Tag: Bluegrass & Old-Time Music

Log Cabin Songs

By Wayne Erbsen

I have a thing for log cabins. Always have. To me, they symbolize almost everything I’m trying to say when I play old-time mountain and bluegrass music. In fact, that’s why I named the band of students I work with the “Log Cabin Band.” 

Log cabins have long been a symbol of frontier America. Their sturdy construction of handhewn logs are a true representation of the tough and independent pioneers who built them.

One of the strongest and most enduring themes of traditional bluegrass music has been the lost son who wanders back to the old log

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Clarence White and the Roots of Bluegrass Guitar in Southern California

By Wayne Erbsen

In the early sixties I lived within earshot of the Ash Grove, a legendary folk club on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. As I recall, Monday night was called “hoot night,” and the house band was “The Country Boys.” When I first heard the band in mid-1962, it consisted of Clarence White on guitar, Billy Ray Lathum on banjo, LeRoy Mack on Dobro, and playing bass was Roger Bush.

In the fall of 1962 the band got the opportunity to record their first album for Briar International. At that time the founder of the band, Roland White,

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The West Virginia Coon Hunters

Coon Hunters 2

The West Virginia Coon Hunters-On the Trail of a Lost String Band by John Lilly

Not long ago, two men from West Virginia — both fine guitarists — were enjoying a visit to Nashville. During part of their stay, they browsed some of the big record stores in Music City, marveling at the wealth of country music LP’s, CD’s, and cassettes offered for sale — recordings that they could never find in the stores back home.

Robert Shafer, a national champion flatpicker from Elkview, casually picked up a release of vintage old-time music. On the back of the jacket,

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Blind Alfred Reed

Henry Reed with Fred Pendleton

The Blind Man’s Song  – Recalling Alfred Reed By John Lilly

Young Violet Reed climbed a tall tree near her family’s home in Summers County and watched the road. She was looking for her father, Blind Alfred Reed, to return from Hinton, where he would go most days with his fiddle to play and sing on a street corner, a tin cup by his side. She could see him coming from a distance, walking down the road, fiddle tucked under one arm. Sometimes, if the day went well, he’d have a pound of bacon in his hand. Or, if the

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Okeh Record’s Historic Session in Asheville by Kent Priestly

Click on the image above to view a slideshow by Kent PriestleThe guitarist, Henry Whitter, slid his chair across the floor to bring his instrument a little closer to the recording machine’s sound-gathering horn. A harmonica dangled from his neck on a wire truss; he made a tentative puff on it and looked over to the man behind the controls.

The guitarist, Henry Whitter, slid his chair across the floor to bring his instrument a little closer to the recording machine’s sound-gathering horn. A harmonica dangled from his neck on a wire truss; he made a tentative puff on it

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Appalachian Tradition Music, A Short History by Debby McClatchy

MOST Europeans consider the Appalachians to be mountains of the southeastern region of the United States, but in truth they encompass eighteen states, reaching from Maine to Georgia, and include, among others, the Berkshires of Connecticut, the Green Mountains of New Hampshire, the Catskills of New York, the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Southern Appalachia includes three hundred counties covering most of West Virginia and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, an area called today the Southern Highlands or Upland South, or, in Colonial times, the ‘Back Country’.

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Music of the Southern Appalachians by Mike Seeger

This area is to the west of the flat tidewater and piedmont areas of the Atlantic coastline and includes some broad valleys with good agricultural land, such as the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, as well as many smaller valleys, some just wide enough for a little bottomland next to a creek. The eastern mountains are not nearly as tall as the Rockies; they generally rise 1,000 to 3,000 feet with a maximum of 6,000 feet, and are forested with a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees and many smaller bushes and flowers. Some mountains are green, rolling hills, but in

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The Delmore Brothers – by John Lilly

“There was a big crowd there and everything was decorated and all fixed up like the president of the United States would be there. It was by far the biggest and most important contest in the entire country. People who had never been to a contest before gathered with the contestants at the Old Athens (Alabama) Agricultural School. My mother had made (guitar) cases for us out of cotton sacks we used during the picking season and we had our names on them spelled out in full. I painted them on the cases with pokeberry juice.

“You know how it

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History of Jimmy Rodgers, Blue Yodeler by John Lilly

“Folks everywhere knew about Jimmie Rodgers, and although some of them were reluctant at first to believe that he was really there in person, playing their own town, they soon learned that he was as much at home in Sweetwater or O’Donnell as in front of a Victor microphone or on the stage of some fancy big-city theater. Vernon Dalhart and Gene Austin might make a lot of records, but they didn’t come out into the boondocks to rub shoulders and tell bawdy jokes and laugh with the plain folks who bought them. The effects of the Blue Yodeler’s tours

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Carter Family Music & History by John Lilly

Carter Family photograph

Anita Carter was only four years old when she first saw Dr. John Romulus Brinkley in 1938 at a mansion in Del Rio, Texas, but it was a sight she never forgot: a goat-bearded, diamond-studded, round spectacled man, floating down the stairs with a pet monkey on his shoulder. Dr. Brinkley had built the most powerful radio station in the world, 500,000 watt XERA, and blanketed North America with sales pitches for snake oils and his quack remedies. A Chicago company, Consolidated Royal Chemical, also used XERA airwaves to sell patent medicines, and featured the best in country music entertainment

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