Tuesday, July 09, 2024

Old-time debates about old-time music. What's that?

I mentioned to one of my journalism classes 15 or so years ago that on the weekends I played "old-time" music. A student responded, "You mean, like, Sinatra?" 
No, I said, I meant, like Mike Seeger and perhaps his older half-brother Pete, and the older folks from North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia that they learned from. 
Artist's rendition of old mandolin player with long beard, orange cap and 80-year-old mandolin

A Facebook discussion earlier this month has sent me down a compulsive-research rabbit hole to a Wikipedia page about "Old-Time Music," which by one of its definitions I still play every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening at southwest Virginia jam sessions, and which -- by other definitions -- has fascinated me since I bought my first Pete Seeger and New Lost City Ramblers albums during the 1960s "folk music revival" (Or "The Great Folk Music Scare," as Utah Phillips or someone else called it.)
The 20-year-old Wikipedia page has had numerous editorial additions and changes over the years, but its most prominent feature when I got there were a few prominent "citation needed" notices and a somewhat random use of Wikipedia's "references" feature.
My own "primary sources" for learning about "folk music" were big library books, but the phrases "old-time" or "old-timey" music in the 1960s and '70s came to me mostly from LP records and their liner notes, so I've added some of those as references on the Wikipedia page, as well as more recent books I've at least browsed through. A fine CD box-set that came out a few years ago made it very clear that New York's "Friends of Old-Time Music" or "FOTM" used that name as a broad umbrella for "authentic" or "traditional" folk music concerts and records, to avoid confusion with the commercialized singer-songwriter and "interpreter" artists being marketed under the "folk music" banner in the 1960s. The New Yorkers who ran FOTM, unlike the 1920s record companies that used the phrase "old time music," included black guitar players like Mississippi John Hurt under the heading, and older bluegrass bands that had roots in older fiddle and singing styles and perhaps less influence from Nashville record producers ideas of commercial country music. French Canadian and Louisiana Cajun fiddlers also appeared in "old-time" concerts.
Nowadays, "old-time music" is more specifically a fiddle-contest and music convention category to distinguish pre-bluegrass fiddle-and-banjo playing styles in Appalachia, the Ozarks and elsewhere. And today some young players are eager to point out the segregation-area exclusion of black fiddlers and banjo players from early 20th century "old time" records, and so have been reclaiming recognition for the black performance styles that influenced white players, as well as the black origins of the banjo -- an instrument with African antecedents that fell into white hands in the early 19th century and became an international fad after white-impersonators in black makeup created the "Minstrel Show," leading music-instrument factories to mass-produce banjos, and variations on the instrument found roles in Dixieland, Ragtime and Jazz bands, even crossing the Atlantic into Irish music on tenor banjos and British pop-songs accompanied by banjo-ukuleles.  Both the banjo and old-time fiddle have separate Wikipedia pages, by the way. I'm staying away from those.
Back to "old-time music"; those early U.S. record companies had separate "race" labels and catalogs, which presented black blues and gospel performers, but the producers appear to have left the old folksongs and fiddle tunes to whites, along with most 20th century banjo playing, all featured under headings including "hillbilly," "mountain music" and "old-time" and "country"... industry distinctions that got even more complicated with the later recording categories "country and Western)," "folk music," "rhythm and blues" and "rock 'n' roll." But that's another story.

The whole Wikipedia old-time-music page seemed to assume the definition of that phrase was written in stone somewhere, but so far I haven't turned over the right rock. The page was -- and still is -- weak on citations. Its history section gave a lot of weight to a 2021 website article from the state of Washington, about as far as you can get from Appalachia, but this music has been getting around for a couple of centuries or more, and the article itself seems quite good, even mentioning a few promising book titles. It's available online for free here: 
 
If you save the Wikipedia "page" as a PDF file, which I've finally done, it is 13 pages long. (The banjo page is 22; the old-time fiddle page is 9 more.) I've added a few more "old-time" references at various points, but I'm hoping others with both knowledge and a compulsive attitude toward footnotes and coding Wikipedia citation styles will also come to the page's rescue. For now, I've worked more than a half-dozen sources into sections of the page, but my citation style is an inconsistent mess, which I blame on Web cutting-and-pasting while just using a smartphone part of the time... 
Pasting them into this Blogger editing system will probably create another formatting mess, because I haven't used Blogger much in years, and won't have much time today to come back and clean things up after I hit "Publish." 

But here they are: 
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