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.

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.

Steve Martin’s banjo was more than a stage prop — he was is a solid Scruggs picker who rubbed shoulders with some of the greats. He reminisced rather, rather eloquently, about crossing paths with Doug Dillard in the cat-poem-free literary magazine The Oxford American:

The Dillards boasted the fastest and most thrilling banjoist alive, Doug Dillard. They played live in Orange County in those days, and watching Doug Dillard was like watching God, if God were a finger-picking madman. Doug, thin as a rail, had a grin that Lewis Carroll could describe, like a piano keyboard stuck on the end of a reed. But the sound of the banjo accelerating from zero to sixty in a nanosecond, in a town that had heretofore heard only the lazy folk guitar, made us freeze. Doug was generous, too, and he would teach us various licks (slang for finger and chord sequences).

So here the erstwhile Gern Blanston applies what he learned, dueling with the Muppets.

Banjos, at least decent quality closed-back banjos, are expensive. Even folks who take the initiative to buy the parts from Stewart MacDonald and build their own find that banjo construction is an expensive proposition. Virginia luthier John Calkin has been experimenting with non-conventional designs to make banjos from inexpensive, readily available materials. Like two by fours.

He’s documented his efforts in an interesting page on his website, called Banjo Craziness. He notes that his designs are more appropriate for old-timey frailing rather than bluegrass, and he makes this hilarious (though likely controversial) observation:

[B]luegrass sucks. Bill Monroe should have been a priest or a welder or a pimp, anything other than the father of the hideous noise called bluegrass. Bluegrass is a well-spring of Southern sentimentality, morbid lyricism, cornball humor, and poor writing. Hardcore ‘grassers lament that there are no good new bluegrass songs, but I maintain that there are no good old ones, either. The real irony is that some of the hottest pickers in folk music play bluegrass.

Read the full series here:

http://www.jcalkinguitars.com/banjo_craziness.htm

In the Pines has long been a standard in Bluegrass and Old-Time country music, and has been performed and recorded by countless performers over the years, perhaps most notably by the Louvin Brothers on their seminal LP Tragic Songs of Life. This recording by Doc Walsh is among the earliest recordings I’ve heard of it. While it lacks the over the top pathos that makes the Louvin Brothers performance so powerful, it’s not without its appeal.

The song is a fairly straightforward waltz, and generally uses commonplace interchangeable verses. The chorus and the most famous verses (”the longest train I ever saw”) are there, albeit in slightly different form.

In the Pines (MP3)

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

Buell Kazee’s recording career is not dissimmilar to that of other pioneers of old-time country music. He recorded extensively in the late 1920s, but his recording career did not survive the Great Depression. Inclusion in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music helped rekindle interest in his work, and he resumed recording and performing after an almost 30-year absence. His postwar career included recordings for Folkways, and a performance at the Newport Folk Festival.

He was an unusually good ballad singer, with a smooth and expressive voice. Kazee’s frailed banjo accompaniment is also impressive.

Interestingly, the titular Dying Soldier is a Yankee, having been laid low by a Southern ball. Kazee was a Baptist preacher, and I suspect the text’s emphasis on redemption and the afterlife had a great deal of appeal to him.

This is an unissued side, recorded for the Brunswick company in January, 1928.

The Dying Soldier (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org

I’m not aware of this song being among the ballads Child collected in his landmark folkloric work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, but it shares common elements with many of the songs therein, and appears to be English in origin. While the references to London Town betray English origins, some of the text has been modernized and Americanized, with the Butcher’s Boy becoming a Railroad Boy in Kazee’s version.

Its inclusion in Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music has made this a popular song for revivalists to cover, with folks from Peggy Seeger to Elvis Costello taking a crack at it.Kazee’s voice is smoother and gentler than the recorded voices of many of his Kentucky bretheren. The modal banjo accompaniment is georgous.

The Butcher’s Boy (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org