Sid Hemphill, Senatobia, September 1959.

Sid Hemphill was a multi-instrumentalist, band-leader, and patriarch of a prodigiously musical family in the Mississippi Hill Country. Blind Sid played fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, fife, quills, organ, and every type of drum that the region’s picnics and dances required, and he sang – perhaps shouted is a better word for what he did with his voice – with a ragged, joyful intensity that will shoot the hair on the back of your neck skyward. He was 65 years old when Alan Lomax met him in 1942. Lomax, fifty years later, described Sid thusly:

No one told me that Sid Hemphill was blind, but it was the last thing you’d recall about him. His face blazed with inner light. He ran rather than walked everywhere. He could never wait for his wife to bring something, but always darted up to find it himself. His speech, which could not keep pace with his thoughts and designs, had become telegraphic and brusque.

All of this can be recognized instantly in his music, much of it – at least that which Lomax recorded of him (and only Lomax’s recordings are extant*) – strung up to such a fever pitch, near to bursting with giddiness, passion, and energy. Even when the two met up again in 1959, though Sid was in his early 80s and had mellowed considerably, he retained more than a little of his earlier fury.

Hemphill passed on no small amount of his talent and repertoire to his gifted daughters, Sidney Hemphill Carter and Rosalie (or Rosa Lee) Hill, as well as to his granddaughter, Jessie Mae Hemphill. All of these heirs have now passed on themselves, although they did, to varying degree, make their own representative recordings, Jessie Mae to the widest acclaim.

Rosalie Hill (seated) and Sidney Hemphill Carter at the home of Fred McDowell, Como, Mississippi, September 1959

These Hemphill women, along with their more famous male landsmen – Fred McDowell, Otha Turner, R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough – have rightfully put the music of the Mississippi Hill Country on the map, and it’s now a musical tourist destination for its fife-and-drum picnics and, at least till it burned down, Kimbrough’s juke joint, Junior’s Place. What hasn’t received much recognition is Sid Hemphill’s remarkable ability as a song-writer. His compositions didn’t find a place in the oral tradition of the Hill Country; perhaps the sheer size of his ballads – the longest was 26 stanzas – were too daunting for anyone to attempt to remember. (Other explanations are offered below). The most remarkable of these, to this listener, was a 21-verse ballad called “The Carrier Line,” “The Carrier Railroad,” or just, as Rosalie Hill recalled to George Mitchell in 1967, the “Carrie Song.” It was recorded by Sid and his band – Lucius Smith, Alec Askew, and Will Head – for Alan Lomax in 1942, and that performance is simply one of the most powerful, affecting, and exciting recordings you’re ever likely to hear, from any place, any time, even reaching us, as it does, from an acetate disc made over 65 years ago, and dealing with obscure local events that took place over a hundred years ago.

There are only a couple of places, not counting the Reading Room at the American Folklife Center, where “The Carrier Railroad” (as Lomax notated it in his field log and as it’s filed at the Center) can be heard. One is on Document’s “Field Recordings, Vol. 3: Mississippi” CD, currently available at inflated prices on Amazon, or through Document itself at a more reasonable rate.  This release, to these ears – and if you’re at all familiar with the Document catalog, this will sound counter-intuitive – actually features the available “Carrier Line” of the best fidelity. Another is in “Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi,” a CD released by Rounder in 2000, part of their reissue series of material from the Folklife Center’s archives. Originally released as a Library of Congress Recording Lab LP in 1978, with a highly enlightening and engaging introduction by one of the world’s foremost experts on black vernacular music, Dr. David Evans of the University of Memphis, this album features recordings made by Evans during field-work in the Hill Country from 1969 to 1971, alongside several of Lomax’s acetate sides of Sid Hemphill from ‘42.

You can also hear “The Carrier Line” below. I treasure this recording more deeply than just about any Lomax ever made. I also wanted to share it, its fascinating subjects (John Carrier and his wily engineer, Dave Cowart), and Sid Hemphill’s extraordinary compositional ability with whoever might care to enjoy them, so I asked Dr. Evans for his permission to reprint a portion of his notes regarding the song and its story, as well as his transcription of Sid’s lyrics. This transfer of the tune comes to me from a source separate from the Document and Rounder releases, duly noted so as not to run afoul with any master-use clauses or what-have-you that might apply, even though the only real rights herein belong to the Hemphill family.

I hope you’ll enjoy it, and please do note that the Rounder release that includes Dr. Evans’ notes is luckily still in print – unlike many other essential albums of vernacular music recordings that once made Rounder a label worthy of great acclaim and appreciation (before “Tangle-Eye” and Plant & Krauss, et al., remade their business model) – so consider yourself strongly urged to pick it up before it too is put out to pasture. Act fast – Amazon thinks it already has been.

*                    *                    *

The Carrier Line (click to download)
Performed by Sid Hemphill, vocal and fiddle; Lucius Smith, banjo; Alec Askew, guitar; and Will Head, bass drum.
Recorded by Alan Lomax in Dundee, Mississippi, August 15, 1942.

Notes by David Evans, 1978:

This song is an example of a “blues ballad,” combining the narrative quality of balladry with the loose, shifting, and subjective approach of blues singing. A blues ballad often assumes a prior knowledge of the underlying events of the story on the part of the audience. Most ballads in black folk song are blues ballads, as are quite a few in southern white folk song. Often the same piece is known in both black and white traditions (e.g., “John Henry,” “Frankie and Albert”), so that it may be difficult to determine its origin. This particular blues ballad was composed by Sid Hemphill, a black man, but all the main characters in the story were white.

Robert Carrier owned a logging company and in 1901 built the Sardis and Delta Railroad, called simply Mr. Carrier’s line in the song, to haul logs to Sardis in Panola County from Bobo Lake (later renamed Lake Carrier), twenty-two miles to the west in the Delta. Hemphill told Alan Lomax that he composed the song in 1903, but he may have been a few years off. Lucius Smith, Hemphill’s banjo player, said that the wreck occurred in 1905 or 1906, but possibly it occurred at the same time as the other event referred to in the song – the financial panic of 1907. Local newspapers for this period are unenlightening about these events.

View Larger Map

“Now you can get the map out and trace his whole damn route,” said Hamper McBee about “Billy Richardson’s Last Ride” in West Virginia. Same for Dave Cowart’s in Mississippi. The “A” marks Lake Carrier, according to Google maps, although that doesn’t look like much of a lake to me. That spot does rest on Bobo Road, however. Sardis is to the northeast, and about a dozen miles north of it along Highway 51 (and now Interstate 55) is Senatobia. Eighteen miles west of Sledge is Dundee, where Lomax made his recordings of Hemphill’s band.

In any case, the song has two themes, which are not clearly connected to each other in the text. Stanzas 1, 14 though 17, and 23 refer to the panic. Carrier paid his workers with brass scrip while the banks were closed [see comments below for a differing opinion on this], but many of them became discouraged and took up farming near Malone’s Trestle, where the wreck was to occur. The remaining stanzas refer to the wreck. Carrier had two engineers, “Pop” Bailey and Dave Cowart. Hemphill described Cowart to Lomax as a “rough engineer.” Carrier had warned Cowart on several occasions not to run his train so fast. He transferred Cowart to another engine and threatened to fire him. Stanza 13 indicates that he actually did fire Cowart, but in stanza 18 he is back his running his original engine, the “Seven Spot.” Cowart wrecked the train at Malone’s Trestle. Nobody was killed, but several were scalded badly by the steam, including a preacher named Lovey Lemons who worked on the railroad.

The refrain after every stanza is unrelated to the text of the song. In its full form it should be “Oh, my honey babe, why don’t you come home?” Hemphill, however, plays the last half of the line on his fiddle. The first half actually sounds like “Oh, my heart beat,” but Hemphill insisted to Alan Lomax, who heard it similarly, that he had sung “Oh, my honey babe.” A similar refrain has been reported elsewhere in black folk music for blues ballads and blues. Howard Odum noted it in adjacent Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Dorothy Scarborough in Texas.

Hemphill was fond of singing blues ballads and, in addition to this piece, he also composed ballads about a local bad man [Jack Castle, "The Roguish Man"], a mob at the Senatobia jail ["The Strayhorn Mob"], and one of the world wars ["So Soon I'll Be At Home"]. Among traditional ballads he sang versions of “Joe Turner,” “The Boll Weevil,” “John Henry,” “Old Blue,” and “Casey Jones.” Except for a nine-stanza version of “The Carrier Line” collected by George Mitchell from Hemphill’s daughter [Rosalie], none of Hemphill’s composed ballads has survived in the folk tradition of the area. Lucius Smith can only remember the banjo parts to a few ballads and one stanza of “The Carrier Line.” He says that he never paid much attention to the words.

There seem to be several reasons why these ballads are not well known in the area despite the fact that Hemphill was generally acknowledged as one of the best local musicians and has been dead for only about 15 years. [Hemphill died in 1963.] Blues ballad singing has declined in general among blacks in recent years. New ones are not being composed, and only a few old ones are kept alive in tradition, mainly through the influence of such records as Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” and Buster Brown’s “John Henry.”

Hemphill’s own ballads were performed with a string band. This type of ensemble no longer exists in the area, a fact that has undoubtedly conctributed to the disappearance of the repertoire of songs associated with such bands. Furthermore, there exists a strong feeling in this area that songs like “The Carrier Line” belonged to Hemphill only. Several people have said that Hemphill performed mostly “his own” songs, so that other performers avoided them. Hemphill himself made it well known that he had composed “The Carrier Line” and some other songs. Although the tune, stanza structure, and refrain are traditional, most of the words of “The Carrier Line” are very much Hemphill’s own creation; it contains very few of the lyric phrases that seem to “float” freely from one blues ballad to another.

Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith, Senatobia, September 1959

A final reason may be that Hemphill performed some of his songs mainly for white people. He was asked to write “The Carrier Line” by a Mr. Willard, a white section foreman on the line. Hemphill said he sang it for all the participants in the events except Mr. Carrier himself, although Lucius Smith said that the band often performed at Mr. Carrier’s house in the country as well as for picnics held by “all them big rich folks in Senatobia.” Another musician has stated that Hemphill would sing this song for Mr. Carrier every Saturday morning and collect ten dollars for his efforts. No doubt this is an exaggeration, although Hemphill may have done this once or twice and bragged about it to others, so that a legend arose locally.

[Evans continues, describing the structural influence blues ballads like "The Carrier Line" had on the  development of the blues, and briefly discusses the transition away from the black country string band, and those bands' instrumentation.]

Enjoy.

*                    *                    *

Nobody had a nickle, you couldn’t get a dime.
If you want to make your money, boys, work on Mr. Carrier’s time.
Oh, my honey babe… (Refrain repeated after each stanza.)

Mr. Dave Cowart went on Mr. Carrier’s engine; Mr. Carrier he looked and laughed.
“Tell you, Dave Cowart, don’t run my train too fast.”

Mr. Dave told Mr. Carrier, “Man, don’t you know I know your rule.
Tell you, Mr. Carrier, a train ain’t no mule.”

Mr. Dave Cowart went down to Baptist; Mr. Carrier stood on the railroad track.
“Send back Dave Cowart, get Mr. Bailey back.”

Mr. Dave told Mr. Carrier, “Man, fire me if you will.
Every time it come a shower of rain, he can’t run it up Johnson Hill.”

Mr. Carrier said, “Dave Cowart, see what you have done.
You left Sardis at twelve o’clock, done made it back at one.”

Mr. Dave said, “Well, Mr. Carrier, let me have my way.
Let me run this Seven Spot, I’ll make three trips today.”

Mr. Carrier said, “No, Dave Cowart, tell you in time.
Can’t let you run the Seven no more.” “Well, I’ll have to run the Nine.”

Everybody around Sardis said “Mr. Carrier, I know you got your way.
Mr. Bailey’s much too old a man to run your train like Dave.”

Last one Monday morning, it come a shower of rain.
Nine come to Ballentine blowing like a fast train.

When the Nine got over to Sardis with a large load of logs,
Mr. Carrier told the people at the plant, “Yonder train off the Yellow Dog.”

They said to Mr. Carrier, “Man, ain’t you ’shamed?
Looking out the window, don’t know your own train?”

Mr. Carrier went to Dave Cowart, “Dave, I done told you so.
Train costs too much, you can’t run my train no more.”

Mr. Carrier’s timbermens quit too. Thought they all was mad.
They didn’t like his paydays cuz he’s paying ‘em off in brass.

Mr. Carrier’s timbermen left, thought they was going home.
Stopped down the railroad, farming at Malone’s.

Mr. Carrier went down to Malone’s, he didn’t mean no harm.
He didn’t know his timbermen knowed how to farm.

Oh he couldn’t pay ‘em no greenbacks, couldn’t pay ‘em no gold,
Couldn’t pay ‘em no silver. All his banks done closed.

Mr. Carrier’s engine left Sardis then; she left there mighty hot.
Got down to Malone’s Trestle where he could wreck that Seven Spot.

Well, they telephoned to Mr. Carrier. Don’t you think it’d be nice?
“Telephone to Sardis and get Dr. Rice.”

Mr. Carrier said to Dave Cowart, “Man, ain’t you ’shamed?
You done wrecked my Seven Spot, done scald the preacher’s hand.”

Mr. Carrier said to the conductor, ‘ductor / doctor [?], thank you for saving his life.
Conductor says he’s a lazy man, he won’t hardly die.

He wore a mighty fine coat, boys. Mighty fine shirt.
Rid that train every day. He didn’t never work.

I played on Mr. Carrier’s railroad, Sardis on Main and Beale.
I made dollars down there without working in the field.

Well they carried him down to Emma’s. Aunt Emma hollered and screamed.
“Needn’t cry, Miss Emma, but he got scalded by the steam.”

*                    *                    *

*Dr. Evans has corrected my earlier assertion that Lomax was the only one to make recordings of Sid Hemphill, noting that James W. Silver – Ole Miss history professor, friend of Faulkner, and outspoken civil rights advocate – also recorded Sid, but the tape has not survived. For more on Sid Hemphill and his “Carrier Line,” see James W. Silver, “Paul Bunyan Comes to Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 19 (1957): 96-101.

I’m sitting on a draft of about 1200 words devoted to my feelings regarding Mike Seeger, scrambled together shortly after his passing, of multiple myeloma, on August 7. But I’ll admit that there’s no way to adequately express his influence on my appreciation of traditional American music, both because the words that I did attempt ultimately left me dissatisfied and because I have no doubt that, as I amble forth with my explorations of the music of the “true vine,” as he called it, I’ll find myself on trails he blazed long before, the influence ever deepening.

So instead I’d like to share a brief, candid moment that Mike captured, perhaps unwittingly, on his tape recorder in 1982. A very rough estimation is that it accounts for less than 1/25,000th of his recorded output – and that’s meant in the capacity of a field recordist only, and not as a solo artist or a New Lost City Rambler – but for me it beautifully encapsulates who Mike was. And by “was,” I suppose I mean in the capacity of a recordist, a listener, a fan, which is how I knew the little of him I did, although, by all accounts of those who knew him thusly, also as a friend. Despite its brevity, it shows Mike Seeger as a man of humor, humility, humanity, and grace.

Last year I had the pleasure of working with Mike on an issue of his 1982 recordings of Nimrod Workman (discussed elsewhere herein). He had never planned to release them – in fact, he wrote that he had gone into the sessions with an album explicitly out of mind, instead with the intention of documenting as much of Workman’s huge repertoire as possible – but as long as the Workman family were into it, he’d be too. All he wanted, he told me, were two copies of the album, with any proceeds he would earn going to the Workmans.

While making selections for the album, I found a couple of nice interview pieces I wanted to include, but made sure to ask Mike first if he’d mind his voice being heard. As I had assumed, he said he’d be all right with that, as long as I submitted the pieces to him for approval first. He, personally, didn’t want to appear “prominent or inappropriate.” He made sure, as he did whenever I saw him make appearances publicly or in print, to deflect attention from himself and onto the principle performer or subject, or, when there wasn’t one, the greater musical, cultural, or historical context, of which he saw himself as just a student. (Why must this quality be so staggeringly rare…?)

So I was a little worried about whether he’d allow me to include this tiny bit of audio that I’m taking so long to introduce. But as he had written about how he treasured his time spent with Nimrod and Molly Workman, I hope that he was ultimately happy to have our record end with the sound of their warm leave-taking of one another, with Nim and Molly’s invitations to “come on back,” and that it recalled that time to him fondly.

That’s all it is – just the sound of farewell – but I imagine he said farewell, equally as fondly, to so many of the singers and musicians he recorded: folks he met as a fellow singer and musician, but from whom he departed as a friend. I didn’t know Mike well enough to call him a friend; instead I knew him primarily through his music – and therein, primarily that which he recorded – so it makes sense to say my own farewell to him through the voices of Nimrod and Molly Workman, who last brought Mike and me together, to whom and for which I’ll always be grateful.

Nimrod and Molly Workman say farewell to Mike Seeger, Mascot, Tennessee, 1982.

Published in the April 1 edition of the Louisville Eccentric Weekly (LEO).

In mid-December, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi received a memorandum from a constituent on Caselli Street in San Francisco. President-Elect Obama had been publicly ginning up support for the stimulus package he would submit to Capitol Hill immediately after his inauguration, and the constituent, 91-year-old Archie Green, had a bit of historical perspective to share with Madame Speaker. He reminded Pelosi that during the New Deal there weren’t just roads paved and bridges built; federal agencies stimulated all manner of American ingenuity and creativity, and reflected the best parts of the country back to itself.

“The Federal Writers Project,” Green wrote, “included a folk unit that both preserved and presented workers’ culture” through photography, recordings, film, and journalism, and he advocated the establishment of a similar cultural unit to document the occupational experience of the current stimulus projects.

Archie Green at home, courtesy of Adam Machado.

Green, who died March 22, was a shipwright, union activist, labor historian, folklorist, record collector, professor, author, a wholly unreconstructed progressive, and the progenitor of the theory and expert of the practice of “laborlore.” Defined as the expressive culture – song, story, slang, and technical know-how – of workers, laborlore blew open the hermetically sealed pantheon of generalized American “folk” archetypes -  the Yankee, the Negro, the Indian, the hillbilly, the lumberjack, the cowboy – all of which had long prevailed in both popular and academic consciousnesses. Archie insisted on a deeper, more fluid understanding of American diversity, reflected by the diversity of occupational involvement, and to be seen where any two bodies gather to work a job together, swapping stories, jokes, and expertise. Ingredients of class solidarity and union brotherhood, to be sure, but also, and more essentially, a proud, conscious, and engaged citizenry.

Longshoremen, pile-drivers, coal miners, gandy dancers, catskinners, steel workers, millwrights – Archie saw their expressive traditions as aesthetically worthy, intellectually rich, and politically viable. His first book, 1971’s Only A Miner, was a study of recorded coal-mining songs, a number of which were drawn from Eastern Kentucky’s Sarah Ogan Gunning, Aunt Molly Jackson, and George Davis (“The Singing Miner of Hazard”). Songs of and by miners and their wives/sisters/daughters were not mere accessories to the struggles of life in the coalfields but fundamental documents of them; giving them audible space in the public realm through publications, festivals, concerts, and exhibitions – now widely known and practiced as “public folklore” – was not romantic fetish or ideological showboating, but a service to democracy.

(Green didn’t take kindly to the romanticizers, especially as expressed by the likes of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, whom he described and dismissed as “Stalinism plus pablum.”)

He was no pretender. Weaned on his father’s immigrant Jewish socialism and his after-school engagements with the Workmen’s Circle, Archie joined Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps before paying his first union dues to United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America on the San Francisco waterfront  in 1941. “I know what it’s like to have wanted to be a worker,” he recalled in 2007. “It was a state of exultation.”

In our supposed post-industrial age, such reveries may themselves ring sentimental or romantic. But Green never succumbed to the smug, insulated comfort of the academy, despite his professorships at the Universities of Illinois, Texas, and Louisville (a Bingham Humanities fellowship brought him here in 1977). Foundations and fellowships were only different avenues for his agitation; although he was a self-described left-libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist, he used his affiliations to agitate enthusiastically and effectively. Apart from his union, of which he was a member for sixty-seven years, he was a senior associate at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center; a founding member of the Fund for Folk Culture; and he has been credited for nearly single-handedly lobbying Congress for the passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act. Unanimously approved and signed by President Ford in 1976, the bill created the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; Librarian of Congress James Billington in turn presented Archie with a Living Legend Award in 2007.

“Exulted” is among the last adjectives most Americans would choose to describe their metaphysical state of employment, unless, in the current climate, exultation is the state of being employed at all. Indeed, as America has endeavored to shed its blue collars and clip its dirty fingernails, trading the pension of the skilled journeyman for the retention bonus of the well-connected MBA (and losing both in the process), exultation has become a privilege reserved for those who succeed in avoiding work rather than those who specialize in it. But now that our wide, frantic eyes are beginning to grow accustomed to the tripartite darkness of recession, crumbling infrastructure, and snake-oil finance, perhaps labor might regain some of its attraction. Perhaps we’ll remake the country in the spirit of cooperative toil and communal gain, revealing new dimensions of Americanness. Perhaps a new generation of laborlorists, assisted by the public trust, will take down the songs and stories of new folk heroes – new Casey Joneses, John Henrys, and John L. Lewises – for the ages.

But it will take ingenuity, creativity, and leadership. Archie Green didn’t live to hear how Nancy Pelosi responded. As of press time, she hadn’t.

October 31: I’ve updated this post to jibe (almost) with the version published in this week’s edition of the Louisville Eccentric Observer. If you’d like to see Catherine Irwin’s striking cover art, have a look at http://www.leoweekly.com/.

It’s the first of July 1929, and at Brunswick Records’ studio in Chicago a recording supervisor invites a banjo-pickin’, tabacker-chawin’, moonshine-swiggin’ hillbilly to sit in front of a microphone (“Mike who?” the yokel asks) and make a record. The hillbilly delivers some canned vernacular (“Well dog my cats!”; “Well that’ll make a black snake spit in a bulldog’s eye!”), threatens the engineer, and gets learnt what a cuspidor is. After the supervisor coaxes a few verses and “some of that old-fashioned banjo picking” out of his guest, who has meanwhile gotten himself drunk, both sides of the record are finished, to be released later that year in the Brunswick/Supertone catalog as “A Mountain Boy Makes His First Record.”

That mountain boy was a 28-year-old from Magoffin County, Kentucky, named Buell Kazee, and this recorded skit was of his own devising: two sides of 58 that he made for the Brunswick label between 1927 and 1929, the heyday of the “hillbilly” recording era. Those sides, however, are among the least representative of the mountain boy’s considerable musical abilities (and did not in fact constitute his first record). And, as Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, writes in his notes to the June Appal label’s recently released CD of Kazee’s later recordings, “Buell did not look on them as major accomplishments.”

They are also a completely misleading portrait of the man himself (not that many fell for it; the record hardly sold and has never been reissued), as the June Appal album, Buell Kazee, released in June, makes clear. Kazee was well-educated, deeply religious (he heard the call to preach at 17), and without a doubt one of the most remarkable talents in American folk music. His extensive repertoire of ballads, lyric songs, and occupational pieces reflected an upbringing in a mountain community steeped in the “old songs” and entertained by square dances and bean stringings, where he picked up the banjo at the age of five and where his love of music was nurtured by his parents, both of whom were talented singers.

Kazee’s vocal delivery, however, belied the influence of a sophisticated musical education, and, while for some listeners it placed him in an uncertain territory between authenticity and affectation, it was wholly his own. He had studied voice — in high school; at Georgetown College, where he majored in English, Greek, and Latin; and after graduation in Ashland, Kentucky, with a visiting tenor from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York — and he brought to his material a vocal sensitivity seldom heard applied to old-time music. For many, his “good voice,” as he called it, was at best an occasional distraction and at worst a liability. A Brunswick engineer remarked of it, “That’s fine, but it won’t ring on the cash register.” One of America’s foremost scholars of country music, the late Charles K. Wolfe, wrote in 2003 that “fortunately, only a few of [Kazee’s] recorded selections were seriously marred by his inclination to employ artistic vocal technique.” Indeed, most of Kazee’s recorded output is marked by a subtle synthesis of that technique with the “light throat” he explained was characteristic of mountain singing, and though it might not have been the most “authentic” article, it marked Kazee as an artist of depth, grace, and individuality.

Authentic or not, Buell Kazee’s career as a professional musician came to end in 1929, despite offers of tour support for county fairs across the country and membership in the radio cast of WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago. His priorities were spiritual, not musical. As he is quoted in the June Appal CD: “I couldn’t go that way. My life was cast in a different direction and there wasn’t any reason to consider it…. I was going to preach all my life.”

He got out just in time. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the Brunswick label into bankruptcy, and by 1933 countless banjo pickers, blues singers, jug bands, and old-time combos would be driven back into obscurity by the Depression. Considering the grandiose and metaphor-prone enthusiams of many fans of this era of American music, one might forgive its end being likened to the natural calamity that finished off the dinosaurs. The outcome of the labels’ collapse was that many performers with gigantic repertoires and talents disappeared back into the folds of the fields, hollers, bottomlands, and assorted Southern locales from whence they came and where they returned to jobs more typical of those environments. Many old-time players like Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs went into the mines. Bluesman Mississippi John Hurt farmed as a sharecropper. Others, such as Son House and Blind Willie McTell, like Buell Kazee, entered the ministry (with varying degress of success, professional or spiritual). Still others moved north seeking work, which some found, in industry. Many vanished without a trace.

Over the next forty years, Kazee led congregations in Morehead and Lexington, wrote two books on Christian theology, and taught at Lexington Baptist Bible College. Despite a struggle with depression and an agonizing period of uncertainty about his faith after his wife left him in 1940, he surely would have been content with his religious vocation and to keep any singing of the “old songs” a purely private affair.

But in 1952 the Folkways record company released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP set reissuing old-time, blues, gospel, and Cajun music from the pre-Depression 78 era. Up to this point most urban listeners had gotten their folk songs secondhand, from songbooks, summer camps, and spit-shined renditions perfomed by the tuxedoed likes of the Weavers. The Anthology was remarkable because it transmitted American folk material democratically, from primary (if commercial) sources, without mediation. It also helped precipitate the period now known as the Folk Revival.

Smith — eccentric, occultist, avant-garde filmmaker, collector of Ukranian Easter eggs, Seminole quilts, and 78 rpm records — compiled his Anthology as a glorification of the “exotic” in American music: an exploration of the metaphysical space writer Greil Marcus termed “The Old Weird America,” an era not even 30 years gone but separated from the early 1950s by a massive gulf of political, cultural, and technological developments. Smith saw the album as a catalyst for social change that, according to Marcus, was to “distinguish those who responded from those who didn’t.” You either got it or you didn’t, and a handful of dissatisfied young people coming of age in Eisenhower’s America really got it. They responded to Smith’s mytho-anthology by identifying with the gamblers, hobos, and murderers inhabiting the songs therein; recreating those songs to the best of their urban teenage abilities; and fantasizing about the vague deities who howled, moaned, and keened them out.

One of those keening voices was Buell Kazee’s. Harry Smith had included three of his sides — “The Butcher Boy,” “East Virginia,” and “The Wagoner’s Lad — and soon Revival performers like the New Lost City Ramblers were trying their hands at them in Washington Square Park, admirably approximating Kazee’s banjo frailings and tunings. But as the Anthology offered only aural hints as to such specifics of the original performances – Smith was more inclined to elevate them to the realm of musical mysticism (the set’s cover bears the hand of God tuning a monochord) — it occurred to some of the young revivalists that perhaps the best way to learn the Anthology’s songs was to seek out their original singers and players and study at the source; some might still be alive!

Thus, in 1957, Gene Bluestein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, tracked Kazee down in Lexington and recorded a session that Folkways soon released on LP as Buell Kazee Sings and Plays. It was a process that would be repeated many times over the next decade: young folk music enthusiasts “rediscovering” pre-war recording artists — elderly musicians with predominantly rural backgrounds and perspectives – making albums of them, and introducing them to predominantly young, urban, and middle-class audiences at innumerable folk festivals. While those artists were pleased by the interest their music engendered, and often enjoyed the notoriety they received, such arrangements were not always happy ones.

Buell Kazee, for example, was disappointed with his Folkways album, feeling it had been recorded in too-casual circumstances and did not offer an adequate portrait of his abilities and repertoire. Later, in the Vietnam years, when Kazee shared festival stages with the likes of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, his conservative sensibility was scandalized by the radical social notions that were the calling-cards of the Folk Revival. After all, however much the revivalists honored the Rediscovered as elder statesmen, the latter had reëmerged into the cultural universe of the former, who called the tunes and determined (however inadvertently) how their “contemporary ancestors,” saved from obscurity, were presented.

Buell Kazee died in 1976 and Buell Kazee, conceived as a memorial album for the man, was released on LP that year by June Appal, the imprint of the Appalshop media center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It was the first attempt — and a successful one, both in its release and now in its reissue — to showcase the broad and nuanced context of Kazee’s music and biography, drawing on recordings made in the 1960s by ex-New Lost City Rambler John Cohen, folk documentarian Mark Wilson (responsible for many other fine recordings of old-time musicians), Kentucky Educational Television, and Buell himself. Here are Child ballads; songs of teamsters and a railroad track-lining gang (the latter composed by Kazee); popular country tunes; a blues interpretation; and two very beautiful hymns, sung accompanied. There are no hillbilly skits included.

That this subtle vindication of Buell Kazee should be provided by Appalshop is fitting, though to be fair, he is not in desperate need of it. The power and beauty of his 1920s recordings are not remotely in dispute. But a legacy of Harry Smith’s “exotic” Anthology, for all its inclusive brilliance, is a fetish of pre-war folk musicians as foggy denizens of a mystical, bestial, primitive place, their ballads and banjo tunes emanating from the crackly surface of an old 78 like some kind of speech-in-tongues or tribal utterance. Appalachia, of course, is used to this sort of exoticism, from (but certainly not beginning with) D.W. Griffith’s 1909 film “The Mountaineer’s Honor,” through “The Beverly Hillbillies,” to the current voyeuristic fascination exerted upon it by the likes of New York City’s Vice magazine.

Appalshop, however, has been working hard in the face of this trend. The media cooperative, founded in 1969, assists Appalachian filmmakers in the telling of their own stories and those of their region, and it has become one of the most visible and highly regarded advocates of rural issues, be they cultural, political, environmental, or aesthetic. Through its films, theater productions, radio broadcasts, and symposiums, Appalshop has proven that the reality of life in Appalachia resists pat generalizations and has gone far in asserting the complexities of the experiences, perspectives, and personalities of Appalachians.

For Buell Kazee was nothing if not complex. Despite the fervor of his calling, nearly his entire life was marked by the struggle to reconcile his love and talent for music with his faith and devotion to his ministry. He disagreed with the assertion that the old mountain ballads should be exempt from sophisticated musical interpretation, as he considered them among the world’s great poetry. And though, as Loyal Jones remarks, rediscovery “was not a totally happy experience for Buell,” it gave him the opportunity to “tell the story of his music, to create a spell,” and to enjoy the ovations of audiences edified and entertained by his performances. These complexities, illustrative of a thoughtful and sensitive man, helped to make Buell Kazee the profound musician he was. Appalshop deserves thanks for giving us the chance to consider him anew.

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Buell Kazee, the CD reissue on June Appal, is now available from, among other outlets, http://www.appalshop.org/store/.