The Secret Signals of Musicians

By Wayne Erbsen

It’s Saturday night. Instead of relaxing safe at home plopped comfortably in front of your big screen TV, you’ve got your hind quarters parked squarely on a hard folding chair. If that’s the case, chances are you’re either at a festival watching your favorite bluegrass band, or perhaps you’re huddled under a tarp in the pouring rain jamming with friends or total strangers at a fiddlers convention. Either way, you often witness secret or not-so-secret signals or cues from one musician to the rest of the group to alert them that a song or tune is about

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“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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Mountains of Songs

By Wayne Erbsen

Hank Williams was once quoted as saying, “You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.” If Hank was right, then what I did today puts me over the top into the ranks of genuine hillbillies.

It all started when I got back from a week of fiddling and singing at the Appalachian Stringband Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia. After I barely had a chance to settle into my normal routine at home, my wife, Barbara, said she had a “honey do” list for me. The good news was

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Fiddlin’ John Carson

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It wasn’t the popcorn in the New York’s Palace Theater that spring day of 1923 that got Atlanta businessman Polk Brockman thinking. Instead, it was the newsreel he watched of a Virginia fiddler’s convention that made him scribble this note on a piece of paper: “Record Fiddlin’ John Carson.” Seconds before he had reached in his pocket for his pen and something to write on, Brockman recalled why he came to New York on this most recent trip.

As the owner of a number of furniture stores in the Atlanta area, Brockman also sold what were then

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Blue Sky Boys

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It all began with a misunderstanding. It was early June, 1936, and the teenage brother duet of Bill and Earl Bolick had just abruptly ended a three-month stint at radio WGST in Atlanta over a dispute with the sponsor, W.J. Fincher’s Crazy Water Crystals. Within a matter of days the Bolicks traveled to the RCA Victor studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, to fulfill a contract to make their first recordings.

Perhaps out of spite, W.J. Fincher passed on to RCA Victor the erroneous information that the brothers had broken up their act. For this reason, Eli Oberstein

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Ernest ‘Pop’ Stoneman

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

We couldn’t quite figure out who he was. As the lights were dimmed and the audience hushed, my sister Bonnie and I sat in suspense at the West Hollywood club known as The Ash Grove. All at once, the band started to play and even as our attention became riveted on the spectacle unfolding before us, we wondered about the little old man sitting on stage in a hard-backed chair with an autoharp flat on his lap and a little black hat stuck on his head.

We got a hint when members of the Stoneman Family eventually

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Karl and Harty

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

The search for the core of the roots of bluegrass always leads to the many brother acts that were so popular with rural audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. The familiar names that always crop up include the Monroe brothers, Callahan brothers, Delmore brothers and the Bolick brothers. Practically forgotten, but no less important to the roots of bluegrass, were Karl and Harty. Though “officially” not brothers, both were born in 1905, growing up in Mount Vernon, Kentucky, as if they were brothers. This same area produced such artists as Bradley Kincaid, Red Foley, and John Lair.

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Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Thunderstruck. What better word to use to describe the reaction of fans of old-time fiddle music when they first tuned into the Grand Ole Opry and heard the fiddling of Arthur Smith coming out of their radios? From the time Smith first stepped up to the WMS  microphone in December 1927, the world of southern fiddling would never be the same again. Who was this man that set fiddling so much on its ear?

Born April 10th, 1898, near Bold Springs, Tennessee, Arthur Smith got his first fiddle when his young wife, Nettie, sold enough chickens to

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Henry Whitter & G.B. Grayson

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

No one ever stands up for Henry Whitter anymore. And they never did! Recent scholars have scoffed at his meager guitar skills and at his singing. He is given credit for little more than inspiring others to become recording artists because they knew they could sing and play rings around old Henry. And they were right!

Harry was no guitar virtuoso, and he was not endowed with a great voice. But he was clever, or persistent, enough to get himself a recording contract in New York. Among those who heard his 1924 recording of The Wreck of

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Dock Walsh & The Carolina Tar Heels

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Standing tall among the early pioneers of the roots of bluegrass music was Dock Walsh. Born and raised on a farm in Wilkes County, North Carolina, on July 23, 1901, Dock was one of eight children who all played music from an early age. His first banjo was presented to him by an older brother, who made it out of an axle grease can. Dock eventually outgrew this first instrument in favor of a fancy “store bought” Bruno banjo.

In 1924, 23-year-old Dock heard Henry Whitter’s recording of Lonesome Road Blues and Wreck on the Southern Old

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