I have found recordings by jive bands in the 1930s and '40s and an old-time string band from Virginia in the late 1920s.
Today, I stumbled on the biggest surprise yet: this YouTube clip of boxing champ Jack Sharkey singing and playing tiple -- and saxophone -- with Abe Lyman's Orchestra at a 1932 training camp.
Was the instrument his or something regularly used by one of the band members?
Now I guess I'll be listening to other Lyman recordings to see whether I can hear that distinctive jangly sound in the band when the boxer isn't around.
My friend Richard loves to sing this song, and I noticed a while ago that I could pick it out on my Firefly banjo uke in his key... so at least a couple of times a month we inflict it on folks at one or another of the local jam sessions.
Last night someone asked where the song came from, but my voice doesn't carry well enough to give the 1911, 1929 and 1952 answers in a noisy restaurant...
So my department of compulsive research spent the morning aggregating some bookmarks about the song to post here and reference on Facebook.
(Most of the links below are to YouTube copies of the recordings by the folks named.)
The "root" source for most of us seems to be Henry Thomas's 1929 78rpm Vocalion record -- reissued decades later as part of the still available Harry Smith "Anthology of American Folk Music" collection on LPs (and later CDs) by Folkways records starting in 1952.
From the Smith album, which I remember taking out of the library when I was in high school, Thomas's version of "Fishing Blues" was learned by the sixties' generation of jug bands and folk singers, including Mike Seeger, the Jim Kweskin band (who inspired me to figure it out on the guitar), the Lovin Spoonful, Taj Mahal (who added more verses and seems to have spread it the farthest), Doc Watson (who also had new lyrics), and many more.
Mike Seeger and Dom Flemons, 21st century American songster, are the only folks I have met who learned to play it like Thomas did, with a rack of pan pipes called "quills."
Songwriters have added their voices to the campaign against natural-gas pipeline construction in the mountains of West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.
Since they have put copies of their songs on YouTube I've started this page to bookmark them...
This first draft was made with my phone. When I get to a real computer I'll add more text and links.
Terrific breakfast music... making me wonder whether the steel resonator I recently saw on a picture of an old banjo ukulele could be used as a biscuit tin... or vice-versa.
Meanwhile, I have just been reading up on Dr. Humphrey Bate's daughter, Alcyone Bate Beasley, who played the ukulele (and piano) with Dr. Humphrey Bate & The Possum Hunters. I'm going back through YouTube videos made from their old records, trying to find some where I can actually hear her ukulele.
I don't hear one on this recording, but I'm playing along on my own banjo-uke here at the breakfast table, so maybe I'm drowning her out. For anyone else who wants to play along, the tune is in C, a great key for the uke in clawhammer banjo style!
(This blog post is actually copied from a series of Facebook posts I made this morning, gradually becoming aware that I'm spending a lot of time writing things that get lost in the great Facebook Empire instead of being out here on the open web supported by applications and hosting services like Blogger and WordPress.)
Anyone have any suggestions of records where you can actually hear Alcyone's four-string?
Here's what All music says about Ms. Bate, who was part of the show at the age of 13.
"Bate’s daughter, Alcyone (b. 1912, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, d. 14 October 1982, Nashville, Tennessee, USA), first sang with his band as a four-year-old and by 1926, at the age of 13, she was the regular pianist who could also play ukulele. She is reckoned to be the first woman both to appear on and sing on the Grand Ole Opry."
Maybe my ukulele playing friends Marcy A. Marxer or Terri McMurray or Lightnin Wells will see this on Facebook and know the answer!
Speaking of Dr. Humphrey Bate & The Possum Hunters, I have two questions about this YouTube posting.
First, I think I actually might hear a ukulele in the background, but it's hard to separate out from the banjo.
Second, the picture accompanying this clip includes a gentleman in a cowboy hat holding what looks to be a tiple, my favorite 10 string member of the ukulele family, or perhaps a taropatch, the eight string version.
It's too nice outside to stay online searching for a higher quality copy of the photo and some written histories of the band, but maybe I will get back to this. https://youtu.be/SRmxKiC07SY
A friend has been singing the song "When Did You Leave Heaven?" at a local jam session off and on for a year or so, and while he is on vacation another friend gave it a try last week, so I decided to let Google and YouTube show me who has recorded it over the years. Amazing.
One of the YouTube comment threads claims it was the first song ever broadcast on television, from a 1937 recording by Lilly Fryer, which I did not find on YouTube. From various web posts, it looks like the song was introduced by Tony Martin in the movie "Sing Baby Sing" in 1936.
I composed this blog post on my phone with the latest version of the Blogger app, a rather clumsy editing process that I belatedly discovered did not make links automatically. I finally came back with a computer to make YouTube addresses actual links. (I did make a few of significant names direct links until I started going cross-eyed from doing it on the phone.) Stauffer & Toffel's 1936 German-accented version on Telefunken is culturally and historically fascinating. The song certainly has a way of jumping back and forth across cultural lines.
The dates are according to whoever posted the item at YouTube, or from a Discogs.com search, but may not be the first -- or last -- time the person recorded the song.
Recordings from the days of 78 rpm phonographs continue to find their way to YouTube, where my latest discovery touches three issues that interest me:
Old time string band music from Virginia (where I've lived for the past decade);
The "Martin tiple," a 10-string instrument I have been playing for a few years, related to the ukulele and South American instruments, made in America for half a century and used for a variety of musical styles;
And the often racist minstrel-show roots of some of the old-time string band music repertoire. In this case, the latter is only present in the form of a fiddle tune title, without the original 1880s lyrics, which mocked a well-to-do gambler and ladies' man.
The "All Music" (http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-four-virginians-mn0001387068/biography) and "Martin Tiple" (http://martintiple.blogspot.com/2011/12/four-virginians.html) history blogs both have pages about the band in question, The Four Virginians, from the Danville area. They were active from 1925 to 1935 and reportedly recorded only six tunes, all for the Okeh record label.
Accompanied by a picture of the band, with the tiple used as a rhythm instrument, YouTube has five of the recordings: three square dance tunes with dance calls (one of them with a nineteenth-century minstrel show "coon song" title), and two sentimental songs.
You can hear the jangling treble sound of the tiple (not as high or clean as a bluegrass mandolin "chop") on most of the recordings. It plays full chords while the fiddle plays the melody and the two guitars play rhythm and bass runs. Unlike many old time string bands, the four Virginians did not include a mandolin, banjo or bass.
The other published sources identify the remaining band members as:
Fiddle – Richard Bigger
Guitar – Fred Richards
Vocals and Guitar – Elvin Bigger
Google search reveals several books that mention the band, including these:
Title one : Virginia's Blues, Country, and Gospel Records, 1902-1943: An Annotated Discography, by Kip Lornell
Title two : Linthead stomp: the creation of country music in the Piedmont South, by Patrick Huber
(The first draft of this post was made with an Android smartphone and its Blogger app. I should eventually get back to edit it and make the web links more attractive and functional.)
Ever wish one of your favorite old songs could go on for a half hour? Or want to know the story-behind-the-story of a ballad?
While I've been using this blog for intermittent posts about folk, blues and old-time stringband music, in my other incarnation over at http://jheroes.com ("Newspaper Heroes on the Air") I write about the portrayal of journalists in the radio dramatic series of the thirty-some years before television killed radio drama as a major element in American popular culture.
Here's a crossover: One of the radio dramatic programs that sometimes had journalist characters in its plots also had a "folk song revival" theme in a group of 1950s episodes based on traditional ballads and blues. Posting a journalism-related episode of "Suspense" to jheroes reminded me that a few of its tales of death and disaster came from old songs.
"Suspense" was a highly rated and expertly produced series for 20 years, specializing in tension, adventure and murder, from "Othello" to "Frankenstein" and "Leinengen vs. the Ants." As a result, the Old Time Radio Researchers Group has a substantial collection of episodes (more than 900 of them!), which it shares with the public through the Internet Archive (archive.org).
Below are direct links to the folk-song episodes I've noticed, produced and directed by Elliott Lewis, with scripts by several writers, according to radio historian J. David Goldin's listings ... Click to download the MP3s or open them in your browser.
While it's not folksong-based, music fans also might be intrigued by the vaudeville title "Never Follow a Banjo Act," with Ethel Merman.
I'm particularly fascinated by the fact that "Suspense" put its dramatization of "Tom Dooley" on the radio long before The Kingston Trio's arrangement of the song became a national hit. A version of the song had been recorded as early as 1929 (by Grayson and Whitter), but re-entered the "folk song revival" consciousness when collected by folklorists Frank & Anne Warner from Frank Proffitt in North Carolina in 1938, then published in John & Alan Lomax's book Folksong U.S.A. in 1947.It was recorded by Warner in 1952 (and eventually by Proffitt on Folk Legacy Records in 1962).
The Suspense radioplay based on the song was rebroadcast in 1958, using that year's Kingston Trio hit recording. According to J. David Goldin's "RadioGoldindex" of "Suspense" episode information, Harry Stanton was the vocalist on the 1952 broadcasts of both "Tom Dooley" and "Old 97."
Louise Louis was vocalist on "Barbara Allen." Big band singing stars who crossed over to film and television were also part of the casts: Dinah Shore played the lead and sang the song in "Frankie and Johnny" and Rosemary Clooney was listed among the cast for "Saint James Infirmary." Margaret Whiting was Frankie in the 1957 broadcast.
According to Goldin's logs, Stanton (although not featured) was also among the cast members for a different radio series' musical drama, the Lux Radio production of "Dixie," an hour-long, thoroughly fictionalized and whitewashed dramatization of the life of minstrel banjo pioneer Dan Emmett. Based on the movie by the same name and broadcast Dec. 20, 1943, the radioplay has the film's star Bing Crosby in the lead. You can almost smell the blackface burnt cork in one of Hollywood's regrettable acts of nostalgia for the days of on-stage racism and a romanticized 1800s Southland.
Instead of admitting that imitating black musicians was the inspiration for white minstrels' "blacking up," the story has the absurd excuse of Emmett and another performer originally using blackface makeup to cover up black eyes and bruises from a fight. (Crosby vs. Barry Sullivan as "Mr. Bones.") Their act is mostly joke-telling with "Amos and Andy" accents. Minstrel-style music is barely heard amidst the Crosby crooning. And, no, Dan Emmett didn't write the Crosby classic "Sunday, Monday or Always" that opens the program. In fact, some researchers believe the title song "Dixie" actually came to Emmett from the Snowdens, a black family in Ohio.
While this was a more general blog at first, since 2009, Boblog has been for occasional writing about music, part of trying to differentiate my web writing spaces. My other blogs are JHeroes (old-time radio's portrayal of journalists) & Other Journalism, a general-purpose writerly blog, successor to stepno.com/oldblog. When I was teaching, they all sometimes served other purposes.
I have worked for two newspapers (one full time for 11 years), several magazines, four software companies, and six colleges and universities, counting part-time, freelance and student jobs. See stepno.com.
