Customer Reviews

Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

well, this disc fascinates me. I didn't much care for it during my first listen. put it away for a few months & came back to it. by about the 3rd play it was striking a chord in me. this is not easy listening. not by a long shot. if you are going to succeed in liking this cd, you are going to have to have a certain level of tolerance for unusual voices. this man was no honey-throated songbird. usually i have a hard time describing unique voices with words, but in this case it seems easy: when mr boggs sings he sounds like an alcoholic uncle whom you would not trust around your children. i realize this is not sounding like a high recommendation (i do like this disc - i gave it four stars), i just think you should have a clear idea of what you might be getting into here. this is rural folk music with a raw and vital vibe to it. though sounding drunk and demented mr boggs fascinates, and he plays a mean banjo, to boot. lots of excellent banjo on this disc. but back to that voice: i will insist that some of these old tunes are best suited by a voice such as this. take "pretty polly," for example. now, if you are not familiar with old mountain ballads, you might think "pretty polly," that sounds like a nice song; but, if you are familiar with these ballads, you will see that title and think "uh-oh! pretty polly is surely going to die." and of course, die she does. mr boggs sings about murdering her, and he sounds just right for the role. someone like say, oh, how about johnny mathis, could not pull this song off convincingly. this is a truly disturbing song and it deserves a distrubed sounding man to do it justice. now i know next to nothing about doc boggs, the man (i have not even read the lengthy linear notes that come with this disc). maybe he was a great fella. i hope so. but i am saying "he truly sounds like a rural maniac." so that's part of the reason that this disc now fascinates me. that and all the fine music on it. i don't really have time to go further with this now; i have a life and you have a life. we need to get on with things. buy this, or don't. thanks for hearing me out.

Beautifully packaged treatment of Dock's 1920s recordings. Kind of a banjo flailing hillbilly Robert Johnson. Sidenote, I actually met Dock when I was a child, he was a friend of my pawpaw's. They worked in the coalmines together and was wild together back in the old days. I had no idea Dock even played an instrument until I read a book by Greil Marcus years later...

Greil Marcus's American Studies/Joe Campbell influenced "old wierd America" nonsense does a terrible disservice to roots artists like Dock Boggs. A working man who played the banjo and sang old timey blues-drenched folk material in an eerie croak, Boggs is one of the godfathers of American roots music. But Marcus, in his dreadful essay on Boggs which is included in this otherwise beautifully packaged CD/Booklet, tries to turn Boggs into a mythic figure. This is the same hero-worshipping schoolboy mindset that fantasized Robert Johnson as a devotee of Satan. Ironically, Marcus is projecting a showbiz framework (where musicians must be "legends" -- so they may be sold as pure media images) onto musicians who were community entertainers in the days before music was a plastic fantasy world. Boggs is no myth, his humanity is one of the greatest lessons he has to teach us in a world where superstar worship strips away any human relation between artists and their audience. Listen to Dock Boggs for yourself, don't let Marcus pollute your appreciation of this great roots artist.

For my money, Dock Boggs created the quirkiest old-timey music in the twenties. This collection of his original recordings, recorded before his "re-discovery" during the early sixties "folk scare" is awesome in its intensity and bad boy attitude. This is the rawest bajo playing I've ever heard and these songs stay with you forever. If you're not an old-timey music fan yet, you will be after you hear this. Beautiful packaging to boot which includes a great deconstructionist pseudo-culture rant by Greil Marcus. Indispensable.

Dock Boggs' banjo and voice are perhaps the most hypnotic ever recorded. He lays it all on the line, hides nothing--his music is brutally honest and sincere. There is a song on this collection called "Will Sweethearts Know Each Other There?" that could be the most beautiful song ever written. He performs as though he doesn't care who likes it, as though he does it because he HAS to just to survive and get through the day. The packaging and interviews in the liner notes amplify the raw power of the recordings. Better than a crawl through the spookiest attic.

Anyone familiar with Greil Marcus' INVISIBLE REPUBLIC is also familiar with the legend of Dock Boggs' early recordings. They are every bit as haunting as Marcus makes them out to be. If you enjoy pre-war, rough-sounding, _raw_ blues, this is the long lost album you've been waiting for.

To be enjoyed while sipping whiskey, not wine.

Oh MAN! Did this guy have demons! And you usually don't hear that about 1920's banjo pickers ... but "Dock" Boggs is so iconoclastic he's almost not of our world. If you had the pleasure of hearing "Country Blues" and "Sugar Baby" from the Anthology of American Folk Music, you won't be disappointed by the rest of the cuts here. My partner says he sings like Alfalfa from Our Gang ... but that's because he blasts notes like he's one of James Brown's JB's. Strangely moving, and not as far removed from Nirvana (who covered "Polly") as you might think.

Dock Bogg's music is typical of old time music by white appalachian performers, particularly banjo players. They are playing an African instrument, transmitted into their area by African Americans, their repetoire ranges into blues, their musical styles on the instruments even in non-blues are influenced by blues music. They lived in a society where the formal racial separation of Jim Crow Segregation and Lynch law existed because of the actual integration of the lives and cultures of white and black workers and farmers and above all musicians was greater than what we have today.

Dock Boggs was quite explicit. He recalled the names of the black banjo players he saw in childhood who played banjo finger style, rather than in the claw hammer style that his brothers played. From childhood he wanted to play like them. Many of the tunes he recorded he said he got from listening to Black blues records. Some tunes, like "Down South Blues" he learned from female classic blues records that were more in the lineage of Jazz, than acoustic blues. Anyone who cares to read the many interviews with Boggs that have been published or listen to the cds and lps of his memories can learn about this.

Bogg's skills as a singer, as a banjo player, and, above all, as a performer who throws himself entirely into his songs,are unique. But the mixture of African and European American music he represents is hardly unique.


He may collide with the rather false, sometime boring, washed white fantasies about old time white country music nourished by folkies and post folkies and with what white racists who cling to as something purely "white," but Boggs' bluesyness is part of being real old time and not a suburban 60-90s fantasy of old time life.


What about the other great finger picking discovery of old-time banjo playing, Roscoe Holcomb. When he was rediscovered though Holcomb's repetoire included all kinds of music played on banjo, guitar, harmonic, and fiddle, he said he was a blues singer and one of the better ones around his area of Kentucky!

The mixture is real. If you go back and listen to say the Carter family (who added to the Carter Scratch guitar style Maybelle Carter originated, finger style blues and slide playing Maybelle learned from African American blues singer Leslie Riddle who traveled with AP Carter collecting songs and lived with the Carter Family for a time) or to Bill Monroe (who along with fellow western Kentuckian Merle Travis learned much of his music from Black bluesman Arnold Schultz) they sound so much blusier, so much more black influenced, than the Allison Krauses and Nickel Creeks reared in suburbia and not the world of racial cultural mix that Dock Boggs comes from.

Just a point of fact, Bogg's banjo style is closer to bluegrass than most other banjo players of his time. Many of Boggs's contemporaries including his older banjo playing brother were frailers of various kinds, whereas Boggs was a finger picker for the most part. Bluegrass banjo involves precisely adding in the bluesier licks and sounds to the music in an systematic fashion. It is a finger style with just the kind of synchopation that Boggs was a master of, although not exactly what Boggs does here.

On the other hand, Boggs's banjo playing is very strongly influenced by the white parlor guitar and classic banjo stylings, whereas bluegrass in my opinion after the suggestions of my friend Allen Feldman, comes from styles of North Carolina finger picking that descend from clawhammer banjo. Boggs eschewed clawhammer and doesn't play any of those finger styles.

This release was almost willed into existence, firstly by the attention given to the singer by Greil Marcus in 'Invisible Republic', his 1997 study of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes and their dependence on the 1952 Folkways Anthology, and secondly by the re-release of that Anthology on CD and the subsequent singling out for special praise of the two Boggs songs it included. Although Boggs's original twelve recordings have been available on a Folkways album for some time, this CD, with all known alternate takes as well as contributions from associated musicians, contains much more.

Moran Lee 'Dock' Boggs was a coal miner from Virginia who played banjo and sang with a strong nasal twang some of the most intensely haunting white blues of the 1920s, rivalling many a black blues singer in fervour and pain. There is a strong sense of more ancient traditions, both white and black, in his performances. He listened to the recordings of black singers, such as Rosa Henderson and Sara Martin, and adapted some of their songs, including 'Down South Blues', 'Sugar Blues' and 'Mistreated Mama Blues', into his own repertoire. Others, like 'Pretty Polly', 'Danville Girl', and 'Sammie, Where Have You Been So Long?', come from the white tradition.

Boggs recorded the first eight tracks on this album for Brunswick in 1927, accompanied on most songs by Hub Mahaffey on guitar. The following four songs, and the alternate takes, were recorded for the small Virginia label Lonesome Ace in 1929. Both 'Old Rub Alcohol Blues' and 'False Hearted Lover's Blues' from this date use the same tune as the more successful 'Country Blues'. Boggs was backed on this session by the guitar of Emry Arthur, who composed and recorded 'Man Of Constant Sorrow' for Paramount in 1929, a song covered by Dylan on his first album. Dock Boggs was not to record again until after his rediscovery in the 1960s when three new albums were issued by Folkways, and these are also now available on CD.

The final four tracks of this album feature the brothers Bill and Hayes Shepherd from Kentucky, singing in the typical 'high-lonesome' style associated with that state. Hayes, in particular, exhibits an intense delivery similar to that of Dock Boggs on his outstanding pair of performances included here.

Sound quality is pretty good, but surface noise is intrusive on certain tracks, and I can't help feeling that someone such as John R T Davies could have achieved a better standard of remastering. There is a certain quirkiness in the programming, since two-minute periods of silence are provided, to separate the alternate takes from the original releases, and the Shepherd brothers from Dock Boggs. An unnecessary measure, which proves to be quite irritating on repeated playings of the disc.

The CD comes inside a 64-page hardback booklet, cunningly designed to be just too tall to fit onto conventional CD shelving. The external sleeve notes and track listing detach themselves when the cellophane outer wrapper is removed, and are then presumably intended for disposal, since there is no way of re-securing them to the package. It is also difficult to remove and re-insert the CD into its rough cardboard sleeve, attached inside the rear cover. The booklet includes detailed notes by Greil Marcus, adapted from 'Invisible Republic', and also by Jon Pankake, and lyrics are provided to all twelve of Boggs's songs. Photographs are included, but their reproduction is faint. Given the attention that has been lavished in other areas, a discography is almost conspicuous by its absence, and would have been a useful addition. The music itself is superb, and this CD is an essential acquisition for all lovers of old-time music. But beware of the eccentric packaging.

Great music, like great movies, has atmosphere and tactile presence. You can just imagine what Boggs' contemporaries thought about these songs. There is a seriousness and a pervading sense of doom that must have shocked and compelled his early audiences. The old power is still there.