| ARTIST | SONG | ALBUM |
|---|---|---|
| Stephen Wade | Interview | |
| Kelly Pace | Rock Island Line | The Beautiful Music All Around Us |
| Leadbelly | Rock Island Line | Leadbelly Vol: 4 1944 |
| Nashville Washboard Band | Soldier's Joy | The Beautiful Music All Around Us |
| Nashville Washboard Band | Kohoma Blues | Too Late, Too Late Vol. 10 1926-1951 |
| Blind James Campbell & His Nashville Street Band | Buffalo Gal | Blind James Campbell & His Nashville Street Band |
| Vera Hall | Another Man Done Gone | The Beautiful Music All Around Us |
| Willie Turner | Now Your Man Done Gone | Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 1: Secular Music |
| Big Joe Williams | Please Don't Go | Big Joe Williams Vol. 1 1935-41 |
| Baby Doo Caston | I'm Gonna Walk Your Log | Chicago Blues Vol. 2 1939-1944 |
| Leadbelly & Golden Gate Quartet | Alabama Bound | Alabama Bound |
| Dennis Gainus | You Gonna Look Like A Monkey | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 |
| Grover Dickson & Group | Grizzley Bear | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 |
| Dudley Alexander and Washboard Band | Baby, Please Don't Go | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 |
| Joel Hopkins | Better Down The Road | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 |
| Jack Jackson & Lightnin' Hopkins | The Slop | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 |
| Mance Lipscomb | Tom Moore's Farm | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 2 |
| R.C. Forest & Gozy Kilpatrick | Tin Can Alley | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 2 |
| R.G. WIlliams & Group | Hammer Ring | A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 2 |
| Prisoners | Chopping In The New Ground | Negro Prison Camp Worksongs |
| Prisoners | Go Down Old Hannah | Negro Prison Camp Worksongs |
| Jesse "G.I. Jazz" Hendricks and group | Rattler | Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons |
| Johnny Jackson & Group | Raise 'Em Up Higher | Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons |
Show Notes:
On today’s program we spotlight some great field recordings captured between the 1930’s through the 1960’s. In the first hour we talk with Stephen Wade about his new book The Beautiful Music All Around Us which presents the fascinating back stories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942. Through prodigious research, Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them and reconstructs their lives and how the music was tied to the larger community. Wade is also known for his long-running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He also produced and annotated the Rounder CD collections A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings and Black Appalachia. In the second hour we spotlight field recordings made by Mack McCormick and others around Houston plus recording made Texas prisons by Bruce Jackson in the 1960’s and Pete & Toshi Seeger, John Lomax Jr., Chester Bower and Fred Hellerman in 1951.
Through the dilegence of a relatively small number of dedicated researchers we know an amazing amount of information about early blues musicians. I’m no expert on country music but I imagine the case is similar. For all our knowledge there are many gaps; a fair number of the blues artists were itinerant musicians, traveling from town to town, or state to state and the other factor comes down to the fact that the white establishment wasn’t all that concerned with documenting African-Americans, and if they were listed on census records, court documents, etc. that information is often inaccurate. The artists and songs Wade covers in The Beautiful Music All Around Us were biographical blanks, leaving leaving behind little of their origins, and seemingly impervious to discovery after so many decades. Through dogged research Wade has been able to flesh out the lives of folks like Bozie Sturdivant, Ora Dell Graham and Kelly Pace and find the origins and stories behind iconic songs such as “Rock Island Line” and “Another Man Done Gone.” Our show has always focused on African-American music but Wade’s book covers much wider territory, and illustrates the cross pollination there was between white and black music. Our focus for the first hour plus is some of the African-American artists covered in Wade’s book: Kelly Pace, Nashville Washboard Band and Vera Hall.
In October 1934 John Lomax set up his recording equipment at Cummins State Prison in Little Rock, Arkansas and recorded a group led by Kelly Pace singing “Rock Island Line.” The story of that song and its singer is one of my favorite chapters in Wade’s book, fleshing out Kelly from those who knew him, he comes across as fascinating, talented man who simply could not stay out of trouble, spending half his life behind bars. “My brother,” said Kelly’s brother Lawrence, “was a songster. He sang all sort of songs – songs of the church, of the blues, dance songs, work songs …You couldn’t beat him working. He didn’t wait till the dew is off. He’d say ‘I’m going to get 400 pounds of cotton.’ And when you was done half-way, he done cut out and coming back. …Kelly, he was something else.'”
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| Handbill from lecture given at the Library of Congress (click to enlarge) |
Wade also unlocks the origins of that famous song: ‘Rock Island Line’ begin its journey in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the repair shops of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Based on a traditional form and arising within a commercial setting, the song, like a trunk line whose branches radiate across the countryside, soon moved beyond this work site making new stops, shifting its contents, and streamlining its load. It migrated from a gospel quartet that the Arkansas prisoners performed to a rhythmic fable that Huddie Ledbetter created as he traveled with John Lomax as chauffeur, auto mechanic, and musical demonstrator. Eventually the song reached an incalculable number of players, singers, and listeners via skiffle, rock and roll, country, pop, and the folksong revival.”
John Work IV recalled to Wade when his father, John Work III, welcomed a quartet of street musicians called the Nashville Washboard Band into his home in 1942. As Wade writes “the musicians faced them in a row, seated side by side, lodged between the Works’ radio set on one end and their Steinway parlor grand on the other. One band member chorded his banjo-mandolin, and another the guitar, but Work IV fixed most on the string bass a third member of the band had cobbled together from a length of laundry wire, a broomstick, and a lard can. …[T]he band’s fourth member, who was blind, sat between, who was blind, set between two washboards mounted on a sawhorse and hinged in the shape of a V. He had attached to them an assemblage of frying pans, tin plates, and a metal bell, each registering different tones. Wearing sewing thimbles on his fingers, he tapped, clocked, and hammered this clattering array of stove-top resonators and corrugated surfaces.” John Work IV recollected “These people were the music. …They could just play on and on, and the house would reverberate.” Twenty years after a group calling themselves Blind James Campbell And His Nashville Street Band were recorded by Chris Strachwitz for Arhoolie Records. The group members knew the earlier group, linking the two in a long, if largely undocumented, tradition of black street bands.
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| Read Liner Notes Pt.1 / Pt. 2 | |
In 1940, in Livingston, Alabama, Vera Hall sang “Another Man Done” twice into John Lomax’s recording machine. The song became Hall’s signature number and when Alan Lomax included the number for one of the Folk Archive’s first releases the song entered the mainstream, recorded by Johnny Cash, Harry Belafonte, John Mayall, Odetta and numerous others. In the chapter on Vera Hall, Wade provides background on Hall, the conditions she grew up in and the meaning behind the song. “When Vera recorded “Another Man Done” she told John Lomax that she learned it from her guitar-playing husband. …When writer-collector Harold Courlander came to Livingston in February 1950, he recorded both Vera singing ‘Another Man Done,’ as well as someone she knew: Willie Turner, a twenty-seven-year-old confined at Camp Livingston. With his two fellow inmates, he sang and recorded ‘Now Your Man Done Gone,’ a piece they otherwise sang on the county road gang. …Two days before Courlander recorded Willie Turner at Camp Livingson, he stopped forty miles away in Marion, Mississippi. There he recorded a singer identified in his notes “only as Cora, who sang ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ . . . the same song, but with some variance in the lyrics.” That song was first recorded commercially by Big Joe Williams in 1935. These songs “fit within a larger family of songs that “fit within a larger family of songs that include ‘I’m Alabama Bound,’ ‘Don’t Ease Me In,’ ‘Don’t Leave Me Here,’ and ‘Elder Greene’s in Town.’ This network of songs that arises by the late nineteenth century uses a consistent verse pattern and, largely, a recurring subject matter.”
There is a connection between the albums featured in the second hour: A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 & 2, Negro Prison Camp Worksongs and Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons. As Mack McCormick writes in the notes to A Treasury Of Field Recordings: “The various collecting projects which have funneled into this final selection were initiated in 1951 when Pete Seeger visiting Houston, bringing together Ed Badeaux, John Lomax Jr., Chester Bower and Harold Belikoff, resulting in the founding of the Houston Folklore Group. At that time recordings were made at two of the Texas prison farms.” The recordings McCormick is talking about resulted in the album Negro Prison Camp Worksongs with some songs from that session appearing on A Treasury Of Field Recordings. The recordings Bruce Jackson made over a decade later for the album Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons were recorded at the same Texas prisons and it’s likely some of the same prisoners were recorded.
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| Read Liner Notes |
A Treasury Of Field Recordings Vol. 1 & 2 were compiled by Mack McCormick and issued on the British 77 label in 1960. Sponsored by the Houston Folklore Group and the Texas Folklore Society, these Fields recordings were collected around Houston by McCormick and other collectors like Ed Bradeux, Pete Seeger, John Lomax and others. The 36 selections contained in this set were drawn from over 400 items recorded over a nine year period. The original recordings are housed at the University of Texas and the Library of Congress. As the notes state it portrays “A panorama of the traditions around Houston – the city and its neighboring bayous, beaches, prisons, plantations, plains and piney woods…” And as John Lomax writes about this collection “This is one good, long look at the guts of America – songs sung by those who make them up and pass them along, showing the character of themselves, the flavor and spirit of their lives.” Below is information on some of the albums’ performers.
Joel Hopkins was Lightnin’s older brother and first gave him a guitar. Joel traveled the south with tent shows and traveling caravans. Lightnin’s other brother, John Henry also played guitar. The three were recorded together in Waxahatchie, TX in 1964. The results were issued on Arhoolie under the title Hopkins Brothers: Lightnin’, Joel, & John Henry .
As Mack McCormick writes in the notes: “When his wife is away at church, Jack Jackson will sit down at his piano and sing “sinful” songs. Sometimes when she has an evening prayer meeting he’ll invite someone like Lightnin’ over to ‘kick it around.’ Lightnin’ has ceased working with pianists (though he stills plays primarily in jook joints (for dancing) and Jack has established himself in business on the corner of Milam and Prarie in Houston’s downtown business district.”
Tom Moore was a powerful plantation owner who farmed land along the Brazos river in Texas. Asked about the song, sung on this collection by Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, he replied: “They’re happy people – they don ‘t always mean what they sing. He laughed deprecatingly, ‘Only I best never catch one of them singing that song.'” As McCormick notes: “In order to protect him [Mance Lipscomb] and his family, his name is withheld from his recording of ‘Tom Moore’s Farm’. …The simple fact is that the singer and Tom Moore are neighbors, the one a poor laborer, the other a powerful and vindictive man who has long felt the song to be a thorn in his side.”
Recorded by Pete & Toshi Seeger in the winter of 1951 at two Texas prison farms, Negro Prison Camp Worksongs, released on the Folkways label, represents some of the oldest and most traditional work songs found among African American prison communities in the southern United States. In 1951, when Pete Seeger as one of the successful Singing group, The Weavers, was booked to appear at a Houston hotel ballroom, he wrote John Lomax, Jr. suggesting that he ask permission for them to visit the nearby prison farms with recording equipment. The governor granted permission and the group, with Chester Bower providing the tape machine and assisting, visited Ramsey and Rechine farms on consecutive Sunday afternoons.
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| Read Liner Notes |
A couple of months back we devoted half a show to recordings made by Bruce Jackson in the 60’s at Texas prisons. Today we feature selections from Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons (Elektra, 1965) which I omitted last time. Jackson wrote: “I started recording in Texas prisons in July 1964. I think Texas had about 12,000 prisoners in 14 prisons back then …My primary interest in Texas was the black convict worksongs, which seemed to me to be part of an unbroken musical tradition going back to West Africa….”
–Stephen Wade Interview/Feature (75 min,. mp3)
