I am full of prejudices and nebulously formed judgments about the blues. This is my disclaimer. Please take note.
The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD release of Classic Appalachian Blues is a fantastic collection of East Coast and Piedmont blues musicians. The two men who curated this collection, Barry Lee Pearson and Jeff Place, took a vast pool of raw material and distilled it into a smooth, blue-burning liquor that is at once pleasant, rewarding and intoxicating.
This must have been a daunting project. There is scarcely any place in the U.S. that is as culturally varied as the Appalachian region. Geographically, it stretches from coastal Maine in the north to central Alabama in the south and from the fall line in the east as far as central Mississippi in the west. It is topographically diverse, including the rolling hills of the piedmont In the Carolinas, the agricultural lowlands of the Great Tennessee Valley, the undulating ridges and valleys of Virginia and the high Appalachian plateau of West Virginia and the eastern parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. Every state in Appalachia hasregions defined by sparsely populated agricultural communities, but sprawling urban areas like Pittsburgh, Winston-Salem, Atlanta and Knoxville draw people and their talents and their influences from the hinterland and other states. Thousands of musicians have been recorded in this vast region by hundreds of collectors and record labels over a period of roughly one hundred years.
In order to make some sense of this mess, Pearson and Place restricted themselves to using recordings from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian. Now having crimped the edges of their pie somewhat, Pearson and Place still set themselves a herculean task. The Rinzler collection includes Moe Ash’s entire Folkways catalogue, all of the surviving field recordings gathered in the forties by collectors like Rinzler and Sam Charters and twenty years of recorded performances from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Eleven of the album’s 21 tracks are field recordings or products of the Folkways studio. The other ten tracks were pulled from live performance recordings made in the seventies and eighties at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C.
It is a pleasure to meet old friends on this recording. Men like John Jackson, Howard Armstrong and John Cephas who were conscientious transmitters of culture and teachers of songs. It is a pleasure to be reminded of some musicians who, for no good reason, are not played as heavily in the rotation of my personal soundtrack. Men like Lesley Riddle, who was a great influence on A.P. Carter and the shape of country music as we know it and John Tinsley who was Blind Blake’s eyes as he hoboed around the south playing and singing before Blake’s mysterious disappearance in 1933. It is a pleasure to discover some musicians I had never heard. The Foddrell brothers were a revelation to me as was E.C. Ball.
North and South Carolina’s blues is well-represented on this collection. Doc Watson and Etta Baker come/came from Deep Gap and Morganton, North Carolina; Lesley Riddle had sturdy North Carolina mountain roots as he was born in Burnsville, just north of Asheville. J.C. Burris was born in Kings Mountain, North Carolina and had strong ties to his uncle Sonny Terry who was a Durham resident for many years. Gary Davis also lived in Durham though he came to Durham from Laurens, South Carolina. Brownie McGhee lived in Durham and made his first records as Blind Boy Fuller II recording for J.B. Long’s outfit. Peg Leg Jackson was born in Jonesville, South Carolina and spent part of every year for twenty five years living in Rocky Mount, NC. so he could perform on Fenner’s Tobacco Market: a fifteen minute radio show that aired every morning during the four months the tobacco market was in session. Josh White, Baby Tate, and Pink Anderson were all from Greenville, SC. In all, fully half of the performers on this collection are from the Carolinas. Kind of makes you feel proud, doesn’t it?
I have three complaints: first, there are few actual mountain musicians on the record. The majority of them are piedmont (which is admittedly still a part of the Appalachians geologically, but not so much culturally – more germane to my complaint, I suppose, is the fact that piedmont musicians already tend to be catalogued together as a distinctive type of blues player) or Tennessee Valley musicians…or, men who had transplanted into the hinterland of Washington D.C. and had lived there for so long that they had cut most of their ties to Appalachia. Second, as Barry Lee Pearson writes:
Overall, Appalachian blues tradition is far more integrated than Delta or Texas blues. To be sure, bands like the Mississippi Sheiks had a repertoire suitable to either black or white audiences, and some Mississippi artists like John Hurt played with white musicians— in Hurt’s case with fiddler Willie Narmour. But the blend of black and white tradition appears more prevalent in the mountains, probably due to the closer social interaction between blacks and whites in the region.
Because he makes this point, I wish they had included tracks from Dock Boggs, Dick Justice or Frank Hutchison. They were all mountain people, all were influential, all were white and all had blues repertoires which made clear their interactions with black bluesmen like Luke Jordan (another West Virginian who would have fit beautifully into this collection, but, alas, was left out). I also would have been happy to hear Blind Alfred Reed on this collection. Though he was not strictly speaking a blues musician he did record “Black and Blue Blues” and “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” - a fine anchor for any blues repertoire. In spite of these couple of blues songs, I would have included Reed for his hymn, “There’ll Be No Distinction There,” with the inelegant but powerfully revealing line:
For we’ll all be white in God’s heavenly light and there’ll be no distinction there.
Which brings me to my final complaint. I call it the “Carter Family Rule” This rule comes out of the Carter song “Give Me Roses While I Live.” A rule the Baseball Hall of Fame violates with gleeful abandon. See, for obvious reasons, a lot of dead men’s songs were included in this collection – so I wish that this record included a cut from Nat Reese. He’s still living and could have used the kind of attention one gets when included in a Smithsonian Folkways collection. We’ll have Nat Reese play for the Triangle Blues Society at the Rialto Theater on June 24 both to promote the ClassicAppalachian Blues record and to combine Nat’s powerful living Appalachian blues tradition with the one that is so beautifully and erratically preserved on this album.
Classic Appalachian Blues is a fine album. It is a worthy album and should be included in every blues fan’s collection. But I’ll tell you, my experience with this album makes me want to torture an analogy. See, it’s like craving a Mounds bar and opening the wrapper to discover an Almond Joy. The coconut’s still good; the chocolate’s great and the almond is a pleasant surprise, but none of that really changes the fact that I thought I was opening a Mounds bar.
Buy the record anyway. It makes a fine place to start discovering the blues tradition in our part of the world. You should hear Peg Leg Jackson and then hunt down Tom Davenport’s 1976 film “Born For Hard Luck.” You saw a clip of that short film in the French movie “Amelie.” You should hear Doc Watson and then go to one of his concerts. You should hear Lesley Riddle and be inspired to investigate Brownie McGhee’s records and then the Carter Family and see all of country music laid out in front of you - grown from seeds sown among musicians who were trying to see black and white in ink and paper, in musical notation, on a piano keyboard and not in each other. You should hear J.C. Burris’ gorgeous facility with the harmonica and go out and buy yourself one…give it a try…a harmonica is a lot of fun.
Smithsonian Folkways recordings are available at record stores. Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings, Folkways, Collector, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, and
Paredon recordings are all available through:
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Mail Order
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Phone: (800) 410-9815 or 888-FOLKWAYS (orders only)
Fax: (800) 853-9511 (orders only)
To purchase online, or for further information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings,
go to: www.folkways.si.edu. Please send comments, questions, and catalogue requests
to smithsonianfolkways@si.edu.
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