With this blog, i want to use the Folkways Anthology as a roadmap to explore american folk music. I’ ll use texts, images, music and videos gathered from my personal collection and from the web to make this work-in-progress enjoyable and educational the best i can. Any suggestions, additional informations, comments and critics are welcome…
I’ll use Harry Smith’s numerical order starting from the number one performance in the Anthology, “Henry Lee” by Dick Justice and end (someday…) with “Fishing Blues” by Henry Thomas. Each time, i’ll try to collect interesting links on the artist and on the song performed. There will be other performances by the artist and different versions of the selected song that i have access to. You’re invited to download and enjoy the selections but please, as much as you can, try to support the efforts of the small records companies and the living artists by buying their records.
Recorded in New Orleans in 1927, Richard (Rabbit) Brown was a songster, a black folk singer and musician, often itinerant, busking on street corners and working as a boatman on Lake Pontchartrain. He grew up in the late 19th century on Jane Alley (or Jane’s Alley, as the residents called it), the turpentine distillery district of New Orleans. Louis Armstrong grew up in the same neighborhood, a rough and dangerous one by all accounts. From the sides he recorded in 1927, we can assume that his repertory was a mix of Minstrel-type and pop songs (Never let the same bee stings you twice, I’m not Jealous), ballads about contemporary events (The Sinking of the Titanic, Mystery of the Dunbar’s Child) and proto-Blues (James Alley Blues). Harry Smith said in his notes that Brown was one of the earliest musician to learn the twelve bar-Blues cord pattern and the most important (and maybe the only one, during this time)New-Orleans folk singer to record. He was accompanying his singing with a rough, vibrant and slapping guitar style that fits well with his deep and gritty voice.
In 1927 Richard “Rabbit” Brown was already at least middle aged. He was probably born around 1880, just as the first rumblings of Jim Crow moved across the South as the Federal army went home. The place of his birth remains a mystery. New Orleans usually receives the honor, but doubts cloud the issue. Local bluesman Ernie Vincent remarked on hearing the recording that Brown sounded like he came from north Louisiana or perhaps Mississippi. Indeed, Brown’s vocal and phrasing does show hints of a rural origin, particularly if he is compared to singers like Joe Harris and Kid West, who hailed from new Iberia and had lived near Bunkie for a while.2 Then there is Brown’s testimony in “James Alley Blues”: “Cause I was born in the country, she thinks I’m easy to rule.” Brown sings the line with a conviction that seems to indicate that his woman did think he did come from the country. A rural origin for Brown also fits the general pattern of migration of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century. Thousands moved to the city to escape sharecropping and festering racial tension which exploded at the turn of the century. Even if Brown was not born in rural Louisiana, his parents probably migrated into New Orleans shortly before his birth. The Browns would have settled in one of the “neighborhoods uptown above Canal Street.” His father may have worked as a longshoreman or in the cotton presses. His mother might have sought work as a domestic. Regardless, poverty would have dogged them and they would have had to suffer the displeasing stares of the black Creoles.3
Didier Hébert “I Woke Up One Morning in May“
A similar cajun song was recorded the same year (1929) by another blind guitar player from Louisiana, Blind Uncle Gaspard with fiddler Delma Lachney. (Go to 
Jug Band scene in Memphis, a man who got his musical education at the beginning of the 20th century, around Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of many great Delta Blues musicians and on the road with Medicine shows. One of the rare black performer recorded on 78rpm records who played the 5-string banjo, which he taught himself to play on an instrument he made out of a frying pan and a raccoon skin, he also had a jug mounted on a rack that allowed him to blow bass figures while strumming and picking the banjo.
The first Cannon’s Jug Stompers piece we hear on the Anthology, “Minglewood Blues” appears on their first session on January,30, 1928 where they recorded 4 sides for Ralph Peer, A&R man of Victor Records.
player in the band is said to have “compose” the song, the tune itself being a very common one used in many other Blues like “Rollin’and Tumblin” for example. The answer to where exactly is this “Minglewood” is a bit uncertain. I have read somewhere that it was a lumber camp near the Mississippi where musicians (including Noah lewis and Gus cannon) gathered on weekends to have a good time, and judging from the lyrics of the “New Minglewood Blues” that Noah Lewis recorded with his own jug band (“If you’re ever in Memphis, better stop by Minglewood”), it was a place in the city or close to it. But I discovered recently an article, (on the
The song was also sung in another Kentucky county, Viper, by members of Jean Richie’s family. Jean remembered,”This beautiful family love song comes to me from my father, who used to slip off into the deep woods on Sundays with his young friends and play gourd fiddles.” The song was printed in 1955 in Ritchie’s book “Singing family of the Cumberlands”. In this version, the verse” I’d rather be on some dark, blue ocean” becomes “I’d rather be in some dark valley” and the valley would turn into a “hollow” in many other versions.
string banjo, most of the time tuned in the “saw-mill” tuning (gDGCD), which allows the tune to keep his modal ambiguity, somewhere between the major and the minor mode. Exceptions would be Morgan Sexton’s beautiful version in major or Roscoe Holcomb and Pete Steele who would keep their banjo tuned in a regular major G tuning but would sing the modal melody over it. Of course, all made their own version, adding or changing some words to it, giving the melody some unique inflections. Some, like Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, or B.F Shelton recorded for some commercial recording companies in the 1920′s and 1930′s, others were recorded by collectors, for the Library of Congress or their own collections. All gave exceptional renditions of this most haunting folk song.
A different way of singing the song, played this time in a straight major mode, developed during the 1930′s, under the name “East Virginia Blues” and “Greenback Dollar” with a slightly different set of lyrics. Clarence Ashley, who already recorded a modal banjo version under the name “Dark Holler”, recorded both “East Virginia Blues” and “Greenback Dollar” with the great harmonica player Gwen Foster in 1933. The Carter Family recorded their version in 1934 but it was issued only in 1940. During the 1930′s, the song was recorded numerous times by string bands and later by early bluegrass bands. Some recorded variants under names like “New Greenback Dollar” or “Answer to Greenback Dollar”. The Carter Family themselves issued a “East Virginia number 2″ in 1935. The Bolick Brothers (Blue Sky Boys) recorded their version in 1937 under the name “What Have You Done”.
After World War 2 and during the folk revival, the song continued his life, either sang in his lonesome modal banjo form by Pete Seeger, or with straight major guitar chords by Woody Guthrie. In the UK, skiffle bands included it in their repertoire of classic american folk songs. But it’s Joan Baez’s delicate and beautiful version (based on Jean Ritchie’s) that popularized the song to a wider audience in the 1960′s. Since then, it’s still performed a lot, either by folk artists or Old-time and Bluegrass bands (I’ve included some of my favorites here), and the charm and attraction of its simple melody and lyrical verses is not ready to vanish yet.
