This appealing side was cut on July 10, 1928 in Richmond, Indiana, for the Gennett label. It was paired with a tune from a session five days earlier (‘Somebody’s Waiting for Me’) on Gennett 6620.

The personnel:

• Herbert Sweet: fiddle;
• Earl Sweet: banjo, vocal;
• Ernest Stoneman: guitar, vocal

I don’t know much about the tune. The text seems to be a combination of verses unique to this song with commonplace stanzas. Nor do I know much about the Sweet Brothers, whose recorded output doesn’t seem to extend beyond these sessions in Richmond. I assume that they were fellow Virginians, given their work with Stoneman, but am far too lazy to verify this at the moment.

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Courtesy of Archive.org. This is included on the Old Hat compilation Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s, which I recommend unreservedly.

This side, recorded in Memphis in December, 1927, represents one half of the total recorded output of Weems String Band. It’s a pity, too, because it’s a rather extraordinary record. With more weemses than one could shake a stick at.

The personnel:

• Dick Weems, fiddle;
• Frank Weems, fiddle;
• Alvin Condor, banjo/ voc;
• Jesse Weems, cello

While the inclusion of the cello is unusual, the loose two fiddle and banjo sound is classic old-time country: multiple instruments playing simultaneous variations on a melody. There’s not really much accompaniment per se, just thick, glorious heterophony.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

Before he was a singing cowboy, Gene Autry was a Jimmie Rodgers imitator, and a good one. His earliest recordings include several titles from the Rodgers canon, as well as new songs in Rodgers’ style, delivered in a vocal style remarkably similar to the Singing Brakeman’s.

Autry was a national radio star before he transitioned to films, performing on the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago from 1930-1935.

This track was recorded in New York in October, 1931, and issued on a slew of cut-price labels: Banner, Oriole, Conqueror (one of the Sears house labels), Melotone, Perfect, Romeo, and Panachord. The tenor banjo accompaniment is by Roy Smeck, one of the most versatile instrumentalists of his era.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

This beautiful performance was recorded in Richmond, Indiana, for the Gennett label in March of 1929. Ward recorded 15 sides in two sessions. All were rejected. Fortunately for us, however, the recordings survived, and most have been reissued on LP and CD.

Fields Ward was a Virginian who had a long and varied career as a performer, which continued through the folk revival of the 1960s up to his death in 1987. He hailed from Buck Mountain in Grayson County, in the state’s Appalachian southwestern tip. Grayson County produced a remarkable number of outstanding old-time country musicians. The backing band on the track, the Grayson County Railsplitters, includes legendary old-time country musician (and prolific procreator) Ernest Stoneman on harmonica and Eck Dunford on fiddle.

This song (albeit the Frank Blevins version) was the musical inspiration for the Tangleweed song Hard Times, from our second CD.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

Thomas Edison was, apparently, almost completely deaf. This would help to explain the quality of music on his record label, as it was almost uniformly dreadful. There’s not a lot of interest for conisseurs of early jazz or blues. There are, however, a few old-time country chestnuts in the Edison catalog.

Case in point: this 1924 recording of Lonesome Road Blues (aka Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad) by the Blue Ridge Duo. The Duo were George Reneau and Gene Austin. Reneau recorded nearly sixty sides in 1924 and 1925, and he had already recorded this tune for Vocalion a few months earlier.

Henry Whitter appears to have made the first recording of this tune, which has since become an old-time and bluegrass standard, when he cut it in December, 1923, for the OKeh label.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

I’ve written of my admiration for former Chicago radio stars the Hoosier Hot Shots in previous posts. While much of their recorded repertoire consisted of novelty ephemera, they could whip out a convincing hot instrumental on occasion to remind folks that the folks playing this ridiculous music were serious musicians.

In this case, it’s the McPhail/ Michels song ‘San’, with some of the finest slide whistle playing you’ll ever hear.

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Courtesy of Archive.org

The most comprehensive readily available compilation of Hoosier Hot Shots sides is Everybody Stomp, still in print, and well worth picking up.

Ernest Thompson cut this side for Columbia (and their cut-price Harmony label) on September 9th, 1924, in New York. The Harmony release is under a pseudonym (as was the convention for cut-price labels), the label credits the performance to ‘Ernest Johnson’.

The song is often credited to A.P. Carter, though this recording and others (Ernest Stoneman and Henry Whitter’s versions, for example) predate the Carter’s recording by several years. It has become one of the more widely-recorded tunes in the old-timer repertoire, with versions recorded by the aforementioned artists, as well as:

• Asa Martin
• The Light Crust Doughboys
• The Delmore Brothers
• Riley Puckett
• The Shelton Brothers
• Claude Davis
• Richard Burnett
• Daphne Burns
• McFarland & Gardner
• The Monroe Brothers
• Holland Puckett
• The Red Fox Chasers
• George Reneau
• Billy Vest

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Courtesy of Archive.org

The embedded doohickey below has a playlist with the last ten sound files we’ve posted to the site. If folks like this, I’ll do another one in a few weeks.

1. Wreck of the Southern Old 97
2. Sandy River Belle
3. Sally Goodin
4. Ragtime Annie
5. Coo Coo Bird
6. Dark Holler
7. Rain Crow Bill
8. Arkansaw Traveler
9. Fourteen Days in Georgia
10. Flop-Eared Mule

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