Despite recent praise for freshly reissued collections by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, the folk revivalists are often slighted by both rock and country music critics, who often cite their errors in aesthetic judgment and ideology, and their supposedly trivial musical achievements. Pete Seeger and Joan Baez are standard targets, especially for their strained commitment to some “folk purity.”
But our debt to their work looms large. Smith, Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen and Alan Lomax — among many others — created an audience for brilliant musicians, recorded their songs and documented their lives, and brought them before a public at a time when the commercial country establishment couldn’t care less about Clarence Tom Ashley, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Cotton and Wade Ward, and when many old-time musicians had long given up professional careers.
From the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s, Mike Seeger (Pete’s brother), the son of two composer-musicologists and eventually an accomplished picker himself, produced a number of thematically oriented collections at the request of Folkways director Moses Asch. From those projects, as well as earlier, personal recordings, come these 38 (on one disc!) old-time tunes.
An instrumental by Cotton, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”, opens the set with a spare, almost languorous fingerstyle pattern, the notes gradually accumulating until one melody circles in and around another complementary melody — and you know you’re hearing a virtuoso. Ashley, who often played alongside Watson, offers a rare unaccompanied performance of “Pretty Fair Damsel”; the depth of consequence and energy in his phrasing is remarkable. There’s also delightful, easy humor, especially in Clyde Lewis’ hysterical and subversive parking lot discourse on Columbus’ “discovery” of America. The most haunting performance, however, is “Old Gambling Man” by fiddler J.J. Neece, who performed at the Grand Old Opry in its earliest days and was an in-law to the fabulously gifted Sutphin family (appearing on a number of tracks). Neece draws his bow with slow, tearing strokes, all the while singing with a growling, coarse intensity, like a rake pulling deep and hard over coals.
The breadth and vigor of these recordings, as well as their overall fine sonic quality (from one mike and a portable recorder) means they should be a part of any country music collection. Those already smitten by the masters of old-time music would do well to investigate this collection.
