Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family (one of three takes):

Carter Family Visits Jimmie Rodgers (one of two takes):

The visits took place eighty years ago this month, in a mobile studio set up in an empty storefront on Main Street near Sixth Street in downtown Louisville. They were part of a week of recording sessions that Ralph Peer had arranged not only for Rodgers and the Carters, but for a diversity of acts — country blues, holiness gospel, hillbilly string bands, Louisville’s native jug-band music — that ran the gamut from the famous to the utterly obscure.

The lion’s share of the material recorded by Victor that week was for its catalog of “race” records — blues, gospel, and black dance music marketed to African American audiences. The city was and had long been a hub for performing bluesmen and jug bands and the names that appeared in Victor’s Louisville ledgers were among the most gifted artists of the era: Arkansan Roosevelt Sykes; Mississippi’s Walter Davis; Henry Townsend from Cairo, Illinois; Belmont, Kentucky’s Bill Gaither; and Louisville-born Clifford Gibson. It’s curious that Peer didn’t hold these sessions in the other River City, given that most of these men were based in or around St. Louis at the time. But a stack of great sides were made, and made here, including some by Louisville’s own Whistler’s Jug Band. Buford “Whistler” Threlkeld and his band’s “Foldin’ Bed,” cut on June 15, 1931, remains one of the foremost — and last great — jug band classics.

It wasn’t just Victor’s race catalog that was enlarged that week in Louisville. Northern Kentucky guitarist Elmer Bird brought his Kentucky Corn Crackers down to record two sides; one of which, “Crossed Old Jordan’s Stream,” has long been an essential entry in the canon of pre-war sacred hillbilly music. Unfortunately, two similarly holy-minded tunes cut by a string band called the Kentucky Coon Hunters were never issued, and the band’s provenance has been lost to history.

(Here’s the flip-side of “Crossed Old Jordan’s Stream.” Both sides feature a very forward-looking mandolin.)

One of the most exciting products of the Louisville sessions from a purely musical perspective was that made by a black ensemble Victor dubbed the Louisville Sanctified Singers. Presumably a Pentecostal Holiness group, they made four sides of joyful noise with a gang of co-ed shouters, a brutally bashed guitar, and an ecstatic tambourine. (Victor’s files credited a “Miss Davis” and “Mrs. Hayes” as the lead singers, and I don’t see why the latter wouldn’t be the wife or sister-in-law of Louisville’s great jug-band leader, violinist, and hell-raiser Clifford Hayes.) Their tunes are impossibly catchy; they’re also impossibly rare. Only several copies of their first record are extant and no copies of their second are known to survive. Keep your eyes open, neighbors.

The star of the week, though, was Jimmie Rodgers. Tubercular, wracked with coughing fits, frequently spitting up between takes, the Blue Yodeler still managed to record a startling variety of tunes — from Tin Pan Alley schmaltz to innuendo-laden blues (in one instance with Clifford Gibson on second guitar). His time in Louisville is arguably the broadest recorded display of his versatility, with no take more illustrative than his collaboration with Earl McDonald’s Original Louisville Jug Band. “My Good Gal’s Gone Blues” is the sound of sublimely competent and confident performers collaborating across lines drawn both by Jim Crow segregation
and that of Victor’s marketing schema. It’s also one of the only places — if not the only place — where you’ll hear a yodel and a jug sharing sonic space. (And it’s also only the second time in Jimmie’s career when he recorded with African Americans; the first time was a year earlier in Hollywood with none other than Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin.)

Cliff Carlisle had a particularly fond memory from the week. The great steel guitarist, alongside his partner Wilbur Ball (with whom he performed as the Lullaby Larkers on WHAS radio), had been tapped to accompany Rodgers on two of his Louisville sides. Carlisle recalled to Jimmie’s biographer Nolan Porterfield that after the session Rodgers graciously invited them to Cunningham’s for their famous frog legs.

It remains a mystery why Ralph Peer chose Louisville for the site of the sessions, but, eighty years later, it’s hardly important. The Singing Brakeman, the Whistler, the Corn Crackers, our own Sanctified Singers, Cunningham’s frog legs — they’re all long gone. It’s a good time for us to remember them.

[A slightly abridged version of this piece appeared in the LEO Weekly, June 22, 2011 — our first "Root Hog Or Die" column for that publication. It will appear monthly or so.]

First page of Lomax's "Southern Journey" log. (Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive)

Parchman Farm, September 1959. (Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive)

In October I will have worked for the Alan Lomax Archive for ten years. (I remark to friends with some regularity about this being my only job as an adult, putting in context, perhaps, some dimension of my peculiarity.) I started at the age of 22, having been hired after three afternoons’ worth of volunteerism at the Woody Guthrie Archive several blocks uptown, with not a whit of archival training or experience, sticking accession numbers on soon-to-be-obsolete DATs; running off copies; doing – as so many 22-year-olds new to New York City have begun and still begin their professional lives – data entry. Virtually none of my tasks that first year, at least, reflected my interest in the music, but I had to pay to play, and I’ll never forget the giddy joy I experienced the evening I lugged home all thirteen volumes of the “Southern Journey” CD series that had kicked off the Alan Lomax Collection reissue project, launched by Rounder Records five years earlier. Those discs made all the workaday tedium worthwhile, and I remember their revelations acutely, listening rapt as I did in the kitchen of my girlfriend at the time’s apartment (where I lived, awkwardly): the sublime harmonies of the menhaden fishermen’s Bright Light Quartet; the keening desolation of Almeda Riddle’s “Lonesome Dove”; the chopping, hoeing, and singing of the Parchman Farm convicts (above), desperately vital against all odds and opposition; the holy terror dripping from E.C. Ball’s “Tribulations.”

Times got better at the Archive – I picked up more responsibilities, began enjoying something akin to a haphazard ethnomusicological home-schooling, and in 2004 was given the role of production coordinator for the Collection on Rounder. We squeezed a few great CDs out over the following couple of years – recordings of Gaelic-speaking women at work in the Western Isles of Scotland; the Lomax Blues Songbook; live tapes from the 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh; the complete 1938 Library of Congress Recordings of Jelly Roll Morton – but a dying CD market and a lack of inspiration from various corners sped the series’ demise. It went out with barely a wheeze some time in 2007.

Without delving into the twists and turns of the most highly specialized folkloric record business or indulging in musings about its current strange renaissance and the stranger counter-cultural moment from whence it comes, I’m pleased to say that the season of my tenth year with Alan Lomax’s archive also marks the release of five new LPs commemorating Lomax’s most famous field-recording trip: what he called his “Southern Journey” of 1959 and 1960. Production for a commemorative series began exactly a year ago, after I met Eric Isaacson of Portland, Oregon’s Mississippi Records – one of the principals in the unlikely vanguard of the vernacular music LP resurgence – at a panel discussion put on as part of Asheville’s fine Harvest Records’ fifth anniversary festival. While Harvest was turning five, the Southern Journey turned 50, yet there was not a whisper regarding it anywhere (outside of a season-long tribute series in Belgium, put on by the noble Herman Hulsens and the Ancienne Belgique). Adding insult to injury was the fact that not a single release of Southern Journey material was currently in print.

Eric shared the formative experience that Lomax’s ’59-60 recordings had had on me, and we hove away on a proper anniversary release. I spent weeks and then months listening, culling, annotating, wringing hands, losing sleep, and wondering, frankly, at my good fortune to be granted not only such intimacy with the collection, which I’ve had bumping around in my own hard drives for years, but also a generous degree (from my boss and Alan’s daughter, Anna Lomax) of curatorial license. It was an incredible blessing, and I hope I ultimately did a measure of justice to Lomax, the artists, the recordings, and their legacies.

Reprinted below is the introduction I wrote to these five LPs. When sequencing them, I tried my best to ignore the rather sizeable catalog in which performances from the Southern Journey had been previously reissued – on Atlantic, Prestige, New World, and Rounder Records – and approach the 70-odd hours of recordings as if they were virgin territory. A few previously unissued items were included, as were a number of oft-anthologized pieces that were just too good to leave out of a reissue (Ball’s “Tribulations” and Fred McDowell’s “Gravel Road Blues,” among them). A brand new job was performed by Timothy Stollenwerk of Portland’s Stereophonic mastering studio. Working from our digital archival masters made 2000–2003, he did a shockingly great job of teasing out dimensions of the performances that have elided previous attempts.

James Lindsey and the Mountain Rambers

I labored long and anxiously to make my annotations both accurate and engaging, but of course there were times when I failed at both. The only glaring error I’ve found so far credits Jimmie Davis as having in 1932 recorded the first version of James D. Vaughn’s country gospel number, “Down At the Old Country Church,” a version of which James Lindsey and the Mountain Ramblers did for Lomax in Hillsville, Virginia. I found this title attributed to Davis in Tony Russell’s discography, but then relied entirely on my assumptions about Davis, whose later, most famous work I have no taste for at all. (E.g., “You Are My Sunshine.”) Having found a recording of that 1932 record, however, and realizing just how brilliantly irreverent it was (as Davis’s other early recordings turned out to be), sharing the Vaughn title in tongue-in-cheek name only, my feelings changed for the later Governor of Louisiana. Unfortunately, it was too late to change the erroneous liner notes.

Lomax’s Southern Journey wasn’t the first recording trip south (although it was the first to be done in stereo), nor was it the last. It gave us the best recordings ever made, sonically speaking, of the Parchman work song repertoire, although earlier, mono performances were arguably stronger. Lomax did wonders with the Georgia Sea Island singers – they were made for stereo – but still couldn’t quite wrangle a good grasp on a Sacred Harp convention with just two mics (although they were the most successful shape-note recordings made theretofore). Since 1960 nearly every genre and region represented herein has been covered more deeply (some would surely argue more sensitively) by recording trips, doctoral theses, public-sector fieldwork. But none of this minimizes the transcendent beauty and humanity of so much of the Southern Journey, and its enduring, revelatory effect on fifty years of listeners. May it be received with wonder and joy for and by many more.

The Archive will be launching our digital Global Jukebox imprint in a matter of weeks, and digital versions of the Southern Journey LPs will constitute our first release. For now, find these records in any shop that carries Mississippi titles. There are a surprising number of them.

“People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.” –Alan Lomax, 1960.

Alan Lomax, BBC radio, early 1950s. (Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive)

In 1958, Alan Lomax returned to America. He had spent the decade recording the traditional music of Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; producing radio and television series for the BBC; and compiling the eighteen-volume “World Library of Folk and Primitive Music” for Columbia Records. In no small measure he’d also been beating the heat of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts, which had a particular hunger for Lomax’s folk-music peers.

But drink had killed the junior senator from Wisconsin in 1957, and when Lomax arrived back in New York City, he found an urban folk revival in full bloom. Crowds of young banjo players, guitarists, fiddlers, and fans were gathering in Washington Square Park to pick and sing traditional songs and tunes, many of which Lomax had recorded years earlier from the likes of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Hobart Smith, and Texas Gladden. That year the Kingston Trio had a number-one Billboard hit with “Tom Dooley,” based on a version of the murder ballad that folklorists Frank and Anne Warner had recorded from North Carolina banjo player and singer Frank Proffitt in 1940. The young revivalists were becoming proficient on their instruments, and with the help of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, they had access to hundreds of songs in albums, books (among them Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country), and burgeoning folk-music magazines like “Sing Out!”

It was in “Sing Out!” that Pete Seeger announced Alan’s return: “Alan Lomax, considered by many America’s foremost folklorist left the U.S.A. an ‘enfant terrible’ and returns a legend…. I welcome back Alan Lomax, not just because he is an old friend, but because he is more responsible than any other single individual for the whole revival of interest in American folk music.” Seeger concluded with a description of the cultural moment to which Lomax had returned and the unique place Lomax held in it. “Well, of course, the folk-song revival did grow, and flourishes now like any happy weed, quite out of control of any person or party, right or left, purist or hybridist, romanticist or scientist. Alan Lomax probably looks about him a little aghast.”

Next summer, Lomax wrote his own article for “Sing Out!” – an astute critique of Seeger’s “happy weed.” The revivalists might pick a banjo fluently or boast of a large repertoire of songs, but, Alan pointed out, when those songs are “ripped out of their stylistic contexts and sung ‘well,’ they are, at best, changed. It would be an extreme form of cultural snobbery to assert, as some people do, that they have been ‘improved.’ In my view they have lost something, and that something is important.” Writing forty years later, Lomax was more blunt:

Some of the young folkniks, who dominated the New York scene, asserted that there was more folk music in Washington Square on Sunday afternoon than there was in all rural America. Apparently, it made them feel like heroes to believe that they were keeping a dying tradition alive. The idea that these nice young people, who were only just beginning to learn how to play and sing in good style, might replace the glories of the real thing, frankly horrified me. I resolved to prove them wrong.

Alan Lomax began making arrangements for a field recording trip throughout the American South using state-of-the-art stereo tape. He secured support from the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Neshui, who ran Atlantic Records, and who had just wrapped up a profitable summer filled with hit records by Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Bobby Darin, and the Coasters. Atlantic had also begun recording in stereo in 1959, and, as fans of early jazz and rhythm and blues, the Erteguns were personally invested in Alan’s project. Accompanied by the young British folksinger Shirley Collins, whom he had met in London several years earlier (and whose “America Over the Water” – a coming-of-age memoir of Sussex, London, and this trip through the American South – is essential and wonderful reading), Lomax left New York City in late August.

For the next two months the pair traveled through Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, making over seventy hours of recordings. The project was shorter than every other major recording trip of Lomax’s career, but it is among the crowning achievements of his legacy. It marked the first-ever stereo recordings made of American traditional music in the field, at last doing justice to the sonic complexity of the Georgia Sea Island ring shouts, the many-voiced work songs of the Southern prison farms, and the thunderous hymnody of the Sacred Harp. It gleaned the debut recordings of farmer and bluesman Fred McDowell. When Lomax returned to New York City in late October, he prepared seven LPs for Atlantic, which were soon released as the “Southern Folk Heritage Series.”

There was much music left over, however, and Lomax ultimately made an arrangement with Prestige Records to issue another series entirely – twelve LP volumes under the title “Southern Journey.” This series also drew on recordings Alan and his daughter Anna made on a tour through coastal Georgia and Virginia in the spring of 1960, when Lomax was invited to Williamsburg, Virginia, to serve as music supervisor to a historical film being produced by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

The Atlantic and Prestige albums were proof that many old-timers were still alive and making music, and Lomax succeeded in involving these tradition-bearers directly in the folk revival. He arranged for appearances at the Newport Folk Festival by Almeda Riddle, Fred McDowell, Hobart Smith, Ed Young, and Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, all of whom became frequent performers at other revival events and seminally influential figures of the era. Riddle and Jones each went on to make records of their own and enjoy considerable popularity at concerts and folk festivals for decades to come. McDowell appeared on dozens of albums and became a highly renowned and regarded bluesman. Alan, sitting on the board of the Newport Foundation, also saw that money left over from the annual festivals was donated to traditional performers and to new documentation projects in the field.

From the Little Sandy Review, c. 1960

Fifty years later, the 1959 and 1960 trips are known singularly as Alan Lomax’s “Southern Journey.” Their music has been released in various formats over the years, retaining every bit of their vitality, power, and emotive effect. Some of the traditions represented therein have gone extinct in their vernacular contexts – the prison work songs; the Sea Island shouts; the menhaden fishermen’s chanties – while others, like singing from the Sacred Harp and playing old-time country music, have expanded far past their traditional boundaries, finding fans and practitioners worldwide. The Southern Journey didn’t just prove that the folk revival wasn’t the sole inheritor of America’s traditional music. It proved that we all are.

“This was 1959 and I finally had German mikes and a Cadillac of a recorder and was doing stereo – the first stereo field recordings made in the South. You should hear the recordings – for me, a life’s dream realized.” –Alan Lomax, 1993.

The records:

Volume 1: “Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea.”

Side A.
1. Wade Ward: Chilly Winds
2. Texas Gladden, Hobart Smith, and Preston Smith: Lonely Tombs
3. Ed Young, Lonnie Young, and G.D. Young: Church, I Know We Got Another Building*
4. United Sacred Harp Convention: Sherburne (#186)
5. Bessie Jones & group: Reg’lar, Reg’lar, Rolling Under
6. Floyd Batts & prisoners: Dollar Mamie*
7. George Fields: Bob Johnson’s Tune*
8. Silver Leaf Quartet: Dark Day
9. Texas Gladden: Whole Heap Of Little Horses

Side B.
1. Forrest City Joe & His Three Aces: Drink On Little Girl†
2. Johnny Lee Moore & prisoners: Early In the Morning
3. Ollie Gilbert: Pretty Polly Oliver
4. Neal Morris & Charlie Everidge: Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea
5. Fred McDowell & Fanny Davis: Gravel Road Blues
6. Vera Ward Hall: Riding In A Buggy*
7. Daddy Cool on WEUP Huntsville*

*Previously unissued. †Previously unissued version.

Volume 2: “Worried Now, Won’t Be Worried Long”

Side A.
1. Sidney Carter: Worried Now, Won’t Be Worried Long*
2. Norman Edmonds & the Old Timers: Walking In the Parlor
3. Rosalie Hill: Rolled and Tumbled
4. Ishman Williams & the William Singers: The Old Ship of Zion*
5. John Davis, Henry Morrison, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers: Hop Along, Let’s Get Her
6. United Sacred Harp Convention: Hallelujah (#146)
7. E.C. & Orna Ball: The Cabin On the Hill
8. Ed Young, Lonnie Young, and G.D. Young: Ida Reed

Side B.
1. Bright Light Quartet: I’m Tired
2. Viola James: I’m Going Home to Live With Jesus*
3. Boy Blue & His Two: You Got Dimples In Your Jaws
4. Wade Ward: Cumberland Gap
5. Johnny Lee Moore: Levee camp holler (Downtown Money Waster)
6. Almeda Riddle: Lonesome Dove
7. Neal Morris: Turnip Greens

*Previously unissued.

Volume 3: “I’ll Meet You On that Other Shore”

Side A.
1. Fred McDowell: What’s the Matter Now?
2. Bookmiller Shannon: The Eighth of January
3. Ruby Vass: Old Gospel Ship
4. Union Choir of the Church of God and Saints of Christ: None But the Righteous
5. George Spangler & Thornton Old Regular Baptist Church congregation: Why Must I Wear This Shroud?
6. Neal Morris: Sing Anything
7. Vera Ward Hall: Black Woman (Wild Ox Moan)†

Side B.
1. Floyd Batts: Dangerous Blues
2. Hobart Smith: Railroad Bill
3. Unidentified woman & St. James Church congregation: I’ll Meet You On that Other Shore*
4. Charles Barnett: Moses Was A Servant of the Lord*
5. Spencer Moore & Roy Everett Blevins: The Girl I Left Behind
6. Lucius Smith: Goodbye Honey, You Call that Gone*
7. John Davis & the Georgia Sea Island Singers: Moses, Don’t Get Lost
8. Almeda Riddle: Rainbow Mid Life’s Willows

*Previously unissued. †Previously unissued version.

Volume 4: “I’ll Be So Glad When the Sun Goes Down”

Side A.
1. Wade Ward & Charlie Higgins. Did You Ever See the Devil, Uncle Joe?
2. James Shorter, Viola James, and the Independence Church congregation: Jesus On the Mainline
3. Mattie Gardner, Ida Mae Towns, and Jessie Lee Pratcher: Green Sally Up
4. Fred McDowell: Woke Up This Morning
5. Ollie Gilbert: Joseph Looney
6. United Sacred Harp Convention: Calvary (#300)
7. James Lindsey & the Mountain Ramblers: The Old Country Church
8. Willis Proctor & the Georgia Sea Island Singers: One of These Days
9. Norman Edmonds & the Old Timers: Sally Anne*

Side B.
1. Texas Gladden: Three Little Babes
2. Hobart Smith: Banging Breakdown‡
3. John Dudley: Clarksdale Mill Blues†
4. Miles & Bob Pratcher: All Night Long
5. Neal Morris: The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit
6. Henry Morrison: Lazarus
7. Ed Lewis & prisoners: I’ll Be So Glad When the Sun Goes Down
8. Sidney Carter: Leather Britches*

*Previously unissued. †Previously unissued version.
‡Alas, due to unfortunate circumstances too banal to disclose, Hobart’s “Banging Breakdown” failed to make it onto the finished LP, and is offered here as a mea culpa. The hope is that a second pressing of the record – as well as the digital versions – will include it.

Volume 5: “I’m Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die”

Side A.
1. J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers: Number 111
2. Fred McDowell: 61 Highway
3. Bright Light Quartet: Chantey medley†
4. E.C. Ball & Lacey Richardson: Tribulations
5. Bessie Jones & the Georgia Sea Island Singers: Daniel In the Lion’s Den
6. Unidentified woman & Pentecostal Temple congregation: Heaven Is Mine*

Side B.
1. Emma Hammond: Shout Lula*
2. Ervin Webb & prisoners: I’m Going Home
3. WROS Scottsboro Old-Time Religious Hour excerpt*
4. Hobart Smith: The Devil’s Dream
5. Sid Hemphill & Lucius Smith: The Devil’s Dream
6. United Sacred Harp Convention: The Last Words of Copernicus (#112)
7. Elder I.D. Back: Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow
8. Vera Ward Hall: The Last Month of the Year
9. Miles & Bob Pratcher: I’m Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die

*Previously unissued. †Previously unissued in entirety.

photo by Blaine Dunlap

There are no words to describe my excitement about the third release on our Twos & Fews recording imprint, out June 29. Recorded by the late, peerless country music scholar Charles K. Wolfe and the filmmaker Sol Korine in late ’77 and early ’78, “The Good Old-Fashioned Way: Hamper McBee of Monteagle, Tennessee” may well be this year’s best record of unaccompanied singing and also its most inexhaustibly hilarious comedy album.

I had only heard of the moonshiner, carnival barker, singer and raconteur Hamper McBee (who was first recorded by Guy Carawan and ended up an impossibly scarce Prestige LP called “Cumberland Moonshiner” in 1965) in passing – just as a subject of one of Korine’s films I had never seen – until I met Sol himself through his filmmaking son Harmony. Knowing my interest in those folkloric films of his dad’s, made with Blaine Dunlap in the ’70s, Harmony had a screening of Sol and Blaine’s “Raw Mash” profile of Hamper in his Nashville home, and it rendered me speechless. There’s no other way to say it: Hamper was an absolute original. His clothes; his mustache and pompadour; his lusty dedication to booze, cigarettes, and light cussing (“goddamn” and “hell” being foremost in his lexicon); his keen intelligence and creative grace (sincerely) sharing space in his conversation and repertoire with hysterically bizarre, irreverent, and filthy songs and tales from a life spent on the carnival circuit, at the moonshine still, in the Wauhatchie railroad yards, in the back of Sheriff Bill Malone’s patrol car, and as Hamper McBee.

photo by Blaine Dunlap

Wolfe and Korine père‘s recordings were originally momentarily issued on a Rounder LP, also entitled “Raw Mash,” to accompany the release of the film, but have been out of print for over 30 years. With Sol’s blessing and the permission of Wolfe’s widow, Mary Dean Wolfe, and Hamper’s son Troy McBee and his family, I was honored by the chance to do a record and thrilled to introduce Harmony’s and my generation to Hamper. Judging by the speed with which his aphorisms, witticisms, and vulgarities have been adopted by my gang of friends, I think he’ll be well received.

What follows is Charles Wolfe’s essay on Hamper McBee that accompanied the original Rounder LP and which we reprint in “The Good Old-Fashioned Way.” All photos are used courtesy of Blaine Dunlap, except that on the record cover above. Troy sent it to Harmony, writing that “I do have a very good photo of Dad chained to a pole in a bar. He gave it to my mom for the reason he didn’t make it home that weekend.” Hamper died in 1998, cut down not by booze, but by lung cancer. Well, hell. Goddamn.

(I’d write R.I.P. or some such thing but, as Hamper said, “these goddamn churchpeople make me madder than a goddamn and the goddamn people are out here robbin and stealin.”)

“I just like them old songs better.”

photo by Blaine Dunlap

If you don’t know anything about Hamper, you might start by learning that he had for some years been recognized as one of the better singers of unaccompanied songs and ballads. Though Hamper is a genuine mountain man, he has been known to a couple of generations of students and teachers at the University of the South at nearby Sewanee, and to the people at the old Highlander Folk School near his home in Monteagle. He has toured with the Southern Folk Festival, and in 1964 he recorded a now-out-of-print album with Guy Carawan. More recently, he has been written up by the Associated Press, and is the subject of Raw Mash, a 30-minute television documentary by Sol Korine and Blaine Dunlap.

Hamper was born in 1931, in Emory Gap in Roane County, Tennessee, but moved to Sewanee when he was a small boy. His father was a state highway inspector who supplemented his income by searching the mountains for herbs and roots. Hamper himself did this for a time after he quit school – he sold Black Haw bark for 65 cents a pound – and then in 1950 joined the army, doing a hitch in Korea and Germany. “After that I started in to making whiskey,” Hamper recalls. “And I stayed drunk a lot of the time. I did all sorts of jobs: construction, timber cutting, mule driving, working in taverns. Spent some time working for three or four carnivals.” All the jobs usually lead back to Monteagle, though, and it’s there that Hamper lives today, in a trailer set back in the woods a few hundred feet from I-24.

In spite of all this, there’s no way you can pigeon-hole Hamper into a typical mountain stereotype, either as a person or a singer. He can be wild and boisterous, or introspective and moody; you can find him swapping stories down at the local tavern, or home systematically reading his way through an encyclopedia. While he has learned a number of his songs from traditional sources, he’s very much aware of the folk revival movement, and doesn’t hesitate to pick up a song from a record or a songbook if it fits his style. One of his favorite singers is Bradley Kincaid; Hamper remembers hearing Bradley on the radio, on records, and traveling miles to hear him in person. Another favorite is Almeda Riddle, whom Hamper feels is about the best unaccompanied singer performing today. Other interests range from Woody Guthrie to Burl Ives to Vernon Dalhart. You won’t find that Hamper is a source for too many rare or obscure ballads (though he on occasion composes fine songs in traditional modes, such as “Jasper Jail” and “Wauhatchie Yards”); you will find that Hamper is a supreme stylist, with a rich, authentic, expressive voice that has mellowed with the years. It’s a voice that has what one listener has called “mountain soul.”

photo by Blaine Dunlap

Back in the 1850s a Tennessee writer named George Washington Harris created an immortal backwoods character named Sut Lovingood. Sut liked drinking, dancing, singing, yarn-spinning, and loving; he hated preachers, hypocrites in any form, sheriffs, and middle-class bankers. There’s a lot of Sut Lovingood surviving in Hamper McBee, and by listening to him on this album, you can get a sample of the spirit that keeps the old songs and old tales alive.

—Charles Wolfe, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1978.

*Our 2010 album does in fact contain material unsuitable for airplay, including the title track. Though it obviously can be stretched to apply to them, it’s not a reference to old-time songs or ways of life, but to a certain state of copulation.

Topic marked its birthday by the release of the massive Three Score and Ten boxset last summer, and New York City’s Other Music, for whose weekly updates we write occasional reviews, has just made available an introduction to Topic through a dirt-cheap digital sampler, as well as deals on some classic albums in the Topic catalog. The prices make the news too good not to pass along, although here we are guilty, yet again, of slinging record reviews. Thus is the entropic reality of blogdom, perhaps. Anyhow, we include brief considerations of some of our favorite Topic records below, with an invitation to check out the Topic-specific installment of the OM Update for more essential (digital) records at awful low prices (through February 22, 2010 – then they return to the still-well-worth-it price of $9.99. A way to show your support for stalwart independent record shops and record labels at once.)

But first, here is our Topic’s birthday gift to you – a download of the label’s second release: “International Folk Song Contest, 1955.” A display of Topic’s political predilections, these performances were recorded at the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. Picked this 8″ record up at the late Chelsea Flea Market in New York (along with Pavement’s first single) a few years ago for a total of $3. Why an 8″? The Guardian‘s Alexis Petridis, in a great piece last August on Topic’s 70th, explained that:

Indeed, Topic’s survival is a staggering, inspirational tale of resourcefulness and of blind, fervent belief in music surmounting any obstacle. In the label’s early days, some of their albums were 8in across rather than the usual 12, because, [Martin] Carthy claims: “They would get a job lot of 8in vinyl blanks and a machine that would do them for nothing.” Even by the time of Engle’s arrival at the label, at the height of the late 60s folk-rock boom, things were tight: “I thought a record company was a big operation with a neon sign. Topic was in the basement of someone’s house.”

International Folk Song Contest, Warsaw, 1955.
“Issued by TOPIC RECORDS for the British Youth Festival Committee with the co-operation of the Radio Section of the World Youth Festival Organising Committee.”

Side A. (click to download)
A1. Aniela Swiatek (Poland): The White Dove
A2. Yanka Delcheva Ivanova (Bulgaria): The Bagpipe Began to Play
A3. Nirmal Chaudhuri (India): Baul
A4. Ibrahim Tukici (Albania): O my flower

Side B.
B1. Kladvia Aleksandrovna Kotok (USSR): Chastushka
B2. Nadka Ivanova Karadzhova (Bulgaria): Sing, Girls, Sing
B3. Jarmila Sulakova (Czechoslovakia): Ek, rozo, rozo
B4. Asek Dzhumbayev (Kirghizia, USSR): O my Kobuz

Archie Fisher: Will Ye Gang, Love (click to sample and buy; that’s right.)

I like Martin Carthy, really like Bert Jansch, and love Nic Jones, but my affection for the music made by Archie Fisher is inexpressible. He’s not as widely known on these shores, but his abilities as a singer, guitarist, songwriter, and interpreter of traditional material are deserving of at least an equal portion of the acclaim afforded his more famous peers. His recorded output as a solo artist is sparse – he’s only made six albums in forty years – and his emphasis on traditional Scottish material, especially Jacobite songs, perhaps makes him a bit less approachable. But if you’re game, this 1978 Topic LP, the only one he made for the label, makes for a fine introduction to his brilliant guitar playing, effortless singing, and uncommon versatility. There are paeans to Bonny Prince Charlie and the Gallant Ninety Two; traditional Scots ballads; an interpretation of an oyster-dredging song (by means of incantation); and a couple Fisher originals, including a topical piece about the 1960s North Sea oil boom. A great record by a sublime artist, who also happens to doing a rare tour of the States now. If he comes within a day’s drive, you’d be well-advised to make it.

Margaret Barry & Michael Gorman: Her Mantle So Green

Cork City’s Margaret Barry was born in 1917 into a Traveler family of musicians. She left home as a teenager, wandering County Cork frailing a banjo and singing for money at football matches, pubs, and county fairs, and was “discovered” by Irish folklorist Sean Boyle on the streets of Dublin in 1951. Alan Lomax made the first recordings of her later that year, and by the mid ’50s she had moved to Camden Town in London, where she became a popular figure of the folk revival and where the songs that comprise Her Mantle So Green were recorded. No one could sing like Barry – her voice was immense, intense, but exceedingly beautiful and filled with pathos. She could wring emotion out of ballads that nearly every other singer turned to treacle. Once you hear her versions of “The Flower of Sweet Strabane,” “My Lagan Love,” and especially “The Factory Girl,” you’ll never again stand them sung by any lesser singer. Margaret was often joined for dance tunes by fiddler Michael Gorman and her ballads and songs are punctuated on this disc by some jigs, polkas, and reels the pair recorded live at the Bedford Arms, the epicenter of traditional Irish music in Camden. This record also contains one of the best sporting-related songs ever committed to tape: “The Cycling Championship of Ulster,” alone well worth the bargain download price.

The Yemen Tihama: Trance & Dance Music from the Red Sea Coast of Arabia

With Yemen serving as this season’s premiere semi-failed state, now is a good time to explore some of the more enduring aspects of its character. That’s what Anderson Bakewell did in 1982, recording the music of the Tihama region, along the country’s western Red Sea coast. Tihama’s geographic disposition has made it a port of call for centuries of varied commercial, social, and imperial forces, and its music a synthesis of many disparate regional styles and traditions. Bakewell’s recordings of work songs, dance tunes, zar ceremonial music, and trance rituals in veneration of local saints sound at once familiar – there are echoes of North African Sufi brotherhoods; Arab mawwal singers; troubadours of the Horn of Africa – and wholly new. Although so many competing interests didn’t bequeath Tihama a very peaceful history, the music that has emerged from it is exceedingly more noble and enlivening than the sort of exports – attempted underwear bombers come to mind – for which Yemen has more recently been credited.

Dominic Behan: Down By the Liffeyside – Irish Street Ballads

Dominic Behan was a prolific singer, composer, man of letters, and Irish Republican who made over a dozen albums in the late 1950s and ’60s. Some of those records were among the best offspring to issue from the mid-century commingling of radical politics, literary sophistication, and folk-music fancy, but sadly “Down By the Liffeyside” (1960) is the only left in print. Drawing on a huge cache of traditional ballads, Gaelic airs, Fenian songs, and his own compositions – most famously “The Patriot Game,” “The Auld Triangle” (which first appeared in his brother Brendan’s play “The Quare Fellow”), and “Easy and Slow” (included here) – Behan sang like a proper Irish street singer, keening quaver and all, and had a profound impact on more than a generation of like-minded singers and songwriters: among them Andy Irvine, Johnny Moynihan, and Shane MacGowan. Not handy with an instrument himself, Behan was backed on “Down By the Liffeyside” by some young players who came to be known as leading lights of both the British and American folk revivals: Leon Rosselson; Peggy Seeger (wife of Dominic’s occasional collaborator Ewan MacColl); and Ralph Rinzler.

Nic Jones: Penguin Eggs

Nic Jones got better with every record, and 1980′s “Penguin Eggs” is arguably his masterwork. He could breathe new and exciting life into just about any old ballad, no matter how hoary, and it’s no different with his interpretations of these songs of the sea, sea creatures, and sea-goers. His singular guitar technique is as virtuosic as ever, his voice strong and true, and somehow even “Barrack Street” – the comic tale of a shore-leave gone awry, along the lines of “The Beggar Wench” – elicits chills and sighs. Perhaps it’s because we know this was the last record Jones made. He barely survived a severe car accident two years later. His prodigious musical gifts didn’t.

June Tabor: Airs & Graces

This is June Tabor’s staggeringly wonderful solo debut from 1976. Hold on to your hat as it starts – Nic Jones’ guitar comes blazing in, and then there’s Tabor doing that thing that she does with her voice, dropping and wheeling like a swallow, then following Jones’ attack like a fox on a hound. (Forgive me – enthusiasm breeds weak metaphors.) But as satisfying as Jones’ guitar work is, Tabor’s blistering a cappella versions of “The Plains of Waterloo,” “Queen Among the Heather,” and “Waly Waly” require not an iota of accessory. There’s no one else that can carry the six and a half minutes of “Waltzing Matilda” with only her voice, and not only does she do it, she owns it entirely. Of all the many talented female voices of British folk music’s golden age, June Tabor was the greatest. And if she’d never made another record besides “Airs & Graces,” that’d still be true.

I write somewhere around here that I’m disinclined to use this forum for the reviewing of records, as it seems like the internet is comprised solely of pornography and record reviews, but one of the latest Arhoolie releases has struck me as something so exciting, fresh, and sui generis and, being so surprised that I felt thusly, I wanted to do my part to spread the word about it.

Chances are you’re like me: regardless of how much you fancy that you care for the traditional music of the world, that of Western Europe is well towards the bottom of your list, with the Germanic variety probably bringing up the rear. (That’s probably why I have seen, as they say in the King’s English, fuck-all about this record, which came out last July. Nothing in shops, not in magazines, not on the record-reviewing internet.) Almost wholly obscured on these shores by the classical tradition, the oom-pah band, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Edelweiss” — and over-shadowed closer to home by the made-for-TV pseudo-folk of Volkstümliche — the songs sung and tunes danced to in the country beer-halls and alpine cowsheds might be some of the most unheard music in the world.

So this project, begun in 1967 and completed in 1998 by the dynamic duo of Johnny Parth (native Austrian; founder of Document Records) and Chris Strachwitz (native German; founder of Arhoolie Records), was a necessary one, but few might have guessed it’d be so good. Recorded at performers’ homes, in pubs, on the street, and in a ski lodge, these two CDs include unaccompanied ballads sung solo and in duets and trios; dance tunes and lyric songs played by brass bands and on clarinet, accordion, drums, and cimbalom; instrumentals on harp (traditional and jew’s), brick xylophone, and something called a “grenade glockenspiel,” which is in fact just what you think it might be. They’re packed with warmth, tenderness, giddiness, and humanity, not to mention some downright filth, much (though hardly all) of which is provided by the Original Herberstein Trio. These three elderly men performed regularly at a tavern in Eastern Styria, and their repertoire is filled with sly, raw, and kinky sex. Erectile dysfunction abounds, as do euphemisms involving barnyard fauna and pieces of fruit. Priests get involved in some nasty business, and one gets thrashed by a cuckolded husband. I’m sure the Arhoolie gang were pleased to be able to stick a “Parental Advisory” warning on the cover of this one, though as long as your kinder aren’t fluent in any number of Austro-German dialects or in a position to get their hands on the PDF file on Disc 1 that contains all lyric transcriptions, you’ll be all right.

It’s not all gleeful filth and nastiness, though. Strachwitz and Parth met dairy farmer Fefi Eibisberger at her home in the Styrian mountains, and with her plaintive yodel and hammered dulcimer accompaniment she’s one of the most affecting voices I’ve heard in recent memory. Her ballad of the changing seasons — “When the Heath Cock Has His Mating Season” (it’s more innocent that it sounds) — and delicate songs of milkmaids’ amorous affairs are utterly lovely. Somewhat less lovely but no less tender is the hyper-falsetto of street singer Emil Thun, who Parth rightly describes as sounding like an Austrian Tiny Tim. His “When My Grandfather Was Twenty-Years Old,” even in translation, is an achingly lonesome bit of pastoral poetry, made all the more so by his bizarre vocalizing.

Portions of these discs have been previously released on LP by Arhoolie and Roots (in Austria), but plenty of unreleased material has been included here. Truer, more humane music has seldom been recorded, and I can’t recommend this set more highly. As Karl Scherrer, Lower Austrian innkeeper, singer, and brick xylophonist croons:

Therefore, my dear people, do me the honor
and come to my inn, you won’t regret it.
My playing and yodeling will excite you,
so when you think about me later, your hearts will laugh.

Here’s an original composition of Phyllis’s, shot by Alan Lomax in 1983, at her parents’ home in Mascot, Tennessee.

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.

The album gathers a large number of singers and musicians for whom I have great affection, appreciation, and respect, and who provide fairly non-standard interpretations of songs from the Balls’ repertoire — mostly traditional (or nearly-so) country gospel and folk songs, but a few of E.C.’s originals too. It was played in large measure by a Louisville group of much-earned local renown called the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band, and an additional grip of good friends and talented musicians.

What follows is the introduction I wrote for the album, as well as the album’s track list and a note about the provenance of the songs in E.C. and Orna’s recorded output, should you be interested in hearing the originals on which we drew — and I do urge you to so be. Downloads of some available below. And should you pick up “Face A Frowning World,” I hope you’ll enjoy it, and find that we’ve given E.C. and Orna a portion of the tribute they so greatly deserve.

(All photos courtesy of the Blue Ridge Institute. See below for their involvement.)

To ears used to the high lonesome sound of the Southern Appalachian mountains, the music made by Estil Cortez Ball of Rugby, Virginia, can seem out of place. His rich, relaxed baritone seems a world away from the plaintive keen of a Roscoe Holcomb, a Clarence Ashley, or a Nimrod Workman, and his guitar playing, gifted with genius and grace, always takes its time, while so many of the region’s instruments flail and frail as fast as they can.

Perhaps it was E.C. Ball’s day jobs that made his music sound that way – he ran a service station and drove a school bus: two occupations requiring patience and a gentle touch. No doubt his deep religiosity and commitment to sharing the gospel of Christianity inspired a certain forbearance in him. But most likely, like the best of artists, the music he made was just a reflection of who he was — in his case, thoughtful, diligent, and honest, with severity, gentleness, and humor in equal measure.

One thing certain is that he, with his wife, Orna, made music prolifically. The Balls’ repertoire was legions deep, and was open to all manner
of material: not just hymns or country gospel — traditional, borrowed, or of their own devising – but play-party songs, blues, ballads, self-composed comic numbers and E.C.’s sui generis guitar instrumentals. They performed on two Sunday morning gospel radio programs and in churches of every denomination throughout the Blue Ridge. They were the subjects of frequent recording sessions — at the hands of John A. Lomax (the first to record E.C., in 1937) and Alan Lomax (first in 1941 and again in 1959), then John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Mark Wilson, Kip Lornell — and were featured on a number of LPs, both with their Friendly Gospel Singers and on their own. But this recorded output represents just a fraction of their repertoire. Indeed, as more archival collections of Blue Ridge mountain music are cracked open, inventoried, and presented to the public, more insight into E.C. and Orna’s prodigious songbook becomes available. They rarely recorded more than a handful of the same songs twice, and their recorded legacy extends into the hundreds of songs.

So it wasn’t easy to make selections for this tribute album, and some aspects of the Balls’ repertoire have been under- or un-represented: there are none of the mountain ballads — “Pretty Polly” or “Poor Ellen Smith,” most famously — and no attempts (and they’d only be attempts) to recreate any of E.C.’s sublime guitar pieces. Two of his most endearing comic numbers are tackled here — “The Early Bird Always Gets the Worm” and “Plain Old Country Lad” — as well as the Balls’ immensely winning “Jenny Jenkins,” but it’s the religious material that predominates. It’s this material that always struck me the hardest and deepest. It’s no wonder that E.C.’s composition “Tribulations” has spread far and wide, often being declared “public domain” or “traditional” when appearing in someone else’s hands. It’s hard to imagine one man writing such a thing; a terrifying meditation on the end of days as envisioned by the Book of Revelation and a celebration of a hard-won faith in redemption. But E.C. and Orna Ball, as writers, arrangers, performers, were most often most effective with the songs they felt the strongest, and so in the hopes of adequately and respectfully representing them, it’s primarily their sacred material we’re presenting.

I feel compelled to mention that of the 30-odd contributors to this record, not all are believers a la the Balls; in fact, few are. I’m not. I do hope, however, that our interpretations of these songs — sacred or secular — will serve the ultimate goal of honoring the talents of E.C. and Orna, informed and inspired as they were by the traditions of their region and of their faith.

While this album is a tribute to both E.C. and Orna Ball, it was conceived, in the winter of 2007, as a memorial to E.C., who died July 14, 1978, at the age of 64. The plan was for its release to mark the 30th anniversary of his death, but although, like all such plans, it’s a bit late in finding fulfillment, I’m overjoyed that it finally has. A thousand most sincere thanks to the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band and all the contributors for their interest, generosity, talent, and patience.

As E.C. and Orna Ball left no heirs, royalties from the sale of this album will be donated to the Blue Ridge Institute, which documents, preserves, and promotes the folkways of the people living in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thank you, too, for your interest in E.C. and Orna Ball.

“Face A Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album.”

01. INTRODUCTION by E.C. Ball.
Recorded by Alan Lomax at E.C. and Orna’s home in Rugby, Virginia, August 1959. Previously unreleased. Used courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.

02. HE’S MY GOD. Sung by Dave Bird
Original on “E.C. Ball and the Friendly Gospel Singers,” 1967 (County Records). Out of print.

03. JOHN THE BAPTIST. Sung by Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Original on “E.C. Ball,” 1972. Reissued on CD in 1996 as “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.” (Rounder).

04. JENNY JENKINS. Sung by the Handsome Family
Several original versions recorded by John A. Lomax (1937), Alan Lomax (1941 and 1959), and John Cohen (1965). Those of Lomax the elder and Cohen are currently in print on, respectively, “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years, 1937-1975,” 1999 (Copper Creek) and the CD reissue/expansion of Cohen’s “High Atmosphere” compilation, 1974 / 1995 (Rounder).

05. WARFARE. Sung by Joe Manning
Original on “High Atmosphere” and “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years.”

06. PLAIN OLD COUNTRY LAD. Sung by Pokey LaFarge
Original on E.C. and Orna’s “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home,” 1976 (Rounder). Out of print.

07. LORD I WANT MORE RELIGION. Sung by Rayna Gellert
Original unreleased. Home recording made by E.C. in 1970.

08. THE EARLY BIRD ALWAYS GETS THE WORM. Sung by Michael Hurley
Original on “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.”

09. WHEN I GET HOME I’M GONNA BE SATISFIED. Sung by Jon Langford
Original on “White Spirituals” LP in the Southern Folk Heritage Series, 1959 (Atlantic); reissued in “Sounds of the South” box-set, 1993. Both out of print.

10. TRIBULATIONS. Sung by Joe Manning and Glen Dentinger
Original versions on “White Spirituals”; “Sounds of the South”; and volume five in the Southern Journey series, “Deep South… Sacred and Sinful,” 1960 (Prestige). Reissued on “Southern Journey #6: Sheep, Sheep, Don’cha Know the Road” in the Alan Lomax Collection CD series, 1997 (Rounder). Only version currently in print is on “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years.”

11. ONE DAY I WILL. Sung by Nathan Salsburg
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

12. CABIN ON THE HILL. Sung by Catherine Irwin
Original on “White Spirituals” and in “Sounds of the South.”

13. WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLES CLEAR. Sung by Glen Dentinger
Original on “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.”

14. BEAUTIFUL STAR OF BETHLEHEM. Sung by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Dave Bird, and Catherine Irwin
Original on “E.C. Ball and the Friendly Gospel Singers.”

15. FATHERS HAVE A HOME SWEET HOME. Sung by Jan Bell, Jolie Holland, and Samantha Parton
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

16. JUBILEE. Sung by the Sandpaper Dolls
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

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.

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.