[78-L] First country recording?

[David Sanderson]

On 1/30/2012 7:52 AM, Gregg Kimball wrote:
> I haven't heard those sides and I don't know anything about Barton.  What
> was his background?  What tunes did he perform?
>
> There is no right answer to this, but I would look at several factors:
>
> Was the artist primarily a trained, professional performer who picked up a
> few popular tunes like "Arkansas Traveller" but didn't have a wide
> traditional repertoire?
>
> Certainly performing on the stage or studio should not exclude someone.  For
> instance, Mellie Dunham performed in stage settings AFTER he became famous
> via Henry Ford.  But before that he had primarily performed in local
> settings as a country dance fiddler. Did Joseph Samuels ever perform in such
> settings?  I doubt it.

For those of us who come at this question from our interest in 
traditional music, the question becomes one of to what extent the 
performer, style and repertoire connect directly with the musical 
tradition being represented. Richardson is usually discounted here 
because although his fiddle tune recordings are of material that is in 
tradition, there is no evidence that he derives his playing from 
traditional sources. I don't know the Ward Barton material, so can't 
comment here.

It is generally considered that the first recordings of musicians that 
come directly from tradition are the Eck Robertson/Fiddlin John Carson 
sides from the early 1920's, and that it was the recording boom of the 
late 1920's that created a class of professional "country" musicians.

The Dunham example is a good one. Dunham learned from the local 
tradition, never learned to read music, and was simply a local performer 
before he came to national notice in 1925, part of his appeal being the 
fact that he was not a professional. His recordings from 1926 reflect 
this traditional bias - his regular pianist and bass player caller 
traveled from Maine for the sessions, and produced probably as good a 
representation of the local dance music from this area at that time as 
we have.


Along the same lines, I have recently been paying some attention to 
Elizabeth Burchenal, who preceded Henry Ford as a revivalist of 
traditional dance, helped found the American Country Dance Society among 
other things. She collected traditional dances from all over the world, 
and published them with instructions and music. My particular interest 
is her contact here in western Maine with Stephen Kimball, a traditional 
fiddler and dancing master, from whom she collected and published a 
quadrille in several parts and one fiddle tune. Uncle Steve was never 
recorded; instead Burchenal did arrangements of his pieces and recorded 
them with the Victor Band, including a set of two 12" Victors, "Uncle 
Steve's Quadrille," with Billy Murray giving instructions for the dance, 
and calling it. She did a couple of dozen sessions like this for Victor. 
This was, I suspect, her way of turning the "country" material into 
something that would sound respectable in the upscale urban world, very 
different from Henry Ford's careful effort to reproduce the dancing he 
remembered from his youth.

This refers mostly to fiddle-based music. Vocal music is a somewhat 
different story, I think - Vernon Dalhart was certainly regarded as a 
"country" musician, uptown though his singing was. Then there is the 
question of repertoire, since "country" recordings were wildly eclectic, 
drawing on popular songs, minstrel material and anything else that 
struck people's fancy. The problem is that these folks didn't know that 
there were rules about what they should and shouldn't be doing, not 
surprising since the rules weren't concocted until some decades after 
the fact. A slippery business, this categorization.


-- 
David Sanderson
East Waterford Maine
dwsanderson685 at roadrunner.com
http://www.dwsanderson.com