East Tennessee State UniversityDigital Commons @ East Tennessee State University

ETSU Faculty Works Faculty Works

2013

'Can You Sing Or Play Old-Time Music?': TheJohnson City SessionsTed OlsonEast Tennessee State University, olson@etsu.edu

Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works

Part of the Appalachian Studies Commons, and the Music Commons

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in ETSU Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For moreinformation, please contact digilib@etsu.edu.

Citation InformationOlson, Ted. 2013. 'Can You Sing Or Play Old-Time Music?': The Johnson City Sessions. The Old-Time Herald. Vol.13(6). 10-17.http://www.oldtimeherald.org/archive/back_issues/volume-13/13-6/johnsoncity.html ISSN: 1040-3582

'Can You Sing Or Play Old-Time Music?': The Johnson City Sessions

Copyright Statement© Ted Olson

This article is available at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University: https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/1218

«'CAN YOU SING OR PLAY OLD-TIME MUSIC?"THE JOHNSON CITY SESSIONSBy Ted Olson

In a recent interview, musician Wynton Marsalis said, "I can't tellyou how many times I've suggested to musicians to get The BristolSessions—Anglo-American folk music. It's a lot of different types ofmusic: Appalachian, country, hillbilly. It's folk music in the Anglo-

American tradition. It's essential for musicians to know that." JohnnyCash (who was not entirely unbiased, since he had married into the fa-mous family group "discovered" in Bristol) once referred to the 1927 Bris-tol Sessions as "the single most important event in the history of countrymusic." Scholar Nolan Porterfield went so far as to suggest that, "As asort of shorthand notation, [the Bristol Sessions have] come to signal theBig Bang of country music evolution."

As important as Victor Records' 1927Bristol Sessions were (and are), the atten-tion paid to their impact has led to a gen-eral neglect of the larger phenomenonof "location recording sessions" in Ap-palachia. The most noteworthy locationrecording sessions to be staged in Appa-lachia after the 1927 Bristol Sessions werethose held by Columbia Records in Oc-tober 1928 and in October 1929, only 25miles away from Bristol in Johnson City,Tennessee, then a boomtown and a bus-tling railroad hub. Though they did notuncover musicians of the caliber of Jim-mie Rodgers and the Carter Family, whofirst recorded in Bristol, the sessions inJohnson City generated many fascinatingrecordings. Indeed, Columbia's JohnsonCity Sessions, taken as an entire corpus,are as worthy of our attention today asthe recordings made in Bristol for Victor.The Bristol Sessions, conducted by Vic-

tor Records producer Ralph Peer in July- August 1927, yielded memorable record-ings by influential Appalachian musicians,including such often-overlooked old-timemusic luminaries as Ernest Stoneman, BundAlfred Reed, Henry Whitter, Ernest Phipps,and Alfred G. Kames, as well as artists whowould change the direction of country mu-sic—Jimmie Rodgers and fhe Carter Family.Experiencing commercial success with therecordings and management contracts hehad generated in Bristol that summer. Peerreturned the next year to make additionalrecordings by Stoneman and his group,Ernest Phipps and his quartet, Kames, andother musicians. The location recording ses-sions Peer conducted in Bristol became leg-endary for having marked the emergenceof the modem country music industry and,equally important, for continuing to in-spire musicians working in a range of other

genres, including old-üme, Americana, alt-country, bluegrass, and rock.For several years before the Bristol Ses-

sions, record companies had been settingup recording sessions on location near theplaces where Southern musicians actuallylived. This practice began in such majorSouthern cities as Atlanta and Memphis,where A&R (Artist & Repertoire) scouts(in contemporary parlance, record pro-ducers) sought out traditional and pro-fessional musicians in the effort to createcommercially viable records. By the early1920s, A&R scouts focused on findingblack musicians to perform blues and jazznumbers, as such records were provingpopular to a broad record-buying audi-ence. In June 1923, Ralph Peer, then work-ing for OKeh Records, cut and releasedthe first commercial record of Southernvernacular music by a white musician,Fiddlin' John Carson. The record's successproved that there was an audience forthe new commercial music genre, whichwould be referred to by several names,including "hillbilly music," and whichwould eventually be termed "country andwestern" and then "country music."

There was one location recording ses-sion in Appalachia before the BristolSessions: Peer's 1925 recording visit forOKeh Records to Asheville, North Caro-lina. In late August and early September1925, Peer set up a temporary studio inAsheville's George Vanderbilt Hotel andrecorded such important 1920s-era mu-sicians as Stoneman, Whitter, BascomLamar Lunsford, Wade Ward, and KellyHarrell. (In the fall of 1925, Robert W.Gordon of the Library of Congress alsotraveled to Appalachia to make noncom-mercial documentary cylinder record-ings of regional music.)

The idea of transporting recordingequipment to Appalachia was, to recordcompanies, a shift from their previouspractice of depending on Appalachianmusicians to leave the region to makerecords in the large Southern cities, orup North. While these 1925 recordingsfrom Asheville were hampered by thelimited dynamic range rendered by ana-log recording. Peer realized that there wasmore talent to be mined in the mountains.After accepting a position with Victor Re-cords in 1926, Peer began to speculate asto where his next recording foray in Ap-palachia should be. Working with ErnestStoneman, who was by that time already asuccessful "hillbilly" recording artist, andwho hailed from southwestern Virginia,Peer selected Bristol, a small yet moderncity situated on the border between Vir-ginia and Tennessee, and a crossroads forrail and automobile transportation.The Bristol Sessions recordings of 1927-

1928 were dramatically superior to thosemade at the 1925 Asheville Sessions.Whereas the sessions in Asheville hadmade use of low-fidelity acoustic hornmicrophones, for the Bristol SessionsPeer utilized the recently-introducedelectronic carbon microphone system,which made it possible to capture a full-er, more natural dynamic range of sound.The commercial success of many ofPeer's Bristol Sessions records for Victorled A&R scouts from competing recordcompanies to set up location recordingsessions in and near Appalachia. Othersuch occasions included a September1927 session by OKeh in Winston-Salem,North Carolina; a February 1928 sessionby the Brunswick label in Ashland, Ken-tucky; two sessions, in August 1929 andin April 1930, by Brunswick in Knoxville,Tennessee; and Columbia Records' John-son City Sessions in October 1928 andOctober 1929.

Peer's Bristol Sessions recordings wererevolutionary in their influence, of course,but the Johnson City recordings, overseenby Columbia's pioneering A&R scoutFrank B. Walker, reflect Walker's moreeclectic tastes and keener sense of humor.Indeed, the recordings from the JohnsonCity Sessions provide a disfinctly differentportrayal of Appalachian music. Peer wasinterested primarily in capturing vocalperformances of sacred material or secular

THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDT1MEHERALD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6 11

12 THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDTIMEHERALD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6

songs with concisely-structured lyrics pro-jecfing generalized emofions—ostensiblyto reach the broadest possible audience.For his part. Walker maintained an ojDen-tent approach, which led him to make re-cordings that would not have interestedPeer. And by the sheer happenstance ofwho showed up to make records for Walk-er, the Johnson City Sessions also docu-mented some different regional soundsand styles from those recorded during theBristol Sessions. Walker recorded a widerange of Appalachian musicians, primarilyfrom Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia,and North Carolina. In Bristol, Peer hadrecorded musicians from the first three ofthose states plus Virginia, but had notattracted North Carolinians.

Like Peer, Frank Walker was a pioneer ofthe commercial recorded sound industry.Born in 1889 and reared in Fly Summit,New York, Walker when young playedmusic in a string band and ultimatelyconsidered rural white vernacular musicas his "first love" (his own words, takenfrom his interview with Mike Seeger).After World War I Walker promotedconcerts for Italian opera singer EnricoCaruso, then left to work for ColumbiaRecords. By 1923 he was successfully re-cording Bessie Smith and other blues per-formers. (By his own recollection. Walkerhad already begun recording rural whitemusic by 1922. He claimed that his label,believing such music was commerciallyunprofitable, refused to release these ear-lier recordings.) By January 1925, he hadconvinced Columbia to launch a seriesof commercial records that eventuallyfeatured performances by such whitemusicians as Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett,and Charlie Poole. As was the industrystandard at the time. Walker inifiallyworked in temporary studios set up inlowland Southern cities. After Peer'ssuccess at Bristol in 1927, Walker decidedto set up his own temporary studio innearby Johnson City.

A few of the 78 RPM records made inJohnson City in 1928 sold well when re-leased by Columbia in early 1929. Onerecord by the duo of Earl Shirkey andRoy Harper, "Steamboat Man" backedwith "When the Roses Bloom Again forthe Bootlegger," sold nearly 75,000 cop-ies. Walker decided to return to JohnsonCity the following October to make addi-tional recordings. His timing was unfor-tunate, to say the least, coinciding withthe Wall Street Crash; in fact, the last dayof recording in Johnson City in 1929 tookplace on October 24,1929—"Black Thurs-day." As a result, the 1929 Johnson City

THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDTIMEHERALD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6 13

Byrd Moore and ¡lif Hot Sliots (Byrd Moore, Clarence Greene, Clarence Ashley)

Tenneva Ramblers {Grant Brothers with ¡immie Rodgers), 1927.

Sessions recordings, despite their overallexcellence, sold poorly upon their releasein early 1930.

Few of the recordings from JohnsonCity are widely known today. Three re-cords—"Old Lady and the Devil" by Billand Belle Reed, "The Coo-Coo Bird" byClarence Ashley, and the Bentley Boys'immortal "Down On Penny's Farm"—were reissued in 1952 on the influentialAnthology of American Folk Music. "DownOn Penny's Farm" would lend a thematicand stylistic backdrop for not one but twoBob Dylan songs, "Hard Times in NewYork Town" and "Maggie's Farm." Otheroutstanding recordings from the sessionsinclude, from 1928, "Johnson Boys" by theGrant Brothers, "Southern Number III"by the Roane County Ramblers, "JohnsonCity Blues" by Clarence Greene, "Lindy"by the Proximity String Quartet, and "RollOn Buddy" by Charlie Bowman and HisBrothers; and from 1929, four classic re-cordings by Clarence Ashley, "I'm Just aBlack Sheep" by Jack Jackson, "BeckleyRag" by Roy Harvey and Leonard Cope-land, "West Virginia Hills" by the Moats-ville String Ticklers, and "Powder andPaint" by Ira and Eugene Yates.

Frank Walker's inspired work on theJohnson City Sessions may not have gar-nered much scholarly aftention, yet hispeers certainly bestowed respect uponhim for his subsequent roles in the record-ed sound industry. For his work for RCAVictor, producing recordings by Bill Mon-roe, Glenn Miller, Coleman Hawkins, andDuke Ellington, and for MGM Recordsoverseeing the career of Hank Williams,Sr., Walker acquired the sobriquet "TheDean of the American Record Industry."

Columbia Records' Johnson City Ses-sions have long merited an in-depth ex-amination, and that examination is nowhere, in the form of a four-CD box set andbook released by Bear Family Records.Developing a story begun in the 2011 boxset The Bristol Sessions, 1927-1928: The BigBang of Country Music, this new collection,entitled The Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929: Can You Sing Or Play Old-Time Mu-sic?, continues Bear Family Records' com-mitment to tracing the larger stor)' of thelocation recording sessions conducted inAppalachia in the late '20s and early '30s.The Johnson City Sessions compiles all 100extant recordings made during those 1928and 1929 Columbia sessions—the first timethat they have been collected in any form.The recordings and accompanying bookchronicle the presence in Johnson City ofall the musicians who heeded the invita-

14 THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDTIMEHERALD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6

Charlie Bowman

15

The Bowman Sisters

16 THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDTIMEHERALD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6

tíon of a 'widely disseminated October 1928newspaper ad, calling upon area musiciansto participate in "an actual try-out for thepurpose of making Columbia Records."

In April 2013 the State of Tennessee erect-ed an official historical marker to com-memorate this compelling if overlookedevent in early country music history. InOctober 2013, Johnson City will host sever-al public activities focused on the JohnsonCity Sessions, including the dedication ofthe Bear Family Records box set.

Today, the Johnson City Sessions record-ings are deemed by those who know thembest (scholars and record collectors, if notyet the general public) as a strong, distinc-tive cross-section of old-time Appalachianmusic made at the cusp of the Great Depres-sion. Indeed, they might arguably constitutethe second-most important recording ses-sions ever conducted in Appalachia. If the1927 Bristol Sessions caii be considered "theBig Bang of Country Music," then the John-son City Sessions were a major aftershock. (^^

Ted Olson produced and wrote liner notes fortwo box sets for Bear Family Records, TheBristol Sessions, 1927-1928: The Big Bangof Country Music (with Christopher Kingand Tony Russell) and The Johnson CitySessions, 1928-1929: Can You Sing Or PlayOld-Time Music? (witli Tony Russell).

Weekcd yKsKokari August 11-17 j

Old Time, Clogging, Cajun, ZydecoClasses: fiddle, banjo, guitar, accordion, singing, dancing,

jamming, band clinics, dance parties and more.

The Red Stick Ramblers, Kathy Anderson, Nie Gareiss,Ginny Hawker, Tracy Schwarz, Cedric Watson, BruceMoisky, Riiey Baugus, Emily Schaad, Debra Clifford, JohnKrumm, Sharon Leahy, Rick Good, Emma Young, KevinWimmer, Michael Merenda, Ruthy Ungar, John Schwab,Rafe Stefanini, Jay Ungar, Molly Mason...more.

office@ashokan.org • www.ashokan.org • (845)246-2121

Workshops, Camping, FoodNightly Dances

Hoppin' John Cookoff

-̂Individual Contests^-Band Contests-

I

www.HoppinJohn.org1439 Henderson Tanyard Road, Silk Hope NC 27312

(919)542-1746

THE OLD-TIME HERALD WWW.OLDTIMEHErLA.LD.ORG VOLUME 13, NUMBER 6 17