New Old-Time Music

[Darwin]

I've been PM-ing about all this with several Chiffers and have mentioned some groups in passing in several threads, so I thought I might as well sum up what I've found, in case anyone else is interested in some excellent Old-Timey music from some relatively new musicians. (In Old-Timey terms, this means that they are still alive. )

Country music seems to have gotten deflected a bit by rock'n'roll, but these are still on an older track--and going strong. I have lots of field recordings of singers who were old in the '20s and '30s, so it's good to see that there are some younger ones who still like to play the older styles.

This may look like a long post, but it's mostly just listings of personnel and track titles. It just covers four of my newer CDs.

The first three are published by CD Baby, and they have nice, long clips for all the tracks. I've bolded a few of my favorites, for those who don't have the patience to listen to everything. If you have the time and interest, there are buttons to play all the tracks.

The Lonesome Sisters http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lonesomesisters
Lead Vocals: Sarah Hawker
Harmony Vocals, Acoustic Guitar & Mandolin: Debra Clifford.
Clawhammer Banjo: Rose Sinclair.
Fiddle: Chad Crumm.

The material on this one is all traditional.

Tracks:
1. Could You Love Me One More Time
2. Over The Sea
3. Elkhorn Ridge
4. I Have No Mother Now - tear jerker - good on whistle
5. If That's The Way You Feel
6. Pretty Saro
7. Precious Memories
8. Let YOur Light Shine On Me
9. Omie Wise
10. Old Flames
11. Western Dream
12. Bright Morning Stars

====================
The Lonesome Sisters With Riley Baugus: Going Home Shoes http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lonesomesisters2
Lead & Harmony Vocals:
Sarah Hawker, Debra Clifford & Riley Baugus
Rhythm Guitar: Debra Clifford
Lead Guitar: Riley Baugus
Clawhammer Banjo: Riley Baugus
Fiddle: Riley Baugus
Acoustic Bass: June Drucker

Six of these are composed by Sarah Hawker and one by Debra Clifford, but even those have a pretty traditional feel. The liner notes include the words to all the songs.

Tracks:
1. God's Golden Key
2. Oh Sleeper
3. Going Home Shoes
4. Forgiveness
5. Go Home Little Girl
6. Rain and Snow - scary
7. They All Pale
8. Token Reminder - funny
9. Wild Bill Jones
10. Oh Sing to Me of Heav'n - classic
11. What Can I do
12. Highlander's Farewell[/b] - moves right along

====================
Next is jimmyjohnnyjack, Oldtime Fiddle Music & Songs http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jimmyjohnnyjoe
Joe Thrift - fiddle, vocals
Mark Olitsky - banjo
Jason Sypher - acoustic bass
Debra Clifford - rhythm guitar, mandolin, vocals

Tracks:
1. Tiv's Tune
2. Adieu False Heart
3. Sally Ann - modal version
4. Old Joe Clark
5. Elk Creek Blues
6. Darlin' Don't You Know That's Wrong - bluesy
7. McMichen's Breakdown
8. Sail Away Ladies
9. Sally Gooden
10. Hog Eyed Man
11. Chompin' at the Bit
12. Shut it Tight
13. Turkey in the Straw
14. Cherokee Trail
15. Old Joe
16. Boliver
17. Reprise

====================
The following came from Amazon.com

The Freight Hoppers play some of the most energetic fiddle tunes you'll ever hear, but also do a variety of songs.

The CD I have is Waiting on the Gravy Train http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... c&n=507846

The clips are a bit shorter on Amazon than the ones on the CD Baby site. I hate it when you listen to a song clip and just get an instrumental break.

Tracks:
1. Trouble
2. Backstep Cindy - zoom!
3. Anchored in Love
4. Molly Put the Kettle On
5. Ways of the World
6. Warfare - eerie
7. Polecat Blues - raggedy - jazzy
8. Nobody's Business
9. Roving on a Winter's Night
10. Fall on My Knees
11. Fort Smith Breakdown
12. We Shall All Be Reunited
13. Wild Fling in the Woodpile - nice fiddle-banjo unison
14. Hell Broke Loose in Georgia
15. Young Emily
16. Shortenin' Bread

====================
I have a couple more new ones from Ginny Hawker, aunt of Sarah Hawker (of the Lonesome Sisters), but need to do some more listening.

[Walden]

Guess I'll come out of the closet on this one. Old timey is, and always was, my music of choice.

[Wombat]

Old timey is one of the styles I collect and I have a large cross section of the recordings of the first generation of musicians to record in this style: Uncle Dave Macon, Dock Boggs, Darby and Tarlton, the Carter family and various string bands from throughout the south and so on.

Being geographically and culturally much more distant from the source of this music than many of you, I've sometimes wondered just how close a recording has to be to those originals to count as the real thing. I assume that, to count, it has to sound as though it might have been passed down in the family and learnt the traditional way. But is it legitimate to 'update' the sound in any way? (I'm not asking should someone be jailed for updating, I just want to know if one could update and still be classed as authentic. After all, the original musicians themselves would have regarded it as OK to learn from musicians passing through or from new neighbours and probably from records.)

To test your views, I wonder what you make of Tim O'Brien's Songs From the Mountain which I bought a couple of years ago. It's an album I like but I find the smoother vocals in particular less appealing than the rougher vocals on the songs he covered. But would that count as genuine Old Timey?

I imagine that people would have bought that album with it's smoothed down edges who would never buy the originals. Others, of course, might have found their way to the world of Old Timey music through that record who might otherwise never have known of its existence.

[missy]

Darwin - I LOVE the Freighthoppers (saw them in concert about 5 years ago). I particular like their version of "Gray Cat on a TN Farm". We put together a cut of theirs, with a cut of Uncle Dave playing it, and a cut of us playing it "plain" and "fancy" for our students to hear just what you can do with a very basic, easy to learn song.

Wombat, while there are many "crossovers" between Old Time and Bluegrass (and country) what I usually look for is the presence of clawhammer banjo. In Bluegrass you'll find a lot more "Scruggs" five finger roll style, while in Old Time, the banjo is basically part of the percussion of the song.

A great dulcimer player in the style of Old Time fiddle music is Don Pedi. That man's fingers FLY on the dulcimer!

Missy

[glauber]

Hello, Darwin,

i love Old Crow Medicine Show. They're at a dangerous point because they're finally breaking into the mainstream, but they kick all kinds of @ss. I could listen to "Wagon Wheel", for example, for hours. Rock me mama!

[Joe_Atlanta]

Country music seems to have gotten deflected a bit by rock'n'roll

Well, as much as I like old timey, I prefer that first step of deflection when it combined with a little R&B, drums and electric guitar. That late 50's Sun studio stuff has the heart of the mountains, soul of the Delta and the kick of the drums. Hard to beat, IMO. Kate James and Lost Country

[Miwokhill]

There are probably similar shows on college stations all over the country but one old time show I like is on Foothill College's (near San Jose) radio station. Actually it's also bluegrass and traditional as well. The station is KFJC and it's on Tuesdays from 10:00 A.M till 2 P.M., Pacific Time. (live internet feed) -mike (oops i just corrected the call letters)

[rh]

more new Old Timey:

two west coast bands, both straight-ahead OT with an edge:
<a href="http://www.crookedjades.com/"> Crooked Jades </a>
<a href="http://www.foghornmusic.com/"> Foghorn Stringband </a>

and a native of Italy, you'd swear he was born and raised around Round Peak:
<a href="http://www.rafestefanini.com/"> Rafe Stefanini </a>

[anniemcu]

My kind of stuff... thanks for that!

I started out doing this kind of music, and it is in my bones, so to speak.

[Darwin]

Wombat, while there are many "crossovers" between Old Time and Bluegrass (and country) what I usually look for is the presence of clawhammer banjo. In Bluegrass you'll find a lot more "Scruggs" five finger roll style, while in Old Time, the banjo is basically part of the percussion of the song.

Not to get too picky, but that's three-finger roll style. There are also "modern" Bluegrass banjo styles (starting with Bill Keith joining Bill Monroe in the early '60s). I had a friend at Ft. Bragg in the mid-70s who played banjo in the 82d Airborne Division Bluegrass Band. He was missing his middle finger and was able to play Keith's melodic style with just two fingers. The local NC folks that I played with referred to Keith-stlye as "Boston". There's a nice discussion of Bluegrass banjo styles at http://departments.mwc.edu/hipr/www/206/adler.htm.

Meanwhile, I'd say that every style that existed prior to Scruggs qualifies as Old-Timey. In addition to the more rhytmic "frailing" style (think Stringbean), clawhammer includes drop-thumb styles that can get very melodic, but never seem to lose their driving rhythm.

However, there are "two-finger thumb lead" (e.g., Roscoe Holcomb and Pete Steele), at least a couple of "two-finger finger lead" variations (Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Wade Mainer, and, more recently, Doc Watson), and a few pre-Scruggs three finger styles (Snuffy Jekins) that occur in pre-Bluegrass music.

Still, I'd agree that clawhammer styles are the most common.

One thing about "Old-Timey", is that it isn't a single style. It's a catchall term that includes quite a few regional styles and varying degrees of innovation. It's like "country blues" including everything from Bukka White to Pink Anderson to Mance Lipscomb.

[izzarina]

Great stuff Dar. I'm just re-finding my "old-timey" roots as of late. I grew up listening to bluegrass and OLD country music (despite my yankee leanings! ). Thanks for the links!

[Darwin]

Hello, Darwin,

i love Old Crow Medicine Show.

Thanks. I hadn't heard of them before.

It's interesting to compare their version of Fall On My Knees to the Freight Hoppers' version. (It's not a fair comparison, however, since one is live and the other was done in a studio.)

[RonKiley]

I am just one more who loves this music. I grew up with it married a girl whose family played it professionally. I like the acoustic style even though I played a Fender when I was young. I wish I still had it. It was a nocaster made about 1954. Very few were made and they are now worth mucho. I sold the Fender and bought a Martin which I still have. I do have a Fender now but it is a 5 string. Thanks for the link.. My kind of sound.

Ron

[BrassBlower]

11. Fort Smith Breakdown

[Darwin]

I assume that, to count, it has to sound as though it might have been passed down in the family and learnt the traditional way. But is it legitimate to 'update' the sound in any way? (I'm not asking should someone be jailed for updating, I just want to know if one could update and still be classed as authentic. After all, the original musicians themselves would have regarded it as OK to learn from musicians passing through or from new neighbours and probably from records.)

Warning: Personal opinions follow. (And, probably way more detail than is justified by the lack of any firm conclusions.)

Of course, Old-Timey is a relatively new category of music. I think lots of musical categories have more to do with the imagined target audiences of record producers than with anything that the original "users" of the music cared about. Maybe it's the shift from "users" to "consumers" that changed that.

In the beginning, there were no real limits on what kinds of things could be done. Genres were mixed freely.

Mountain Music of Kentucky http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 51-5436968 has quite a few bluesy songs that are obviously not out of the supposed Scots-Irish tradition. Listen to Roscoe Holcomb do something like Graveyard Blues. There's a similar rhythm to Hills of Mexico, and I still wonder how a Texas song like that made it back to the hills of Kentucky.

Roscoe Holcomb and Tom "Clarence" Ashely both recorded versions of House of the Rising Sun that were as different from each other as they were from the Animals' version.

Holcomb's Stingy Woman Blues sounds like an obvious precursor to Bill Monroe's version of Muleskinner Blues, so it seems that Monroe didn't just come out of nowhere. He must have grown up with influences like Holcomb.

It wasn't all what we normally think of as folk music, either. For example, there's Coney Island, a rag that sounds like what Willie Nelson did as Alabam'. Check it out Williew's version at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 8?v=glance

To test your views, I wonder what you make of Tim O'Brien's Songs From the Mountain which I bought a couple of years ago. It's an album I like but I find the smoother vocals in particular less appealing than the rougher vocals on the songs he covered. But would that count as genuine Old Timey?

I imagine that people would have bought that album with it's smoothed down edges who would never buy the originals. Others, of course, might have found their way to the world of Old Timey music through that record who might otherwise never have known of its existence.

I'm not sure how to separate what I think of as "edge" from roughness. I think that it has to do partly with directness and intensity of feeling, but it's hard to pin down. It probably involves not being pretty for the sake of prettiness. That doesn't mean that it can't be clean and include precise technique.

Another factor in something being "legitimately" Old-Timey is whether the older harmonies, melodies/mode, and styles of accompaniment are maintained. I do have my prejudices. I probably wouldn't consider anything with a horn section to be really Old-Timey.

The instrumental parts of Songs From the Mountain sounds pretty traditional to me--just better recorded than most of the originals. Cluck Old Hen sounds just right. So does the vocal on Raleigh and Spencer (or what I could hear of it, as I'm having trouble with Amazon.com today). On the other hand, Mole in the Ground sounds kind of "soft". I think it may have something to do with O'Brien's vocal range, as much as it does with his style. (Actually, I always thought that Bascom Lamar Lunsford's version sounded a bit stilted, but maybe that's just based on a prejudice that I developed from early exposure to the New Lost City Ramblers. )

I put off trying to discuss my new Ginny Hawker CDs partly because one of them, Letters From My Father, ihttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 51-5436968 includes some modern instrumentation--even steel, piano, and drums on a couple of tracks. The liner notes make the point that: "Musically, the family is all here--gospel, bluegrass, honky-tonk, old-time--the first cousins that make up what Ben Hawker [Ginny's father] would have simply called 'music'."

Start with what I think of as typical Hawker: The Gospel Ship Has Long Been Sailing. It gives me chills, but there's really nothing rough about it. Undone in Sorrow, with just banjo is also distinctly Old-Timey.

Compare Oh, Have You Seen That Turtle Dove, an a cappella duet with Tim O'Brien, to My Warfare Will Soon Be Over, with O'Brien's mandolin giving it a distinctly Monroe-like bluesy sound, then with Long Black Limousine, where the same instrumentation produces a kind of honky-tonk sound. Those Two Blue Eyes is another example of bluesy Bluegrass, this time with the full standard instrumentation.

The most modern of the lot is George Jones' The Day I Lose My Mind. It certainly isn't Old-Timey, but it's a sort of tree grown from those roots.

I don't really know where the edges should be drawn.

Did you know that Hank Williams and Bill Monroe wrote the Bluegrass song I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome together? I think I've heard that there's another for which Williams didn't get credit, but don't recall what it was. There are probably a good dozen Hank Williams songs that are regularly performed by Bluegrass bands.