[78-L] Grayson and Whitter "Going Down Lee Highway" with Bill Broonzy Composer Credit

[Richard Blaustein]

Many thanks to Gregg Kimball for his answer to my query re: Going Down Lee
Highway.

Selection:     Going Down Lee Highway
Artist:    G.B.Grayson & Henry Whitter
Composer:    Bill Broonzy (label)
Date Recorded:    09/30/29
Recording Label:    Victor
Catalog Number:    vi23565
Matrix 1:    56313=1
XRef 1:    bb5498
Source File:    http://honkingduck.com/fix/victor23000series.html
(Source: Online Discography Project)

Joe Wilson got the story about G.B. Grayson composing Going Down  Lee
Highway in the back of a car
riding down the Lee  Highway on the way to a recording session in Memphis
from a recorded interview with one of Grayson's children.

In the early 1970s one of my early students at East Tennessee State
University, Jim Meadows,  videotaped an interview
with his mother, one of G.B.'s daughters, who told him a  similar story with
a slight variation: Grayson was riding in the back of a car driving down
the Lee Highway coming back from a fiddle contest when he made up this
tune.

After all these years, it is impossible to tell where the truth lies.
Memories become confused, stories run together,
and what started out as family history becomes family legend and mythology.
This is how folklore develops, after all.

What makes this story even more complicated and interesting is the fact that
fiddler Jimmy McCarroll and his Roane County Ramblers from east of Knoxville
recorded an almost identical fiddle tune, "Home Town Blues," issued a year
before Grayson and Whitter's "Going Down Lee Highway":

Selection:    Home Town Blues
Artist:    Roane County Ramblers
Date Recorded:    10/15/28
Recording Label:    Columbia
Catalog Number:    15328 d
Matrix 1:    w147182
Source File:    http://settlet.fateback.com/COL15000d.htm
(source: Online Discography Project)

This tune was reissued on two LPs:

Roane County Ramblers. Southern Dance Music, Vol. 1, Old-Timey LP 100, LP
(1965), trk# 15 [1928/10/15] (Home Town Blues)

Roane County Ramblers. Original Recordings, 1928-29, County 403, LP (1971),
trk# B.02 [1928/10/15]

"Home Town Blues" is currently available on an MP3 CD,
"Roots of American Fiddle Music, Volume 3." HEAHEAH - MP3CD-0600

Ahmet Baycu, the producer of  this compilation, was clearly unaware of  the
recording history of  this tune when he stated: "from Tennessee, the blazing
Jimmy McCarroll of the ROANE COUNTY RAMBLERS provides an amazing reworking
of the classic Lee Highway Blues with his Home Town Blues."

This error is readily excusable when you hear both recordings:

"Home Town Blues" and "Going Down Lee Highway" are virtually the same tune
with very slight variations,
so close that it is very, very  hard to imagine that they are not  connected
somehow.
Bill Broonzy's name on the composer credit of Grayson and Whitter's
recording of "Going Down Lee Highway"
just adds another element of  mystery to the cloudy history of this tune.

Whoever actually composed it first, the Grayson and Whitter version clearly
was the source of "Lee Highway Blues,"
which has been  frequently  recorded and is still widely known and played by
fiddlers to this day.

All the best,

Richard Blaustein
1303 Buffalo Street
Johnson City, Tennessee 37604
rjblaustein at gmail.com


-----Original Message-----
From: "Gregg Kimball" <gdkimball at cox.net>
Subject: Re: [78-L] Grayson and Whitter "Going Down Lee Highway" with
       BillBroonzy Composer Credit

>Joe Wilson's liner notes to County 3517, "The Recordings of Grayson and
>Whitter," state that "He [Grayson] composed Going Down the Lee Highway in
>September 1929 as Whitter's Model T chugged down U.S. Route 11 in northeast
>Tennessee (known locally as Lee Highway) on the way to a Memphis recording
>session." Indeed, Tony Russell shows the tune recorded on September 30,
>1929, in Memphis (their last recording session), matrix # 56313-1.

>I still love driving down sections of the old Lee Highway here in Virginia.

>Gregg Kimball"