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.

FloydFest 2012 links

Adventurous visiting friends from Maine -- on their way home from a drive that included stops in Idaho and Louisiana! -- were what it took to get me to the closing day of FloydFest on Sunday, and we had a great time.

I tend to prefer small venues to crowds myself -- and prefer moonlight to  sunstroke -- but the festival has its share of smaller stages and shady corners.

(Folks who paid a last-minute $70 thinking they were going to arrive mid-afternoon for the closing Alison Krause concert -- as if it were a stadium concert -- were certainly disappointed by parking lot and shuttle-bus jam-ups, and then finding no reasonable place to sit and watch on the already well-staked-out concert lawn. Maybe some "acts" are too big for this venue?)

My favorites: Local heroes DotDotDash did a fine morning contradance, which could be an alternative Sunday morning form of worship... and catching part of the two gospel acts later in the day probably provided absolution for saying such a thing. I also thought the Molasses Creek band from Ocracoke Island was charming, playing mostly on the children's area stage, mixing new songs, old songs and humor. (They even did "Sweet Violets" nicely for a Sunday morning, making me wonder whether they have a less kid-friendly late-night version for the Ocracoke saloon trade.)

My big failure was not checking my camera's battery before I threw it in the backpack, and not bringing the spare. I may get some pictures uploaded here from my Droid phone, but there will be better ones elsewhere:

BlueRidgeMuse

Floyd Press

Roanoke Times FloydFest search Slideshow

Blogger is capable of more than I remembered

It's almost a year to the day since I've posted anything here. I'm paying a visit today in "how the heck did he DO that?" mode, after spending some time browsing around the "not-just-a-'blog'" sites done with this same Web system -- Blogger.com (a.k.a. yoursite.blogspot.com) -- by an old-time-radio fan and prolific blogger who goes by the handle "Jimbo."

For a couple of years I've been pointing out to students that WordPress can be used for sites that don't really look "bloggish." (http://rstepno.wordpress.com | http://bstepno.wordpress.com | http://stepno.wordpress.com/just-for-326-demo | and http://jheroes.com)

But I'd never tried using Blogger that way -- or noticed anyone doing the kinds of things Jimbo is doing. Here's the list from his "about" page:

• Jimbo's OTR Podcast
• OTR Books
• Silent Radio
• Jimbo's OTR Buffet
• Marxisms
• Imagined Plots of Vic and Sade
• otr photo
• Billboard Magazine OTR Review Index
• OTR People
• Vic and Sade Characters
• Comic Weekly Man
• Golden Age Newspapers
• OTR Advertisements
• Say Hello To...
• OTR Casts
• The Mixed-up World of Uncle Fletcher
• Unfishul Lum and Abner Dictionary
• Peabody's Peabrain
• OTR Audio Interviews
• DUMMY
• Vic and Sade Notebook
• The Crazy World of Vic and Sade

On second thought, "prolific" is a pretty weak word for all of that! I sent him a note via Twitter to find out if he had any magic tricks up his sleeve. Yup, there IS a secret: "Hundreds of hours of work." And that was just for his Billboard Magazine OTR Review Index http://bbotr.blogspot.com -- a terrific mashup of Google's archive of digitized Billboard magazines, searched, "clipped" and indexed for folks interested in particular radio programs.

That site in particular should be a great resource -- and role model/inspiration -- for other kinds of "media history" researchers, like my friend Bill Kovarik, author of Revolutions in Communication and its accompanying website, and his students.

Yet Another Blog by Bob: and couple of songs

I've been posting here so infrequently that I ought to mention why: As part of my media history research I've started yet another blog, JHeroes.com -- Newspaper Heroes on the Air, and it's taking most of my blogging time.

I'm exploring how newspaper reporters were portrayed in "popular culture" for a series of articles and maybe a book. The blog will help me sift through and comment on more than 30 years of old time radio: dramatic series, dramatized biographies and historical series.

Why? Partly because I like the storytelling of radio. At its best, it let your imagination paint the pictures, instead of some Hollywood special effects department. Professionally, I'm curious whether any "old media" (newspapers) and "new media" (radio) competition showed up in radio stories, or whether radio simply reflected how important newspapers were in daily life back then.

I also wonder whether radio dramas put newspaper reporters in a better or worse light than Hollywood movies of the same era, including whether radio had strong women reporter characters like the movie portrayals of Hildy Johnson, Torchy Blane and Lois Lane. (For more about the radio version of Lois, and her reaction to that upstart Clark Kent, see this second half of this blog entry.)

So... this old "boblog" blog has slipped off my radar for the past few months. So has music -- the main thing I write about here.

Here's one coincidence: An episode of one of the best old-time radio shows about crime-fighting newspapermen also featured one of my favorite blues singers and guitar players, Josh White.

Listen to "The Prisoner's Song" episode of the series "Big Town," although you may have to carefully copy and paste this address:
http://otrrlibrary.org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/B%20Series/Big%20Town/Big%20Town%2049-02-15%20(467)%20The%20Prisoner's%20Song.mp3

Josh sings original blues songs that parallel the story of the radio play; to be part of the scene, he plays a prisoner on death row.

"He's going to the chair..." the guy in the next cell says. "They let him have his guitar. He wanted it instead of his supper."

Incidentally, Josh White's song here is not "The Prisoner's Song" -- that's just the title of the "Big Town" episode.

The other "The Prisoner's Song" was a huge heart-breaking hit in the early days of recorded music, for Vernon Dalhart (a No. 1 hit for 12 weeks in 1925-26).

Since then has been re-recorded many times. I even remember my mother singing it, sometimes just the line, "If I had the wings of an angel..." when she needed a quick escape from whatever was getting her down.

Bells to celebrate many seasons

Mostly I'm celebrating the discovery that Ellen Kushner's "Sound and Spirit" radio program is available online. I used to be a regular listener to her wonderful mixture of music and stories, but lost track of it when I moved from one NPR/PRI station's listening area to another.

Her website has players and "embed" code for individual episodes. This is my first try at embedding one in a Blogger page. Utterly painless... Odd that it looks like a video player when only audio is involved. The program logo didn't show up properly when I first posted this, but the audio plays -- and that is the point.