Disc 1: The Stringband Era

That same year, Hay arranged for Bailey to record for both Columbia, which failed to issue either of his two sides, and Brunswick, which issued eight selections, including “Pan American Blues” and “Muscle Shoals Blues.” Bailey learned the latter number, one of his most popular on the Opry, from a Bessie Smith vaudeville show. In 1928, Bailey recorded for Victor at the first commercial recording sessions in Nashville history, but the company released only three of his eight sides. As with most radio acts of the day, Bailey’s mainstays were broadcasting and personal appearances, and he never recorded again commercially.

After WSM set up its booking department, around 1932, Bailey joined numerous Opry acts on tours of theaters and schoolhouses throughout much of the South and Midwest. He was often refused service at segregated hotels and restaurants, although some of his fellow performers either insisted that he join them or helped him make other arrangements. Bailey endured these conditions with quiet dignity, just as he brushed off Opry publicity naming him the program’s “mascot.”

On October 14, 1939, Bailey was one of the featured performers when the Opry made its NBC network debut during the half-hour Prince Albert Show. The live recording included here of “Fox Chase,” one of Bailey’s signature numbers, dates from that first Prince Albert broadcast. In 1941, WSM fired Bailey amidst a battle between the performance rights society ASCAP and the radio networks, which had formed a rival performance rights licensing organization, BMI. Since some of his standard numbers had been copyrighted with ASCAP-affiliated publishers, Bailey was in a quandary, for the contract dispute between radio stations and ASCAP had temporarily taken ASCAP songs off the air. Bailey refused to stop performing his older material and was let go. Whether race was a factor in his firing is unknown, though many have speculated it was.

Understandably, Bailey became embittered and generally stayed out of music, preferring to operate a shoeshine stand to earn a living. In his later years, though, he did make a few radio and TV appearances, including several Opry shows, before his death in 1982. In 2005, Bailey was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, becoming only the second Black artist to achieve that honor.

Taylor’s Kentucky Boys

A Gennett Records act composed of Kentucky musicians primarily from Jessamine and Garrard counties, Taylor’s Kentucky Boys were a racially integrated group that illustrates well the stringband music traditions shared by Black and white Americans in the early twentieth-century South. Although not a member of the group, Dennis W. Taylor, of Madison County, served as its manager and sponsor. A loosely organized ensemble composed of shifting members, the band seems to have been assembled only to make recordings and does not appear to have performed together publicly.

The band included James “Jim” Booker Jr. (1872–1940), a Black hoedown fiddler from southern Jessamine County, who came from a musical family. Booker and his brothers, John and Joe, along with a neighbor named Robert Steele, comprised the Booker Orchestra, an all-Black stringband that also recorded for Gennett. Other early members of Taylor’s Kentucky Boys included such white musicians as banjo player Marion Underwood, guitarist Willie Young, and singer Aulton Ray.

Taylor’s Kentucky Boys made their first trip to Gennett’s studio in Richmond, Indiana, in April 1927, and recorded, among other numbers, the traditional tunes “Gray Eagle” and “Forked Deer.” As country music authority Charles Wolfe has pointed out in his book The Devil’s Box, this event constituted the first known racially integrated recording session in country music history.

Andrew & Jim Baxter

Andrew Baxter (c. 1870–1955) and Jim Baxter (1898–1950), Afro-Cherokee musicians from Gordon County, Georgia, were a father-and-son duo who played violin and guitar, respectively, and frequently performed for barbecues and parties over the northern part of the state. They often played with Bill Chitwood, of the Georgia Yellow Hammers stringband, as well as with other local white musicians. The Baxters’ diverse repertoire featured traditional pieces, pre-blues numbers, rags, and blues.

Over the course of four sessions for Victor between 1927 and 1929, they recorded nearly twenty selections, among them “K. C. Railroad Blues,” which dates to the duo’s first session, August 9, 1927. This often-recorded folk blues—also known as “K. C. Moan,” among other titles—varied widely in structure, melody, and lyrics, as revealed in recorded versions by such contemporary white country artists as Riley Puckett, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and Darby & Tarlton.

Georgia Yellow Hammers
(with Andrew Baxter)

The relationship between the Georgia Yellow Hammers, a white stringband from Gordon County in rural northern Georgia, and fellow local musicians Andrew and Jim Baxter further highlights the close bonds shared by white and Black stringband musicians in the pre–World War II South. The Yellow Hammers’ usual lineup consisted of Bud Landress (fiddle, vocals), Bill Chitwood (fiddle, vocals), Ernest Moody (banjo-ukulele, guitar, vocals), and Phil Reeve (guitar, vocals). Together, the band stood out among similar groups of the day for its strong singers and original songwriters. (Moody wrote the well-known “Kneel at the Cross” and “Drifting Too Far from the Shore.”) The Yellow Hammers’ repertoire was not limited to gospel songs, however, for the band also recorded sentimental numbers, blues, pop songs, fiddle breakdowns, rags, and even comedy routines.

The Yellow Hammers’ recording lineup sometimes featured other local musicians, including white guitarist and singer Clyde Evans and Black fiddler Andrew Baxter, both of whom played on “G Rag” when the band recorded for Victor on August 9, 1927. Phil Reeve, who was then managing the Baxters, had brought them along on this recording trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, and, as noted previously, the father-and-son duo made their own first recordings together that same day. As it happened, this Charlotte remote recording session was supervised by Ralph Peer who, just a week earlier, had discovered and recorded for the first time the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers at a similar series of remote sessions in Bristol, Tennessee.

Dallas String Band

“The Dallas String Band is a unique little organization of stringed instrument players from in and around Dallas,” read a 1928 Columbia Records press release. “All the boys in the band sing, and they play engagements varying from dance halls to street concerts, after the delightful fashion of the South, where music is a part of every-day life.” Composed of several brothers and cousins and featuring instrumental combinations that variously included one or two violins, guitars, mandolin, string bass, and clarinet, the band entertained both Black and white audiences at dances, barbecues, picnics, and often on street corners.

The Dallas String Band’s leader was Coley Jones, an old-fashioned songster with a diverse repertoire, who played guitar and mandolin and who recorded solo as well as with the group. The ensemble toured widely throughout East Texas and recorded at four sessions for Columbia, all in Dallas, between 1927 and 1929. Among the selections were the ragtime piece “Dallas Rag” and “Sweet Mama Blues,” the only true blues the group recorded. On “Dallas Rag,” notice how Marco Washington’s trombone-like bowed string bass undergirds Jones’s confident, syncopated mandolin. Washington, incidentally, was the stepfather of future jump-blues great Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who not only learned to play guitar from Washington but also received his professional start as a youngster playing in his stepfather’s own stringband.

James Cole String Band

“They don’t come much more obscure than James Cole and Tommie Bradley,” observed Dick Spottswood in his notes to the 1983 Document Records CD The Tommie Bradley–James Cole Groups, 1928–1932. In fact, until relatively recently, it was not entirely clear that the James Cole who fiddles on the 1928 recordings “Bill Cheatem” and “I Got a Gal” was the same performer who, between 1930 and 1932, also recorded with Bradley and other Black musicians for Gennett under artist billings such as “Cole’s Blues Five” and “James Cole’s Washboard Four.” Nor was it certain where the musicians were from. Spottswood surmised that they hailed from central-western Kentucky, a fertile area of Black-white stringband interaction that gave rise to country music’s Travis-picking fingerstyle guitar technique. In retrospect, that speculation has proved spot-on, at least in the case of Cole, who appears to have been born in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It also seems clear now that the James Cole String Band and the other Cole-led ensembles were organized and led by the same man.

Cole formed his namesake ensemble in Indianapolis, the group’s home base and site of the 1928 remote session that produced the group’s debut recordings, though several of its members, like Cole, originally hailed from Kentucky or Tennessee. Over the course of their short recording careers, Cole and Bradley, together with accompanying musicians such as Sam Soward (piano), Eddie Dimmitt (mandolin), and Roosevelt Pursley (jug), cut a wide range of material, including Tin Pan Alley tunes, ragtime-derived pieces, straight-ahead southern blues, and southern fiddle breakdowns, such as the well-known “Bill Cheatem,” featured in this collection. It and the group’s “I Got a Gal” were so country-sounding that Vocalion released them in its hillbilly series.

Peg Leg Howell & Eddie Anthony

Joshua Barnes “Peg Leg” Howell (1888–1966) was one of the most colorful figures in Atlanta’s pre-World War II musical scene, a man whose music mixed blues, ballad fragments, fiddle tunes, and rags. He came from Eatonton, Georgia, where he attended school through the ninth grade and then took up farm work with his father. In 1916, he lost his right leg in a shotgun accident, a disability that spawned the nickname by which he would become known professionally. By the time of the accident, Howell had already been playing guitar for several years. “Didn’t take long to learn,” he told researcher George Mitchell. “I just stayed up one night and learnt myself.” Following the loss of his leg, Howell performed, off and on, in and around Eatonton for the next several years. Then, tired of small-town life, he relocated to Atlanta.

In Atlanta, Howell was occasionally imprisoned for selling moonshine, but he made a living chiefly from his music, playing at house parties and juke joints, and very often on street corners. A Columbia talent scout spotted him “serenading” on Decatur Street, a center of Black cultural life, and this chance encounter led to Howell recording at six sessions between 1926 and 1929. “Turkey Buzzard Blues,” recorded in 1928 and featuring Eddie Anthony, is based on the antebellum minstrel-stage number “Turkey in the Straw,” common to Black and white fiddlers as well as stringbands. Anthony’s rasping fiddle, Howell’s rough strumming, and their exuberant hollering combine to give this performance a wild excitement typical of street musicians of the prewar era.

Charlie McCoy & Bo Chatmon

For rural Black Americans, as for whites, music has frequently been a family affair. From the late 1920s to mid-1930s, this was especially true in the Hinds County area surrounding Jackson, Mississippi, home base for the McCoys and Chatmons who, along with a neighbor named Walter Vinson, often performed and recorded together in various combinations.

The recordings of guitar and mandolin player Charlie McCoy and fiddler Bo Chatmon reveal some of the rich tradition of rural stringband music. A multi-instrumentalist and younger brother of blues singer-guitarist “Kansas City Joe” McCoy, Charlie McCoy (1909–1950) began playing music as a youth and honed his skills to become a talented sideman. His neighbor, Armenter “Bo” Chatmon (c. 1893–1964), also came from a farming family. One of at least eleven children, Chatmon worked as a sharecropper, though, by 1918, he had also begun to play for local square dances, fish fries, and other social gatherings with his family’s band.

Evidently, Chatmon made his first recordings for Brunswick in or around November 1928, merging talents with mandolin player McCoy, who is believed to also have played on this session. Probably joining them was guitarist Walter Vinson, another Hinds County resident. One of the four selections they cut was “Corrine Corrina,” a song that was widely performed and recorded by both white and Black musicians, including western swing bandleader Bob Wills.

Chatmon went on to record extensively before World War II, including with the Mississippi Sheiks and related stringbands. He enjoyed an even more prolific solo recording career, producing, under the name “Bo Carter,” more than 100 selections of chiefly bawdy, double-entendre “party blues.”

Mississippi Sheiks

The Mississippi Sheiks ranked as the most successful Black stringband of the pre–World War II era. The group’s principal figure was Bo Chatmon’s older brother, fiddler Lonnie Chatmon (c. 1890–1943), of Bolton, Mississippi, who considered farming beneath him and turned to music instead. Chatmon learned to read sheet music, which helped make him the leader of the Chatmon Brothers, a stringband composed of him and six siblings that was active between World War I and the late 1920s. Chatmon then teamed with local singer-guitarist Walter Vinson (1901–1975), who, like Chatmon, had grown weary of sharecropping.

Chatmon and Vinson performed for both Black and white audiences, and, while playing for a white square dance, the pair was discovered by a local record dealer, who arranged their first recording session in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1930, with Okeh Records talent scout Polk Brockman. At the session, Brockman asked the two musicians for the name of their group, and Vinson suggested the Mississippi Sheiks, after the 1921 pop hit “The Sheik of Araby,” or, alternatively, as the story goes, the cinematic blockbuster that inspired it, The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino. Chatmon’s brother Bo evidently joined them on this date, playing second fiddle, as he often did on other sessions over the next five years. The group broke up in the mid-1930s, when Vinson moved to Chicago, but not before recording nearly 100 numbers for Okeh, Bluebird, and other labels.

“Sitting on Top of the World,” from the band’s 1930 debut session, ranks as the Sheiks’ best-selling recording. Although Vinson took credit for writing it, part of its melody had been recorded earlier by Tampa Red. White country acts, including western swing pioneers Milton Brown and Bob Wills, readily adopted the number during the 1930s, and to this day, the song remains a standard among bluegrass and blues performers alike. “Yodeling Fiddling Blues,” also recorded in 1930, reflects the influence of the Sheiks’ contemporary Jimmie Rodgers, now celebrated as “The Father of Country Music.”

Mississippi Mud Steppers

Members of the Mississippi Sheiks recorded with other musicians in a variety of combinations and under a variety of artist billings, including, as heard on this set, as the Mississippi Mud Steppers. One of its members was Walter Vinson, who, born on a farm near Bolton, Mississippi, began playing guitar by age six and performing at parties and picnics soon thereafter. By 1930, when he and Charlie McCoy recorded as the Mississippi Mud Steppers for Okeh Records at a Jackson, Mississippi, remote session, Vinson had already recorded several hits with Lonnie Chatmon as a member of the Mississippi Sheiks. Together, Vinson and McCoy cut both stomps and waltzes, including “Morning Glory Waltz.” On it, the versatile McCoy plays banjo-mandolin, although he was proficient on guitar and straight mandolin, too, making him a much-sought-after accompanist for recording sessions with Jackson-area singers and groups. Like many Black southern musicians, both Vinson and McCoy eventually gravitated to Chicago, where they recorded for several labels, both solo and with others, including, in the case of McCoy, with the famous locally based hokum band the Harlem Hamfats.

Memphis Sheiks

The Memphis Jug Band, which is masquerading on this collection under the pseudonym “Memphis Sheiks,” boasted one of the most distinctive sounds of any Memphis musical act before World War II. The group was organized by Will “Son Brimmer” Shade (1898–1966) and his wife, Jennie Mae Clayton, who often sang with the band. Shade, who was born in Memphis and took up the guitar in his teens, grew up around Beale Street and learned from a street singer named “Tee Wee” Blackman. Shade and his wife started working Beale Street bars around 1926 and soon added a jug player nicknamed “Roundhouse.” Eventually, they incorporated additional instruments, including a kazoo, another jug, and Shade’s harmonica.

Charlie Williamson, leader of the pit orchestra at Beale Street’s Palace Theater, secured the Memphis Jug Band an audition with Victor A&R man Ralph Peer, and the group cut its first releases at a 1927 session. After recording in twenty-one Victor sessions over the next three years, the band shifted to Okeh in 1934. About a dozen musicians recorded with the group at one point or another, but the central figures remained Shade and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Burse, originally from Alabama, who usually played guitar or tenor guitar.

In addition to featuring Shade and Burse, this rendition of “He’s in the Jail House Now” includes Vol Stevens playing banjo-mandolin, Jab Jones on jug, and Charlie Nickerson on lead vocals. The song had been previously popularized, with different lyrics, by Jimmie Rodgers’s 1928 recording, but shortly before he cut his version, Blind Blake and Jim Jackson had each recorded versions, indicating something of the piece’s popularity among performers on both sides of the musical color line. All in all, the recording of “He’s in the Jail House Now” heard here is an excellent example of the Memphis Jug Band’s tight musical arrangements, as well as its broad-spectrum musical approach, aimed at both white and Black listeners.

Lead Belly

The outlines of Huddie Ledbetter’s life have been widely chronicled, including his birth in 1888 near Mooringsport, Louisiana; his early exposure to blues, gospel, ballads, and stringband music; his proficiency on several instruments and his mastery of the twelve-string guitar; his performing at private parties, dances, saloons, dancehalls, gambling houses, and brothels in Texas and Louisiana; his imprisonment in both states, for assault and murder; his nickname, given to him by a prisoner-chaplain impressed with his ability to lead work gangs; his discovery in 1934 by folklorist John A. Lomax, then collecting folksongs for the Library of Congress; his service as Lomax’s chauffer and assistant, following Ledbetter’s release from prison; his many recordings; his tours with other folksingers like Woody Guthrie; and his death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1949.

“The Midnight Special” comes from Lead Belly’s stint at Sugarland Prison Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, from 1920 to 1925. As with many of his songs, he took parts of it from folk tradition and added touches of his own. The title refers to a Southern Pacific train that passed near the prison farm on its way west out of Houston. The train’s whistle and its light, which shone into some of the cells, reminded prisoners of the freedom that lay beyond their reach. Lead Belly first recorded “The Midnight Special” in the summer of 1934, for John A. Lomax and his son Alan during their Library of Congress field sessions, only a few weeks before his release from the Louisiana State Prison Farm in Angola. Lead Belly went on to record the song several times, including the 1940 version featured here, on which he is backed by the gospel group the Golden Gate Quartet. “The Midnight Special” became popular among urban folk revivalists of the 1950s and 1960s. It also became a 1959 country hit for Grand Ole Opry singers Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper.

Similarly, Lead Belly did not originate “Rock Island Line,” but he did much to popularize it. He almost certainly learned the song from Arkansas prisoners while assisting Lomax on his tour of southern prisons in 1934, but the song itself probably dates to the early 1900s, when the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway first entered Arkansas. Lead Belly recorded the song for the Library of Congress in 1937 and later cut it commercially for RCA, Asch, Disc, and Capitol. This 1942 rendition for the Asch label marks his first recording of the spoken introduction about a railroad engineer who deceives the “depot man” about the nature of the freight he is hauling. A 1956 pop hit for British skiffle bandleader Lonnie Donegan, “Rock Island Line” has been widely recorded by folk revivalists the Weavers, Odetta, and the Tarriers, as well as by country singers Grandpa Jones, Johnny Horton, and Johnny Cash.

In addition to featuring Shade and Burse, this rendition of “He’s in the Jail House Now” includes Vol Stevens playing banjo-mandolin, Jab Jones on jug, and Charlie Nickerson on lead vocals. The song had been previously popularized, with different lyrics, by Jimmie Rodgers’s 1928 recording, but shortly before he cut his version, Blind Blake and Jim Jackson had each recorded versions, indicating something of the piece’s popularity among performers on both sides of the musical color line. All in all, the recording of “He’s in the Jail House Now” heard here is an excellent example of the Memphis Jug Band’s tight musical arrangements, as well as its broad-spectrum musical approach, aimed at both white and Black listeners.

Nathan Frazier & Frank Patterson

In recording musicians for commercial purposes, record companies like RCA Victor, Columbia, and Okeh often preserved Black and white folk music by capturing on disc the songs and tunes of musicians who had grown up steeped in folk traditions. Folklorists like John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, of course, sought to capture these traditions more deliberately, for preservation and scholarly purposes. So, too, did noted Black folksong scholar John Work III, of Nashville’s Fisk University, who collaborated with the Library of Congress in 1942 to record some dozen numbers by fiddler Frank Patterson and banjoist Nathan “Ned” Frazier, able representatives of the Black square-dance band tradition.

Patterson, born in Walterhill, Tennessee, some forty miles southeast of Nashville, learned most of his tunes from an older Black fiddler and was leading his own band by the early 1900s. A sharecropper, Patterson moved closer to Nashville and to his musical cohorts Polk and Wesley Copeland about 1916, thus making it easier for the trio to play house dances, often in white homes. Eventually, Patterson teamed up with Nathan Frazier, also originally from Rutherford County and well-known among Black Nashvillians as a street musician who performed banjo tricks in the fashion of Grand Ole Opry star Uncle Dave Macon.

After featuring Patterson and Frazier on the program of Fisk’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration in 1941, Work recorded the duo a year later for the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Culture (now part of the American Folklife Center). Selections included the old minstrel-stage number “Dan Tucker,” as well as other instrumentals, such as “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” “Leather Britches,” and “Fisher’s Hornpipe.” “Eighth of January,” one of Patterson’s signature numbers, is another common-stock piece shared by Black and white musicians. Listeners may recognize this traditional tune as the melody to “The Battle of New Orleans,” a million-selling pop and country hit for Johnny Horton in 1959.

Murph Gribble, John Lusk
& Albert York

Shortly before World War I, Black fiddle player John Lusk (c. 1889–1969) formed a stringband in the community of Campaign, near McMinnville, Tennessee, consisting of himself, his half-brother Albert York (c. 1884–1953) on guitar, and Lusk’s brother-in-law Murphy “Murph” Gribble (c. 1888–1950) on banjo. Lusk played a fiddle formerly owned by his slave grandfather, whose enslaver had sent him to New Orleans in the 1840s to learn the instrument. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lusk’s band worked street corners in McMinnville, as well as played for both white and Black dances, and gained a reputation as the best square-dance outfit in Warren County and the surrounding area.

In 1946, banjo authority Stuart “Stu” Jamison embarked upon a recording trip in Kentucky and Tennessee, along with fellow collectors Margot Mayo and Freyda Simon. Among the memorable experiences on their excursion, the trio spent an exciting evening at a Campaign general store, where Lusk and his bandmates recorded in front of a single microphone while seated on Coca-Cola crates. Among the numbers the group cut were traditional tunes like “Billy in the Lowground”; “Apple Blossom,” exemplifying regional tunes shared by white and Black fiddlers in the area; and “Rabbit in the Brush,” evidently belonging to a distinctively Black stringband tradition. Three more recording sessions with the Lusk band followed, but none of their efforts saw commercial release until 1989.