye and Bye),” 112 “Good Woman Blues,” 81 “Got the Blues,” 111 “Governor Al Smith,” 102 “Grand Ole Opry Song,” 139 “Grandma’s Rag,” 59 “Greasy String,” 73, 241n3, 249n3 “Great Pretender, The,” 141 “Guitar Rag,” 68, 246n36 “Gulf Coast Special,” 134

“G Blues,” 60, 65–66 “G Burns Is Gonna Rise Again,” 53, 66 “G Rag,” 133 “Gal That Got Stuck on Everything She Said, The,” 105, 249n2

“Halfway to Arkansas,” 243n9 “Ham-Fatchet Blues—Parts 1 and 2,” 100 “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane,” 258n31 “Hangman, Hangman, Slack the Rope,” 4–5, 15, 26, 33

Indexes | 271

“Happy New Year Blues,” 100 “Happy Ship Carpenter,” 39, 239 “Hard Rocks in My Bed,” 98 “Hard Times in New York Town,” 232n14 “Haste to the Wedding,” 242n9 “Hastings St. (Hastings St. Boogy),” 64 “He Calls That Religion,” 98 “Heartbreak Hotel,” 141 “Heaven’s Radio,” 133 “Hell Among the Yearlings,” 243n9 “Hell Amongst the Yearlings,” 59, 64 “Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia,” 116, 165 “Hen Cackle,” 258n31 “He’s Got a Punch Like Joe Louis,” 98 “Hesitation Blues,” 252n3 “Hide Me In the Blood of Jesus,” 84 “High Sheriff,” 242n9 “Highway 61 Revisited,” 263n5 “Highwayman, The,” 230–31n7 “Hip Shakin’ Strut,” 91–92, 98 “Hog Killing Day—Parts 1 and 2,” 47, 165, 192, 195–96, 256n25 “Hokum Blues,” 53 “Hokum Stomp,” 51–52, 91 “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” 139 “Home Brew Party,” 241n3 “Home Sweet Home,” 258n31 “Hometown Skiffle,” 119–20, 124 “(Honey) It’s Tight Like That,” 251n20 “Honey, I’m All Out and Down,” 247n4 “Honeysuckle,” 102–3 “Hook & Line,” 241n3 “Hot Dogs,” 51, 75, 100 “Hound Dog,” 253n8 “House Lady Blues,” 242n5 “House Rent Rag,” 242n5 “House Rent Scuffle,” 242n5 “House Rent Stomp,” 6–7, 47 “How Far to Little Rock,” 173, 260n54, 260n65 “How Long—How Long Blues,” 108–9, 117 “Howling Wolf Blues—No. 1,” 132 “Huckleberry Blues,” 242n9 “Hula Hoop Song, The,” 140 “Hungry Man’s Scuffle,” 49

“I Am Born To Preach the Gospel,” 84 “I Cannot Call Her Mother,” 3 “I Don’t Love Nobody,” 164 “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” 253n9 “I Had To Smack That Thing,” 59 “I Want to See Jesus,” 107 “If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day,” 213 “If You Wanna Be Happy,” 252n7 “Iggly Oggly Blues,” 98 “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You,” 131 “I’ll Never Go There Any More (The Bowery),” 247n3 “I’m Going Where the Chilly Winds Don’t Blow,” 258n31 “(I’m Gonna) Jump Right Out of This Jukebox,” 132 “I’m Gonna Learn to Swing,” 155–56 “I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me,” 84 “I’m Gonna Move To Louisiana—Parts 1 and 2,” 117 “I’m Leaving Town (But I Sho’ Don’t Wanna Go),” 244n24 “I’m Sober Now,” 242n6 “In the Evening,” 104 “Is There Harm In Singing the Blues,” 250n11 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 225 “It Was Tight Like That,” 119 “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” 144 “It Won’t Be Long Now—Parts 1 and 2,” 54 “It’s Tight Like That,” 117–19, 121, 251n20 “It’s Tight Like That No. 2,” 119 “It’s Tight Like That No. 3,” 119 “Jealous Hearted Blues,” 84 “Jeremiah Hopkins’ Store at Sand Mountain,” 54, 165, 166, 192, 193–95, 198, 208, 256n25 “Jesse James” (Laws E 1), 33 “Jesus Gave Me Water,” 143 “Jesus Is My Friend,” 84 “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree—Parts 1 and 2,” 54, 121

272 | Indexes

“Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues—Parts 3 and 4,” 117 “Jimmie Rodgers’ Life,” 112 “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family,” 121 “John Brown’s Dream,” 242n9 “John Henry” (Laws I 1), 76, 102 “John L’s House Rent Boogie,” 75–76 “John Makes Good Licker—Parts 1 and 2,” 241n4 “John Makes Good Liquor—Parts 3 and 4,” 241n4 “Johnny and Jane—Parts 1 and 2,” 100–1, 121 “Johnson’s Old Gray Mule,” 86–88, 248n6 “Joining Church,” 56 “Jolly Butchers, The,” 239n16 “Jump Steady Blues,” 127 “Kansas City Blues—Parts 1 and 2,” 117 “Kansas City Dog Walk,” 47, 49, 64 “K.C. Blues,” 102 “Kickapoo Medicine Show—Parts 1 and 2,” 54, 162–65, 166, 195–96, 256n25, 262n81 King of the Delta Blues Singers, 19–20, 212, 231n11 King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2, 19–20, 212, 231n11 “Kissin’ On the Sly,” 247n3 “Kitty Hill,” 241n3 “Knoxville Blues,” 102 “L and N Rag,” 94 “La Bamba,” 253n9 “Ladies on the Steamboat,” 78–79, 80, 241n3 “Larry O’Gaff,” 242n9 “Last Respects (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr),” 108 “Last Thoughts of Jimmie Rodgers, The,” 113, 115 “Laughing Blues,” 99–100 “Lead Pencil Blues (It Just Won’t Write),” 252n3 “Leather Breeches,” 242–43n9, 258n31 “Leaving This Morning,” 117 Led Zeppelin, 214 Led Zeppelin III, 12, 15

“Lemon Song,” 19, 231n11 “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” 263n5 “Let Me Play Your Vendor,” 131–32 “Let’s All of Us Stay at Home (Husband and Wife Were Angry One Night),” 3 “Let’s Go Out to the Programs,” 142–43 “Let’s Go Out to the Programs No. 2,” 143 “Let’s Talk About Jesus,” 143 “Levee’s Gonna Break,” 213–14 “ ’Leven Cent Cotton, Forty Cent Meat,” 113, 200, 262n85 “Liberty,” 116, 167, 187, 242n9, 258n31 “Lickskillet, Mississippi,” 255n17 “Life and Death of Charlie Poole, The,” 111–12 “Life of Jimmie Rodgers, The,” 112, 113 “Life of Leroy Carr,” 108–9 “Lightnin’s Boogie,” 51, 242n6 “Like a Rolling Stone,” 263n5 “Lindberg Hop,” 131 “Little Betty Brown,” 242n9 “Little Brown Jug,” 186, 258n31 “Little Grave in Georgia, The,” 30, 236n45 “Little Jimmie’s Goodbye to Jimmie Rodgers,” 114 “Little Mama Boogie,” 116 “Little Mary Phagan” (Laws F 20), 236n45 “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane, The,” 156 “Little Rock Blues,” 98 “Liza Jane,” 248n6 “Lock Step Blues,” 98 “Lonesome House Blues,” 98 “Lonesome Weary Blues,” 81 “Long Lastin’ Lovin’,” 249n3 “Long Tall Sally,” 140, 141 “Lost Ship, The,” 239n16 “Love in Vain,” 19, 231n11 “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,” 139 “Lovesick Blues,” 139 “Lullaby Yodel,” 114 “Lye Soap,” 47, 63 “Lynchburg,” 89–90 “ ‘Ma and Pa Poorhouse Blues,” 245n26 “Ma Rainey,” 106–7 “ ‘Ma’ Rainey’s Black Bottom,” 86, 87

Indexes | 273

“Madison Street Rag,” 74–75 “Maggie’s Farm,” 20, 232n14, 237n51 “Maid Freed from the Gallows, The” (Child 95), 12–15, 25–26, 230–31n7 “Maltese Cat Blues,” 85, 251n20 “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues,” 83, 84 “Mama Let Me Lay It On You,” 68 “Mama You Don’t Know How,” 244n24 “Man of Constant Sorrow,” 239n16 “Martha Campbell,” 243n9 “Masters of War,” 263n5 “Match Box Blues,” 85, 212 “Matchbox,” 263n3 “Mean Mistreater Mama,” 108 “Medicine Show—A Revue in Six Acts, The,” 54, 120–21, 165, 257n28 “Memories of Charlie Poole,” 111 “Memories of Jimmy Rodgers,” 112 “Memphis Blues, or Mr. Crump,” 249n10 “Mermaid, The” (Child 289), 38 “Middlin’ Blues,” 90 “Milk Cow Blues,” 68 “Minnie the Moocher,” 229n3 “Mississippi Square Dance—Parts 1 and 2,” 243n9 “Mixed Up Rag,” 120 “Moan Mourners,” 244n22 “Moaning the Blues,” 117 Modern Times, 213–14 “Molly Put the Kettle On,” 243n9, 244n24 “Money in Both Pockets,” 69 “Monkey Turned Barber, The” (Laws Q 14), 39 “Moonshine Kate,” 241n4 “Moonshiner and His Money,” 47, 69 “Mootch Piddle,” 51, 63, 74, 242n5 “More Like Your Dad Every Day,” 89, 247n3 “Moselle—Quadrille,” 243n9 “Mother Bowed,” 143 “Mountain Boy Makes His First Record—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 127 Mr. Tambourine Man, 220 “Mr. Tambourine Man,” 11, 229–30n1 “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town,” 65, 247n4 “Mrs. Rodgers’ Lament,” 113 “Muscat Hill Blues,” 66

“Mustang Sally,” 139 “My Back Pages,” 263n5 “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” 139 “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon,” 111 “My Buddy Doctor Clayton” 111 “My Castle’s Rockin’,” 242n5 “My Friend Blind Lemon,” 111 “My Old Kentucky Home,” 69 “My Old Pal Blues (Dedicated to the Memory of Leroy Carr),” 108 “My Rainbow Trail Keeps Winding On,” 113 “Nancy Rollin,” 59, 70, 151–52, 153, 196, 256n25 “Naptown Stomp,” 93 Nashville Skyline, 263n3 “New Answer to Twenty-One Years,” 117 “New Arkansaw Traveller,” 173 “New Blacksnake Blues—Parts 1 and 2,” 117, 247n4 “New Coon In Town,” 243n9 “New Ford Car, The,” 249n2 “New Market Wreck,” 40–41, 100 “New Orleans,” 252n7 “New Orleans Stop Time,” 49 “New Twenty-One Years,” 117 “Nigger in the Woodpile,” 258n31 “Night in a Blind Tiger—Parts 1 and 2, A,” 48, 165, 202, 204, 262n81 “Night Rambling Woman,” 107 “Night Time Blues,” 84 “Night Train to Memphis,” 139 “No Room for a Tramp” 127 “No Whiskey Blues,” 242n5 Not For Kids Only, 173 “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble?,” 58–59 “Oh Boy!,” 253n9 “Oil Well Blues,” 85 “Old and Only in the Way,” 3 “Old Country Rock,” 93 “Old Country Stomp,” 243n9 “Old Dan Tucker,” 88–89 “Old Fashioned Square Dance, The,” 241n3 “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow, The,” 156

274 | Indexes

“Old Jimmy Sutton,” 69, 241n3 “Old Joe,” 70, 73, 241n3, 242n9 “Old Joe Clark,” 70 “Old Maid and the Burglar, The (The Burglar Man)” (Laws H 23), 70, 246n38 “Old Molly Hair (Hare),” 88, 258n32 “Old Red,” 243n9 “Old Taylor,” 104–5, 127 “Old Time Baptism—Parts 1 and 2,” 56 “Old Time Corn Shuckin’—Parts 1 and 2,” 47 “Old Virginia Reel—Parts 1 and 2,” 60, 101 “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks We Stand,” 95–96, 103 “On Tanner’s Farm,” 20, 232n14 “On the Dixie Bee Line (In That Henry Ford of Mine),” 247n3 “Ooh! My Soul,” 140 “Open Up That Door (And Walk Right in My Heart),” 141 “Original Arkansas Traveler—Part 1 and 2, The,” 169–71, 180, 256n25 “Our Father,” 143 “Over at Tom’s House,” 59, 66–67 “Ox Drivin’ Blues,” 247n4 “Packin’ Trunk Blues,” 85 “Painful Blues,” 67, 244n24 “Panama to Chi,” 55 “Pan-American Blues,” 67 “Papa Stobb Blues,” 51 “Pass Around the Bottle and We’ll All Take a Drink,” 186, 189, 202, 258n31 “Passing of Jimmie Rodgers, The,” 113 “Patty on the Turnpike,” 243n9 “Paul Jones (Arkansas Traveler),” 241n3 “Peas and Cornbread,” 166, 188, 258n31 “Peg Leg Stomp,” 51 “Peggy Sue,” 140, 253n9 “Pentecostal Praise Service,” 244n20 “Phonograph Blues,” 131, 252n3 “Piccolo Rag,” 252n2 “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” 60 “Pickin’ Off Peanuts,” 47, 63, 74 “Picking My Tomatoes,” 107 “Pig Meat Papa,” 102, 247n4

“Pig Meat Strut,” 63, 249n3 “Pinchbacks—Take ’Em Away,” 80, 81 “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” 51, 74, 242n6 “Pleading Blues,” 81, 103 “Policy Rag,” 47 “Pontiac Blues,” 252n3 “Pony Blues,” 252n3 “Poor Girl’s Waltz,” 74, 241n3 “Poor Me,” 141 “Poor Sinners, Fare You Well,” 247n3 “Poppin’ Bubblegum,” 139 “Possum Hunt on Stump House Mountain— Parts 1 and 2,” 47, 165, 166, 195–96, 256n25 “Possum Trot School Exhibition—Parts 1 and 2,” 54–55 “Possum Up the Gum Stump,” 258n31 “Practice Night at Chicken Bristle,” 60, 256n25 “Practice Night with the Skillet Lickers—Parts 1 and 2,” 60, 126–27, 165, 192, 198 “Prairie Lullaby,” 114 “Prayer Meeting and Sermon,” 244n20 “Prayer Meeting Service at Burning Bush,” 56 “Prayer of Death—Parts 1 and 2,” 244n22 “Prayer Service, The,” 244n20 “Pretty Little Widow,” 70 “Price of Cotton Blues,” 200–1 “Prison Bound Blues,” 109 “Prohibition—Yes or No,” 165, 192–93, 201, 203, 256n25, 262n81 “Prosperity and Politics—Parts 1 and 2,” 128, 165, 166, 167–68, 192, 198, 202–3, 256n25 “Purple People Eater, The,” 140 “Quarter to Three,” 252n7 “Quartet Rehearsal,” 60 “Radio Papa (Broadcastin’ Mama),” 252n3 “Raging Sea How It Roars,” 38 “Ragtime Crazy,” 242n6 “Railroad Blues,” 67 “Railroad Blues, The,” 71 “Railroadin’ Some,” 134 “Ramblin’ Blues,” 3 “Razor Ball,” 84 “Reckless Hobo, The” (Laws H 2), 239n16

Indexes | 275

“Record Ban Blues,” 128–29 “Record Hop,” 141 “Record Hop Tonight,” 141 “Red River Valley, The,” 113 “Red Steer,” 241n3 “Red’s Got the Piccolo Blues,” 252n2 “Reefer Song, The,” 128 “Return of the Arkansas Traveler,” 260n63 “Rev. Gates’ Song Service,” 244n20 “Richmond Cotillion,” 52 “Ride the Goat Over the Mountain,” 241n3 “Rise When the Rooster Crows,” 89 Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, 213 “Roberta—Parts 1 and 2,” 247n4 “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep,” 114 “Rock and Rye,” 73, 242n6 “Rock of Ages,” 81 “Rockin’ Robin,” 140 “Rocky Pallet,” 188, 258n31 “Roll and Tumble Blues,” 213 “Roll ’Em on the Ground,” 258n31 “Roll Over Beethoven,” 144, 145, 146 “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” 213 “Rough Alley Blues,” 68, 99 “Run, Nigger, Run,” 88 “Running Rhymes,” 42 “Rye Straw,” 88, 166 “Sailor’s Song, The,” 38 “Sal Let Me Chaw Your Rosin,” 85 “Salty Dog,” 98 “Sand Mountain Drag,” 47, 67 “Saro,” 73, 241n3 “Saturday Night Rub,” 7, 31, 47 “Saturday Night Stroll,” 75 “Sea Board Stomp,” 46, 93 “Searcy County Rag,” 46, 61–62 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” 111, 212 “Selling That Stuff,” 119, 120 “Serenade in the Mountains,” 55, 69 “Sermon on Baptism,” 56 “Sermon On Tight Like That,” 119 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 146, 213 “Shake That Thing,” 119–20 “Share ’Em,” 243n9

“Shave ’Em Dry,” 105, 249n8 “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” 258n31 “Shelven Rock,” 69–70, 241n3 “She’s Got What It Takes,” 90 “Sho’ Fly, Don’t Bother Me,” 249n2 “Shootin’ Creek,” 4–5, 8, 31, 59, 62, 70, 74, 103 “Short Haired Woman,” 122 “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered,” 139 “Singing with Praise Service,” 244n20 “Sisters’ Prayer Meeting,” 244n20 Skillet Lickers, The, 20, 212 “Skoodle Um Skoo,” 53, 70 “Sleep Baby Sleep,” 114 “Sleepy Lou,” 241n3 “Slim Gal,” 258n31 “Slippery Rag,” 51, 98 “Slow Buck,” 49 “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” 33 Smokey Mountain Ballads, 20, 212 “Snake Doctor Blues,” 85 “Snatch It Back Blues,” 80, 94 “Soap Suds Over the Fence,” 194 “Soldier’s Joy,” 20, 31, 34, 77–78, 90, 258n31 “Soldier’s Sweetheart, The,” 114 “Song of the Orphan Boy,” 41, 80 Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute, The, 115 “Soon This Morning Blues,” 120 “Soul Finger,” 253n7 “Sourwood Mountain Medley,” 247n3 “Southern Medley,” 69 “Southern Rag,” 70, 92–93, 97, 135 “Southern Railroad Wreck, The,” 40 “Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues),” 125, 128, 133 “Splish Splash,” 140 “Square Dance Fight On Ball Top Mountain— Parts 1 and 2, The,” 47 “St. Peter’s Blues—Parts 1 and 2,” 98, 99 “Stage, The (Stars in Heaven),” 253n9 “State of Tennessee Blues,” 252n3 “State Street Jive,” 60, 64 “Station Will Be Changed After a While,” 79 “Step Lively,” 243n9 “Still Trying to Get to Little Rock,” 173

276 | Indexes

“Stomp ’Em Down to the Bricks,” 47, 74 “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” 231n11 “Stop Breaking Down,” 19, 231n11 “Streak O’ Lean—Streak O’ Fat,” 69 “Stroll, The,” 140 “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” 263n5 “Sugar in My Coffee,” 242n9 “Summer Days,” 263n5 “Summertime Blues,” 253n9 “Sunshine Superman,” 11–12, 230n2 “Susie Lee,” 247n3 “Sweet Golden Daisies,” 89 “Sweet Soul Music,” 139 “Swindler’s Lust,” 225–26 “Take An Old Cold ’Tater (And Wait),” 139 “Take Your Foot Out of the Mud and Put It In the Sand,” 242n9 “Taking the Census—Parts 1 and 2,” 129–30, 165, 204–9, 262n81 “Talk with the News, A,” 141 “Tallapoosa Bound,” 93, 135 “Talmadge Special,” 262n85 “Tampa Strut,” 68 “Tangled Up in Blue,” 263n5 “T.B. Woman Blues,” 247n4 “Teddy Bear Blues,” 244n24 “Tell Your Best Friend Nothing,” 64, 73, 242n6 “Ten Cent Piece,” 243n9 “Tennessee Breakdown,” 243n9 “Tennessee Girls,” 242n9 “Tennessee Jubilee,” 83 “Testifyin’ Meetin’,” 244n20 “Testifying Meeting—Parts 1 and 2,” 244n20 “Texas Stomp,” 49, 51, 63–64, 242n6 “That Black Snake Moan,” 116–17 “That Black Snake Moan No. 2,” 116–17, 118 “That May Get It Now,” 242n6 “That Nasty Swing,” 131 “That’s the Way I Do,” 242n6 There’s A Poison Goin’ On . . . , 225–27 “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” 113 “There’s No Place Like Home,” 188

“These Hard Times Are Tight Like That,” 119 “Thirty Days in Jail,” 127 “This Morning She Was Gone,” 80 “Three Crows, The,” 36, 238n6 “Three Women Blues,” 93–94 “Tight in Chicago,” 73, 242n5 “Tighten Up,” 137 “Time Table Blues,” 134 “Times Is Tight Like That,” 262n85 “Tom and Jerry,” 101 “Tom Dooley,” 11 “Too Tight,” 251n20 “Tragic Romance,” 139 “Train 45,” 134–35 “Traveling Riverside Blues,” 213, 231n11 “Trip to New York—Part 1: On the Train, A,” 8–9 “Trip to New York—Part 2: The Audition, A,” 8–9 “Trip to New York—Part 3: In New York, A,” 8–9, 127 “Trip to New York—Part 4: In the Studio, A,” 8–9, 127–28 “Trouble in My Way,” 143 “Trying to Make a Hundred, Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do,” 57 “Tupelo Blues,” 243n9 “Turkey in the Straw,” 69 “Turkey in the Straw (The Paul Jones),” 243n9 “Tutti Frutti,” 140, 141 “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” 263n5 “Twelve Cent Cotton Rollin’ In Wealth,” 262n85 “Twenty-One Years” (Laws E 16), 113, 117 “Twenty-One Years—Part 2,” 117 “22-20 Blues,” 249n6 “Two Step Quadrille,” 242n9 “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right,” 139 “Ukrainske Wesilia (Ukrainian Wedding),” 245n27 “Uncle Dave’s Beloved Solo,” 81 “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 1 (Misery in Arkansas),” 82 “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 2 (Around Louisville, Ky.),” 82, 260n53

Indexes | 277

“Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 3 (In and Around Nashville),” 82 “Uncle Dave’s Travels—Part 4 (Visit at the Old Maid’s),” 82, 105 “Uncle Jimmy’s Favorite Fiddling Pieces,” 90 “Uncle Josh Takes the Census,” 209 “Walkin’ the Boogie,” 75 “Walking in the Sunlight,” 89 “Warm Wipe Stomp,” 51 “Washboard Rag,” 59 “Washington Quadrille,” 243n9 “Wasn’t It Sad About Lemon,” 109–11 “Watching the River Flow,” 263n5 “Watermelon Smilin’ on the Vine,” 89 “Wave on the Sea, The,” 38 “Way Down the Old Plank Road,” 249n2 “Way Down Upon the Swawnee River,” 69 “Way I Feel, The,” 137–38 “Wayward Girl Blues,” 60 “We Got to Get Together,” 244n24 “We Miss Him When the Evening Shadows Fall,” 113 “We Named Our Old Cow ‘Georgia’ Because She’s Always Dry,” 164 “Weary Dogs Blues,” 100 “Wednesday Night Waltz,” 258n31 “West Coast Blues,” 90–91, 92, 97, 243n9 “West Side Blues,” 244n24 “We’ve Got to Move (A Funeral Sermon),” 56 “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today,” 84 “What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2),” 138 “When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye,” 113–15 “When the Deal Goes Down,” 214

“When the Levee Breaks,” 213–14 “When the Saints Come Marching Home,” 81 “When You Lose Your Daddy,” 81 “Whiskey Head Man,” 106, 116 “Whiskey Head Woman,” 106, 116 “White Mule,” 243n9 “Whoa Mule,” 248n6 “Whoopee Blues,” 111 “Wild Hog in the Woods,” 243n9 “Wild Hogs in the Red Brush,” 243n9 “Wild Side of Life (I Didn’t Know God Made Honky Tonk Angels),” 143 “Will There Be any Stars In My Crown,” 81–82 “Wine and Gin Bounce,” 242n6 “Wish I Had My Time Again,” 241n3 With the Beatles, 145 “Woman I Love Blues, The,” 65 “Woman’s Answer to Twenty-One Years,” 117 World Gone Wrong, 237n51 “Wouldn’t Give Me Sugar in My Coffee,” 247n3 “Wreck of Old 97, The” (Laws G 2), 86, 248n5 “Wreck of the 97,” 86, 248n5 “Wreck on the C. & O., The” (Laws G 3), 39, 239n16 “Yakety Yak,” 140 “Yodeling Cowboy,” 114 “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” 263n5 “You Can Mistreat Me Here,” 103 “You Can’t Fix It Back,” 90 “You Can’t Lose Me, Charlie,” 247n4 Yo! Bum Rush the Show, 225 “You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die,” 244n22 “You’ve Been a Good Friend to Me,” 247n3

Performer Index Ace, Johnny, 250n15 Acuff, Roy, 139, 253n9 Aiken County String Band, The, 242n9 Akers, Garfield, 252n3 Alderson, Mozelle, 73, 241n5 Allen, Austin, 200–1 Allman, Duane, 19

Allman Brothers, The, 19 Almanac Singers, The, 262n85 Anthony, Eddie, 51 Arizona Wranglers, The, 86 Arnold, Eddie, 253n9 Arnold, Kokomo, 47, 73 Ashley, Clarence (Tom), 59, 66–67

278 | Indexes

Ashley, Hobart, 62 Ashley’s Melody Men, 46, 61–62 Austin, Lonnie, 3, 22, 127 Autry, Gene, 112–14, 253n9 Bailey, Deford, 67 Baker, Willie, 83, 84 Barbecue Bob. See Hicks, Robert Bar-Kays, The, 253n7 Barrelhouse Frankie, 59 Bate, Dr. Humphrey, and His Possum Hunters, 242n9 Baxter, Andrew and Jim, 241n3, 243n9 Beale Street Sheiks, The, 65, 98 Beatles, The, 11, 18, 33, 145–47, 212, 213, 263n3 Bell, Archie, and the Drells, 137 Bells of Joy, The, 143 Bentley Boys, The, 232n14 Berry, Chuck, 140, 144, 145 Big Maceo, 49, 51, 63–64, 68–69, 242n6 Bill Johnson’s Louisiana Jug Band, 98, 242n5 Black Brothers, The, 120 Blackwell, Scrapper, 109 Blake, Blind Arthur, 46, 51, 64, 70, 90–91, 92–93, 97, 98, 119–20, 135, 243n9, 251n20 Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Dylan), 212, 263n4 Blind Boys, The, 143 Blue, Bud, 120 Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers, The, 38, 47, 54–55 Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers, The, 59, 66–67, 244n16 Bogan, Lucille, 48, 49, 72, 105, 249n8 Bomb Squad, The, 225 Bonds, Gary (U.S.), 252n7 Bowman, Charlie, 47, 69 Brand, Oscar, 173 Brasfield, Rod, 139, 257n26 Brasswell, Frank, 7, 63 Brewer, Teresa, 140 Briscoe, Bailey, 39 Broonzy, Big Bill, 5–7, 22, 23–24, 27, 47, 51–52, 60, 63, 64, 228, 254n9 Brown, Bill, 76, 90, 94, 158–60, 186–89 Brown, Fiddler Joe, 244n16

Brown, Henry, 47, 74 Brown, Herschel, 47, 54, 241n3, 242n9 Brown, James, 139, 141 Brown, Judson, 73 Brown, Milton, and His Musical Brownies, 131, 134, 242n9 Brown, Nappy, 141 Brown, Roy, 101 Buchanan, Bill, 140 Buckner, Sarah, 13–15, 17, 21, 24, 33 Bumble Bee Slim. See Easton, Amos Burch, Elder J. E., 244n20 Burnett, Richard D. (Blind Dick), 39–40, 41, 43, 78–79, 80, 100 Burnett and Rutherford, 78–79, 98, 241n3 Burnette, Dorsey, 140 Burton, Buddy, 100 Butcher, Dwight, 113–15 Butterbeans and Susie, 252n3 Byrds, The, 11, 18, 24, 219–20 Calaway’s West Virginia Mountaineers, 47 Calloway, Cab, 229n3 Cannon, Gus, 67–68, 74–75 Caplinger, Warren, 73 Captain Appleblossom, 134 Carlisle, Cliff, 131 Carr, Leroy, 81, 108–9, 117, 249n10 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 97, 120, 149, 154, 156, 157, 236n45, 241n4, 242n9, 255n5, 256n20, 257n28, 262n85 Carson, Rosa Lee (Moonshine Kate), 97, 120, 241n4, 257n28 Carter, A. P., 133 Carter, Bo, 262n85 Carter (Chatmon), Harry, 64–65, 103 Carter Family, The, 20, 38, 112, 121, 133 Casey, Claude, 111 Cash, Johnny, 263n3 Castle, Henry Lee. See Too Tight Henry Chaney, Raymond, 111 Charles, Ray, 138 Chitwood, Bill, 86–88, 248n6; and His Georgia Mountaineers, 241n3 Chuck D, 220–21, 225–27

Indexes | 279

Chumber, Coker, and Rice, 44–46, 147, 240n1 Chumbler, Archie Lee, 44–46 Clapton, Eric, 213 Clarke, Jim, 47–48, 74 Clayton, Jennie, 252n3 Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men, 158, 258n31 Coasters, The, 140 Cobain, Kurt, 250n15 Cochran, Eddie, 253n9 Cofer Brothers, 239n16 Coker, Howard, 44–46 Cole, Nat King, 254n9 Coleman, Bernice, 111 Coleman, Jesse (Monkey Joe), 64–65, 103, 245n29 Coleman, Walter, 68 Conley, Arthur, 139 Cooke, Sam, 254n9 Copas, Cowboy, 139 Couch, Dave, 47 Couch, Jim, 47, 203 Covay, Don, 140, 141 Cox, Ida, 81 Cream, 19, 231n11 Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers, 242n9 Crook Brothers, 242n9 Cross, Hugh, 160, 162–65, 193 Crudup, Arthur (Big Boy), 121

Detroit Junior, 137–38 Diamonds, The, 140 Dickens, Little Jimmy, 139 Dickinson, Rev. Emmett, 109–10, 119 Dickson, Pearl, 98 Dilleshaw, John (Seven Foot Dilly), 46–47, 59, 63, 64, 67, 69, 74, 93, 135, 241n4, 244n16 Dixie Hummingbirds, The, 142 Dixie Sacred Singers, The, 89 Dixieland Jug Blowers, The, 242n5 Dixon, Dan, 48 Dixon, Willie, 253–54n9 Dixon Brothers, The, 20, 239n16 DJ Lord, 227 Doctor Clayton’s Buddy (Sunnyland Slim), 242n5 Dodds, Baby, 58–59 Domino, Fats, 141 Dorsey, Georgia Tom, 49–50, 51–52, 91–92, 98, 117–20, 121, 251n20 Down Home Boys, 244n24 Duke of Paducah, The (Whitey Ford), 257n26 Dunford, Eck, 69 Dunham, Mellie, 243n9 Dupree, Champion Jack, 49 Dykes’ Magic City Trio, 241n3, 242n9 Dylan, Bob, 11–12, 18–20, 24, 32–33, 115, 145, 147–48, 211–12, 213–14, 229–30n1, 237n51, 263n3, 263n5

Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, 52, 242n9 Dad Massey and His Family, 243n9 Dalhart, Vernon, 175, 248n5, 262n85 Dandurand, Tommy, 242n9 Danny and the Juniors, 140, 141 Darin, Bobby, 140 Davenport, Cow Cow, 51, 60, 68, 74, 241n5, 242n6 Davis, Claude, 256n25 Davis, Deacon Leon, 56, 244n20 Davis, Jimmie, 75, 134, 244n22 Day, Bobby, 140 Day, Jim, 139 Dean, Eddie, 253n9

Easton, Amos (Bumble Bee Slim), 49, 98, 108–9 Edwards, Frank, 244n24 Eldridge, Albert, 52 Eldridge, Vander, 52 Estes, Sleepy John, 125, 128, 133 Everly Brothers, The, 140 Ezell, Will, 119–20 Fate, Jack (Bob Dylan), 211 Ferguson, Troy, 59, 63 Fiddler Joe and His Boys, 243n9 Flavor Flav, 227 Foley, Red, 139, 253n9 Ford, Oscar, 160, 193

280 | Indexes

Ford, Tennessee Ernie, 253n9 Forest, Rev. J. F., 56, 244n20 Foster, Gwen, 67 Foster and Harris, 48, 242n6 Four Virginians, 243n9 Freeman, Bobby, 140 Freeny’s Barn Dance Band, 242–43n9 Fuller, Blind Boy, 106–7, 109, 252n2 Gaither, Bill, 93, 108–9 Garcia, Jerry, 115, 173 Gates, Rev. J. M., 55–56, 119, 244n20 Georgia Browns, The, 246n33 Georgia Organ Grinders, The, 158, 258n31 Georgia Yellow Hammers, The, 86–88, 133 Gerlach, Fred, 13, 230n5 Gillum, William (Jazz), 129 Goodman, Dickie, 140 Gray, A. A., 69, 244n16 Grayson, G. B., 69, 134–35 Grayson and Whitter, 69, 134–35 Greene, Clarence, 67 Griffith, Andy, 253n9 Grisman, David, 173 Guthrie, Woody, 19, 145 Hamilton, George, IV, 12 Harkreader, Sid, 70 Harkreader and Moore, 70, 73, 241n3 Harper, Aunt Idy, 115 Harper, Uncle Juney, 116 Harris, William, 244n24 Harris, Willie, 65–66, 244n24 Harrison, George, 145 Harrison, Smoky, 98, 99 Harvey, Roy, 3–5, 4, 8–9, 22, 69, 70, 74, 103, 127–28; Leonard Copeland, 81; Jess Johnston, 68; Earl Shirkey, 71 Hatton Brothers, 241n3 Hawkins, Buddy Boy, 70, 80, 86, 94 Hawkins, Ted, 49, 128, 157–58, 166, 198 Hemphill, Sid, 259n37, 260n65 Henry Ford’s Old-Time Dance Orchestra, 243n9 Hicks, Charlie (Laughing Charley, Charley Lincoln), 48, 53–54, 84

Hicks, Robert (Barbecue Bob), 48, 53–54 Highlanders, The, 22 Hill, Alex, 119–20 Hill, King Solomon, 111 Hill, Robert, 60, 65–66 Hill Billies, The, 243n9 Hobbs Brothers, 243n9 Hofner, Adolph, 134; and His San Antonians, 241n3 Hokum Boys, The, 51–52, 60, 91–92, 98, 119–20, 249n3 Holiday, Billie, 254n9 Holly, Buddy, 140, 250n15 Holmes, Winston, 47, 49, 60, 64; and Charlie Turner, 47, 49, 64 Holt, Rev. M. H., 56 Holts, Roosevelt, 124 Hometown Boys’ String Band, The, 157 Hood, Alex, 94; and His Railroad Boys, 94 Hooker, John Lee, 64, 75–76, 121–22 Hopkins, Lightnin’, 116, 121–23, 242n6 Hornsby, Dan, 54, 128, 130, 149, 158–60, 168–71, 175, 180, 187–207, 256n25 Horton, Johnny, 253n9 Houchins, Kenneth, 114 Hound Head Henry, 99–100 House, Son, 262n85 Howell, Peg Leg, 46, 51, 65, 75 Hubbard, Uncle Steve, and His Boys, 242n9 Huff, Willie B., 122 Hull, Harvey, 81, 94, 244n24 Humeniuk, Pawlo, 245n27 Hungry, 86 Hunter, Alberta, 73, 98, 242n5 Hurt, Mississippi John, 249n6 Hutchison, Frank, 70, 100–1, 102, 120–21, 243n9, 257n28 I. C. Glee Club Quartet, The, 55 J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers, 248n6 Jackson, Bo Weevil, 81 Jackson, Jim, 54, 80, 117 Jackson, John, 115 Jackson, Papa Charlie, 53, 70, 98, 119–20, 245n26

Indexes | 281

Jackson, Rev. Lionel, 56 Jacobs, Walter. See Vinson, Walter James, Elmore, 254n9 James, Skip, 249n6 Jarrell, Ben, 52 Jarvis, Reese, 74 Jarvis and Justice, 74, 241n3 Jaxon, Frankie, 98 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 51, 75, 85, 98, 100, 109–11, 116–17, 118, 119–20, 121, 134, 211–12, 213, 244n24, 249n3, 251n20, 251n22, 254n9 Jennings, Waylon, 253n9 Jimmy Johnson’s String Band, 243n9 Johnson, Earl, 173, 236n45, 248n6, 261n67 Johnson, Lil, 242n5 Johnson, Lonnie, 48 Johnson, Robert, 19–20, 33, 131, 212, 213, 250n15, 252n3 Johnson, Stovepipe, 83 Johnson, T. C., 53, 65 Jolly Jivers, The, 49 Jones, Ada, 260n63 Jones, Coley, and the Dallas String Band, 53 Jones, Moody, 75 Judge Sturdy’s Orchestra, 243n9 Junior Skillet Lickers, The, 158 Justice, Dick, 74 Kansas Joe, 213–14 Kazee, Buell, 127 Kelly, Jack, and His South Memphis Jug Band, 242n6 Kessinger Brothers, 243n9 Kimbrough, Lottie, 60 Kincaid, Bradley, 112–13, 139 Kingston Trio, The, 12 Landress, Bud, 133 Langhorne, Bruce, 229–30n1 Laughing Charley. See Hicks, Charlie Layne, Bert, 93, 155, 157, 158–59, 256n25 Lead Belly, 13, 15, 65, 85, 102, 111, 145, 230n5, 247–48n4 Leake County Revelers, 243n9

Led Zeppelin, 12–13, 15, 19, 24, 214, 230n2, 230n5, 231n11 Lee, Archie, 241n4 Leitch, Donovan, 11–12, 230n2 Lennon, Jack, 145 Lennon, John, 145, 250n15 Lewis, Noah, 68 Lick the Skillet Band, The, 157 Lickskillet Orchestra, 157 Lincoln, Charley. See Hicks, Charlie Little Richard, 140, 141, 226 Livingstone College Male Quartet, The, 60 Lonesome Luke and His Farm Boys, 243n9 Lonzo and Oscar, 139 Lookout Mountain Revelers, 241n3 Lucas, Jane, 51–52, 91–92, 98 Mack, Ida May, 81 Macon, Uncle Dave, 20, 77, 78, 79, 81–83, 84, 88–89, 97, 101–2, 105–6, 115, 139, 241n3, 247n3, 248n7, 249n2, 262n85 Mainer, Wade and J. E., 20 Malloy, Martin, 120–21, 257n28 Mantovani, Annunzio, 129 Martin, Andy, 141 Martin, Asa, 70 Martin, Jimmy, 139 Massey, Rev. R. M., 56 May, Hannah, 49–50 McCartney, Paul, 145 McClennan, Tommy, 103–4, 106, 116, 131, 258n32 McGee, Kirk, 101–2, 139 McGee, Rev. F. W., 244n20 McGee, Sam, 67, 78, 81, 101–2, 139 McGhee, Brownie, 84, 107–8 McGuinn, Roger, 219–20, 221, 229–30n1 McKinney, Walt, 65 McMichen, Clayton, 20, 34–35, 49, 70, 77–78, 79, 83, 88, 97, 116, 130, 149–71, 150, 180, 185–210, 228, 256n25, 258n31 McMichen-Layne String Orchestra, The, 155 McMullen, Fred, 68 McTell, Blind Willie, 67, 68, 76, 84, 93–94, 98–99, 99, 244n24, 245n25, 246n33, 246n34

282 | Indexes

McTell, Kate (Ruth Kate Seabrooks), 245n25, 246n33, 246n34 Meadows, W. A., 73 Melvin, Pops, 241n4 Memphis Jug Band, The, 131, 252n3 Memphis Minnie, 49, 106–7, 116, 213–14 Memphis Slim, 104–5 Milburn, Amos, 60 Miller, Bob, 60, 112–13, 117, 175, 262n85 Miller, Clint, 140 Miller, Emmett, 120 Miller, Lillian, 84 Miller, Smokey Joe, 152–53 Mills, Emory, 94 Milton, Billy, and His One Man Band, 241n3 Ming, Floyd, and His Pep Steppers, 243n9 Mississippi Sheiks, The, 98 Mitchell, Pearl, 85 Monkey Joe. See Coleman, Jesse Monroe, Bill, 139 Monroe, Charlie, and His Kentucky Partners, 139 Monroe Brothers, The, 20 Monroe County Bottle Tippers, The, 158, 241n4, 256n25 Montgomery, Little Brother, 64–65, 103, 245n29 Moonshine Kate. See Carson, Rosa Lee Moore, Byrd, 67 Moore, Grady, 70, 73 Moore, William, 72, 93, 242n6, 249n3 Morgan, George, 139 Morton, Jelly Roll, 58 Murphy, Frank (Squire), 65 Narmour and Smith, 120–21 Nation, Buck, 262n85 National Barn Dance Orchestra, The, 243n9 Nelson, Tom, 53, 66 Nelson, Willie, 115 New Lost City Ramblers, The, 173 Newbern, Hambone Willie, 213 Nix, Rev. A. W., 119 Norris, Fate, 70, 151–66, 187–89, 200, 255n5; and His Playboys, 158, 258n31

Norris, Land, 255n5 North Carolina Ramblers, The, 3–5, 4, 13–14, 22, 33, 59, 62, 70–71, 74, 86, 102–3 Oak Ridge Quartet, The, 143 Oaks, Charles O., 40 O’Daniel, W. Lee, and the Lightcrust Doughboys, 112 O’Day, Molly, and the Cumberland Mountain Folks, 133 Okosun, Sunny, 221–22 Owens, Buck, 212 Page, Jimmy, 230n2, 230n5 Papa Too Sweet, 251n20 Paramount All Stars, The, 119 Paris, Blind Benny, 84 Parker, Shorty Bob, 111 Patton, Charley, 244n22, 244–45n25, 252n3 Paul and John, 60 Pearl, Cousin Minnie, 139, 257n26 Perkins, Carl, 144, 263n3 Peterson, Walter, 262n85 Petway, Robert, 104 Phillips, Washington, 84 Pickett, Wilson, 139 Pilgrim Travelers, The, 143 Platters, The, 141 Poole, Charlie, 3–5, 4, 7–9, 13–15, 17, 21, 22–24, 26, 31, 33, 69, 70, 102–3, 111–12, 127, 214, 229n1, 230–31n7 Porkchop, 53, 66 Porter, David, 253n7 Porter, John L., 101 Porter, Steve, 173 Post, Wiley, 253n9 Powell, Eugene (Sonny Boy Nelson), 65–66 Powers, Charlie, 101 Powers, John Cowan (Fiddlin’ Powers), 60, 88, 101, 248n7 Presley, Elvis, 141, 221–22 Prillaman, Ted, and the Virginia Ramblers, 112 Professor Griff, 227 Pruitt, Miles, 60 Pryor, Snooky, 75

Indexes | 283

Public Enemy, 220–21, 225–27 Puckett, Riley, 20, 34, 44, 49, 76, 77–78, 85, 88, 116, 150, 151–69, 258n31, 258n32, 260n65 Quarry Men, The, 145 Rainey, Ma, 50, 64, 81, 84, 86, 87, 106–7, 109, 116, 117, 242n6, 245n26 Rawls, Lou, 139 Reaves White County Ramblers, 243n9 Redding, Otis, 139, 250n15 Reed, Jimmy, 122 Reed, Long Cleve, 94, 244n24 Reedy, Jack, and His Walker Mountain String Band, 241n3 Rice, Hoke, 44–46 Richard, Cliff, 221–22 Richards, Keith, 213 Richardson, J. P. (The Big Bopper), 140, 253n9 Ritter, Tex, 253n9 Roberts, Doc, 243n9 Robinson, Smokey, and the Miracles, 139 Robison, Carson, 85–86, 129, 175, 241n3, 253n9 Rodgers, Jimmie, 71, 112–15, 116, 145, 253n9 Rodgers, Mrs. Jimmie (Carrie), 113 Rogers, Roy, 253n9 Roland, Walter, 49, 72, 242n5 Rolling Stones, The, 19, 33, 231n11 Rorer, Posey, 4, 22 Sam and Dave, 139 Sanders, Elder Oscar, 244n20 Savoy, Ashton, 121–24, 123 Scott, Sonny, 49 Scott, Tom, 141 Scottdale String Band, 243n9 Scruggs, Earl, 229n1 Seabrooks, Ruth Kate. See McTell, Kate Sergent, Shorty, 141 Setters, Jilson (J. W. Day), 173 Seven Foot Dilly. See Dilleshaw, John Seventh Day Adventist Choir, The, 95–96, 103, 142 Shakur, Tupac, 250n15 Shaw, Eddie, 255n17

Shocklee, Hank, 225 Shore, Bill, 151 Short, J. D. (Jelly Jaw), 85 Sims, Frankie Lee, 242n6 Sizemore, Asher, and Little Jimmie, 114 Skillet Lickers, The, 20, 34, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 54, 59, 60, 70, 77–78, 90, 97, 116, 128, 129–30, 149–58, 150, 173, 185–210, 243n9, 244n24, 258n31 Skillet Lickers II, The, 158 Slack, Freddie, 60 Smith, Bessie, 55, 62–63, 73, 80, 81, 111, 244n22, 254n9 Smith, Fiddling Arthur, 20 Smith, Ivy, 60, 64, 68 Smith, J. T. (Funny Paper), 84–85, 132 Smith, Odell, 103, 127 Smith, Pine Top, 51, 74, 127, 242n6 Smith, Rev. Nathan, 56 Smith, Steele, 6 Smith, Walter (Kid), 111–12 Smith, Willie, 111 Smith, Wilson (Thunder), 116 Snow, Hank, 115, 116, 119 Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, 115 Soul, Jimmy, 252n7 Soul Stirrers, The, 143 South Georgia Highballers, The, 52 South Memphis Jug Band, The, 47, 242n6 Spand, Charlie, 64, 73, 119–20, 242n6 Speckled Red, 121 Spencer, Len, 173, 257n26, 260n63, 260n64 Spivey, Victoria, 117 Spruell, Freddie, 68 Stanley Brothers, The, 173, 260n54, 260n65 Steve Soul (James Brown), 141 Stokes, Frank, 65 Stokes, Lowe, 93, 155, 157, 159, 162–64, 166, 170–71, 185–207, 241n4, 256n25; and His Pot Lickers, 158, 201 Stoneman, Ernest V., 38, 54–55, 69 Stringbean (David Akeman), 139, 257n26 Sunnyland Slim. See Doctor Clayton’s Buddy Swamp Rooters, The, 93 Sykes, Roosevelt, 90

284 | Indexes

Tampa Red, 51, 64, 68–69, 117–19, 121, 242n6, 251n20 Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, 251n20 Tanner, Arthur, and His Corn Shuckers, 158 Tanner, Gid, 20, 128, 151–69, 153, 175, 187–209, 247n46, 248n6, 260n65 Tanner, Gordon, 152, 154, 158, 247n46 Tanner, Phil, 158 Tarlton, Jimmie, 53 Taylor, Koko, 254n9 Taylor, Moore, and Burnett, 59 Taylor, Myra, 64, 73, 242n6 Taylor, Walter, 133 Temple, Johnny, 252n3 Tennessee Ramblers, The, 65, 173, 244n16, 260n65 Terry, Lucy, 127 Thomas, Henry (Ragtime Texas), 134, 243n9 Thomas, Rufus, 253n8 Thompson, Hank, 143 Thompson, Uncle Jimmy, 89–90, 115, 248n7, 248n9 Thornton, Big Mama, 253n8 Thornton, Rev. C. F., 56 Todd, Mazy, 101–2 Too Tight Henry (Henry Lee Castle), 51, 60, 72, 98 Tub Jug Washboard Band, The, 59 Tubb, Ernest, 113, 115, 139, 253n9 Tucker, Dan, 241n4 Underwood, Loyal (The Sheriff), 86 Valens, Richie, 253n9 Vance’s Tennessee Breakdowners, 243n9 Vinson, Walter (Walter Jacobs), 103, 262n85 Wagoner, Porter, 212 Waller, Fats, 128 Walter and Byrd, 109–11 Ward, Melgie, 52

Warren Caplinger’s Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, 73, 241n3 Washboard Sam, 131–32 Washington, Booker T., 111 Washington, Dinah, 128–29, 254n9 Waters, Muddy, 121 Watkins Band, 241n3 Weathersby, Uncle Josh (Cal Stewart), 209, 256–57n26 Weaver, Curley, 51 Weaver, J. D., 173, 260n65 Weaver, Sylvester, 246n36 Webster, Katie, 122 Wells, Kitty, 144 West Virginia Coon Hunters, 73, 241n3, 249n3 Wheeler, Onie, 132 White, Leroy (Lasses), 257n26 Whitter, Henry, 134–35, 241n3 Wiley, Geeshie, and Elvie Thomas, 60 Williams, Big Joe, 119 Williams, George (Bullet), 90 Williams, Hank, 139, 212, 250n15, 253n9 Williams, Henry, 51 Williams, Larry, 140 Williams, Mayo, 127 Williams, Rev. P. W., 244n20 Williams, Tex, 33 Williamson, Lacey Belle, 130–31 Williamson, Sonny Boy (Aleck Miller), 252n3, 254n9 Williamson, Sonny Boy (John Lee Williamson), 130–31, 258n32 Williamson Brothers and Curry, 243n9 Willis, Ruth Mary (Ruth Day), 67, 68, 244n24 Wills, Bob, 249n3 Wilson, Charlie, 69–70, 241n3 Wilson, Sunny, 94 Wise, Chubby, 129 Woodlieff, Norman, 22 Woods, Oscar (Buddy), 66 Wooley, Sheb, 140

Indexes | 285

General Index A & R (artist and repertoire) men, 237–38n1 Abrahams, Roger, 29 answer records, 116–19, 138, 253n8 Arhoolie Records, 214 Arkansas Traveler, The (Currier and Ives), 172, 173 Arkansas Traveler, The (folk play), 168–85, 192–210, 258n34 Arkansas Traveler by Mose Case, 171 Arkansas Traveller’s Songster, The, 171 Atlantic records, 221 Auburn Avenue (Atlanta), 246n34 banjo player jokes, 238n4 baptisms, 56 barbecue stands, 53–54, 246n34 barber shops, 72, 246n44 barrelhouses. See drinking establishments bars. See drinking establishments Bastin, Bruce, 28 Bauman, Richard, 28, 35 Beale Street (Memphis), 65, 66 beauty parlors, 246n44 Ben-Amos, Dan, 29–31 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 257n26 “Bill Mason’s Bride,” 71 Black Belt, The (Alabama), 72 Bluebird records, 103–4, 130–31, 160, 168 blues ballads, 25 Bluestein, Gene, 174 bootleg records, 148, 218–21, 254n16, 263n3, 263n4 Brady Street (Detroit), 64 Braisted, Harry, and Stanley Carter, 26 Brando, Marlon, 147 break-in records, 140–41 broadside ballads, 24–25, 38, 234n24 broadside medleys, 40, 119 broadsides, 24–25, 27, 29, 37–43, 38, 100, 112, 234n24 Brockman, Polk, 149 Brooks, R. H., 40–41, 100 Brunswick records, 77 buck dancing, 49, 52

Buck Owens Ranch Show, The, 212 Burroughs, William, 147 Burton, Ellis, 64 busking, 44, 52–54, 53, 74–76 cafés. See drinking establishments Case, Mose, 171–72, 175, 258n34 cassette tapes, 223 Cat Island (Elizabethton, Tennessee), 67 Catnach, James, 41 CDs, 213–20, 223 Charles, Larry, 211 Chess records, 221 Child, Francis James, 12, 22, 24–25, 230n4, 234n24 Child ballads, 12–13, 24–25, 38, 234n24 church services. See sermons Cohen, Norm, 28 college fraternities, 59 Columbia records, 3, 13–14, 26, 44, 111, 155, 157, 160, 164–65, 209, 245n27 Combs, Josiah, 25–26, 29 Confederate States Almanac, 42 corn shuckings, 47 county fairs, 54 Currier and Ives, 173 Daddy Grace’s House of Prayer (Norfolk), 252n7 dance halls, 47–48 dance-call records, 52, 79, 242–43n9, 247n1 dances (events), 44–47, 45, 92, 241n3 dancing, 45, 48–52, 92, 245n25 Davis, Gussie, 3 Decatur 81 Theatre (Atlanta), 246n34 Decatur Street (Atlanta), 44, 76, 246n34 Decca records, 125 Def Jam records, 225 Deliverance, 261n79 Dietrich, Marlene, 147 digital technologies, 217–21 Dion, 147 DJ conventions, 140 Downey, P. J., and L. T. Billings, 3 drinking establishments, 47–48, 48, 92, 242n6

286 | Indexes

Duke-Peacock records, 253n8 Dundes, Alan, 236–37n49, 238n7 Egyptian records, 115 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 13 Evans, David, 28, 124, 244–45n25 Excello records, 221 experience meetings, 56, 244n20 Expresso Bongo, 221 fairs, 54 Fanin Street (Shreveport), 65 Farish Street (Jackson, Mississippi), 65, 245n29 Faulkner, Colonel Sanford C., 171–73, 175, 183–84, 258n34 faxlore, 31, 236–37n49 Ferris, William, 28 fiddle contests, 54, 165, 244n16 Fields, W. C., 147 Finnegan, Ruth, 233–34n23 Ford, Ira, 184 Forget Me Not Songster, The, 39 45 singles, 212, 222–23 Four Star records, 221 Frank, Leo, 30 funerals, 56 gambling, 48, 64 Geechee (Gullah), 92–93 general stores, 197–99, 199 Gennett records, 5–6, 52, 242n9 George Street (Cincinnati), 68, 246n35 Grand Ole Opry, The, 67, 139, 248n9, 257n26, 262n85 Green, Archie, 28 Gronow, Pekka, 234n23 Groom, Bob, 251n22 Guida, Frank, 252n7 Gummere, Francis B., 230n3 Handy, W. C., 3, 249n10, 252n3 Harris Street (Atlanta), 68, 246n34 Harrison, Henry, 3 Harte, Bret, 71

Hastings Street (Detroit), 64, 75 Hay, Judge George D., 139 Hee Haw, 20, 212, 257n26 Henry’s Swing Club (Detroit), 64 Herscher, Lou, 114 hillbilly records (term), 14, 24, 232–33n22 homemade music-making, 59–60 honky-tonk, 143–44 house rent parties, 6–7, 47, 241–42n5 Imperial records, 221 independent record labels, 221 Internet, The, 33, 213, 217–18, 219–20, 221 jazz funerals, 58–59 John Edwards Memorial Foundation, The, 235n38 Johnson, Guy B., 26–27 Johnston, Gen. Joseph Eggleston, 86–88, 248n6 jújú, 222 juke joints. See drinking establishments jukeboxes, 131–32, 132, 143–44 Keyes, Saundra, 236n47 Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, The, 162, 257n28 King records, 221 Kit the Arkansas Traveler, 173 last-goodnight broadsides, 41–42 LaVere, Stephen, 213 Laws, G. Malcolm, 230n4 Lee Highway, The (U.S. 11), 135 Legrand records, 252n7 Lickskillet (place name), 157, 255n17 liquor stores. See drinking establishments Lomax, Alan, 218, 235n31 Long, J. B., 107 Lord, Albert, 233–34n23 Loving You, 221 LPs, 212–13, 214, 216, 222–23 Madison Street (Memphis), 74–75 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 238–39n7 Malone, Bill, 28

Indexes | 287

Marcus, Greil, 237n51 Market Hall (Knoxville), 65 Mart records, 112 Masked and Anonymous, 211 mbalax, 222 McCulloh, Judith, 28 McLuhan, Marshall, 218, 233–34n23 McWilliams, Elsie, 113 medicine shows, 54, 160–65, 161 Melrose, Lester, 103–5 Miller Street (Chicago), 6, 64 Modern records, 221 Monseigneur Restaurant (London), 129 moonshiner records, 20, 47, 69, 241n4 moonshining, 47, 165–66, 185, 203 Motif A2233.2.1, Too cold to build house in winter, 260n59 Motif J1649*(e), Person asks native where the road goes, 169, 175, 259n50 Motif J1738.6, Backwoods preacher questioning householders, 179, 260n62 Motif J1811.5*(f), Bullfrogs in unhealthy country, 169, 177, 260n57 Motif J1919.2, Where the Ducks Ford, 176, 260n52 Motif J2171.2.1, Does not need roof when it is fair, 169, 177, 260n57 Motif X583(a), Lost traveler asks native the way, 180, 261n68 Motif X1110, The Wonderful Hunt, 170, 180, 260–61n66 Motif X1116, The Breathing Tree, 170, 180, 260–61n66 Motif X1124.3.1, Gunshot splits limb, 170, 180, 260–61n66 Motif X1205.1(b), Snake strikes handle of tool, 261n66 Motif X1526, Lie about crooked roads in mountains, 195, 262n82 Motif X1655.2*(b), Good road lies six feet below mud, 177, 260n55 Motif X1733.1, Man lifts heavy load, 169–70, 180, 260–61n66 Motown records, 221 music videos, 217

name-dropping records, 139–40 Narváez, Peter, 28 Nashboro records, 221 netlore, 31, 236–37n49 Newcastle Songster, The, 40 nightclubs. See drinking establishments Niles, Abbe, 235n31 Odum, Howard W., 26–27 OKeh records, 102, 120–21, 156 old-time records, 7, 14–15 Oliver, Paul, 28, 55–58, 136 Pagter, Carl, 236–37n49 Paramount records, 119–20 Parker, Martin, 41 Parkway (Chicago), 75 Parry, Millman, 233n23 Peer, Ralph, 114 Petrillo, James C., 128–29 Petrillo bans, 128–29 Phagan, Mary, 30 Phillips, Sam, 253n8 photocopylore, 31, 236–37n49 Pig ’N’ Whistle barbecue stand (Atlanta), 246n34 Pitts, John, 41 Play It Again Sam records, 225 Poe, Edgar Allan, 147 Polygram-Universal, 225 prayer meetings, 56, 244n20 Princeton Street (Chicago), 75 prostitutes, 59 race records (term), 14, 24, 232–33n22 radio, 133–34, 212–13, 217–18 Randolph, Vance, 27, 36, 172, 234–35n31, 239n8 rap, 223–28 record hops, 141, 254n10 record listeners, 238n1 recording studios, 102–5, 127–28, 244–45n25, 249n6 rehearsals, 60 reissue albums, 19–20, 212–16

288 | Indexes

Robey, Don, 253n8 Rogers, Will, 253n9 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 128, 160, 197, 202, 258n32, 263n87 Rorrer, Kinney, 5 Rosenberg, Neil V., 28, 261n79 sampler records, 119–21 sampling, 224–25 Scarborough, Dorothy, 26 sequel records, 116–19 sermons, 55–58, 57, 136 sharecropping, 197–98 Sharp, Cecil, 13, 22, 25 Sheep-Shearer’s Garland, The, 40 shivarees, 55 skiffle, 145 Slaughterhouse Five, 262n85 Smith, Harry, 237n51 song services, 56 Songs Sung By R. D. Burnett, 39–40, 41 soukous, 222 Southern, Hal, 253n9 speakeasies. See drinking establishments Specialty records, 221 Spitzer, Nick, 115 S.P.Q.R. records, 252n7 Squares Boulevard Lounge (Chicago), 48 State Street (Chicago), 60, 64 Stax records, 221, 253n7 Stevens, David, and Victor N. Pierpoint, 259n39 street musicians. See busking “Strong Man, The,” 169–70, 180, 260–61n66 subsistence activities, 47, 165 Sun records, 221, 253n8 Tale Type 81, Too cold to build house in winter, 260n57 Tale Type 1833E, God Died for You, 179, 260n62

Tale Type 1890A, Gunshot splits limb, 170, 180, 260–61n66 Tale Type 1916, The Breathing Tree, 170, 180, 260–61n66 taraab, 222 Tasso, Joe (Signor Marie de los Angelos José Tosso), 171–73, 175, 184, 258n34 taverns. See drinking establishments Thilp, E. S., 246n38 Thomas, Dylan, 11, 147 Titon, Jeff Todd, 28, 238n1 toasts, 223 Tommy Steele Story, The, 221 train records, 134 train songs, 134 tribute records, 106–15, 138–39 Turn of the Tune, The (Currier and Ives), 173, 182 turntabling, 226–27 VeeJay records, 221 Vocalion records, 90 Vonnegut, Kurt, 262n85 Walker, Frank, 155–57, 158–60 War Songster, 171 washboard, 227, 265n24 Washbourne, Edward Payson, 171 West, Mae, 147 Wiggins, Gene, 97, 157, 262n85 Wilde, Oscar, 147 Wilgus, D. K., 22, 25, 27–31, 236n47 Wolfe, Charles K., 28, 166, 236n47 “Wonderful Hunt, The,” 170, 180, 260–61n66 Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan, 19 Yates Drug Store (Atlanta), 246n34 Yellow Front Café (Kansas City), 64