A few days ago, I posted an MP3 of an old 78rpm record by a group called Mike Shaw’s Alabama Entertainers, about whom I know nothing. Fortunately, my copy of Tony Russell’s masterful Country Music Records: A Discography, the Rosetta Stone for fans and scholars alike, arrived in the mail this week.

Here’s what I learned:

• Unknown fiddle
• Unknown guitar
• Unknown kazoo on 1

Glad I could clear that up for you.

Actually, I did learn a few useful things: the record was recorded on the 10th of December, 1930, in Atlanta, GA. This would place it over a year after the Narmour and Smith recording of Carroll County Blues. It was issued as part of OKeh’s seminal 45000 country music series, with a catalog number of 45518.

If anyone knows more about the group, please drop me a line. Their entire recorded output seems to consist of four sides for OKeh cut at the December 10, 1930 session.

As I ready my Proustian collective posts for the inevitable Oxford University Press book deal, I’d like to draw your attention to some changes to the site:

1. The Amazon.com mini-store in the sidebar — You can buy DRM-free downloads of our records from Amazon.com. You can also buy copies of our CDs, and peruse a list of books we like and recommend.
2. The new Calendar format — The calendar page has been reformatted to make it more useful for you. There are venue links for each show, links to Google maps for driving directions, and we’ve indicated the shows that are open to all ages. You can also get our show calendar in a handy RSS 2.0 feed.
3. The event list in the sidebar — Our next five performances are listed in the sidebar
4. The spam tracker — We get spammed mercilessly by spambots. Fortunately, our blog is protected by the most excellent Akismet plugin for WordPress. To celebrate the futility of blogspam, we’ve added the spam tracker to the sidebar. Join us as we march inevitably towards our 100,000th spam comment (we’re presently at 74,507).
5. The drop-down lists for categories and archives — links to categories and archives have been changed to drop-down lists to make better use of sidebar space. The archive goes back to September, 2004, when this site came online, and the list was starting to get unwieldy.

As always, thank you for your support. If you want to read my 500 posts, start here.

I don’t know much about Mike Shaw’s Alabama Entertainers. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they may have been from Alabama, and that someone named Mike Shaw was involved. The tune is an interesting one, though. It sounds like a close relative of Carroll County Blues, one of the great early country blues fiddle tunes, first cut by Mississippians Narmour and Smith. The instrumentation, with the prominent kazoo, is interesting, as is the loose heterophony between it and the fiddle.

Tangleweed nicked part of Carroll County Blues for our instrumental Mississippi Trashboat, from our as-yet-untitled forthcoming third CD.

Tennessee River Bottom Blues (mp3)

Courtesy of Juneberry78s.com. Please consider purchasing one of their CD-R or DVD-R compilations of old-time 78s and radio shows.

P.S.: I finally broke down and purchased Tony Russell’s discography of pre-war country recordings, so I’ll be able to shed some additional light on recording dates, catalog numbers, and personnel when it arrives.

I just finished rereading Eward Berlin’s excellent Scott Joplin Biography, King of Ragtime. Only two of Joplin’s rags were recorded commercially during his lifetime, and the first piano recording of his most famous composition, Maple Leaf Rag, was not made until 1923, six years after his death.

More typical is this arrangement by banjo virtuoso Vess Ossman. The ubiquity of the banjo and relative scarcity of the piano in early recorded music has more to do with the limitations of early mechanical recording technology than with the popularity of the instruments. The volume and focused, directional sound of the banjo, combined with its lack of sustain, made it ideal for early mechanical recordings. Instruments like the piano and violin, however, tended to sound weak and warbly.

Maple Leaf Rag (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org

Today’s Billboard has good news for Replacements fans: the band’s Twin/Tone-era output will be rereleased in remastered, expanded form on April 22:

Billboard.com

Each of the four CDs will be accompanied by rarities from that period in the band’s career. While some of the bonus cuts have been circulating among Replacements fans for over two decades, others have yet to see the light of day. The bonus cuts for their final Twin/Tone LP, Let It Be:

• “20th Century Boy”
• “Perfectly Lethal,” outtake*
• “Temptation Eyes,” outtake*
• “Answering Machine,” solo home demo*
• “Heartbeat — It’s a Lovebeat,” outtake - rough mix*
• “Sixteen Blue,” outtake - alternate vocal*

‘20th Century Boy’ was a b-side on the ‘I Will Dare EP’ (along with a hilarious Hank Williams cover). ‘Perfectly Lethal’, ‘Temptation Eyes’, and the alternate ‘Sixteen Blue’ have circulated for a long time (I think I got mine from a bootlegger in Columbus in about 1987), albeit in the form of 12th generation cassette copies and MP3s ripped from the aforementioned well-worn 12th generation cassettes. That said, they’re all excellent tracks, and fans should rejoice at the chance to hear them in a more pristine form.

‘Heartbeat — It’s a Lovebeat’ and the ‘Answering Machine’ demo are considerably rarer, and even diehard fans are likely to be hearing them for the first time. ‘Heartbeat’ doesn’t even appear on the excellent Sessionography at Foshay Tower.

There are a few outtakes from the Let It Be sessions that have been omitted from the reissue:

• Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive
• Street Girl (2 versions)
• Gary’s Got a Boner (alternate take)

Of the omitted tracks, ‘Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive’ is the strongest, with some fine Bob Stinson guitar riffs, and a very pretty acoustic 12-string bridge. ‘Street Girl’ (sometimes listed as ‘Sweet Girl’) is more of a fragment than a complete song, one take being a mere minute and a half, and both takes end in flubs before the song is complete.

Apropos to nothing, when Paul Westerberg sings ‘Temptation Eyes’, it sounds like he’s singing ‘F****ng rhubarb on my soul’, rather than ‘through my my my soul’. Also, a friend of mine swore he was singing ‘Ten cents a retard’ rather than ‘20th Century boy’ on the track of the same name.

The first CD issues of these records were absolutely horrible sounding — shrill, glassy, and sterile. Mastering is a contentious issue now (see my previous Loudness War posts), but I’m optimistic that the sound will be an improvement. Whatever the case, it’s a chance to wallow in latent adolescence and celebrate the band at their creative zenith.

H/T to Aaron Cohen for passing this along.

Good news for those of you who find iTunes Digital Rights Management (DRM) irksome. You can now purchase DRM-free MP3 downloads of both our first and second records on Amazon.com.

No DRM means that you can easily transfer your purchases to the MP3 player of your choice, and use your purchases on as many machines as you like. You don’t have to juggle licenses or authorize or deauthorize machines.

Where You Been So Long on Amazon

You can also purchase downloads of our soon-to-be-out-of-print first record, Just a Spoonful. We probably have about twenty five CDs left in inventory, and don’t plan to repress the record any time soon.

Just a Spoonful on Amazon.com

For more information on why DRM is bad for consumers, check out this earlier post:

Holy crap, BuyMusic.com sucks

Simon Napier-Bell, manager of such luminaries as the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, and Wham! UK, has an interesting insider’s perspective on the meltdown of the music industry. Its death should be cause for celebration among artists and music fans alike:

Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company’s discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time.

Read the full article online at observer.guardian.co.uk

I’ve raved about Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s work several times before on this site. This is an early video clip of Lunsford’s fiddle playing. The tune is, for all intents and purposes, Cumberland Gap. His vocal performance in this ensemble piece is impressive, and displays a power not necessarily evident in his solo recordings.

The film speeds up and slows down over the course of the performance, causing the music to sound a little wobbly. Deal with it.