Mapping the Crooked Road online

Click the image (or slow-loading Flash box) above for Music and fun on the Streets and in the Friday Night Jamboree/ from Doug Thompson via Vimeo. (It's Doug's blueridgemuse.com production from Sept.7, 2013, including a mild-mannered mandolin player -- recognizable in a yellow cap I acquired at a New England Fiddle Contest many years ago. The soundtrack, however, is the band playing across the street.)

I've been playing in old-time and bluegrass sessions several nights a week for the past six months, including the RadfordFiddle.com jam on Mondays, a smaller (less old-time) Radford Pizza House session on Tuesdays, the Blacksburg old-time gathering at the Farmers Market on Wednesdays, the street sessions that spread out from the always-packed Friday Jamboree at the Floyd Country Store, and the Sunday afternoon jam, also at the Floyd Country Store.

Most of these venues have some status on Virginia's Crooked Road, a tourism-oriented attempt to map locations for old-time music in the state that really seems to work: I've met musicians from Holland, Germany, the U.K., Ireland and Australia at one or more of these events, and most mentioned that "Crooked Road" venues were on their touring agenda, along with summer music festivals in West Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.

This page will make a good parking space for links to longer articles about the Crooked Road:

New York Times 2011
Smithsonian
Roanoke Times (multimedia, uses Flash)
Roanoke Times stories by Ralph Berrier
Virginia is for lovers tourism site
Roanoke Times on a campaign to name the Crooked Road a National Heritage Area, and a group fighting the idea. (August, 2012), with a follow-up about abandoning the idea in 2013 when some communities expressed fear of "federal strings" connected to federal grant funds.

David Mallett's Song to St. Anne's Reel

I've been telling folks about this song for a couple of years -- usually after they play the tune "St. Anne's Reel" bluegrass style, faster than I can make my fingers move on the mandolin, probably faster than would be comfortable to dance to... and certainly faster than most folks could sing David Mallett's sweet song inspired by the old dance tune.

Today I finally decided to go looking, and found a video of the author singing "The Ballad of St. Anne's Reel" himself -- complete with symphony orchestra.

In case the embedded video doesn't work here, you'll find the original on David Mallett's own page. You may see some other tunes that John Denver and others helped popularize.

The Mudcat Cafe's Digital Tradition collection has the lyrics here: Ballad of St. Anne's Reel

Meanwhile, for the tune itself, here's a lovely ensemble from both sides of the pond playing it on fiddle, dobro and guitar (Aly Bain, Jerry Douglas and Russ Barenberg, respectively):

Exploring music archives, finding fiddles and politics

"Flour, not pork!" -- election campaign slogan

When I saw the name Pat O'Daniel and the Hillbilly Boys on an Internet Archive page, I thought I might have stumbled on some old-time fiddle and banjo music from Virginia or North Carolina by a band saddled with the recording industry's late-1920s term for Appalachian and Ozark music.

Instead, what I had was a collection of 15-minute radio shows by a  "western swing" band from Fort Worth, Texas, broadcasting in the 1930s and '40s for the "Hillbilly Flour" brand. Despite its "I like mountain music..." opening theme, it apparently got its name from a general association of any fiddle-fronted music with the word "hillbilly," no matter how far from the mountains -- or from the roots of traditional or old-time music.

While digging further, I discovered that what I thought was an impressive 41 episode collection of 60-year-old radio programs was only the beginning. There is also an Old Time Radio Researchers "Certified" collection, with 74 programs, enough to fill three full CDs with MP3 files, photos and information. Here it is (downloadable in "zip" files at the first address, downloadable or playable individual episodes at the second):

• http://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_The_Hillbilly_Boys
• http://archive.org/details/OTRR_The_Hillbilly_Boys_Singles

The second episode I listened to caught my attention with its hot fiddle version of "Fisher's Hornpipe," complete with almost-audible square dance calls in the background. (I learned that tune on the mandolin some years ago from a New England fiddler; it's still part of the contradance band repertoire, but I'll leave it to some fiddle scholar to analyze the stylistic differences.)

So some "traditional" tunes are included in the "Hillybilly Boys" programs, but the style is the jazzy fiddle-led "country and western" of that decade, referred to as "Texas swing" or "western swing," popularized by Bob Wills and others. In fact, the only banjo playing I've noticed is far from mountain style -- a tremolo-laden tenor banjo, notably in a solo version of a once-popular sentimental song, "The Roses of Picardy."

The Old Radio Times of February 2008 has an article about the OTRR Group's "certified" release of a collection of the program, noting that members Jim Beshires and Geoff Loker were coordinators of the project.

Geoff Loker headed up the main team and spent literally hundreds of
hours researching, compiling and writing materials that would set this series apart. The evidence of this hard work can be seen in the myriad of accompanying audio files, additional programs, pictures, and text files that you will find included with this release.

Background: Over at jheroes.com, I've been doing research into radio dramatic series going back to the 1930s, looking for journalism connections and using the Internet Archive and OTRR Group as major sources. Meanwhile, in my "secret identity," I relax by learning old-time tunes on the guitar,  mandolin and banjo. This older blog has evolved into a place to save links and notes related to music, but until now I haven't done much linking "old-time radio" and "old-time music."

I'm continually amazed at the amount of radio material preserved at the Internet Archive, so this post is my first to explore it as a source of banjo and fiddle tunes -- some originally recorded on 78 RPM disks, and others originally broadcast on AM radio.

Back to O'Daniel's Hillbilly Boys, Wikipedia has an information page about the band and its relationship to Bob Wills and Western swing history: Pat O'Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys. You can find even more in "San Antonio Rose: The Life & Times of Bob Wills," previewable through Google Books.

The Pat O'Daniel show not only promoted the Hillbilly Flour brand, it promoted the political future of the company's owner. A radio-advertising pioneer, Pat's father W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, was elected governor of Texas in 1938 and U.S. senator in 1941. (For more about him, see the Texas State Historical Association's W. Lee O'Daniel page.)

I've just started listening to the Internet Archive recordings, and so far haven't heard the "Flour, not pork!" election campaign slogan mentioned in one listener's comments on an Internet Archive page. But I'm looking forward to it.

Belated Happy Birthday, Pete!

It's great to see that Pete Seeger is performing at Clearwater's Great Hudson River Revival festival this weekend -- an event he founded back in the 1970s. I'm half tempted to jump in the car and drive the nine hours or so up from Virginia... Alas, at today's gas prices, that would be a pretty expensive nostalgia trip.

I talked about Pete in my last journalism class of the semester -- to which I brought my own banjo for a glorified sort of show-and-tell.  I sang the class a song that reminded me of local journalism, including hours sitting in planning and zoning commission meetings trying to uncover behind-the-scenes details like the ones in Hank Bradley's song, "The Mayor Is a Good Old Boy."

I hadn't intended to talk about Pete or how he had inspired my interest in folk music and the banjo back in the 1960s. But while showing the class my old Fairbanks Electric, I mentioned that a previous owner (or a fan of his or hers) had drawn a small kangaroo in pencil on the banjo head, with a cartoon word balloon saying "Hiya, Slim!"

Having mentioned that bit of personal trivia, I asked how many students knew what Pete Seeger had written on his banjo... and we were off into folk-music anecdote land, mentioning Woody Guthrie, Peggy Seeger (who autographed a banjo instruction book for me) and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

Two days later, I saw in my Twitter feed that Pete celebrated his 94th birthday that same weekend... and was singing with Peggy at a concert a few days later. It just shows what a job it is to keep up with the news! (Bill Moyers did a better job than I did that week, pulling out a 1994 interview with Pete for his blog. He also did a great web page about protest songs last year.)

I did get to tell the class about Pete and show them my earlier blog posts here and there on "Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting People" (a song I don't know well enough to sing, fortunately) and related issues:

http://boblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/sing-song-of-press-titution.html

http://stepno.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/sing-a-song-of-journalistic-responsibilities/

I also got to tell them that you don't have to rely on me for updates about Pete. Here's where to find him online: http://peteseeger.net

That's when I started writing this blog post... the weekend of his birthday. The "belated" headline is even more true now, a month later: I went back and added the Clearwater links and other information after noticing that I never did hit "Publish" on the original version in May.

Perhaps I was distracted by my other two blogs, or by preparing for class, or for retirement, or even giving the students final grades and writing the after-class updates to my other blog post about teaching journalism. In any case, I'll take it all as a fine excuse to publish a few more links about Pete and music, and to revive this old blog as my space for writing about music, mostly.