As we prepare for our special St. Patrick’s Day show tomorrow night at Lizard’s Liquid Lounge, we thought it proper to share a wee bit of our Irish repertoire with you all. The tune is Whiskey in the Jar, originally written by Metallica, and later covered by the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners*.

The recording comes from a practice recording made last year in my basement. Ryan was out of town, so it’s just Billy, Paul, Scott, and me.

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*I may be slightly off on the chronology.

Tangleweed had a chance to record a tune on an early 20th century Edison wax cylinder recording rig. Martin Fisher, audio archivist at Middle Tennessee State University, set up the acoustic recording studio at last week’s Folk Alliance conference in Memphis

This being a pre-electric recording studio, the band was gathered around a single horn, which was connected directly to a lathe that etched the sounds into a blank wax cylinder. Each cylinder blank could hold two minutes, so we had to tweak the arrangement and push the tempo a bit to get it in under the maximum time. We recorded two takes. It’s all live to mono, so there’s no ‘fixing in the mix’, as it were.

The tune is a Tangleweed medley called ‘The Logan Square Dance’.

We will have audio of the cylinder itself soon.

One of Tangleweed’s sets at the 2010 Folk Alliance  Conference in Memphis is available for download. One of our first sets was at the Steam Powered Preservation Society, who had a multi-mic recording setup for capturing the performances.

You can download it here as a zip file:

http://thespps.org/mp3s/partners/sppsshowcases/fa2010/mp3/tangleweed2010-02-18.mp3f.zip

This is the maiden voyage of our version of the warhorse fiddle tune Cherokee Shuffle, from last week’s show at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn. You can download the whole show at Archive.org.

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We tried to mix up the textures and dynamics to keep it interesting. We also play the ‘A’ strain as a round at the end.

Thanks to Joe Steffen for recording the show and making it available on the interwebs.

There’s a fellow on YouTube by the name of 78Man, who has posted over 800 videos of 78rpm records playing. The result is strangely compelling — like the yule log, but with better music.

One of the more appealing sides offered is the Sons of the Pioneers classic, Cool Water. The description says that this is a 1948 recording, but I think this is the version they recorded in Chicago on March 27th, 1941 for Decca. It was released on Brunswick’s English subsidiary, which would expain the label. Of course, I can’t see the catalog label to confirm this.

A free Dixie cup to the person who can count all the instances of the word ‘water’ in this recording.

This is the track that launched a career, and a career that helped launch an industry. It was recorded in Bristol, Tennessee, on August 4, 1927 for the Victor label. Though it was only a modest success, it marked the beginning of one of the most illustrious recording careers in American popular music.

Rodgers actually recorded two sides that day (the other being ‘The Soldier’s Sweetheart’), but this was the side that featured Rodgers’ formidable yodeling talents. Rodgers neither invented yodeling nor introduced it to American music, but he did more than anyone to cement its place in country music.

Rodgers returned to the studio the following November, and recorded what would be his first hit and his most iconic recording: Blue Yodel.

Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (American Made Music Series) remains the definitive work on Rodgers, and one of the more impressive works of vernacular music scholarship one will find.

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Courtesy of archive.org

Rodgers work has entered the public domain in most of the world. It remains under copyright in the U.S. due to Sonny Bono’s Mickey Mouse Protection Act. But let’s ignore Bono’s ignoble legislative career and apparent lack of skiing skills, and remember him as the auteur behind ‘Pammie’s on a Bummer,’ and the associated heavy-lidded PSA:

Sonny Bono Speaks Against Pot

I listened to this expecting to hear the song Riley Puckett sang so well, and was surprised to hear this very nice fiddle instrumental instead. Surprised, especially, in that I had never heard of Fiddlin’ Frank Nelson.

A quick check of Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942 the Rosetta Stone for prewar country music, solved the mystery. Fiddlin’ Frank is a pseudonym for the great Kentucky fiddler Doc Roberts.

This track was cut in Richmond, Indiana, at the studios of the Starr Piano Company, with Joe Booker providing the guitar accompaniment. It was recorded on Saturday, August 27th, 1927, and paired with Roberts’ interpretation of Billy in the Lowground. That pairing was released on half a dozen labels, under half a dozen names. Here’s a mapping for you:

• Champion Records -> Fiddlin’ Jim Burke
• Silvertone and Supertone Records -> Jim Burke
• Challenge and Superior Records -> Fiddlin’ Frank Nelson
• Bell Records -> Fiddlin’ Bob White
• Bell Records (again) -> Bob White
• Gennett Records -> Doc Roberts

Roberts had a career rebirth during the folk revival of the 1960s. Berea College in Kentucky has an extensive collection of his papers.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

Fiddlin’ Powers was a John Cowan Powers, from Russell County, Virginia. His recording career encompasses 33 sides for the Victor, Edison, and OKeh labels, though 14 of those seem to be unissued. This is a 1925 Edison recording, and he is backed by a family band:

• Orpha Powers, mandolin;
• Charlie Powers, banjo;
• Carrie Powers, guitar;
• Ada Powers, ukulele

Despite what Henry Ford thought, a lot of these old time songs are pretty filthy. ‘She lays eggs for the whole darn crew.’ Indeed.

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Courtesy of Archive.org