Shady Grove Old Time Music from North Carolina, Kentucky & Virginia featuring
Kilby Snow Dock Boggs Tommy Jarrell Roscoe Holcomb
Shady Grove Old Time Music From North Carolina, Kentucky & Virginia by Jody Stecher This dvd presents musical performances that took place in the last years of four highly expressive and individualistic makers of traditional old time country music. The footage gathered here shows a personal, reflective side of the music, as well as some more exuberant or dance oriented pieces. There is a strong blues flavor throughout. Although Kilby Snow, Dock Boggs, Tommy Jarrell, and Roscoe Holcomb played vernacular music that in some ways was typical of the regions in which they spent their whole lives, they also were at times astonishingly inventive. Their influence has been very far reaching, extending far beyond their communities and affecting the minds and works of the makers of mainstream popular music as well as the playing of far-flung old time music practitioners. Eric Clapton has called Roscoe Holcomb his favorite singer. In 1962 John Cohen made a documentary art film called The High Lonesome Sound about Holcomb and his milieu. Several years later Holcomb’s recording of Single Girl was used in the commercial film Zabriskie Point. Roscoe also appeared (along with Tommy Jarrell, Mike Seeger, and others) in a film made in the late 1970s by Carrie and Yasha Aginsky called Homemade American Music. Bob Dylan has acknowledged his awe and respect for Dock Boggs. In a new book dealing with Dylan’s “basement tapes” entitled Invisible Republic, author and historian Griel Marcus has written an entire chapter on Dock Boggs in which he considers Boggs to be no less than a “moral anchor” of American vernacular music, his music the ultimate depth. And in 1964 Jerry Garcia had a turtle named Dock Boggs! Tommy Jarrell unwittingly spawned a whole subculture, a strong stylistic musical trend among certain younger old time music practitioners which favors his repertoire, rhythmic devices, and instrumental technique. Innumerable acoustic groupings and at least three punkish electric rock bands, The Horseflies, The Hix, and The Freewill Savages, derive a major part of their central aesthetic, however transformed, from aspects of Tommy Jarrell’s playing. Tommy was also the 2
subject of a Les Blank film, “Sprout Wings and Fly”, made in the early 1980s. At first glance, the obvious influence of Kilby Snow seems to be limited to a small but enthusiastic international coterie of autoharp players. On closer inspection it can be said that from one (slightly mystical) perspective his influence has been the most pervasive, and that his is perhaps the highest accomplishment: While the Holcomb, Jarrell, and Boggsian versions of old time standards are generally recognized -and emulated- as such, some of Kilby Snow’s personal settings and recastings of old songs are now widely taken to be the standard versions. It could be said that Kilby Snow (or a selection of his classic song versions) has attained union with Anonymous. For the purposes of this dvd booklet, “Old Time Music” means the music that has been made for the last two centuries in and around the mountain regions of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and adjoining states. But it is more than that and it has never really been confined to Appalachia or even to the south. In the last quarter of the 20th century the term has also been applied to a highly rhythmic ensemble music that incorporates some old time music elements and whose players – like those of bluegrass, traditional jazz, or blues – may and do live anywhere. It is easy to distinguish old time music from bluegrass because the parameters of the latter are so clearly delineated. Old time music includes a broader variety of styles, practices and attitudes. It is widely and wrongly believed, however, that one of the differences is that bluegrass musicians improvise while old time musicians do not. Careful scrutiny of the musical performances on this dvd will reveal that the musicians are constantly spinning variations and virtually never repeat themselves. These spontaneous changes are very, very subtle however – and that is typically old time. One could call this music “folk music” and not be wrong but few would agree. “Folk music”, nowadays, has come to mean the stylistically unrooted, confessional creations of singer/songwriters, sung to the accompaniment of a piezoelectronically amplified round hole guitar. One could call it “country music” and not be wrong, but that term suggests the “Hat Acts” of the Country Music industry. One difference between Country Music and country music, by which I mean music which has been made and 3
Tommy Jarrell & Lily Scott, circa 1917, Round Peak, North Carolina From the collection of Ray Alden
listened to by inhabitants of non-urban America, is the relative absence of glitz and stardom in the latter. If Kilby Snow were a Country Musician he’d pay more attention to having his teeth fixed and hiding his blind eye behind dark glasses or a low slung hat than to improving the expressive potential of his autoharp. It’s not that Kilby and the other musi4
cians on this dvd were not aware of or desirous of an audience- you certainly don’t put your name in big letters on your instrument, as Kilby Snow did, if you want to go unnoticed – but the priorities are considerably different. Within the genre that can be called old time music there is an element of the values of entertainment of years gone by: just watch Clark Kessinger on the dvd “Old Time Music From The Newport Folk Festival” – but more strong is the ethos of making music for oneself and those very close. And the music often goes deeper than entertainment. It seems that all four musicians featured here made music primarily to satisfy an inner need. It was the need to made music, not the need to be on the stage, that was primary in these men. None of them makes much of an effort during the act of music making to get the listener to like them, adore them, or in some way approve of them. Perhaps the words “old time music”, which are sometimes used and embraced as a regional or cultural or tribal emblem, refer equally to a psychological reality as to a historic one. A treatise on the music of the Chinese string instrument the ch’in (or qin) sheds light on the notion of “old time”. The italics are mine: “When the vulgar sound can not enter and when one is imbued with grand elegance, the tone will not compete to charm, instead, it will become ancient. The fingering will not descend to popular music, its tone will be ample, gentle and generous, rid of any affectation and imprinted with antique elegance. A small chamber will be transformed into a valley hidden in the high mountain, listening to the cold stream and the murmuring wind under the old trees, one is far away from the mundane world with a liberated mind”. These words were written by XU Qingshan in 1673 describing an attitude and a situation quite different from that of the musicians on this dvd. Still, they help one to understand. Elegance is not the first word that will come to everyone’s mind when listening to the rough textures of some of these performances. Yet I do find Tommy Jarrell’s Cripple Creek (a “cold stream”?) and Dock Boggs’s Pretty Polly to be “imprinted with antique elegance “ The roots of the music lie in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Africa. There may also be a Native American component. There is also the effect and the reflection of the natural world in old time music. The influence of nature and the local terrain cannot be ignored. The difference, for instance, 5
between the circular music of Tommy Jarrell who belonged to the rounded hills of the Blue Ridge and the angular music of Roscoe Holcomb who lived in the harsher terrain of East Kentucky is not unlike the difference between their homelands. Although there is an informal chain of transmission of musical values and practices the music is not unchanging. There has been evolution and devolution and just plain neutral change. Outstanding musicians like the ones on this dvd have always engaged in the creative recasting of the familiar. It is a positive virtue in old time music for a line of verse or melody to be borrowed from an older piece of music and be woven -whole or reshaped-into something new. Authenticity is valued and that means having one’s own style while retaining the old time flavor. Old time music becomes authentic not in the mimicry of a static received tradition but in the process of absorption, assimilation,—leading to authentically possessing and knowing, and then putting forth – in personal terms – what has been received, assimilated, known, and possessed –within certain parameters, which may gradually change over time.
Kirk McGee, Roscoe Holcomb & Eck Robertson, 1965
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Photo by David Gahr
Kilby Snow Kilby Snow, Nottingham, PA 1961 Photo by Mike Seeger
John Kilby Snow was born on May 28, 1905 in Grayson County, Va, an extraordinarily musical territory just above North Carolina. The family soon migrated across the border where young Kilby won the title of Autoharp Champion Of North Carolina before he was six. Is this starting to sound like The Ballad of Davy Crockett? Read on - his story is about to sound like John Henry and The Blind Fiddler too. In the early 1920s Kilby was blinded in his left eye by flying debris, a little piece of steel or rock. He was working in a mine as a driller’s helper, turning the steel bit between hammer blows, when the accident occurred. He travelled around the mountain states for several years with an itinerant music, dancing, and magic show and by the end of the 1920s, settled down and raised a family. He worked at a variety of jobs and continued to play and develop his music over the years. In order to better express the music he was able to imagine, Kilby Snow altered his autoharps in various ways, rearranging the grouping of the chord bars, modifying the bars themselves, replacing the felts with patterns that created chords that suited his music, and even increasing the number of strings. (He is playing a converted Montgomery Ward harp on this dvd.) He made his own fingerpicks and he made his own playing technique. The picks were fashioned from a 7
Kilby & Jim Snow Photo by Mike Seeger
variety of sources including brass sheet metal and the reflectors of 1930s automobile headlights. Kilby was left handed so he played upside down and backwards. He sounded select notes on unexpected chord bars and found them with no bars depressed. He often used a characteristic ornament of approaching a melody note from below, dragging his fingerpick across several open strings and surrounding the final note with the sonic atmosphere of a chord, gotten by pushing down the chord bar of his choice. Some autoharp players achieve their sound by tuning some successive strings to the same pitch, Kilby Snow used the standard chromatic tuning, although I believe he sometimes experimented with microtonal shading on the strings that he would use for “drag notes�. These alterations were all made to facilitate the making of his highly original, expressive and often poignant music. His repertoire and style kept pace to some extent with local and national musical developments. There are echoes of bluegrass in his music and he wasn’t adverse to playing Yakety Sax on his autoharp. The performances on this dvd were filmed in Seattle Washington in 1970 when Kilby Snow was 65 years old. He died March 20, 1980.
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Troubles One of the features of Kilby Snow’s musical style is the unusual harmonization of modal melodies. This lovely pentatonic piece is a five line variant of an older three line song called Red Rocking Chair. I suspect Kilby made it himself. It certainly suits his singing style. The poignancy of the “four chord” and the pathos in the singing of Troubles makes an interesting contrast to Dock Boggs’s famous Sugar Baby, recorded in 1927, a more stark, mysterious, and archaic sounding rendition of what is really the same melodic material. Cindy This is done in typical Grayson County style, with the “Get Along Home” (or “Come On Home”) starting out on the first beat-in contrast to the (newer?) form in which the phrase starts before the downbeat. I went down to Cindy’s, She’s standing in the door, Shoes and stockings in her hand, Feet all over the floor. Come on home Cindy, Cindy. Come on home. Come on home Cindy, Cindy. Down in Rockingham.
Shady Grove I first heard of Kilby Snow as “the guy with the unusual melody to Shady Grove”. His version turns out to be the same pentatonic Shady Grove known all over Appalachia and beyond -with the tonic note taken to be one step low. The shift of the tonic anchor transforms the song without actually changing the tune. Kilby is playing Shady Grove in D. Were he to play and sing the very same pitches and put a E drone behind it instead of the harmonic accompaniment which places it in D ,we’d hear the more familiar melody. Put another way, Kilby’s scale is 1.2.3.5.6 and the scale of the more familiar Shady Grove is 1 2 4 5 7b
Chicken Reel There is some controversy about Kilby Snow’s picking technique. He always maintained that his index finger only moved upward. He appears to be moving in both directions 9
here, but it might be to catch the lower strings with his thumb. What do you think?
Two Timing Blues A blues stream has been flowing into old time music for some time now. Blues is often thought of as more emotive than old time music. I find this puzzling and I have always been baffled by the not uncommon depiction of old time singing as “expressionless and emotionally flat”. Does this performance seem that way to you.? Expression of feeling is so central in old time music. What I see is the absence of theatrics.
You Are My Flower This was one of the signature pieces of the famous early professional old time country performing and recording group, The Carter Family. Maybelle Carter may have composed it during the time the band was living in Texas and broadcasting on “Border Radio”- it shows some Mexican influence. Maybelle did a bang–up job with her guitar playing on this one and Kilby out – Maybelle’s Maybelle herself with his version, adding even more descending notes between the main melodic phrases.
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Dock Boggs Doc Boggs, 1965 Photo by Mike Seeger
Moran Lee “Dock” Boggs was born on February 7, 1898, in West Norton, Wise County, Virginia., a rough and often desperate area in the southwest part of the state, not far from the Kentucky border. His parents decided to honor the doctor who delivered the baby by naming their child after him. The physician was named Moran but of course, everyone called him “Doc” and that is how the child came to be known. The spelling was an acceptable local variant. Dock’s childhood years coincided with the local transition from farming to coal mining. He began work in the mines when he was 12 years old. Most of his brothers and sisters sang and played banjo and Dock acquired his musical skills at home. However his actual technique was quite different from that of his siblings. He developed a way of picking that meshed well with his singing and that resembled certain ways of playing the guitar. As a boy, he was particularly fascinated with the music of local African-American players, and there was always a blues component in his music. In 1927 he journeyed to New York City (and to Chicago in 1929) to record what were to become classic 78 records. He played for a while in a stringband, Dock Boggs and His Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, and hoped to make 11
music a livelihood. Inner conflicts about the morality of a musician’s life, the relationship between music, alcohol, God, and the Church, and the relationship of all of these things to his marriage led him to abandon music for many years. (In Dock’s speaking segment of this dvd, his mention of domestic trouble and “King George”, refer to this time and this conflict and -I think-to Prince Edward who gave up the English throne to keep a marriage.) In 1963 Mike Seeger located Dock in Norton and presented him the opportunity to return to music and to play for a new audience. He had been working in the coal mines for over three decades. He began to tour to some extent and made three albums for Folkways records. Dock Boggs had an extraordinarily rich store of old ballads in his repertoire as well as excellent and surprising versions of newer songs and blues. His banjo technique was very consistent, utilizing certain fingers only on particular strings, whether they were picking up or down. His banjo playing is instantly recognizable. His vocal style was complex with a great variety of tonal shading, slides, shakes and tremors. This black and white segment was filmed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1966 when Dock Boggs was 68 years old. He died February 7, 1971 on his 73rd birthday.
Country Blues Country Blues is Dock Boggs’s name for an old piece of music similar to the song Darlin Cory, that was once called Hustling Gamblers. He recorded it in 1927, a haunting performance that had a second life with a remarkably far flung sphere of influence when it was included on the Harry Smith anthology which was issued on Folkways Records in the fifties. He recorded it again in 1963 for Folkways with more verses, a performance similar to the one on this dvd. While most of the old time tunes and songs can be set on just about any traditional instrument this one seems to be particularly linked to the banjo. Its long drawn out notes and elastic phrases seem to inspire unusual banjo settings and tunings (I have heard, for instance, two very fine versions on a private tape of Rufus Crisp, an irrepressible and highly listenable banjoist from Floyd County, Kentucky. On one he played two finger thumb lead in the key of D, tuned ADADE. On the other he played clawhammer style in the key of E, 12
Doc Boggs, 1965 Photo by Mike Seeger
apparently tuned ADABC ,a seemingly odd tuning for the key.) Dock Boggs has tuned, just flat of true C, – E Bb F G C, which also seems odd, until you try it. (That would be F# C G A D for the key of D) Odder still is F# C F A D, a tuning Boggs may have never used but was believed to be his main tuning by some of his 13
admirers. In 1966, Marc Silber was the proprietor of a shop and lively musical hub in New York’s Greenwich Village known as Fretted Instruments. It was like a rustic bar that served guitars and banjos instead of drinks. He had gotten word that Dock Boggs (along with Mike Seeger and Mississippi John Hurt) was going to visit his shop on a particular day. Silber and an imaginative young employee named David Grisman prepared for the event by tuning every banjo in the shop to the non-standard (and for that time and place – utterly mind boggling) tuning believed to be preferred by the legendary Boggs. They were going to pretend they believed this was the normal way banjos were tuned. The visiting dignitaries arrived in due course and Dock Boggs did inspect the banjo stock as expected. “He seemed puzzled”, said Silber when he told me this story recently, “and he retuned all the banjos! Do you know what he did for a living? He was a banker!”. Now I was puzzled. Wasn’t he a retired coal miner? “I asked him what he did for a living at home in Virginia,” Marc continued, “and he told me ‘Why, I’m a banker’”. I thought about this for a few days.-Dock Boggs a BANKER?-Dock Boggs of the U MW who lived in a little community called Needmore?.– (the name says it all) – and I thought about the tuning and wondered if the New York pranksters had got it wrong somehow. I phoned Mike Seeger who knows a zillion banjo tunings and who had been a close friend of Boggs. He laughed and said “You know I used to kid Dock Boggs about how he dressed when he travelled and performed up north. He always wore a serious looking suit and tie. I used to tell him he looked like a banker!” So I reckon that Boggs knew pretty quickly that he was being kidded and quietly, deftly, played his own little joke that took 30 years to play out.
Pretty Polly Boggs recorded a wonderful rendition of Pretty Polly in 1927. It was reissued by Brunswick in the 1940s on a ballad album called “Listen To Our Story”. (My mother had that record and I heard it hundreds of times -it was the first banjo music I ever heard.) Woody Guthrie used the tune for his anthem Pastures Of Plenty. There is an English ballad with a lot of the same words (but a different melody) called The Gosport Tragedy. 14
The banjo tuning here is E C F G C, which differs from his Country Blues tuning only in the bass string which is a step higher here. It is interesting to note that the sung melody of Pretty Polly extends down a step below the tonic to Bb. Dock is following his voice pretty closely with his banjo on this song and one might expect the banjo tuning to be the same as for Country Blues but that is not the case. The particular pentatonic mode of Pretty Polly (1 3b 4 5 7b ) which is so prevalent in Gaelic Scots and Irish music is only a few microtones away from blues tonality. The picking technique on these first two songs is similar. Both melody and what might be called “accompaniment”although it’s all of a piece- are shared by the thumb and first two fingers, with the thumb playing the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings, the 1st finger playing the 2nd string and the 2nd finger playing the 1st string. Off beats are gotten on the 1st string or 1st two strings and sometimes on the 5th or by “pinching” the 1st and 5th. Dock’s left hand technique is very economical in motion. Basically he uses one finger per fret, with the little finger doing double duty on the 4th and 5th fret.
I Hope I Live A Few More Days This melody is not of the characteristic Boggsian modal bluesy spooky type. In fact, it’s 95% the same as Where O Where Has My Little Dog Gone? ! The banjo is tuned F Bb F A C, one step below the well known standard “single C” tuning (G C G B D.) Although the first finger is sometimes picking down across several strings instead of up on one string, the banjo technique is not completely unlike that of the first two pieces in that each finger otherwise remains in its assigned territory. The first verse goes: I hope I live a few more days and God will give me grace, I’ll buy me a bottle of Ethamotel drops to wash your deceitful face. I haven’t been able to positively determine just what “Ethamotel” drops might be. It seems to have been some kind of patent medicine. There is a tuberculosis “remedy” known to have been used around Norton, Virginia called “Ethambutol”. Perhaps there is a connection. 15
Tommy Jarrell Tommy Jarrell & Fred Cockerham, 1975 Photo by Ray Alden
Thomas Jefferson Jarrell was born at the foot of Fisher’s Peak, March 1, 1901 in Surry County, North Carolina just below the Virginia border. His father, Benjamin Franklin Jarrell was a renowned fiddler and distiller. The family was Scots Irish and were actually Fitzgeralds. Tommy used to say that they used to be called “Fitsjarrell” and dropped the first syllable after several generations had passed and no one was going to have fits anymore! I’m probably making too much of his Ulster roots, since he learned from a variety of musicians, but I do see certain stylistic affinities between Tommy’s music and that of Northern Ireland. There is the tendency to finger and sing on the high side of certain notes and the resulting electric atmosphere, the perception, practice, and preference of the circular over the linear, and a particular flavor of concentration. 16
Tommy has cited numerous early musical influences including his father Ben Jarrell, Baugie Cockerham, Pet McKinney, Huston Galyen, and at least 3 separate individuals named Uncle Charlie. He started playing banjo around the age of 7 or 8 and took up the fiddle at 13. He seems to have spent most of his time as a young man making whiskey and music and imbibing both prodigiously. He married in 1923, raised a family and spent his entire working life in the employ of the Highway Department. Until the 1970s, when he began to play on a limited basis for the “outside” world, he was strictly a community musician playing for friends and family. He never bothered with contests but played many dances. Tommy made many records for the County label, one for Heritage, and is on one Folkways album as well. Through his records, occasional tours and festival appearances, and reports from visitors to his area, he gained a well deserved nationwide reputation as an outstanding musician in a class of his own. Tommy was unusually hospitable and over the years many fiddlers and banjo players came to learn from him, sometimes for an extended time and very intensively. His influence on national old time music is enormous. The only other American country musician I can think of who changed so many other musicians’ ways of playing through direct personal contact is Bill Monroe. Tommy taught a philosophy of music as well as a repertoire and technique. He was actively conscious of form, tune, phrase, line, note, beat and sub-beat and he used to tug and pull at both pitch and tempo to get a desired effect. Most of his music was based on a very localized tradition or practice around Round Peak and Fisher’s Peak. You might say his repertoire, now thought of as “trad-itional”, was sort of “trendy” in his area during his youth. He also played an older body of pieces that he considered “old time”, some of which were older versions of his standards. He remained uninfluenced by radio, records or newer trends, although he was well exposed to them. However he continued to develop as a musician in his old age, deepening and becoming ever more subtle and more surprising. He enjoyed playing with other instruments but his fiddling was complete in itself. His instrumental technique was considerable but there was nothing unique in any of the techniques themselves. Rather it was the surprising and satisfying way he combined 17
the usual techniques and used them to transform his tunes, that was so extraordinary. On the fiddle, his fingering was orderly and on the fretless banjo (and sometimes fiddle!) he used some fingernail along with the fingertips and pads to clarify the tone. He maximized the fretlessness of both instruments, sliding and placing his fingers between where frets are put. His bowing included broad sweeps, pulsing patterns, and rhythmic rocking which utilized all the strings. His banjo picking was the down-picking, “clawhammer” kind, contacting the 1st four strings with the fingernail of the first finger and catching the fifth (and second) with the thumb on the way back up. This footage was shot in Black Hawk College, Moline, Illinois, in 1976 when Tommy was 75 years old. His accompanists are Mike Seeger on guitar and Blanton Owen on fretless 5 string banjo. The banjo fingerboard is formica just as it appears to be. The accompanists are superb players in their own right and had elected to play a subdued role in the band in order to let the details of Tommy’s music shine through. Mike Seeger is one of America’s foremost Old Time musicians. He has done a huge amount of work to share his knowledge, encourage younger musicians, and to locate older traditional musicians and enable others to hear them. It’s hard to imagine a more suitable young banjo accompanist for Tommy in 1976 than Blanton Owen. He had already absorbed a lot of the Round Peak flavor and he knew enough of Tommy’s versions of the repertoire to make a perfect foil for the older musician. Blanton Owen is now the Nevada State Folklorist. Tommy Jarrell died in 1985.
Bonaparte’s Retreat Bonaparte’s Retreat is a favorite of Southern old time fiddlers who usually tune their instruments the same as Tommy has here: D D A D low to high.. The lowest string has come down a full octave below the third string while the first string is an octave above. I’ve heard a number of versions, some of them quite asymmetrical and convoluted. Most versions include some amount of “program music”. Tommy was fond of saying as he sped up the last few phrases, “that’s Bonapartes retreating!”. I’ve heard one fiddler say as he played the low strain: “Now that’s the bony part”. Some scholars trace the tune to an Irish air in triple meter called The Eagle’s Whistle. Tommy learned Bonaparte’s Retreat from his wife’s 18
uncle, Logan Lowe, who described it as “General Washington’s tune”.
Cumberland Gap One of the differences between old time music and contemporary bluegrass is that the latter has squared off the old music, which had a great variety of irregular forms and meter, into even rows of four. However, Earl Scruggs, the man who invented bluegrass banjo, grew up in an old time music environment and if you listen to Scruggs play Cumberland Gap you’ll hear that he uses the same shape as Tommy: a two line low part played twice followed by a three line high part played twice. While the shape of Tommy’s version is not unusual, the complex rhythmic detail of his execution is. Tommy has tuned his fiddle A D A D and Blanton is in a special banjo tuning particularly suited for this tune: F# B G A D. Noteworthy is Mike Seeger’s bare-handed guitar accompaniment, a style that used to be commonplace but seems to be becoming scarce.
Boll Weevil It would be a mistake to minimize the importance of singing in Tommy Jarrell’s music. While his vocal prowess was perhaps not that of Holcomb, Boggs and Snow, he was very affecting nonetheless. This song has many variants, versions and verses, and was once widespread all over the south. Note the lovely sliding neutral 7th, a signature of both blues and Gaelic musical sensibilities, that Tommy produce on both fiddle and voice. The fiddle is tuned D D A D.
Jimmy Sutton This is a popular tune in Tommy’s part of the world. Blanton gives excellent support on banjo here. He is tuned A D A C# E , 2 full steps above Dock Boggs’s banjo on I Hope I Live A Few More Days. The fiddle is tuned A D A E.
Forked Deer Rhythm and pulse were paramount in Tommy’s music. Forked Deer is a great favorite among Southern fiddlers. It appears to be derived from the Scots’ reel Rachel Rae and is often quite melodically detailed, sometimes spanning 21/2 octaves. Paul Brown, a musician who spent considerable time with Tommy Jarrell and has pondered old time music deeply, 19
offered this observation, reminiscent of XU Qing-shan: “Tommy took what is usually a notey tune and turned it into the Blue Ridge Mountains.” The fiddle is tuned A D A E for the key of D, which has been the key of these first five pieces.
Sail Away Ladies Old time musicians typically know, use, and devise a variety of tunings for their instruments. Each tuning creates a particular mood or sonic atmosphere quite distinct from other tunings. A view held by more than a few past writers on old time music is that vernacular instrumentalists deliberately mis-tune their instruments. It is based on the precarious notion that one particular tuning is universally correct (usually G C G B D for the banjo-and G D A E for the fiddle) .The special tuning that Tommy describes having learned in the road from Pet McKinney is none other than standard violin tuning: G D A E. Apparently he considered it an oddity, but worth knowing.
Cripple Creek Tommy didn’t own a banjo for much of his life, yet he was possibly even better on the banjo than on fiddle. I say this because he drew a deep beautiful tone from literally any banjo while his fiddle tone wouldn’t please all listeners. (His instrument was nothing to write home about and he rosined his bow from a large hunk of rough tree resin that he gathered himself). While his fiddle tone was raw and edgy, smoother professional bluegrass fiddlers like Kenny Baker and Art Stamper openly admired his playing and were among Tommy’s visitors. Cripple Creek is considered by many able musicians to be too hackneyed to be worthy of their attention. Tommy Jarrell turned it into a rolling thing of beauty. The banjo is tuned to an open A chord: A E A C #E.
Breakin’ Up Christmas Breakin’ Up Christmas commemorates and celebrates the local version of a very ancient custom. Breakin’ Up Christmas is the name for 12 days of partying, dancing, and music making ending up on January 6th, Old Christmas day. I think the tune itself is not of great antiquity. It may have been composed by Pet McKinney. Breakin’ Up Christmas is very 20
popular in Surrey County and thereabouts and is often the first tune of the evening at a dance. Tommy’s rendition here features some fine bowing. The instruments are tuned for the key of A, where Tommy played some of his most hair raising music. The fiddle is tuned A E A E and the Banjo is A E A C #E.
John Brown’s Dream This is one of the early Round Peak “trendy “ new tunes Tommy learned as a young man. It’s based on an older tune Pretty Little Girl which also resembles a tune which is called Jimmy Johnson in West Virginia. Tommy’s personalized, stylized and compelling version has most components of his musical system. The instruments are tuned for A, as in the previous piece. The guitar has been in standard tuning throughout the program.
Roscoe Holcomb Photo by David Gahr
Roscoe Holcomb was born in 1912 in East Kentucky, an area known for vigorous banjo playing, older ways of fiddling, and strong forceful singing. He took up the banjo at about age 20 and learned very quickly. During his first five decades he spent his life doing manual labor in lumber mills, 21
coal mines, and building sites and sometimes playing music in church and for square dances. Banjoist and film maker John Cohen encountered Roscoe in the little community of Daisy, Kentucky in 1959 where he was making an exploratory documentary recording trip focussed on old songs and banjo playing. Cohen described some of the people he encountered in Eastern Kentucky as “isolated and stranded in America”. Unemployment was high, people were dispirited and worn and so was the land. (This was even before strip mining was introduced). Roscoe was afflicted with asthma, emphysema, black lung, torn-up hands and a broken back. He described himself to Cohen as “a worried man”. But his music was phenomenally strong. Over the years Cohen recorded Roscoe many times in varying circumstances. His music appears on four Folkways record albums. Of the four soloists on this dvd, Roscoe Holcomb makes the least apparent concession to the listener but by all accounts he was a spellbinding performer, if that is the word, who often pierced the veils of social and mental convention and drew the listener into another dimension. The sheer burning intensity of his direct raw music was overwhelming to many, including, apparently Roscoe Holcomb himself. Of the four, he made the most music from the least amount of technique. In the notes accompanying the LP “Mountain Music Of Kentucky”, Roscoe Holcomb delivered this profound credo: “I know the whole fingerboard of the banjo – up and down – but I only play one way – it’s like a preacher who knows all of the scriptures and can recite any of them at will, that doesn’t make a good sermon. He’s got to know one part and use it well to make the sermon effective, if he really has something to say.” His playing then, consisted only of essentials. Along with that, his songs are delivered with a fullness of intention like a declaration of love or of war or of pain or happiness. This essentiality, which typifies old time music, is often mistaken by the distracted sophisticate for simplicity. In reality, all the music on this dvd is extremely complex. If you don’t believe that, just try to replicate it. The tune forms are relatively simple. The complexity lies in sonic texture, in emphasis and timing, in modal tonality and microtonal shading, in subtle melodic variation and subtle phrasing. His voice was highly inflected, shaped by the church, by the blues, and by a Ken22
Photo by David Gahr
tucky tradition of high pitched, well projected singing. These three songs were filmed in Seattle, Washington in 1972 when Roscoe was 60 years old. He was the youngest principal performer on this dvd and looks like he might be the oldest. Roscoe Holcomb died in 1981. 23
Black Eyed Susie This is a common old time tune with a structure that suggests an African-American origin. The American banjo and its playing techniques certainly are developments of preexisting African instruments and practices. It needs to also be remembered that in early times, so many slaves were trained as fiddlers and that they put a different emphasis in their playing which fed back into the historical stream of fiddling. Also, it seems to have been itinerant African-American musicians who first brought the guitar into the southern Mountains. Roscoe is playing with the same banjo mechanics as Tommy Jarrell and Blanton Owen. However, the speed, pulse and rhythm are altogether different, the thumbpick emphasizes the 5th string, and his first finger brushes across the strings, a device Tommy Jarrell avoided. The banjo is tuned G C G C D for the key of C.
Pretty Polly Roscoe’s version resembles one often sung by Ralph Stanley, a bluegrass musician steeped in old time music. Roscoe’s performance is akin to Boggs’s in that both men trust the song completely and therefore are inherently disinclined to distort their music through dramatic gestures of any sort. The guitar picking style is very close to the banjo picking technique in Old Smokey.
Old Smokey When I first heard Roscoe sing and play this in the 1960s it was kind of a revelation. As I recalled the dull sing-song version that was presented as “folk music” in grade school, hitherto unsuspected musical possibilities appeared on my imaginative horizon. I became simultaneously aware that one could transform what was received, how one could and that I could. I think Roscoe Holcomb had that effect on a lot of musicians. The banjo is tuned F# A D A D for the key of D. The thumb plays all strings but the 1st, and the 1st finger plays 1st and 2nd strings. The melody is taken entirely with the thumb. Although the rhythm of the banjo is regular and steady, Roscoe phrases his vocal lines the way he might were he 24
unaccompanied, holding out a word here, compressing a phrase there. Like much of Roscoe’s music, the performance is a fine and exhilarating piece of African/Anglo-Celtic confluence. When I hear America singing it sounds like Roscoe Holcomb doing Old Smokey. Thanks to: Paul Brown, Heath Curdts, Mike Seeger, Ed Kahn, Griel Marcus, Mary Lou Orthey and the Autoharp Quarterly, Marc Silber, David Grisman, Alan Senauke, Josh Michael and Mark Simos Doc Boggs,Norton VA, 1963 Photo by Mike Seeger
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This dvd presents poignant and exciting musical performances by four highly expressive and individualistic makers of traditional old time country music. There is a strong blues flavor throughout. Although Kilby Snow, Dock Boggs, Tommy Jarrell, and Roscoe Holcomb played vernacular music that in some ways was typical of the regions in which they spent their whole lives, they also were at times aston-ishingly inventive. Their influence has been very far reaching, extend-ing far beyond their communities, and affecting the minds and works of the makers of mainstream popular music, as well as the playing of far-flung old time music practitioners. Here is the only known footage of Dock Boggs singing his classic mountain blues and playing his signature banjo style; the intense and original “high lonesome” singing of Roscoe Holcomb, playing both banjo and guitar; Kilby Snow’s moving vocals and brilliant autoharp playing and the legendary fiddle and banjo of Tommy Jarrell, solo and accompanied by Mike Seeger and Blanton Owen. Each tune represents the creative recasting of familiar elements into masterfully crafted handmade music that accords with their respective temperaments. Titles include: KILBY SNOW, 1970 Troubles, Cindy, Shady Grove, Raggedy Ann, Two-Timing Blues & You Are My Flower DOCK BOGGS, 1966 Country Blues, Pretty Polly & I Hope I Live TOMMY JARRELL, 1976 Bonaparte's Retreat, Cumberland Gap, The Boll Weavil, Old Jimmie Sutton, Forked Deer, Sail Away Ladies, Cripple Creek, Breaking Up Christmas & John Brown's Dream ROSCOE HOLCOMB, 1972 Black-Eyed Susie, Pretty Polly & Old Smokey
Vestapol 13071 Running Time: 60 minutes • B/W & Color Cover photos by David Gahr Nationally distributed by Rounder Records, One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 Representation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications © 2004 Vestapol Productions A division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, Inc.
ISBN: 1-57940-988-1
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