“We Always Tried to Be Good People”: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-1935 by Pamela Grundy

If you are easily exhausted, or too nervous, you have headaches or backaches or can’t sleep as you should, if your complexion is sallow or your tongue coated; maybe you’re just being warned by Nature that the troubles with far more serious names may be on the way. Faulty elimination, the sluggish and delayed passage of waste throughout the system, causes many serious disorders, disorders with all kinds of names…. Don’t give up to pain and illness…. Why all you need is determination, ordinary drinking water, and Crazy Water Crystals. Won’t you try it? -Crazy Water Crystals radio advertisement.

From

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Online Audio for Instruction Books

Thank you for buying one of our music instruction books! If you’ve arrived here, it is because you need a digital copy of your instructional CD.

Please click on one of the buttons following the name of book you purchased below to download or stream the instructional MP3s. If you have any trouble, please contact us at info@nativeground.com.Β Note: If you email us for assistance, make sure to include the full title of your book so we are able to help you!

Important Note: To better give you listening options, we have two buttons: the first is to

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The 5-String Banjo in North Carolina by C.P. Heaton

By C.P. Heaton

North Carolina is banjo country. No other area has done more to nurture and preserve banjo traditions; no other area has had greater influence on banjo innovations. The colorful history of America’s favorite folk instrument is very nearly synonymous with the history of banjoists and the banjo in the Tar Heel state.

The American banjo is of diverse ancestry. Stringed instruments with skin heads and wooden shells are known to have existed nearly 4500 years ago in Egypt. Similar instruments have been used for hundreds of years in India, Burma, Siam, Arabia, Tibet, and the Celebes. 1

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Online Audio for Music Instruction Books

Thank you for buying one of our music instruction books! If you’ve arrived here, it is because you need a digital copy of your instructional CD.

Please click on one of the buttons following the name of book you purchased below to download or stream the instructional MP3s. If you have any trouble, please contact us at info@nativeground.com. Note: If you email us for assistance, make sure to include the full title of your book so we are able to help you!

Important Note: To better give you listening options, we have two buttons: the first is to

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Frank Smith, Andrew Jenkins, and Early Commercial Gospel Music

In 1923 two forces were working in the South to transform the face of American music: the radio and the phonograph record. As the various forms of traditional and grass roots music encountered these new mass media, a curious and complex chemistry developed that gradually changed the nature of the music, the musiΒ­cians, and the role music played in people’s lives. Music once designed for the parlor, the back porch, the barn dance, or the church was now the creature of the radio studio, the Victrola, the fiddling contest, or the vaudeville theater. Musicians used to playing for a local

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Privacy Policy

Last updated February 19, 2021

Thank you for choosing to be part of our community at Native Ground Music, Inc., doing business as Native Ground Books & Music (β€œNative Ground Books & Musicβ€œ, β€œweβ€œ, β€œusβ€œ, β€œourβ€œ). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy. If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy notice, or our practices with regards to your personal information, please contact us at info@nativeground.com.


When you visit our website https://www.nativeground.com (the β€œWebsiteβ€œ), and more generally, use any of our services

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Cleo Davis, The Original Bluegrass Boy

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

On March 9, 1919, a doctor rode his horse-drawn buggy through the hills of northwest Georgia to the home of Ben and Effie Davis. He was summoned because Effie was about to have a baby. By the time the Doc had left, Effie and John were the proud parents of a healthy baby boy. As yet, they had no name for him. By and by, they gave him the name Cleo.

As young Cleo was growing up, he was surrounded by music. Mama played the pump organ and sang the old hymns along with her brothers and

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Banjo History by George R. Gibson

By George R. Gibson

Uncle Dave Macon, the first star of the Grand Old Opry, was an extraordinary banjo player and entertainer. It is likely that black musicians as well as minstrel entertainers influenced his music. Earl Scruggs, who originated a unique style of bluegrass banjo playing, came from a mountain area where banjos and banjo songs had long been a part of the culture. Many mountain banjo songs became popular with early radio string bands, and later became bluegrass standards. When the banjo and banjo songs entered the mountains is a question that has not been definitively addressed.

Various

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Gospel Boogie: White Southern Gospel Music in Transition, 1945-55

It has become a truism to say that most forms of traditional music in the American South were to some extent ‘commercialized’ by the end of the 1920s; certainly this is true of fiddle and instrumental traditions, country singing, the blues and jazz. By the middle of the Depression most of these musics had gained access to the mass media, either through phonograph records or radio. Throughout the Depression amateur musicians gave way to semi-professional, and then fully professional, musicians who spent most of their time playing music. While these changes meant erosion of regional styles and dilution of tradition,

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‘Gospel Boogie’: white southern gospel music in transition, 1945-55 by Charles Wolfe

It has become a truism to say that most forms of traditional music in the American South were to some extent ‘commercialized’ by the end of the 1920s; certainly this is true of fiddle and instrumental traditions, country singing, the blues and jazz. By the middle of the Depression most of these musics had gained access to the mass media, either through phonograph records or radio. Throughout the Depression amateur musicians gave way to semi-professional, and then fully professional, musicians who spent most of their time playing music. While these changes meant erosion of regional styles and dilution of tradition,

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