Customer Reviews

The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music (Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You can tell if someone is a fan of "old time country music" if you say "Bristol Sessions" and a moment of awe and respect comes over them. (Give me my moment of hyperbole!). Everyone knows something about the session from an article here and a cd booklet there, but now we can find a number of authoratative articles in one volume. Each has something to offer, but what I found valuable was the insight given on the recording process of the day. The facts added to my enjoyment of the legend but did not take away my sense of "awe."

Anyone who has read Charles K. Wolfe's books or the books he has edited knows the high quality of scholarship found. This book is no exception. Highly recommended.

The Birthplace of Country Music Was Not Nashville., September 10, 2006

Reviewer: Betty Burks (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

In 1998, The U. S. Congress passed a resolution which declared Bristol, Tennessee, as making a "significant contribution to the development and commercial acceptance of country music." Actually, I had to learn from a fiction book written by Lee Smith that country music actually began in Bristol. It was a

revelation to me, even though Bristol is just north of my hometown, which is all bluegrass music. In my short amateur career as a singer here in my teens, I tried country only once, "Your Cheating Heart" on the Cas Walker t.v. show and was

not a hit. I did not look or sound like Dolly Parton. When I sang it at school dressed as a cowgirl holding my dad's guitar, the younger kids deemed me a star. I stayed with pop music on the local talent radio and t.v. shows and at teen time Saturday mornings at the Tennessee Theater, also broadcast over WROL.

Well, I did hear Tennessee Ernie Ford back in the Fifties and Dinah Shore, but this book informed me that he had been a deejay while a teenager at a Bristol radio station. Most gifted deejays start out on the air at an early age if they are blessed with a mature voice, and he was.

It was the 1927 Bristol sessions which started the world of country music. Now, how was I supposed to know that when I

wasn't alive back then? They were recording Appalachian ballads like the one about Frankie Silver. My favorite writer based most of her novels on these ballads, and I learned of the "Knoxville Girl" in her book, "If I Ever Return Again, Pretty Peggy-O." She also wrote one about Frankie Silver. My favorite ballad was She

Walks These Hills "In A Long Black Veil."

Jimmie Rodgers who sang about trains and railroads, not the Jimmie Rogers of pop music fame started in Bristol. As did many of the cross-over singers like Don Gibson (who was rude to me at the Fair where I fell hard for Lash LaRue), the Everly Brothers, Archie Campbell (Hee Haw fame) who hosted his own t.v. show in Knoxville, and the Carter family. Now, Dolly is the only star

we have left in this area. Blind Alfred Reed was a composer as well as fiddler, called the devil's instrument, and he performed at a clan meeting in Princeton for pay; he said, "they were better people then." You had to go to Bristol to record

hillbilly songs like Hank Williams' sad, sad tunes. Here in Knoxville, the black music of the 20s and 30s was recorded for a short time at one of the hotels. I did not know anything about that until a local historian mentioned it in passing in one of his weekly columns. East Tennessee is not a very progressive

place. We have no documented history until now. What I have learned about my hometown is from Jack Neely's books. This is

a well-documented account of an important contribution to society by a group of hillbilly performers from East Tennessee and Virginia.