[78-L] First country recording?

[Michael Biel]

I thing this discussion is great because I have had many of these same 
questions for decades as I came across the records and previous 
writings.  Some of this discussion parallels discussions of the 
authenticity of Polk Miller.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com

On 1/30/2012 10:35 AM, David Sanderson wrote:
> 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.
>
>