Remembering When Country Music Was ‘Hillbilly’ — And Was Great
I’m here today for two reasons, and the first is to say a few kind words about Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers, Charlie Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers, Uncle Dave Macon’s Fruit Jar Drinkers and a wagonload of guitarists, fiddlers and banjo pickers who a hundred years ago were shaping country music.
“Hillbilly,” the music was called then, and given the shelf life of all things in popular culture, it’s not surprising that few of today’s country fans would remember, say, the Tennessee Ramblers’ 1928 recording of “The Preacher Got Drunk and Laid His Bible Down.”
But some people have remembered, which is all it takes to keep that early music available to be appreciated.
And that brings me to my second reason, which is that as a fan of this music, I owe much of my personal debt to a man named Dave Freeman. He died last Christmas day, age 84, and I was reminded of my debt when I got a notice this week that his 78 rpm record collection will be auctioned on eBay starting in early October.
That’s big news in the small world of people who collect early 78 rpm recordings of country, blues, Cajun, gospel and other non-mainstream music from what music critic Greil Marcus once called “the old, weird America.”
While a lot of people collect records, only a handful have thousands of rare early discs, like maybe one of two or three surviving copies of some great tune that was recorded in 1931 and disappeared because the Depression had turned records into an unaffordable luxury for rural Americans.
Dave Freeman had one of those collections, assembled over many decades, and unlike many elite collectors, he shared it with the world.
Back in 1964, when he was 24, he launched County Records, whose mission was making great early country recordings, drawn mostly from Freeman’s own collection, available to non-collectors for the first time since their original release.
It was on a County album, County 505, that I first heard Charlie Poole, whose music still makes me stop what I’m doing and just enjoy.
Poole played the banjo, in a style that helped point the way to bluegrass, and his North Carolina Ramblers in his early recording days featured the great Roy Harvey on guitar and the wonderful Posey Rorer on fiddle.
For live performances, which is how such bands made their real living, the Ramblers often included Poole’s sister Lucy Terry on piano. Columbia, the main label for which he recorded, thought a piano wasn’t “hillbilly” enough, so they had him record without it. Some of the sides he cut for the Paramount label, which was less into micromanagement, do feature Terry’s piano. That probably makes them a more authentic representation of his sound, but with or without the piano that sound is sheer exuberance. The banjo and guitar blaze through a wild dance with the fiddle, and if you like propulsive music that makes you move, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers yield nothing to a New York night club a hundred years later.
Nor am I the only one, I suspect, who came to Charlie Poole through Dave Freeman. I’d guess that’s how Bob Dylan, a big Poole fan, dove into his catalog. I’d bet that County records were Loudon Wainwright III’s homework before he created his lovely High, Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project in 2009.
Country music in its early years was a big tent, bigger than it is today. Vernon Dalhart, a trained opera singer, was marketed to country audiences with contemporary pop tunes like the melodramatic “A Prisoner’s Song.” The Carter Family recorded traditional songs with Sara and Maybelle singing harmony and Maybelle inventing a new guitar sound. Jimmie Rodgers, “the father of country music,” worked with everything from Hawaiian strings to Louis Armstrong, but most often sang alone with his guitar. The Skillet Lickers or Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, like Poole’s band, spun their music swirl around strings.
While many of the songs from that era can fairly be called period pieces, that doesn’t reduce them to historical artifacts. Like all music, they evoke the era in which they were created. They’re fascinating time capsules of a culture that thrived a century ago, and they planted the seeds that evolved into what grows today.
They illustrate not only the evolution of music, but of cultures. One of Freeman’s County releases collects the music of the Red Fox Chasers, another North Carolina string band, and the most irresistible track on that compilation is “Honeysuckle Time,” a 29-year-old man’s love song to his 16-year-old fiancé. That’s a more disturbing idea today than it was in 1929, just as it’s more disturbing today to hear vernacular terms for black folks. Which can also, by the way, be heard in songs by black blues singers of the era. What may be most striking is how matter-of-factly these terms were inserted, reflecting the fact they were an accepted part of the vocabulary in wide swaths of America a century ago.
At our best, we change.
Dave Freeman not only collected records, he and fellow collectors tracked down some of the surviving artists who made them. One imagines the artists were amused that this young New York kid had such a passion for music they recorded back when they were his age, but it had to be flattering as well, and he wrote warmly of the friendships he developed with artists like the Red Fox Chasers.
Freeman bought Rebel Records in 1980 and recorded classic bluegrass artists like Ralph Stanley and the Seldom Scene. He also auctioned vintage records — full disclosure, I won a few — and throughout his adult years made a living from his obsession. Top that.
In the process he helped ensure the music of Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett, the Leake County Revelers, the Dixie Clodhoppers, Roy Harvey, the Georgia Yellow Hammers and a few hundred other pickers would remain an extant part of America’s musical footprint.
Top that, too.
