The Carter Family first cut this tune in 1928 for the Victor label, and it remains one of their most-loved performances. Though the lyrics border on doggerel, the singing and playing are gorgeous. This has long been required learning for all aspiring old-timey guitarists. Guitar tablature for the piece is easily found with teh Google, nearly all of it wildly inaccurate. This tab, while it doesn’t match the Carter Family version exactly, is a good arrangement.

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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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West Virginia guitarist and singer Frank Hutchison was one of the great instrumental stylists of early country music. Perhaps best-known for his song ‘The Train that Carried my Girl from Town’, his recorded legacy consists of 32 tracks recorded for the Okeh label between 1926 and 1929. Like many other pioneering country artists, his recording career didn’t survive the depression and subsequent collapse of the record industry. Hutchison was a pioneering ‘white bluesman’, an excellent slide guitarist with a widely varied repertoire that included old-time country tunes, rags, and blues.

This track was recorded in St. Louis on April 29th, 1929, for the OKeh label. It was paired with Hutchison’s Worried Blues on OKeh 45114.

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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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I came across this photo, circa August 1997, when I was cleaning out some old files. Howard (‘Louie Bluie’) Armstrong was a mandolinist I admired enormously, from his early recordings with the unfortunately named Tennessee Chocolate Drops to his later work with Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong, and as a solo artist. His recording of State Street Rag should be required listening for every mandolinist.

Terry Zwigoff (of Crumb, Ghost World, and Bad Santa fame) made his first foray into film making with a documentary of Armstrong called ‘Louie Bluie’. Sadly, it’s not in print on DVD in the US, and VHS copies can be hard to come by.

Wreck of the Old 97 was country music’s first great hits when it was recorded by classically trained former light opera singer Vernon Dalhart (nee Marion Try Slaughter) in 1924. The song had already been recorded by Henry Whitter in 1923, and Thompson’s recording actually predates Dalhart’s by a few weeks.

The song was in the style of the old broadside ballads, and set to the tune of ‘The Ship that Never Returned’. Authorship of the ballad (and entitlement to the substantial royalties generated by a million-plus selling record) was bitterly disputed in a case that eventually found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Wreck of the Old 97 was based on the events of September 27, 1903, when a speeding mail train crashed off a train trestle near Danville, Virginia, killing 9 (some sources say 11).

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Here’s a remarkable display of jawharp virtuosity by Obed Pickard, one of the early performers on WSM radio’s Grand Ole Opry. His earliest commercial recordings were in 1927. This is from 1929, cut for Banner and affiliated cut-price labels (Oriole, Regal, Conqueror, etc).

The tune is Sally Goodin (also spelled Gooden), an old warhorse of a fiddle tune first recorded by Eck Robertson. Pickard’s performance is charming — earnest, understated, and well-played.

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By the way, there’s some hot jawharp, played by the author of this post, on the forthcoming Tangleweed CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals.

This acoustical recording from 1922 is among the earliest examples of rural Southern vernacular fiddling we have on record. Alexander Campbell (’Eck’) Robertson was a skilled contest fiddler from Texas whose recording career extended into the folk revival of the 1960s. This was recoded in New York on July 1st, 1922, the second day of a 2-day session for Victor that yielded ten sides.

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