Anyone putting Ash Grumwald or anything like that in here will be removed from the premises.
Mississippi John Hurt
So this dude recorded some tracks in the 20's/30's (I'm going off the top of my head here), and then disappeared off the face of the earth for 30 years, culturally speaking.
Only a handful of copies survived. Eventually, some of them started doing the rounds amongst the folk revivalists kicking round America in the 50's and 60's. This is pre-mp3. They'd pass these records around by hand. Everyone would go over to someone's house for a listening party. Collecting rare music was a proper hobby that took real work. Not like us kids today.
Anyway...
One of the tracks he recorded was a song called 'Avalon Blues', that talked about "Avalon, my home town...".
So a couple of bright sparks decided to track this Avalon place down. Unfortunately, it had been removed from the Mississippi maps of the time (they could only find one in Georgia), but eventually, whether through hard detective work or dumb luck, depending on who you believe, they found some old railway maps that had the town still listed there as a stop.
Anyway, long story short, these white guys go to this ghost town, ask around about this guy they've heard on these records, and eventually discover him sitting on a tractor in a field, where he's been farming all these years. He doesn't really believe them, because, hey, this is a pretty weird thing to happen, but eventually they convince him to play some guitar.
They bring him back to New York and he spends a few years earning big bucks playing folk festivals and uni coffee houses and stuff to appreciate young white Yankees, before peacefully shuffling off the earth.
Pretty good story.
Here he is telling an incomprehensible yarn about spike-driving John Henry, then playing his totally unique and awesome thumb-picking, alternating bass rag-style blues guitar.
He pretty much invented this guitar style on his own.
Rev Gary Davis, who I might get to later, invented a pretty similar style on his own around the same time, but the two had nothing to do with each other.
It's like Newton and that other guy both independently inventing calculus, with equally significant implications for ballistics, economics, structural engineering and epidemiology.
[YOUTUBE]BvRxA8gR7bw[/YOUTUBE]
Anyway, who are your favourite early American folk musicians? Black, white, blues, country, it's all good stuff.
Mississippi John Hurt
So this dude recorded some tracks in the 20's/30's (I'm going off the top of my head here), and then disappeared off the face of the earth for 30 years, culturally speaking.
Only a handful of copies survived. Eventually, some of them started doing the rounds amongst the folk revivalists kicking round America in the 50's and 60's. This is pre-mp3. They'd pass these records around by hand. Everyone would go over to someone's house for a listening party. Collecting rare music was a proper hobby that took real work. Not like us kids today.
Anyway...
One of the tracks he recorded was a song called 'Avalon Blues', that talked about "Avalon, my home town...".
So a couple of bright sparks decided to track this Avalon place down. Unfortunately, it had been removed from the Mississippi maps of the time (they could only find one in Georgia), but eventually, whether through hard detective work or dumb luck, depending on who you believe, they found some old railway maps that had the town still listed there as a stop.
Anyway, long story short, these white guys go to this ghost town, ask around about this guy they've heard on these records, and eventually discover him sitting on a tractor in a field, where he's been farming all these years. He doesn't really believe them, because, hey, this is a pretty weird thing to happen, but eventually they convince him to play some guitar.
They bring him back to New York and he spends a few years earning big bucks playing folk festivals and uni coffee houses and stuff to appreciate young white Yankees, before peacefully shuffling off the earth.
Pretty good story.
Here he is telling an incomprehensible yarn about spike-driving John Henry, then playing his totally unique and awesome thumb-picking, alternating bass rag-style blues guitar.
He pretty much invented this guitar style on his own.
Rev Gary Davis, who I might get to later, invented a pretty similar style on his own around the same time, but the two had nothing to do with each other.
It's like Newton and that other guy both independently inventing calculus, with equally significant implications for ballistics, economics, structural engineering and epidemiology.
[YOUTUBE]BvRxA8gR7bw[/YOUTUBE]
Anyway, who are your favourite early American folk musicians? Black, white, blues, country, it's all good stuff.
