From The Independent July 1999
African-American Country Music
By Art Menius
The African-American music of the rural South provided the source for gospel, jazz, and blues, while the oft ignored black contribution to country and hillbilly music went far beyond providing the banjo and Charley Pride. Southern rural musicians drew upon a common well, segregated into blues, country, and folk by recording companies and folklorists only well into the 20th century. Until the explosive emergence of the blues a century ago, blacks played fiddle and banjo for dances throughout the South, entertaining audiences of both races and often playing with European-American musicians. While 80 year old Mebane fiddler Joe Thompson may be the only living representative of the tradition, three recent collections help present the African-American country music story, shattering any illusions about one race claiming a monopoly on the music.
The most ambitious, richly documented, and comprehensive of the trio, From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music (Warner Brothers 9 46428-2), in some ways proves the most uneven. A three CD set produced by the Country Music Foundation, it more than excels in breadth. With cuts from Charley Pride, O.B. McClinton, Stoney Edwards, and Big Al Downing, the third CD well documents the African-Americans who achieved country music success during the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, the collection offers but a solitary track from the man who waxed the most influential country album by a black artist, Ray Charles. The first disc contains three selections from the Grand Ole Opry’s first black member, harmonica giant Deford Bailey, as well as several examples of black and integrated string bands. Lead Belly and the Mississippi Sheiks offer masterful early recordings of songs that became future country hits. The second record, however, tends to overreach with examples of well known R&B and soul performers, even the Supremes and Aaron Neville, covering country songs numerous to the point of dealing mostly with the country influence on African-American music.
Part of folklore activist Alan Lomax’ Deep River of Song series, Black Appalachia: String Bands, Songsters and Hoedowns (Rounder 1823) assembles field recordings Lomax made between 1936 and 1943 ranging from the hillbilly music of Jimmie Strothers to the commercial blues of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee. Lomax not only wanted to demonstrate that blacks played string band music, but that African-Americans pickers and singers were superior. Thus we find outstanding, rootsy tracks assembled to make his point. The most exciting music happens with truly African-inflected pieces, for example, quills or pan-pipe player Sid Hemphill’s "Devil’s Dream" or "Soldier’s Joy" by the Nashville Washboard Band. When these rhythms, instruments, and sounds appear in traditional southern dance music, you can hear the power of this fusion that predated rock ‘n roll by three decades.
Compiled by Raleigh, NC’s Marshall Wyatt, Violin, Sing the Blues For Me: African-American Fiddlers, 1926-1949 (Old Hat CD-1002), demonstrates with pleasure how impossible it becomes to sort riches of this music into arbitrary genre. Since Wyatt used the fiddle rather country music as the organizing principle, these 24 diverse blues, string band, and ragtime recordings suggest more compellingly than the other projects what an extraordinary musical cauldron was the South. In the shadow of Jim Crow, the races made new American music by blending traditions. The Mobile Strugglers bouncy 1949 rag of W.C. Handy’s "Memphis Blues" heard here resembles the sound and feel of white North Carolina banjoist Charlie Poole’s "If Beale Street Could Talk" from a score before. "The Moore Girl," a propulsive 1927 recording by Afro-Cherokee players Andrew & Jim Baxter, predates the pre-Scruggs approach of Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys by a dozen years.
-30-