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I LLINOI S UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007.

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4, Number 5 (whole issue 20)

FINAL

April 30, 1964

A?/

CONCERT :

ALMEDA igrand old lady of the Ozarks will be guest of the Campus Folksong Club i it presents its final public concert .he semester on Friday, May 8, in 112 gory Hall at 8:00 p.m. ,da Riddle, the 66 year-old ballad er from Cleburne County, Arkansas, I be the emcee when she presents not r herself but three of her mountain rhbors in a full concert of authentic *ican traditional music. ,mpanying Almeda will be Doc and :ha Hollister, university-educated Idents of the Ozarks, who have spent .r spare time collecting and learning old tunes from the regionts long time idents, many of whom are accomplished icians. Almeda has also promised to ig a fiddler with her, but she is not Swho the performer will be. Due to extremely high level of musicianship -he Ozark region,the area immediately rounding Almeda's home can boast of , 40 fiddlers, ranging all the way a Uncle Absie Morrison, who is in his ities, to his granddaughter Delena, is nine. The intermediate levels are > filled with fiddlers, including Lette Reeves, a charming and beautiful i school senior who has successfully tered the old-timey style.

ID)DLE AN D F RIEND5

Almeda is not a stranger to the University folk music scene. In her latest letter to CFC concert chairman, Ken Bowen, she lists her credited appearThey include ances around the country. the University of Chicago Folk Festival, New York University, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Berkeley Folk Festival, the Ash Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, and appearances made in folklore classes and study programs across the country. Her latest success has been an offer to sing at this year's Newport Folk Festival. Almeda's specialty is, of course, the old English and American ballads preserved in the great southern mountain regions of the United States--the Appalachians and the Ozarks. Almeda's mother was a native of Tennessee; her father a lifelong resident of Arkansas. It was from them that she learned her amazingly large repertoire of ballads, lyrics and children's songs. She says she has been singing for over sixty years, and has been collecting ballads (folklore collecting is not the exclusive business of university professors) since she was ten years old. She now boasts an abundant anthology of songs native to her region.

TICKETS ON SALE AT THE ILLINI UNION BOX OFFICE-$1.50

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, ARKANSAS,

1964

by F. K. Pious, Jr.

Elsewhere in this issue Paul Sampson takes time to worry the question of authenticity in folksong presentations. Specifically he is worried about the changes that occur when a reputable traditional artist plays his music in a foreign atmosphere, i.e., up north, and in a college auditorium, as opposed to down in the hills, among his own people at one of their traditional functions. This reviewer has suffered from the same doubts for three years, and it was these very doubts which drove him and his friends to visit Mountain View, Arkansas last week to hear Jimmie Driftwood's mammoth, three-day Arkansas Music Festival. There, in the low hills of Rackensack (the local name for northern Arkansas), Jimmie had gathered together the best fiddlers, banjo-pickers, guitarists, singers and dancers. The scene was complete in that all aspects of mountain music were present in the same proportions in which they exist in their native habitat. The result--and I dearly wish Sampson could have heard it--was a superb blend of honest music, much of it brilliantly played. Let us make one thing clear from the beginning: Virtuosity was not the keynote of the Rackensack festival. Competence was there in abundance, but no single artist of dazzling talent came forth to astound either the local or visiting music fans. The emphasis was not and could not be placed on instrumental skill alone. We heard no fiddlers of the level of, say--Paul Warren, Howdy Forester, or Tommy Jackson. There were good banjo players, but nothing that would give Scruggs cause to worry, and the guitarists are not going to give Doc Watson heart failure in the near future, or at any other time. As for the singers--well--you have your records and you've been to the concerts; you know who is good and who is excellent, and none of your favorites is going to be challenged by anyone from northern Arkansas. But, in the midst of all these caveats the reader has no doubt detected some evidence that the author is about to grow lyrical. The reader is correct. I was thoroughly thrilled by the Rackensack festival and by everyone in it--not only the performers, but the local people who listened to them and who so kindly welcomed us into their homes. Not being a devotee of digital algebra, I never intended to get to the festival to see if so-and-so could out-fiddle Warren, Forester, et. al., or if a new super-Scruggs was about to stalk out of the boondocks and amaze the campuses. I have always felt that such talk and speculation is like unto that of the medieval theologians quarrelling over their endless angels on top of numberless pin-heads, and, after visiting Arkansas, I am even more certain that such a view would have so twisted the visitor's perspective that the overall sense and importance of the festival and its music would be lost. What made this festival great was the very thing that Sampson mentioned: The whole proceeding was brought off in its natural habitat. Not only the town, the hills, the rivers, the cabins and the dusty roads, but the people themselves were there to surround the music and give it the essential reality that the records cannot capture. This stuff is kitchen music. It is played by congenial people who share a culture and a geographic contiguity, and who meet in each others homes or at mutually agreed-upon centers (such as the Stone County Courthouse) to extend their

culture into the musical. In such an atmosphere even the foreigner can hear and see things in the music which he cannot understand out of context. A few words about that context: I was charmed by Stone County and its gentle, kindly people. I was impressed and buoyed by their handling of life and by the physical and outward evidences of that life. I confess a warm appreciation of their handsome women and the tasteful and simple way they show off their womanhood. Up north we have little girls, girls, women, and, later on, if you're lucky, a few ladies. In Stone County they have one extra item--maidens. This is an old word--now largely literary--but in Stone County they actually do have maidens in every sense of the word, that is, scarcely nubile young women who dress in honest-to-God dresses, wear little if any warpaint and who, by the time they reach high school, have already absorbed the regional code of manners and thus behave with instictive gentility to menfolk, womenfolk and strangers. They also have beauty and sex appeal of a type now almost lost in more urbanized regions. One would have to mention also the large number of old folks in the area, and the universal respect which they receive from the young. Part of this respect was based, of course, on the fact that the musical skills which all of us had come to admire were largely in the hands of oldsters. Up north, on the other hand, the important skills are in the hands of the younger generation, and the oldsters are merely relics of a bygone age. This contrast alone is enough to justify the propagation of the music we heard in Arkansas. Moreover, the music served as a means of uniting the young and the old. No one who passes an afternoon talking with Willie Morrison the fiddler (as I did, and not just about music either) can fail to come away with a warm feeling of appreciation for the man and his knowledge. The young musicians I met seemed to be thoroughly in sympathy with the older ones, and displayed little susceptibility to forms of music which the elders themselves could not pass on. And so we have the context. What of the music itself and the musicians? For charm and elegance of interpretation we must single out the family of grandmother, grandfather and two grandchildren who played •Cripple Creek"on their four banjos. In the fiddling category we have to award honors to Paulette Reeves, the lovely and charming high-school senior who has been fiddling for only eight years but who displayed such taste and such skill on the fiddle that she may soon become a real threat to the catgut hierarchy of Nashville. Mrs. Ollie Gilbert and her unaccompanied singing impressed us as the old balladeers always do--with her sincerity and love of music. A word about dancing. Who among us has actually seen a folk concert that featured real dancers? Not many, I suspect, and as far as phonograph records are concerned only the clogging of Jean Carignon has ever been transmitted on wax, and the visual element, of course, is completely lost. But in Rackensack we were treated to the delightful spectacle of seeing a 77-year old man do a jig, and to the dazzling pyrotechnics of the Mountain View high school square dancers--as lovely a bunch of maidens and as handsome a bunch of young gentlemen that ever shook a leg. And they can shake it. This was no namby-pamby western dancing at the old folks home, but wild, rhythmic clogging and whirling--"dancing with arms and legs", in Nietzsche's words--a gorgeous and exciting spectacle. The hopping was not confined to the ends of the age scale either; Grandmaw Rainbold took my fancy with her lively jigging. At 49 she still dances every week, and she dances well, sometimes so merrily that her shoe taps at least once for every note from the fiddle. No oom-pah, oom-pah stuff here. The folks in Stone County like to dance,

and even those who were not on the stage were at pains to comment critically on the performance of those who were. Dancing, like fiddling and banjo picking, is not just a casual entertainment in those hills; it is a logical part of the culture, like the language or the way a man raises his sons--something to be criticized and examined, but most of all, something to be performed so that life will be bearable and interesting. Over it all, of course, towered the mighty figure of Jimmie Driftwood, the Grand Exalted Pooh-Bah of the festival and the first local boy to make good with his music. When he took us into his home, fed us, housed us, and entertained us for the weekend, Jimmie expressed in himself all the hospitality, all the knowledge, all the grace, the style, the charm of the region, and when he couldn't do more his wife Cleda took over. Together the pair of them put on a weekend for us that no music addict can ever forget. From his stone cabin above Timbo to the gym at Mountain View he was the leader, the organizer, and somehow, still the musician, the artist, the husband and father, the gentleman, the teacher. WIhere else can his like be found? Perhaps it never will be found again, but if it is, it will probably emerge from those same hills of Stone County, where the fiddlers thrive like luxuriant tropical flora, where the dancers begin kicking as soon as the bow hits the strings, where appreciation for music is equalled only by respect for musicians and good manners for everybody. Everyone I talked to agreed that there is something about Mountain View and the music played there--something missing not only from the traditional music we try to imitate in the north, but also from much of the country music we get on records. That something--I submit--is taste, that is, a balance of all the musical, physical and visual elements entering into the presentation. No one item predominated in the music--neither instrumental skill, historical value of a given song, cute routines, unusual instruments, speed of playing, difficulty of phrasing--all the things which the college imitators work themselves into such a state of cacoethes about. All these items were there in some degree, but they were balanced with the taste good music demands. That such taste in music should exist is not strange at all; it was merely the musical expression of the same gentility, manners, and balanced perspective which the people of Rackensack display on other occasions. Apparently, it takes good people to make good music.

Available from the Campus Folksong Club, Room 28h, of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.

Illini

Union, University

CFC 101 Philo Glee & Mandoline Society, members, $3.50, others, $h.OO. CFC 201 Green Fields of Illinois, members, $3.50, others, $4.0O. CFC 301 The Hell-Bound Train, members, CFC Reprint Number One:

$3.50, others,

$h.O0.

A. Doyle Moore, "The Autoharp: Its Origin and Development from a Popular to a Folk Instrument," New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 19, 1963. 25 cents.

BLUES

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FOLK BLUES SONGFEST.

BROWNIE McGHEE--Face in

the Crowd,

Big Wide World.

HUDDIE LEDBETTER--Keep Your Hands Off Her, Stewball (w/Cisco Huston,

Woody Guthrie).

BIG BILL BROONZY--Hush, Somebody is Calling Me.

LIGHTNIN'

HOPKINS--Fan It. SONNY TERRY--Beautiful City, Dirty Mistreater. ARBEE STIDHAM--Let It Be Me, I Wonder Why. MEMPHIS SLIM--How Long Blues. JACK

DUPREE-Come Back Baby.

Aravel AB 1004.

Nothwithstanding a succession of irritating bloopers, Aravel has compiled a generally impressive, if loosely titled, "folk" anthology of blues and religious numbers for its "songfest". Broonzy's Hush, Somebody is Calling Me recalls the vitality of the late blues singer, and McGhee's polished, expert renditions are effective. Least appealing are Arbee Stidham's Let It Be Me and I Wonder Why, sung to organ, harmonica, and guitar accompaniment and Jack Dupree's Come Back Baby, a deadening, thump-thump rhythm-andblues number originally released in the mid-hO's. It should be noted that Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie have inconsequential roles in the instrumental and vocal accompaniment which they lend Leadbelly on Stewball (from 19h6) and that the album jacket lists side one selections as being on side two and in an order other than that found on the disk.

MANDOLIN BLUES.

Yank Rachel's Tennessee Jug-Busters (Rachel,

vocals/

mandolin; Sleepy John Estes, Mike Bloomfield, Big Joe Williams, guitars; Hammie Nix, jug/harmonica). Texas Tony. Up and Down the Line. Shout Baby Shout. Bye Bye Baby. Stop Knocking on My Door. Move Your Hand. Doorbell Blues. Lonesome Blues. I'm Gonna Get Up in the Morning. Get

Your Morning Exercise.

Delmark DL-606.

On Shout Baby Shout, Stop Knocking on My Door, and Move Your Hand (vocal by Big Joe Williams), the veteran bluesmen of this "jug-busters" group play with a precision lacking in many of the earlier jug bands which they follow. Elsewhere, they sound much like the free-wheeling groups of which Rachel, Williams, Nixon, and Estes were members at various times in the 1920's and 1930's. The effect is different in either case and listeners are likely to note the points at which the performance of yesterday, through which the mandolin stitched filigrees of melody (not always harmoniously), has given way to an intense ensemble playing for which riffs and vocal-against-instrumental breaks provide the principal stylistic flavor. I'm Gonna Get Up in the Morning is an adaptation of Estes' first (and still one of the great blues performances on records). Decca release: Who's Been Telling You Buddy Brown Blues.

TIHE COUNTRY GIRLS. NELLIE FLORENCE (w/guitar)--Jacksonville Blues, Midnight Weeping Blues. PEARL DICKSON (w/2 guitars)--Little Rock Blues. MEMPHIS MINNIE (vocal, guitar) w/Joe McCoy (vocal on 1, guitar)--Where is Iy Good Man 1, Can't I Do It for You. MAE GLOVER (w/guitar)-Shake It daddy. LOTTIE KMIBROUGH (w/guitar; Winston Holmes, vocal and bird whistle on 1)--Going Away Blues, Lost Lover Blues 1, Uayward Girl Blues. Rolling Log Blues. GEESHIE WILEY (w/guitar and 2nd voice)--Pick Poor Robin Clean. ROSIE MAE iOORE (w/guitar and mandolin)--Stranger Blues. LULU JACKSON (vocal, guitar)--Careless Love. LILLIAN MILLER (w/guitar, vocal by Charlie Hill)--Dead Drunk Blues. LUCILLE BCGAN (w/guitar)--I Hate That Train Called the M & 0. ELVIE THOMAS (w/guitar)-Motherless Child Blues. Origin Jazz Library-6. OJL-6 is another distinguished release in the reissue series directed by Bill Givens and Pete Whelan. It brings together 16 rare selections recorded between 1927 and 1934 by women whose styles roughly parallel those of the male "country" singers included on OJL-2 (REALLY ITHE COUNTRY BLUES) and OJL-5 (THE MISSISSIPPI BLUES). Collectively, these performances image the less well-polished, more individualized conceptions and art of women outside the urban blues tradition reflected in the music of Mamie Smith, Lucille HIegamin, and other stars most active in the 1920-25 boom period of blues recording and sales activity. The exceptions nonetheless are striking. Lottie Kimbrough exudes a vocal sophistication and grooming which go naturally with the extremely urbane instrumental accompaniment provided her. The yodel, the "bird" trill, the close harmony of the Kimbrough-Holmes duet on Lost Lover Blues are formalities of the most exact order. The spoken invitation to Lottie in Going Away Blues is to "go down to the cabaret tonight and have a big time," an invitation which she declines with a subsequent explanation of "classic" proportions--the unexplained apprehension, the following letter bearing bad news, the hurried trip home, the dying mother. Her reply is in the deliberate cadence of the theatrical performer of the day. At the other extreme is the raucous bluntness of Lillian Miller's Stranger Blues. In between are a superbly swinging instrumental underpinning for Pearl Dickson's Little Rock Blues and the understated, moving plaint of

Elvie Thomas on Motherless Uhild Blues.

SONGS WE TAUGHT YOUR MOTHER.

ALBERTA HUNTER--I Got Myself a Workin' Man,

I Got a Mind to Ramble, You Gotta Reap Just What You Sow, Chirpin' the

Blues. LUCILLE HEGAMIN--St. Louis Blues, You'll Want My Love, Arkansas Blues, Has Anybody Seen My Corine. VICTORIA SPIVEY--Black Snake Blues, Going Blues, I Got the Blues So Bad, Let Him Beat Me. (w/various instrumental groups).

Prestige/Bluesville 1052.

PINK ANDERSON/CAROLINA BLUES MAN.

Vol. 1. Pink Anderson (vocals,

guitar)--IMy Baby Left Me This Morning. Baby Please Don't Go. Mama Where Did You Stay Last Night. Big House Blues. Meet He in the Bottom. Weeping Uillow Blues. Baby I'm Going Away. Thousand Woman Blues. I Had My Fun. Everyday in the Week. Prestige/Bluesville 1038.

Of the three one-time famous blues singers of the 1920's brought together by Prestige for a commemorative session three years ago, Miss Spivey recently has been the most active. She has had personal appearances in this country and Europe, has participated in sessions before the television camera (including a segment for Lyrics and Legends, the NET series seen in many communities last fall), has written for record magazines, has recorded for her own Spivey label, and has moved among admiring collectors, fans, and persons curious to know what a "real" blues queen was (and is) like. Her current approach to blues music reflects a great amount of her selfawareness not only as a performer but also as a historical figure, rightly if tardily honored for her earlier works. For whatever reason, the quality of her musical posture of today has much about it that appears contrived. Miss Spivey's voice, itself, has remained in excellent repair, but the calculated, mannered artifices of her present singing leave much to be desired. On the other hand, Lucille Hegamin and Alberta Hunter maintain a fidelity to their origins in substance as well as form. Miss Hegamin's Arkansas Blues (the song was a bona fide hit of 1921 available on a dozen labels and on some 15 piano rolls) stands up well under the 1961 performance with its textual changes. Her numbers are striking reminders of (or introductions to) the quavering voice, distended phrases, and torch style--a meld of Negro-white popular blues-ballad style--of the post World War I period. Two of Alberta Hunter's selections, Chirpin' the Blues and You Gotta Reap Just What You Sow, the latter a gospel-flavored exhortation of Miss Hunter's composition, originally appeared on the Paramount label. The subtleties of Pink Anderson's gifts as an entertainer are amply displayed on the excellent recording supervised by Samuel Charters for Prestige. Possessor of a spare instrumental technique, Anderson achieves a variety of dramatic effects by using his guitar to complement lyrics through customary chordal backgrounds; to reinforce lyrics by single note figures played in step with vocal lines; to repeat, interrupt, and change the patterns of sung figures by instrumental ones, and so on. A fine application of tonal and dynamic nuances characterizes these selections, among which I Had My Fun (Going Down Slow), Thousand Woman Blues, and Baby Please Don't Go are highlights. A medicine show entertainer from the age of 14 until his employer, "Dr." Kerr, retired in 19h5, Anderson has absorbed a variety of stylistic influences. His playing brings to mind that of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Francis Blackwell, especially in the use of the short, strutted runs which Blind Lemon favored and the resolute attack which distinguished the guitar work of Blackwell.

THE LEGENDARY PEG LEG HOWELL. Peg Leg Howell (vocals, guitar). Blood Red River. John Henry, Uncle Sam Blues. Jack Rabbit Blues. Worried Blues. Jelly Roll Blues. JoJo Blues. Skin Game Blues. Coal Man Blues. Let Me Play with Your Yo-Yo. Testament T-20h.

Joshua (Peg Leg) Howell recorded these ten numbers in April, 1963, at the age of 75. He had not played the guitar since 193h, when Eddie Anthony, his buddy and musical associate, had died. Howell's age and musical inactivity must be mentioned prior to comment upon his Testament disk, for these factors have made crippling inroads upon the voice and instrumental facility of the once-vigorous performer who recorded his first disk, for Columbia, in 1926 (Coal Man Blues/Tishamingo Blues). Under these circumstances, Howell acquits himself well in a program in which a contemplative spirit is transformed into varying moods of quiet, affecting poignancy. An outstanding selection is JoJo Blues, in which Howell's voice etches a story upon a vast silence just barely broken--and thereby doubly emphasized--by a muted guitar. More than half of the numbers recorded appear under Howell's name for the first time. These include Howell's version of John Henry and Blood Red River, the latter piece one of Bill Jackson's choices in his earlier Testament album (LONG STEEL RAIL, T-201). Pete Welding's notes are exemplary, and an interesting two-page mimeo taken from Howell's taped reminiscences is provided. The album jacket, incidentally, is extraordinarily handsome.

--Ronald C. Foreman, Jr.

BOOK REVIEW

JAZZ:

New York: NEW ORLEANS 1885-1963, by Samuel Charters. Publications. Revised Edition, 1963. 173pp. $2.95.

Oak

"I never do hear SALTY DOG played the way they used to play it when I was coming up. Of course, some of those men was what you call specialists. SALTY DOG was the only tune they could play." (Albert Jiles, in 195h interview: JAZZ: NEW ORLEANS 1885-1963, p. 57) Samuel Charters' valuable index to the Negro musicians of New Orleans, first published in 1958, has been revised and up-dated for inclusion in the paper-back series on folk music released by Oak Publications. The revised edition brings together new biographical and historical information, cites references to New Orleans jazz in issues of The New York Dramatic Mirror for 1919, notes deaths of indexed musicians since 1958, and amends data or spellings discovered erroneous in the first edition. A valuable feature of the up-dated index is a discography of recordings made in New Orleans within recent years and released on the Icon, Riverside, and Atlantic labels. Textual materials are indexed by name of musician, band, halls, theaters, Delta area cities and towns, and song titles.

cabarets,

A. L. LLOYD by John Black

Certainly the most distinguished member of the Campus Folksong Club this year is John Black, George A. Miller Distinguished Professor of Economics. A visitor from Oxford, Professor Black brings to our campus not only the highest standards of British scholarship, but an intense involvement in the substance of folksong as well. He is a performer in his own right, and has spent the past eight months enhancing our folksings with his unaccompanied English, Irish and Scottish ballads. No stranger to the folksong-club movement, Professor Black is Senior Member of the Oxford Heritage Club, CFC's most distinguished British counterpart. ?When A.L. Lloyd came to Urbana we turned to Professor Black almost by reflex action and asked him to review Lloyd's performance.

The Club had the good fortune this month to hear an informal concert by A.L. Lloyd, en route from the University of California (Los Angeles) Folk Festival to another in North Carolina. Most of the concert consisted of unaccompanied songs, the remainder of Australian stories. He seems to have an inexhaustible supply of the stories; I have heard him round out several talks and concerts in this way without repeating one. The songs compensate by their variety of sources and rhythms for their uniform medium. A.L.L. says he sings unaccompanied from necessity, and will not admit to being able to play any instrument. On his records he is often accompanied, though many of his songs are hard to accompany. As a former shanty-man (on film, at least), he did not need the amplification which was not working. Four of his songs were Australian. Two of these, "Queensland Drovers," a travelogue of the Queensland Bush, to the tune of "Spanish Ladies," and "Bluey Brink," the epic of a shearer who drank sulphuric acid with never a wink and came back for more despite the fire in his whiskers, are to be found on Outback Ballads, issued in Britain by Topic Records; I don't know if it is available here. The others were dream songs; "The Drover's Dream" catalogues outback animals, and "The Shearer's Dream" explains how much more pleasant life would be in the shearing sheds if, amongst other improvements, every one of the shearers' assistants were a girl instead of a boy. I don't know if these are recorded. A second main source of songs was the sea. "Short Jacket and WIhite Trousers" is available, together with a number of other fine sea songs by A.L.L. himself and Ewan MacColl, on A Sailor's Garland, Prestige-International 13043. I found both the words and tune of "The Handsome Cabin Boy" familiar, having heard the words to a more skittish tune on one of A.L.L.'s Topic records, and seen the tune in his book The Singing Englishman, which was printed long ago by the Workers' Music Association in Britain (I believe it is now out of print). His version of "The Maid on the Shore" was new to me. Taking the three sea songs together, the maidens beat the sailors by two to one, a record not sustained in English traditional songs.

"The Trooper and the Naid" is a jovial song, which appeared with highly modified words and slightly altered tune in the Vaughan Williams collection as "Seventeen Ccme Sunday"; in the Lloyd version, like the Irish one, the words make more sense. "With me Pit Boots On" is a miners' version of a song widespread in England; it is available, with a few more of the good ones he could not find time for here, on The Best of A. L. Lloyd, Prestige-International 13066. In these songs, and in "Three Drunken Maidens" who were in fact four by the end of the song, the maidens failed to score. Some critics indeed feel that, considered as a whole, A.L. Lloyd's songs are insufficiently moral. I believe his view of the matter is that a serious student of popular culture should be prepared to record songs on any theme people take sufficiently seriously to sing songs about it, without setting up as a censor of morals or politics, reserving only the right to select what he likes best on aesthetic grounds. The final group of songs serves as a reminder that it is not only in morals that some of the folk, in England as elsewhere, hold non-conformist views. The theme of "The Poor Pitman's Wife" is industrial discontent--I was sorry that the verse beginning "Good Morning, Lord Firedamp" somehow got left out. "The War between the Cages," of which we were given only a fragment, appears to have been written as a way of working off a feeling of grievance. The final song, "The Bitter Withy," is a country song concerning the fate of three rich lords' sons, who "drowned were all three" for refusing to play at the ball with the infant Saviour on account of his lowly birth. Religion in the English countryside was often associated with radical politics. I was glad to have the chance to hear A. L. Lloyd here, even if I have heard him sing some of his songs better on his records. I suppose the moral is that we should all go out and buy his records. If we did, the Recording Companies might make some more; I suspect they would run out of plastic before he ran out of songs.

From the editor's diary...

DOC WATSON has left town, but the electric effect he produced on our campus will linger long. Is anybody else as eager as we are to buy that Vanguard album he kept pushing? The Club sends hearty thanks to DI editor ROGER EBERT for the review he published in Saturday's Daily Illini...somehow the plaudits sound a little more kosher coming from that editor than this one, who is a little too close to the scene to be "impartial"...How could anyone stay impartial, though, after Watson's perfornance here? It was a big weekend, and the editor wants to thank the many people who kept the mechanism humming smoothly.. .CAROL BECKER, for the salad she prepared for the dinner at which the Executive Committee hosted Doc...also to SUE CALDWELL, our Social Chairman, who, along with Carol, gave yours truly a hand with the dishes after the great feed...Concert Chairman KEN PBOEN deserves a hand, not only for the fine production he arranged, but also for driving Doc up to O'Hare to catch his plane on Saturday a.m....JUDY MCCULLOH and LOUANN GREEN for opening their homes to Doc and giving him such a congenial atmosphere in which to relax and practice...Also a hand to JOHN MUCHMORE and GEORGE BRETSCHNEIDER of Knox College, who gave us a hand in the kitchen. The two of them hitchhiked all the way from Galesburg in fog and rain just to hear Doc pick and sing...LYLE MAYFIELD, for the warm appreciation he provided Doc in those practice sessions...BILL KORBUS, for his really masterful drawing of Doc that appeared on our posters...the members of the executive committee for pushing those tickets...RON AI'DERSON and his House Management staff for the capable and efficient ushering they displayed in the Lincoln Hall theater...TLACHER ROBINSON for recording the performance on those big fat stereo tapes of his...Club president JONT ALLEN for shepherding Doc around to all the places he wanted to visit...WALT LYNGE, our new Publicity Chairman, for his efficient footwork in getting the posters up and the releases submitted to the papers...JOHN SCH1IDT, for running over to Purdue and fetching Doc back to us in the truck...JOHANNA BOWEN for sitting in the cage and selling tickets...VIC LUKAS, for the delicious dinner he prepared. ...and DOC WATSON, for a concert of the finest order; we found Doc to be a first-class musician, and this we had expected. What we found pleasantly surprising was Doc's kindness, gentleness, good humor. Somehow the lined and leathery face that had stared out from the record album covers, the enormous seated figure we had seen on so many stages, the deep and somehow sad voice familiar to us from records and concerts--all these suggested a grim man, a sad man. And that is why we were so pleasantly surprised by Doc's constant joking, his high spirits, and his clever mimicing of himself and of the character the professional folksy-wolksies want him to be. Concert patrons noticed this immediately from Doc's remarks. He continued in the same spirit after the concert and thus managed to endear himself to his hosts to such an extent that we were honestly sad to see him go...and God-proud to have him stay with us for a day. It's a pleasure to share the same earth with such people. FACES IN THE CROWD: University Bursar C.C. DELONG, a traditional music fan when most of us were still unborn, enjoying the Doc Watson concert from a seat down front...Professor JOHN BLACK of Oxford, on loan to our University for a year. Professor Black is a serious student of the Anglo-Celtic ballads when he's not professing economics...JOHN AND BETTY HARFORD, the country singers and instrumentalists from WHOW at Clinton who entertained us all so well at the third

anniversary folksing in February...THE VAPPY V-LL.EY BOYS, along with their wives, who dropped in from Danville with old friends PAUL and SUNNY DAVIS... which reminds us to ask the DAVISES where they've been hiding these last few months... LYLE MAYFIELD (he works Friday nights) and CONSPICUOUS BY THEIR ABSENCE: faculty advisor ARCHIE GREEN, who had to be in New York over the weekend. Executive Committee members informed Archie by wire of the great success the concert enjoyed...Happily, both of the absent ones sent their wives to the concert; LOUANN'I GREEN and DORIS MAYFIELD both seemed to enjoy the festivities as much as Hope you all had a good the rest of us, wandering husbands notwithstanding. time too.

Club menbers who cannot get down to the campus for a peek at the bulletin boards and/or the University Calendar might do well to watch the "Calendar" published each night in the Champaign-Urbana Courier, where notices of our events are being inserted two days prior to the actual business. As this is written Vic Lukas is still rehearsing his jug band for its Stellar attraction is Simon Stanfield blowing rhythm on an long-awaited debut. enormous stone jug--that is, he will be blowing rhythm if he doesn't crack his a bigger job than it looks to get sound to come out of that It's lip first. thing...orders are starting to come in for THE HELL-BOUND TRAIN, the Club's third LP record, featuring Glenn Ohrlin at his concert here last winter...still available: THE PHILO GLEE AND MANDOLIN SOCIETY and GREEN FIELDS OF ILLINOIS...see BRUCE HECTOR, our record production chairman, at the half-time ceremonies in the hall next folksing...Anybody catch Walter Cronkite's TUWENTIETH CENTURY teevee show on Sunday, March 22? Cronkite narrated the story of John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, with effective background music provided by Joe Glazer singing DARK AS A DUNGEON; Glazer, a longtime singer of industrial folksongs, was featured here in 1961, one of the first artists brought here by the newly formed CFC. POSTSCRIPT to the Doc Watson concert: Doc was charmed to find those three University of Chicago students standing in the rain to shake his hand when he arrived at Lincoln Hall. Makes us wonder if they followed him to Syracuse when he left here...Tip to Club members who'd like to get more active but don't know what to do: try grabbing a tape recorder and collecting music or lore of the residents of your home town. You might start with some of the old-timers in your own family. ý-hy not a session with JUDY MCCULLOH or ARCHIE GREEN in the Library of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations; they've been at it for years. Folklore is everywhere, but somebody has to be there to dig it out. Those who live in rural areas will have especially good luck...For those who just want to listen to the important finds in traditional music CFC maintains an archive of tapes and discs, and an Archives Chairman to handle them; he is RICH CHARLETON out in Orchard Downs. Give him a call at 332-2806. CLUB PERFORMERS getting active in the surrounding community, working at parties, benefits, etc.: LYLE MAYFIELD and wife DORIS charmed the Woman's Club

at Piper City last month and did a short program for the teen-agers at Holy Cross to be done by Lyle: a mother-and-daughter banquet up Church recently...still in Forrest this coming May...the editor, plus VIC LUCKAS, PRESTON MARTIN and The girls were gig for the girls at INDECO in March. JOHN MUNDAY did a little holding their Cultural Night, and evidently expanded their definition of culture to embrace our genre... CONDOLENCES to VIC LUKAS, who put his thumb in his pocket and pulled out--not a plum--but a pencil, with the lead trapped under his fingernail. University Health Service had to remove Vic's thumbnail, thus ruling out any fancy guitar picking for the nonce...Vic is showing the strain too; best wishes for a fast recovery...Welcome home to JARVIS RICH, back in circulation after six months in the Coast Guard...Bad news for local fans of tradition: LYLE and DORIS MAYFIELD, after much soul-searching, have decided to move back to Greenville, Illinois. Lyle has received a job offer in the newspaper plant where he began his career as apprentice printer 15 years ago. The move will not halt Lyle's budding career as folklorist and collector, however; he is planning a complete expedition to collect all the music in Bond County, one of our states most fertile musical areas. JUDY MCCULLOH will assist Lyle in the mammoth project. The good side of the Mayfield story; Lyle and Doris will be free to put in appearances at our folksings on Friday nights...something they couldn't do when they were living in Champaign, where Lyle had a night-shift-job at the Courier. Good luck to all the little Mayfields too.

TREASURER'S REPORT Something new appears in the treasurer's report in this issue of Autoharp. After much work and many hours of discussion, the Executive Committee has approved an operating budget for the 1964 calendar year which appears on the following page. I personally feel that Club members can look to the budget with great pride since it vividly illustrates the tremendous growth of the Club in the last three years. I wonder how many other campus student organizations have an operating budget of approximately $2800 for a school year.

Financial Report Period covered:

3-9-64 to 4-21-64

Cash on hand 3-9-64 Deposits Total cash on hand Expenses Cash on hand 4-20-64

$792.27 674.00 1466.27 988.52 $487.75 W. T. Becker Treasurer

APPROVED BUDGET Period Covered: 1 Feb., 1964 - 1 Feb., 1965

1ITTEE

, Archives a. reprints b. record purchase . Autoharp .

Concert a. planning b. membership concerts (4)

EXPENSES ALLOC TED APPROPRIATED

$100.00 50.00

INCOME

$110.00

360.00

$360.00

00.00

30.00 575.00

30.00

00.00

5.00

00.00

. Externil Affairs a.

.

.

exchange concerts

70.00

b. misc. expenses

5.00

Folksing a. special events b. misc. expenses

15.00 5.00

5.00

5.00

5.00

House Management

00.00

. Membership a. membership identification b. misc. expenses

10,00 5.00

5.00

. Publicity

95.00

95$.00

00.00

5.00

5.00

00.00

700.00

.

Radio & Television

•

Record Production a. new issue (500 copies) b. repressing (300 copies)

775.00 160.00

Seminar a. seminars b. planning

250.00 15.00

•

1550.00 300.00

00.00 15.00

, Social a. dinners for guests b. receptions

25.00 90.00

* Tape, P.A. & Photo a. photo materials b. tape c. equipment purchase d. misc. expenses

10.00 50.00 100.00 5.00

10.00 50.00

5.00

5.00

175$.00

20.00

20.00

00.00

$2835.00

$630.00

$2835$.00

Workshop Elected Officers

00.00 15.00 00.00

5.00

W. T. Becker,

Trs.

JIM GOODWIN'S APPLES IN THE SUMMEFT IME GUITPAR SOLO WITH TABLATURE

by Vic Lukas

Vic Lukas now occupies the post of External Affairs Chairman of the Campus Folksong Club, a position he has used several times to our Club's advantage by arranging exchanging of artists with such institutions as Knox College and Indiana University. His real forte is not administrative, however, but musical; he is the leader of Champaign-Urbana's first jug band--The Hill Street Pneumatic Syncopators--and has worked with his guitar as an old-timey musician, a Bluegrass performer and a blues singer. He is a competent historian and theorist in those same fields and, as we learn in this article, possesses acute powers of observation and explanation when dealing with the often complex problems of documenting and transmitting traditional instrumental styles. We hope our readers benefit from the work Vic put into this study of an Illinois classic. During the collecting period for our Club's second record, Green Fields of Illinois, Jim Goodwin of Urbana demonstrated the above-titled guitar piece, which was subsequently included on the record. This number was considered significant for several reasons--one of them being that Jim obtained the tune by trading away his two guinea pigs to the song's owners in return for the guitar lesson needed to complete his study of it-but mainly because the right-hand playing style and the tuning of the guitar are unusual among traditional folk musicians. Jim remembers having been taught this tune by the Baily sisters (who became the proud owners of the guinea pigs), whom he now believes live near Havana, Illinois. This rendition is particularly noteworthy, in that the picking style requires that the third, or ring, finger of the right hand be in almost constant use, a common enough feature of classical guitar styles, but rather unusual in American country picking. The guitar is tuned like a five-string banjo in "C" tuning, as follows: 1st. 2nd. 3rd. 4th. 5th. 6th.

string string string string string string

D B G C G G

The fifth and sixth strings are tuned to the same note, although in this piece the sixth string is never used. (tablature follows)

tablature (cont'd)

Apples in the Summer-time,

1 21

11

3o

20 3 l f-^

.

^

/ /

lo

lo 2o 3o

2 3o

12 12 1Z12 2 2 2 2 3,-, 30 33o

1u 2o 3o

. --

^

-

^

-. \

third second first 4 -

___2)

12

2 3o

3o _40

3 o

11 2C 30 .42

1

1

2,

2/ 30 3 2.

lI 20 3 o 5-51

2 3 3 o

12.

2!

30 330

1

1

2C

20 3 o

30 5 C"

10 1

12

2

5(--5)

third

lo0 le

2 20 2v 2v 3J 3 3; 30..

30 4,

1,

1i 2 30 5 .0

20

1 I11 1

12. third

21 2, 21

2

3o

30 _

.52_

second first thumb

second

30 3 0

.

first thumb

1) Mr. Goodwin plays these two pickup beats with a quick downward brush of the index finger, followed immediately by an upward brush of the same finger. 2) In the third repetition of these three bars they are replaced by:

1

30 3

12 3o

1 30

Mr. Goodwin commented that the ideal way of playing these three bars would be: 2

21 3o

30 In written cording cording numbers

21

3o

37

3o

30

the tablature the main (typed) number represents the string; the handsubscripts represent the fret. The notes are spaced horizontally acto the beat or half-beat upon which they are played and vertically acto the finger with which they are played. A slide is represented by in parentheses.

(Editor's note: Enthusiasts who wish to learn this song on their guitars will be materially aided if they first purchase and listen to a copy of our record N- CFC 201, Green Fields of Illinois. Price to members is $3.50, to non-members--$4.00. Visit our next concert and buy it in person or send a check to: CAMPUS FOLKSONG CLUB 284 ILLINI UNION URBANA, ILLINOIS

61801

IHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM THE GUITAR? by Lyle Mayfield

What CAN you expect from the guitar? Well, to begin with you CAN'T expect miracles I The guitar is not going to turn you into a cowboy, a folksinger or even a good entertainer. Music is what you make of it, not what it makes of you. Music can be a key to open many doors, but there is no assurance that it will. A brush, an easel and paints do not make a painter or artist. There is one small requirement to consider--talent. In the opinion of this writer, musical talent is a gift. It cannot be developed if it does not already exist in the person involved. You either have syncopation in your body, or you don't. Music needs two kinds of participants-those who listen and those who make it. One is just as important as the other. Without audience reaction many musicians just can't perform. Applause is like dope to an addict or insulin to a diabetic. Without appreciation the talents of many good musicians and entertainers would waste away and die. Many people mistake this need of appreciation for egotism and conceit. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you find that you just don't have what it takes to be a participant in music, don't give up. Decome a good listener and learn to appreciate what the other fellow is doing. He needs you much more than you realize. The above paragraph is not meant to discourage that majority of people who do have a talent. A lot of us can make music of one form or another. The point we are trying to bring out is this: Learn your limitations and stay within them. If you are not given the talent to make music, learn to be a good, receptive listener and make your contribution that way. If you have the talent, the next requirement is desire. How often have people said, "Oh, I'd give anything if I could play an instrument." Yet they won't give the one thing they have most of--time. If you are interested in guitar you can expect to either give some time to it or not learn to play. The great guitarist, Chet Atkins, was once credited with saying that he spent as much as eight hours learning one passage to one tune. A great violinist once said that he never performed a number on stage until he had practiced it at least one hundred times in private. As a lad learning the guitar, yours truly can remember spending as much as four hours locked alone in a bedroom struggling to learn one chord. If you would "give anything" to play, be prepared and expect to give time. Don't expect all your friends and acquaintances to be as thrilled as you are when you do finally put together enough chords to get through a melody. What with Hi-Fi, stereo, radio, television, tape recorders and movies, the average listener isn't particularly interested in the strugglings of an amateur guitarist. Nothing is more personally disgusting to me than a half-prepared musician who grabs an instrument at a party, completely disregards the conversations and feelings of others and stands in the middle of the room twanging away on two or three chords while screeching out some mcntorDus melody that everyone in the room has heard a jillion times before. A good motto that any up-coming musician should follow is this: "Practice at home, Perform in public."

Unless you arc a musical genius, you can expect progress to come slow. You are teaching your fingers to go through unfamiliar patterns while at the same time your brain is having to distinguish chord changes and transmit them to your It is remarkable what the brain is capable of fingers in the form of formations. accomplishing, but don't expect miracles. If all this sounds as if we are trying to be discouraging, you are right. To us music is a serious subject, not a toy to be picked up and with at random. Only those who have an honest desire to participate in do do. If we have disillusioned you then your efforts should be turned another direction. Leave music for those who have the time, the desire talent to give.

absolutely played it should in and the

For those who are interested enough to stay with our writings, next month we hope to start talking about actual playing and handling of the guitar. If you have a question about the guitar drop us a line and we'll try to answer it in an upcoming article. We don't pretend to know all the answers but we'll at least make an effort to find someone who does.

Natalia Maree Belting. Early History of Urbana-Champaign to 1871. University of Illinois, M.A. thesis, 1937.

Cabin raisings, the irregular religious meetings, weddings, huskings, shooting-matches, and quilting bees for many years provided the chief social life of the community. After the county seat had been located C18331, though the settlers of the Big Grove may have been disgusted and suspicious of the methods used to secure the new town on the banks of the Boneyard, they held a great celebration on the Fourth of July. Small timber and underbrush was cleared away near where the yet unmarked Water street and Race street were to intersect, a plank floor laid, and a fiddler hired. Added to the families from the Big Grove region, it is likely that the Jacob Smiths, Gabriel Rices, Matthew Buseys, Mijamin Byers, and John G. Robertsons were among those who jigged to the fiddle's strains. (p. 22)

The Soliders' Aid Society held a festival on New Year's Eve, 1861 and raised $85. After the supper the men, and finally the women, besieged Mr. Bailey to let them use the hall to dance in. For a long time he refused, but when the women entreated him he gave up. Several of the young men hurried out to find a fiddler, but the only one around had already gone to bed. Undaunted they got him up and brought him back to the hall where he fiddled until dawn. Those who didn't dance because of religious scruples sat on the side-lines and kept time with their feet. The first inauguration of Lincoln was celebrated with a grand ball at the Doane House, and not until the roosters were crowing did the dancers start homeward. As a matter of fact, dances that lasted until daylight seemed to be the rule rather than the excpetion in the days when Champaign was young.

NOTES ON THE CHICAGO SCENE:

THE WATSON-MONROE CONCERT AND LESSER EVENTS

by Paul J. Sampson

Paul Sampson, now a resident of Chicago and former student at Illinois, shares with the editor the rather dubious distinction of having once been a fireman on diesel locomotives. He shares the even more dubious distinction of being an urban re-creator of traditional music, and, sticking his neck in the noose even further, doubles as a commentator on the trends in the field today. This is his second appearance in our pages.

Those of you who have discovered the excellent reissue of Bill and Charlie Monroe records from the 1930's (RCA Camden CAL-74h) know that Bluegrass has long, thirsty taproots extending far beyond the 19h5 Bluegrass Boys. The same intensity of delivery and instrumental virtuosity that sets modern Bluegrass apart from the common ruck of present-day country music was already present in the performances of the Monroe Brothers. Chicagoans (and a few adventurous Champaign residents, notably Bill and Carol Becker and Jarvis Rich) had a referesher course in the basic fact on April 11, when Doc Watson appeared with Bill Monroe and his band at the University of Chicago. Monroe has made a number of college appearances now, and is learning what college audiences expect of him. His group stayed as far away as possible from county-fair clich6s ("Nawo yere's an old tyune we all know an' love..."). I don't mean that the program was weighted toward old-timey or traditional material; the Bluegrass Boys played mostly Bluegrass standards (including "Rawhide"). But the approach was decidedly different from the one Monroe uses at, say, the Brown County (Indiana) Jamboree. College audiences for Bluegrass are interested in instrumental skill above all, and Monroe kept them happy with such favorites as "Panhandle Country," played as quickly and cleanly as anyone could ask. This is all well and good, but I think that the same imbalance is present here that obtains when one hears all his country music on records. Just as no author should be quoted out of context, no product of folk culture should be removed entirely from its background. God forbid that campus concerts should cease, but I think it's important to remember that when we hear Monroe or the Stanley Brothers on a concert stage (or on an LP record), we are yanking them like a sore tooth out of their native habitat. If folklore is to avoid the charge of studying isolated aspects of a culture like an extinct butterfly preserved in amber, it had better come to terms with the trappings of commercial country music and the other less attractive (to us city folks) facets of folk culture, seed commercials and promotions for gold bibles and all. Folklore, in my jaundiced view at least, is anthropology or nonsense. The miniscule criticism aside, the April 11 concert was superb. The Bluegrass was instrumentally and vocally superior, and Doc Watson was...there, by God, and enough said. Doc is never even mildly disappointing.

From fiddle tunes on the guitar (try it some time) to his own reworking of Dock Boggs' classic "Country Blues," he worked out a serene partnership with his instruments that forbids one to say he has "mastered" them: he never attempts to overpower the guitar or whip hell out of the banjo, and he never lets his playing disappear entirely beneath his voice. Any recital of Doc's instrumental virtues--command of different styles, intricate counter-melodic accompaniments, "clean" picking--would be incomplete without a mention of his understanding of dynamics, which is unapproached by any other instrumentalist with whom I am familiar. For old-timey buffs, the point of the whole concert was the pairing of Bill Monroe with Doc Watson as a reincarnation of the Monroe Brothers of the middle Thirties. While the two departed occasionally from the Bill and Charlie canon (e.g., "East Tennessee Blues," which I don't believe the Monroes ever recorded--discophiles please check and correct), they maintained the spirit of the best brother act in old-time music. One real treat was the combination of two of the strongest voices in country music. Both Monroe and Watson are at their best at full volume, all stops out, and that was the way they performed in Mandel Hall. In a way, it was eerie to hear them together. True, Doc plays better guitar than Charlie Monroe, but more things than one recalled the original team. First, Watson as an accompanist has the same approach that Charlie did--the guitar is almost a second lead instead of a mere rhythmic backup. (For recorded examples, listen to Bill and Charlie on the Camden reissue, or Riley Puckett on the University of Minnesota Gid Tanner disc.) Second, vocally, Watson's strong lead is so well balanced by Monroe's hard, masculine tenor that one can't help recalling the same combination in the mid-Thirties recordings. For many listeners, the concert was marred by the appearance of Monroe's daughter Melissa, who sang two country torch ballads. Now, it is my personal belief that Melissa's voice is the sonic equivalent of fingernails across a blackboard, but this was no excuse for the ill-mannered way in which the audience received her. As I said, you have to take the bible commercials with the Bluegrass broadcasts, and the raucous girl singers with the Scruggs picking. And she sang only two songs, after all. So much for the Concert Scene in Chicago...a miscellaneous note or two: Warren Leming, charter Club member and extremely slick young banjo picker, is currently working with Ray Tate and the Urban Renewal Boys in what must surely be Chicago's best Bluegrass group. Ray is head of guitar instruction at the Old Town School of Folk Music (otherwise known as Folk City; Ray is otherwise known as Sol Folk); the group is a reincarnation of one of the same name which graced our city in 1961, before Warren Went For a Soldier. Warren has been sprung, and the band is back in business. A new publication, The American West, a quarterly published by the Western History Association, has a folklore article in its first issue (Winter 1964). "Western Folklore and History" by Walker D. Wyman is a highly amusing piece and, whatever its value to the historian, is well worth your reading time. The magazine, by the way, is beautifully designed, with excellent layouts and really intelligent typography (Doyle Moore please note). As a professional editor, though, I feel constrained to note that the proofreading, as we say in the editing game, ain't so hot. At any rate, the article cited above is highly readable and furnished some support for my thesis that folkore is primarily an anthropological study, which can furnish to the historian maps of otherwise uncharted countries. Treasure maps, at that. Anyway, some of the stories in the piece are not only funny but salacious; see if the library has a copy.

LETTER FROM GLENN OHRLIN

Glenn Ohrlin was presented by our Club last December at a membership concert, has since gone on to cut his first record on the CFC label. Proprietor of a ranch outside Mountain View, Arkansas, he was on the the featured performers at this year's Rackensack Folk Festival. Since falling in with our Club he has kept us constantly informed by mail, and because of his easy-rambling and droll epistolary style we herewith present one of his rocont letters.

Mountain View, Ark. March 23, 1964

Dear Judy (McCulloh), Thanks for the Autoharp and other material. I'd also like the paper your friend tEllen Stekert2 wrote on "snake handling cults." Would there be any tapes of that sort of thing? If I learn what its all about maybe I'll jump up and preach a sermon on the subject and surprise everyone. Say'. When you and Doyle and Harlan come down we'd be glad if any or all of you stayed with us. We still have the pre-historic country style plumbing which we hope to correct before summer but I think we can make you comfortable just the same. I've been working on the bunk-house so am quite busy all day. They are also having a big revival every night at West Richwoods Mennonite Church. I been a couple times. Guess I'll go tonight and find out what else I do wrong. You asked about "Put Your Little Foot" and the dances etc. etc. I first heard it and saw the dance also at a cow-country dance held in a one room school-house somewhere on the East Side of the Superstition Mtns in Arizona late in 1943. This was North of Florence Jct. on a gravel road a long way from the high-way. I was working on a ranch belonging to the Clemons Cattle Co. of Chandler Ariz. (The ranch I was on was near this school. Chandler Ariz was the home of the Clemons also Florence Ariz. The Clemons had many ranches in Ariz and Old Mexico.) I went with the ranch manager and his wife and son and daughter in law. All the people were ranchers and their familys and Cowboys. I remember that some miners from either Globe or Miami showed up and after the dance there was a great fight. I remember standing near the porch after the dance and seeing my bosses son knock one of the miners plumb off the porch. All the non-fighters seemed to enjoy it very much. "Put Your Little Foot" or "Varsuviannal' is the only tune that I remember from this particular occasion. And later at other places in Arizona I always took note and listened when it was played. I also heard it several times at Kinsleys Ranch between Tucson and the Mexican border. I think the place was called Amado. I don't remember what instruments they had besides the fiddle and guitar but the music of the Blairs here in Ark. is faintly reminiscent of it. Kinda simple, kinda nice. I remember once at Kinsleys ranch a Mexican cowboy from Calif., Johnny Quijada took great delight in dancing that number. I knew Johnny real well and he sang a lot, both Mexican and hill-billy. I have met people from New Mexico and Colorado who also knew this music and dance. I thought of two more singing cowboys that were good friends of mine and we sung at each other many times. Walt Larue of North Hollywood, a cartoonist, rodeo rider and movie stunt man and Jack Smith who is now married to a farm in

VMnnesota. This is not the colored Jack Smith in the saddle brone pic of me at Bartlett but another. This Jack Smith that sang had a little radio program in Minn. I hooked up with him at Yankton South Dakota in h9 and went to Walnut Grove Minn. rodeo from there. I camped with him about a week and we made lots of music. Jack sung a lot like Ernest Tubbs and about the same songs. But he did sing cowboy songs too. Especially when just visiting. Jack also rode broncs and bulldogged. I'm getting off on a tangent here but I thought of an old talking blues I heard in the Phillipines in Sept 45. Well they said we're going on patrol, So I jumped out of my foxhole. But then I heard a rifle crack, And you should have seen me balling the jack. Runnin through rice paddies - skinnin up palm trees They wont get me . Thats all I remember of the "G.I. Talking Blues." There are probably others. was one that grew in the Phillipines. I was there just a few weeks.

This

The tape Harlan Daniels gave me is just great. Its got Carl Sprague, Jules Allen, Mac Maclintock and Powder River Jack. When I was a kid I sent for all the saddle catalogs I could get and I remember that Jules Allen had a book of Cowboy Lore with some songs advertised in these catalogs. I never did see a copy though. I taped a sermon tonight (There was a time lapse in the middle of this letter) I taped it at 32 and played it back at 7½ but nobody seemed to think it was very funny. Oh yeah' the tape from Harlan Daniels had a song by the old cowboy actor Ken Maynard. I have seen him appear at rodeos as a trick roper and fancy shot. Never heard him sing though. The last time I saw him was at the Winnfield Louisiana rodeo in 55. Another one that made appearances at rodeos was Tex Ritter. Tex was pretty well thought of. He was great on "Rye Whiskey" (the song) and also something of a humorist. When he was on just before the bronc riding he would sing "Blood on the Saddle" for his last number. You know it goes "Oh pity the cowboy all bloody and red. For the bronco fell on him and mashed in his head." Made you fell great if you had a horse in the chute. I got Olly Gilbert to sing "Cole Younger" last Friday night. tune all messed up. But I cant sing her tune.

I got the

Here is another Pistol Holliday episode then I'll sign off -- We were at South Sioux City Neb. 49. A young man was climbing a high light pole. About half way up he fell off and when we reached him he was flat on his back. So Pistol says "You was about half way up when you fell wasn't you?" The guy just barely gasped "Yes." Pistol asked "Were you going to the.top?" The fellow says "Yes." Then Pistol said "Too bad you didn't fall from up there I"

Glenn Ohrlin

BOOKS AND RECORDS that you should know...

Preston K.

Martin

THE BLUE SKY BOYS

I am devoting this entire article to the several recent LP records now available of the Blue Sky Boys, because I feel that they were the best of the early hillbilly duets that made records.

Bill and Earl Bolick, born in Hickory, North Carolina, were, like the Monroe Brothers, raised in a rich folkmusic tradition and began their professional On June 16, 1936 they went to Charlotte, North careers on local radio in 1935. and made their first 78's for Victor, and it was during this period that Carolina they acquired their name, The Blue Sky Boys. Structurally this duet was the same as the Monroe Brothers, Bob and Mac, the Morris Brothers, etc. Bill played the mandolin and sang tenor while Earl picked the guitar singing lead or baritone. Stylistically, however, these brothers were rather unique. The instruments were played quietly and conservatively with few or no breaks between verses as contrasted to the Monroe Brothers-who considered the instrumental breaks as important as the vocals. These boys probably had the bevt voices and vocal control, and it is easy to understand that they featured vocal perfection as a trademark. They were not surpassed by any other vocal duet then or now. A particularly noticable feature is the flat to sharp slides on the end word of a phrase. Whereas the Monroe Brothers were rather rough and driving, the Blue Sky Boys radiate only smoothness and perfection as if they were effortlessly surfing along on top of a wave. Perhaps this is why they we.re content to hold to this same style throughout their musical careers.

Camden CAL-797,

Blue Iky Boys,

Bill and Earl Bolick (1964)

This album of 8 ballads and h songs is the finest and most important reissue out this year. The following numbers with recording dates are presented on this

$1.98 LP. Are You Fron Dixie? (August 1939), Down on the Banks of the Ohio (June 1936), Asleep in the Briny Deep (September 1938), Story of the Knoxville Girl (August 1937), Katie Dear (January 1238), The Butcher's Boy (February 19h0), In the Hi-lls of Roane CountyT October 1915), Sunny Side of Life (June 1936), Mary of tie .ild Moor (February 1940), Fair Eyed Ellen (October 1936), The Lightning Express (August 1939), Short Life of Trouble (October 1940). The lead song, Are You From Dixie?, was used by these boys as their radio theme song, and is the one number where the boys do show their instrumental ability during the breaks between verses. The ballads are particularly exciting

with their beautiful close harmony. Another excellent feature of this superb album is the detailed and complete liner notes written by our own Mr. Archie Green, which makes this the initial first-rate reissue in all respects to be put out by Victor on the Camden label. As with other early hillbilly groups gospel songs made up a large percentage of their repertoire. Camden states that sacred material is being reserved for a second Blue Sky Boys reissue. The sooner the better I say!

Starday SLP 205, The Blue Sky Boys: Past (1963)

A Treasury of Rare Song Gems from the

This album was the first of the Blue Sky Boys to appear on the market. It is not a reissue of old 78 rpm masters, but compiled from electrical transcription recordings. These were like big records on which a whole radio show was recorded and then played at the prescribed time, in lieu of a live broadcast, from opening theme song to closing commercial. These particular numbers were recorded in 1950 with a somewhat expanded group. When the Bolick brothers came back from the service after World War II they added a violin and bass voice to their group. This album is a pleasant mixture of ballads, songs, sacred and instrumentals as follows: The Sunny Side of Life, As Long as I Live, Nine Pound Hammer, The Longest Train I Ever Saw, Golden Slippers (instrumental), Mary of the Wild Moor, I Have Found the Way, Tugboat (instrumental), Get Along Home, The Last Letter, Black Mountain Rag (instrumental) A Picture from Life's Other Side, There's Been a Change, Row Us Over the Tide, Dust on the Bible, Turn Your Radio On. This album complements the Camden reissue and allows the student to compare Sunny Side of Life and Mary of the Wild Moor in their early and later periods. It is significant to note that by 1950 the boys had lost much of their regional accent and had become even smoother and better coordinated than ever. The cover contains a nice picture of the boys but is rather gaudy otherwise, as most Starday covers tend to be, and the album is rounded out by a brief set of notes. However, I congratulate Don Pierce of Starday for bringing out this needed folkmusic album on his mostly country music label. In August of 1963 the two brothers got together again and cut two new albums for Starday Records. The first album, SLP 257 Together Again, is somewhat of a disappointment in that the album is directed at the popular country market by the addition of drums, piano, etc. I feel that this was not the fault of the Bolick Brothers, but of Starday management. I do not recommend this record, but I do recommend the second album which just hit the market this month.

Starday SLP 269, Precious Moments with the Blue Sky Boys. This record contains: Radio Station S-A-V-E-D, Why Should You Be Troubled and Sad, Precious Moments, My God, vhy Have You Forsaken Me?, Come to the Saviour, The Promise of the Lord, The Last Mile of the Way, God is Still on the Throne, The A B C Song, Boat of Life, Whispering Hope, Beautiful.

These songs are done in a style that is similar to the post World War II period. A violin is added and occasionally a little echo chamber can be detected also. It should be pointed out that one brother lives in Georgia and the other in North Carolina, and it is a tribute to their ability that they can sound so good with so little practice and no professional work for some 12 years. The Blue Sky Boys have not yet made a personal appearance on the college folkmusic scene, but after hearing these records I think you will agree with me that the sooner they do, the better. Iy greatest desire is that the Campus Folksong Club present the Blue Sky Boys in their concert debut in the contemporary folk-music revival. Local record collectors will probably have the best luck in locating these records at Eddie Kokoefer's shop just off campus on Sixth. Ed is an old hillbilly from way back (way back in Austria that is) and he will try to have these and other important reissues available for you.

Next issue:

"Odds and Ends"

NETTLE TO TEACH HERE

The Campus Folksong Club is pleased to announce that in September Professor Bruno Nettl, musicologist and music librarian at Wayne State University in Detroit, will join the University of Illinois faculty in the School of Music. He will add his interests and talents to those of Professors Flanagan, Ringer, and Stegemeier, who have so valiantly been instructing Club members in the ways of tradition. Dr. Nettl will teach a course in musical cultures of the world, and plans to spend a good deal of time in the first semester on folk music. Dr. Nettl has taught musicology at Indiana University (where he received his degree) and at Wayne State, and from 1956 to 1958 was a visiting lecturer at the University of Kiel, in Germany. He is well known for his books: North American Indian Musical Styles, Music in Primitive Culture, Cheremis Musical Styles, Reference Materials in Ethnomusicology, and An Introduction to Folk Music in the United States, which we especially recommend to Club members. Dr. Nettl is Editor of Enthnomusicology, Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Dr. Nettl has long been interested in the role of folk music in a contemporary environment, and is sympathetic to the concerns of revival participants; we understand that he is an avid reader of Autoharp, and is looking forward to joining the Club in action. We suggest that when the time comes to arrange their fall class schedules, Club members keep Dr. Nettl's course in mind, as well as those of Professors Flanagan, Ringer, and Stegemeier.

E 1

will be at the University of Illinois May 15 and 16. e on THE CORIDO in Spanish May

He will give a

15 (Friday) at 8:00, 223 Greg Hall.

He

t a concert--"Ballads and Songs of the American Southwestt--which is and open to the public on May 16 (Saturday) at 8:00, 112 Greg Hall, as part he Club's seminar program. There is no better way to present the border ballads and songs of the American hwest than to have them sung by a man who grew up amidst the tradition.

Paredes

collected widely, and has written a book which focuses on "El Corrido de orio Cortez"; this song tells the story of a man pursued by forty fierce Texas ers all the way to Kansas before he was caught.

Paredes sings and accompanies

elf on the guitar; many of you will remember his appearance on WILL-TV in the ics and legends" program on Mexican-American border songs. Those of you who wonder what manner of man we are bringing can perhaps get notion from the dedication in his book With His Pistol in His Hand: To the memory of my father, who rode a raid or two with Catarino Garza; and to all those old men who sat around on summer nights, in the days when there was a chaparral, smoking their cornhusk cigarettes and talking in low, gentle voices about violent things; while I listened. concert, all you have to do is come,

And you can bring all your

r

mnds,

r

singer and will give us a first-rate introduction to a very special

since they do not need tickets or membership cards.

ct of American traditional music. Bob McAllister

Paredes