I’m tickled to say that November 6, 2012, marks the release of Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923–1936, a box-set drawn primarily from what I call herein the Don Wahle Collection. It’s been two and a half years since Don Wahle’s records were recovered, and this set has been in process for nearly half that time. As I write in its introduction, the collection’s concept — occupational and hard-time material, dance tunes and novelty numbers, and sacred pieces — came to me several years before Wahle’s records did. My initial idea was that the songs would be drawn from the collections of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; the diversity therein would have provided for a tantalizing, if unwieldy, breadth of perspective on songs of work, play, and religious longing and observance. Ultimately, though, that unwieldiness left the concept to rot on the vine, and there it stayed till Wahle’s records arrived. The Tompkins Square label was luckily interested enough in the conceit to keep on me about it, and they’ve put considerable resources and energy behind making it an extremely beautiful and satisfying package. Much appreciation is due to Susan Archie of World of anArchie for her brilliant and nimble art direction and design work, and many thanks are due to the exceedingly talented and thoughtful Sarah Bryan, Amanda Petrusich, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, who contributed introductory essays to each of the volumes: Amanda, Work; Sarah, Play; and John, Pray.

Thirty-five of the 42 sides were drawn from Don Wahle’s collection. Frank Mare, Joe Bussard, and Christopher King (Long Gone Sound Productions) generously provided digital files of the other sides, and I’m indebted to Music Memory, Inc. for furnishing me with the technological means of making transfers of Wahle’s records. In fact, the MM project has been supporting the digitization of all approximately 2500 78s that he left behind. That process is ongoing.

Here’s an Amazon link to the playlist and audio samples of Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard, although if you care to buy the set, I urge you to consider purchasing it from your (or somebody else’s) local record shop. And here’s a promotional device put together as a teaser for Labor Day 2012, featuring two of the tunes from “Work Hard,” by Fiddlin’ John Carson and the Allen Brothers, respectively:

Jazz collector Kenneth Hulsizer wrote that when he met Jelly Roll Morton in his role as the impresario/bouncer/bartender at D.C.’s Jungle Inn, circa 1936–1937, and asked him if he still had any copies of his pre-war records, Morton laughed. “What would anyone want with those old things?” he reportedly replied. ”He never met a record collector,” Hulsizer explained. “Records were merely something made to get a little money and to spread his name.” Not long after, Alan Lomax was tipped off by Hulsizer’s friend and fellow collector Charles Edward Smith about Morton’s whereabouts, and, beginning in May 1938, Alan would undertake his eight hours of oral-history recordings with Jelly Roll at the Library of Congress. Lomax’s focus in those interviews was on the years preceding the phonograph era; namely the heady days in New Orleans’ Storyville, known as the “District,” where, Morton claimed, “the birth of jazz originated.”

There’s not a lot of evidence, pre-1938, that commercial recordings held much appeal for Alan Lomax. They weren’t unappreciated: he and his father John A. Lomax acknowledged their documentary value while compiling their American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934). In ’38, however — presumably not long after finishing his sessions with Morton — Alan Lomax got the 78-rpm bug. John Szwed writes in his biography of Lomax, The Man Who Recorded the World:

While rummaging through record stores, Alan stumbled onto a large stash of leftover Paramount recordings that was something of a hidden museum of rural culture from 1922 to 1932 — white country performers like Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles, the Fruit Jar Guzzlers, the Blue Ridge Highballers, Cajun singers Soileau and Robin, and black songsters and bluesmen James “Boodle It” Wiggins, Bumble Bee Slim, and Sweet Papa Stovepipe — recordings whose scarcity and antique sonority would one day make them the most prized discs among collectors. Alan asked [Harold] Spivacke [director of the Library of Congress's Division of Recorded Sound] if he could buy 225 of them at fifteen cents each. After this find, he wanted to go out to the Port Washington, Wisconsin, furniture factory where Paramount records were pressed to see if there might still be some more stored there.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that it would take a good part of a lifetime to listen to all of the rural recordings [made in the "pre-war era," roughly 1922 to 1938], as he had learned that at least seventy-six recording companies had at one time or another operated in the United States. So with the small budget he had, he hired his sister Bess (then in her first year at Bryn Mawr) and Charles Seeger’s nineteen-year-old son, Peter, to help him….

Of the estimated (by Szwed) 3000 titles Lomax, Lomax, and Seeger listened to, Alan selected 350 for inclusion in a Library of Congress monograph called the “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records,” published in a September 1940 Report of the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music. This was the first methodological research made into the pre-war commercial record companies’ documentation of rural vernacular music and, despite its main shortcoming — the fact that the team had little or no access to titles from the Gennett or OKeh catalogs — it proved to be a highly influential road-map for at least two of the earliest and most influential collectors of this music, Harry Smith and James McKune, who in turn paved the way for the many years that followed of its further excavation, investigation, and publication — which, of course, continue apace today.

The list takes some getting used to. Alan’s categories are often idiosyncratic, requiring frequent review of the “Code used in condensation.” Some delineations are peculiar, provocative (on what basis should Charley Lincoln’s “Gamblin’ Charley” be considered “completely authentic”?), and highly subjective. But that’s the point. It’s a thrill to imagine Lomax listening to “Vo 03623, Hell Hound on My Trail, Robert Johnson” and jotting
“unusual m[elody], traces of voodoo, beautiful g[uitar]” in his notebook. How lucky he was to listen with ears unclogged by the intervening decades of myth-making and canon-consolidation.

It’s to be presumed that just because Lomax included a record in the List doesn’t mean he thought it was a great piece of music. No mention is made, for example, of the stylistic attributes of Vernon Dalhart’s performance of “Billy the Kid.” I hope Alan regarded it, rightfully, as abject treacle. Instead, it’s the setting of the BTK folk-archetype in a “contemporary text” and to a “modern melody” that was of interest to him.

Here’s the complete List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records in PDF format. It’s offered me many hours of edification, entertainment, and provocation, and it’s worth spending time with as arguably the first step taken towards outlining what is now broadly accepted, however argumentatively, as the central canon of commercially recorded American vernacular music.

(Thanks to Todd Harvey, curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, for digitizing the List.)

One evening late in March 2010, my friend Joe called. He told me that his friend Chris had been on a dumpster job that day, helping clean out the house of a recently deceased hoarder. The hoarder had had some 78-rpm records, and Chris had brought a few home. Joe was there for dinner and he put him on the phone. “What kind of records?” I asked. “Old-timey stuff,” Chris said. Visions of Harry James and Morton Downey, Sr., began swaying lugubriously in my head. I thought about lying back down on the sofa, but I went to look at the records instead.

I had never tried to collect 78s. I was young, broke, and peripatetic, and by the time I might have started, I didn’t live in a place where the getting was good. (Never mind that I had gone to college in Richmond, Indiana, the home of the late Gennett Records. The nation’s first great independent label, it had released hundreds of sides by jazz, hillbilly, and “race” artists, stars and ciphers alike, but in those days I was looking for mono Kinks LPs.) And when my shellac fantasies began, I was daunted by the many years the Great Southern Record Canvass had been over. So I contented myself with the vigorous stream of reissues from the likes of Yazoo, Arhoolie, and County Records. I had abandoned hope: thus my swoon when I opened the salvaged boxes.

Don Wahle started collecting records in the 1950s — 78s from as early as 1956; LPs from the mid-’60s. The only evidence for these dates are the postmarks on the correspondence with and shipping containers from his fellow collectors that he kept till he died. His tastes — as can best be discerned from that correspondence and the many, many yellowing want-lists that he maintained like so many diary entries — were fairly orthodox; faithful amassments of the hillbilly-recording era’s foremost stars: Uncle Dave Macon, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family. At their heels were the popular North Carolina banjo-man Charlie Poole, Kentucky steel-guitarist Cliff Carlisle, and Georgia’s Skillet Lickers string-band,  along with a generous portion of cowboy titles. What I consider the unholy pop-country trinity of Vernon Dalhart, Carson Robison, and Frank Luther was represented in droves. Don’s favorite was without a doubt Gene Autry, and his collection ran the gamut from the rare Victor 23,800s of young Gene to four or five copies of the later mega-star’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” on that ubiquitous red-labelled Columbia disc.

But what was intermingled with these copious quantities was most unexpected, and wonderful. Wahle seems to have collected every country music record he could get his hands on, regardless of its contents — and despite getting little or no coverage in his hundreds of want lists, he managed to gather dozens upon dozens of sides by the great rural string bands, songsters and troubadours from “hill and range,” singing evangelists and sacred vocal ensembles, and one-off solo instrumentalists from Alabama to Quebec. (Though, sadly and perhaps strangely, not a single Cajun title appears in his collection.) Some semi-popular if not blockbusting artists like North Georgia fiddler Earl Johnson; Eastern Kentucky’s banjoist-cum-theologian Buell Kazee; and the archetypal railroad bum Haywire Mac McClintock made their appearances in Don’s pantheon, but as for the Georgia Crackers, Whit Gaydon, Ernest Phipps and His Holiness Singers, so many other rare and weird gems of the hillbilly recording era — there was no sign that these, past their phonographic corporeality, were worth anything to him at all.

But they arrived just the same, to a house on Keller Avenue in Louisville’s Prestonia neighborhood — a house torn down around 1992 to make room for the airport expansion. Boxes came from Jazz Man in Los Angeles; Jack’s Record Cellar in San Francisco; the Cut Rate Record Outlet in Queens; Manhattan’s King Karol and the Jacob S. Schneider dealership. Others came from backwater collectors in Saginaw, Michigan; Batavia, Ohio; Redondo Beach, California; Kannapolis, North Carolina; Stamford, Vermont. The box with the Big Spring, Texas postmark was full of dealer stock from the former Anderson Music Company. Don never opened it.

Wahle also never opened many dozens of LPs he had been sent from the Old Homestead, County, and Yazoo labels; a redoubtable trifecta of reissue imprints that made those early and indelible introductions of vintage rural Southern music to me and so many others. Those boxes were sent in the early ‘80s to his last address, Templewood Drive, further out Preston Highway. It was here — judging, again, by addresses on bank statements and LP mailers — where he tried to start a mail-order concern called “Vintage Vinyl.” There’s no evidence, however, that it ever got off the ground; no evidence, in fact, that he ever actually sold a record — 78 or LP — to anyone, ever.

All of these revelations came later. First I rifled, pale, through the boxes on Chris’s floor, while several friends looked on from the living room. There were eight boxes, give or take, and Chris said that they had thrown out five or six times that many that afternoon. A half hour later, six grown men were climbing into the U.S.A. Dumpster parked in Wahle’s driveway, our labors lit by a full moon. In the dumpster, which was scheduled to be emptied first thing the next day, we found 40 or so boxes of 78s, holding around 25 discs a piece, stinking of mold, filthy to touch, and a wonder to behold. (There was also a prodigious quantity of family-size ketchup bottles.) Chris said there were many, many more records inside. I was given the dumpster boss’s phone number and told to call in the morning — any help I could offer in clearing out the rest of the house would no doubt be appreciated. Just don’t tell him, Chris suggested, that we dove his dumpster. I slept fitfully, woke at dawn, and called the boss at 7:30. I was invited to Templewood Drive that afternoon.

The place was an utter shambles. I borrowed a dust mask from one of the dumpster crew working away on the upstairs rooms, and descended into the basement. There was paper everywhere — countless linear feet of bank statements, receipts, hi-fi product manuals (the products themselves were conspicuously absent), and mountains of the aforementioned record-related correspondence. While I can’t say if Wahle slept in this room, there was a steel camp-style bed frame topped with a greasy mattress, in turn topped with layer upon layer of yellowed, molding newspapers.

(I’m sorry, and a bit abashed, to admit that I failed to take pictures of the house, too caught up as I was in the excavation of the records.)

The closet was filled with boxes of 78s. I’m six feet tall and they towered precariously above my head. As I pulled them down, one by one, the stacks emitted foul clouds of dust and mold. Two boxes were so mold-eaten that they, with their contents, crumbled in my hands. I filled my pick-up truck — bed (with topper), access cab, passenger seat — to capacity with records and all the documents I could stuff in. I also brought home a Peacemaker six-shooter in the style of Gene Autry’s, loaded with rubber bullets and wrapped, as Wahle had wrapped it, in a paper towel. A friend’s cop cousin later took one look at it and had it destroyed.

We know virtually nothing about Don Wahle. He appears in the documentation he left behind only in clipped and awkward phono-specific correspondence, deposit slips, random scribbles and doodles, and his want-lists.

We don’t know what he did for a living, what he looked like, or virtually any other biographical details apart from his record-collecting. As of this writing, no family members or friends have stepped forward to speak for him, despite efforts made by myself and others. The few people to whom he was known are collectors themselves who had heard his name only in collecting circles, or seen it scrawled on aged bid sheets in the Brooklyn warehouse of Record Research.

Stepping inside his last address on Templewood Drive, as I did on March 30, 2010, you would have thought Don Wahle had been dead for weeks, if not months. But he had passed away only one week earlier, on March 23. The Jefferson County Coroner had to issue a next-of-kin request. Soon after, an obituary appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal. He was survived by a brother, two nephews, and a niece. Cremation was chosen. There was no service. Donald Pickett Wahle was 75. This November, the Tompkins Square label will release a box-set called Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923–1936, that is drawn primarily from Wahle’s collection. Watch this space for more information. The set is dedicated to him.

Letter from pioneering hillbilly-record collector John Edwards to Don Wahle, July 4, 1960:

Ted Husing

“We’ve been walking over to a group of boys who seem to be taking their duties pretty lightly at the moment.” The renowned sportscaster Ted Husing is in Louisville to cover the 65th running of the Kentucky Derby for CBS radio. It’s 1939, three days before the race, and he’s on the backside of Churchill Downs. The “boys,” aren’t; they’re black stablehands in the employ of two barns with horses scheduled to run on Saturday. They’re also musicians in two separate bands that, on Husing’s urging, proceed to “whip up a little bit of jive stomp” for the listeners. Their ten minutes of performances, captured on a single 16″ transcription disc, is an utterly unique, important, and affecting document of Louisville musical and social history.

The Barnyard Boys, a quartet accompanied by two guitars and a banjo, play a composite of two chestnuts of 19th century minstrelsy — “In the Evening By the Moonlight” and, of course, “My Old Kentucky Home.” By 1939 the latter had been Kentucky’s state song for 11 years and played officially at the Derby for 15, but it had also been a central piece of the minstrel repertoire nearly since it published, in 1853. “In the Evening” originally appeared in James A. Bland’s “Great Ethiopian Songs” (1880) and was clearly influenced by Foster’s tune. It had also long strutted on the medicine show and vaudeville circuits (where “the” was pronounced “de” and “evening,” “ebening”): In the evening by the moonlight you can hear those banjos ringing / In the evening by the moonlight you can hear those darkies singing.

This music was hardly “jive stomp,” and Husing’s use of that term (made famous by Duke Ellington’s 1933 hit of the same name) is about the only evidence that what you’re hearing was recorded in the ’30s. The heyday of ragtime minstrelsy was many years over and popular taste was in thrall to swing. (Elsewhere on the disc he refers to the Barnyard Boys’ music as “sweet swing.”) But it’s not hard to imagine that the audiences for whom the band might have been used to playing — affluent whites on race days — could well prefer the hoary echoes of Dear Old Dixie to any contemporary swing-and-sway or jump-and-jive.

“Stand up, boys,” Husing orders. “You look lazy in the sunshine.” The members of the Six Bits of Rhythm might seem a bit more modern-minded with their takes on two Louis Armstrong records, “Old Man Mose” (1935) and “Shoe Shine Boy” (1936 — a sentimental Sammy Kahn composition from the Connie’s Hot Chocolates review), but their instrumentation astounds. CBS’s man, for the benefit of the radio audience, ticks it off: guitars, kazoos, glasses, a jug, a cymbal, frying pans and tin cans; instruments better suited to the turn-of-the-century “spasm bands” — typically kids making rackets on cigar-box guitars and homemade saxophones — than to any swing orchestra.

Husing is especially impressed with the jug. It’s clear he’s never seen one played before and he asks to hear it unaccompanied. “Ah, that’s swell,” he delights, as the blower vamps. “Isn’t that grand?” Many Louisvillians, of course, knew this already. The Six Bits could claim a legacy going back at least to 1903, when Earl McDonald’s pioneering jug band made its first appearance at the Derby.

Husing needs to wrap. He asks the Barnyard Boys for another piece, and with a great rendition of “Dinah,” the massive 1932 Bing Crosby and Mills Brothers hit, they show they’re not purely antiquarian. But the tune ends and our announcer addresses us: “We’re just trying to give you an idea — down here everything is happy moments, glad sunshine…”. Sure, and “in de ebening, by de moonlight…”.

There’s a minute left for predictions. One of the Barnyard Boys has his eye on Technician; the Six Bits’ jug-man wants El Chico. Both were accomplished thoroughbreds but neither placed that Saturday or ran in the Preakness or Belmont; except for their bloodlines, they’ve been forgotten. The stablehands, ultimately, were luckier. Berea College’s Hutchins Library acquired their transcription disc from WHAS in the late ’90s. The Clear Channel-owned station — responsible, in 1925, for the first live Derby broadcast — no longer had a use for it. It has since been digitized, and it’s available for posterity through the Library’s online Sound Archive.

PS. Here’s the running of the 65th Kentucky Derby, courtesy of British Pathé.

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.)

(It’s been written that Dock Boggs was also tapped by Peer to come to town from Norton, Va., to take part in the sessions, but couldn’t — or wouldn’t — make the trip.)

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.]

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.