Customer Reviews

Greenback Dollar

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Go to the Clarence Ashley official web site. Look at the picture of a young Tom Ashley (he was actually known as Tom)holding his TROMBONE in a marching band uniform.

Listen to his banjo playing. Incidentally his instrument is not ODDLY TUNED but played in one of the most popular of the scores of alternate banjo tunings necessitated by the nature of the instrument, tunings well known by banjo players across the country in Ashley's time and our own. He sings ballads hundreds of years old, and blues like Corrine Corrine that had been made popular by black bluses stars like the Mississippi Sheiks. He sings pop songs. He sings in groups whose name and appearance speak to the Jazz Age he was part of such as Byrd Moore and His Hot Shots (in whose publicity picture the cover picture of Tom in a boater comes from).

Ashley, like so many of the other exemplars of this socalled old time music played music that came out of a mix, not a purity, a mixture of then current pop music, the great growth of the blues and other black music--including the blacks who had brought the banjo to the region in the previous century--and the old time ballads.

Ashley isn't that unique. He is good and fun.

What I like here besides the fine banjo playing is his work as a guitar player. When Ashley began to be recorded again in the 1960s (he never went anywhere, it simply took Ralph Rinzler going to a Virginia fiddlers convention and asking for him, just as Dock Boggs was found by Mike Seeger simply looking Boggs up in the telephone book!) he initially believed his arthritis and other problems made it impossible for him to play guitar, though he had always thought of himself as a guitarist first and banjo player second. Most of the recordings he made in the 1960s featured him either singing only or singing and playing banjo. Only in the last year or so of his life did he realize his disability didnt prevent him playing guitar and there are one or two cuts of him playing guitar. It is nice to hear more of old Tom on the guitar here.

This collection is both brilliant and disappointing. If it were me, I would have made this collection all about Clarence's best music... the haunting, lonely, "solo banjo and vocals" mountain murder tunes and ballads. This is what the scariest music of the upland South is all about. Tortured, disjointed, hypnotic melodies and a voice that can crawl right into the deepest corner of your soul and stay there.

For me, that's the heart and soul of this disc. The mountain music.... Li'l Sadie, Coo Coo Bird, House Carpenter, Old John Hardy, Omie Wise, and Dark Holler. That's it.

Everything else on the disc is just the commercial pop-country of the day. This stuff is just not nearly as emotional or hard-hitting as the unadulterated mountain music. The melodies and rhythms are rather bland, Clarence's voice isn't evil like it is on the mountain music, etc....

House Carpenter, Dark Holler, etc... demand your attention, won't let it go. The pop-country tunes with sappy little harmonica playing are just there, taking up space. It's for this reason that I gave this collection 3 stars. 5 stars for the brilliant stuff that you absolutely need to hear, and 1 star for the filler. Make no doubt about it though, even with the filler, this is an essential disc. The 6 great songs are perfect.

This disc goes even better with some of the other discs that share partial repertoire with it, such as Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia, Hobart Smith's Blue Ridge Legacy, etc... and for the full effect, I highly recommend the book, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia.

Hearing the personal and cultural differences among different versions of these same songs is fascinating, and all have things to offer that the others do not.

I first heard Clarence "Tom" Ashley's music, like most people, after I'd been introduced to Doc Watson and was seeking out his recordings. These included, I learned, a couple of Folkways albums called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's, eventually reissued in a two-CD, expanded edition in the 1990s on Smithsonian/Folkways. I thought of Ashley as, of course, a fine musician, but more as an older mentor to the younger Watson. In later years, hearing the occasional Ashley cut on anthologies of 1920s/30s old-time music, I began to realize that he was more than that. So this long-overdue Ashley-only reissue of his early recordings is both welcome and revelatory. You might almost say close to overwhelming: here are 20 songs in the deep-Appalachian tradition, performed by one of the masters, solo or in the company of other gifted musicians. There are the songs from the Anglo/Celtic tradition -- "Coo Coo Bird," "House Carpenter," "Rude and Rambling Man" -- and the not-so-familiar versions of native American ballads, lyric songs, and blues. The blues are a particular delight. I did not fully appreciate just what an accomplished blues singer Ashley was, putting the lie (yet again) to the canard that a white man can't sing the blues. Among them are the gleefully raunchy "Farm Girl Blues" and the forlorn "Drunk Man Blues," both performed with harmonica player/guitarist Gwen Foster. Ashley's readings of the murder ballads "Naomi Wise" and "Old John Hardy" are more intense, more explicitly violent than most versions, and intensely affecting. This is a CD awash in stirring and unforgettable performances, and not a boring or mediocre moment is to be had. Ashley was a giant, and this lovingly fashioned reissue does him all the justice he deserves.

Written by Dan Nelson age 12 (2004)

Clarence "Tom" Ashley is amazing. My favorite songs on this cd are the one he plays with Gwen Foster. Gwen's harmonica playing, filled with trills and bends at the highest notes sounds great behind Tom's high and bright singing.
Ashley played in many groups. A few tracks from each of of them are on this cd as well as some of his solo tracks. The groups he played with were called "The Blue Ridge Entertainers", "The Carolina Tar heels", "Byrd Moore And His Hot Shots" and "Ashley And Foster". The Blue Ridge Entertainers' version of "Corrina Corrina" and "Short Life Of Trouble" are the best versions I've ever heard. Buy this cd and buy the cd with Tom playing in the 60s with Doc Watson. that's a great cd too.

Greenback Dollar collects the best of Ashley's recordings and presents them in excellent sound and a nice package. Ashley represents a bridge between folk culture and the emerging commercial country music. Every cut is prime in this collection, but pay special attention to "Farm Girl" and "Rude and Ramblin Man." For those who like Johnny Cash's "Cocaine Blues" just listen to "Little Sadie" and hear the original.

County has been doing its best to release old-time artists and this one is overdue. His vocals are usually understated and leave a bit of mystery for the listener. Combine his splendid clawhammer banjo playing and this a sophisticated entertainer with a lot to share with his audience. The disk is well mastered and strong from start to finish

I first read about Gwen Foster in an interview with Joe Filisko. I found this CD after doing a little research. Gwen Foster's harmonica playing is the perfect complement to Tom Ashley's voice. It is these songs that really make me float. The diatonic harmonica becomes a second voice on the record. Foster's tongue tremolo bird trills are more than simple ornaments. They are perfectly placed and controlled expressions of his heart and soul. I have always been a fan of high register harmonica playing. I also enjoy Bill "Jazz" Gillum's high register playing.

Ashley's version here of "Corinna Corinna," recorded shortly after the original record by the Mississippi Sheiks, features some of the finest Southern old-time two or three-part harmony ever recorded.

Simply put, this album contains the wisdom and sadness of the ages. This is easily one of the top 20 cd's ever made. I have not heard Clarence "Tom" Ashley's stuff that he did with Doc Watson, but I know it can't be nearly as powerful and sorrowful, and, at times, gleeful, as this wonderful music. Like Dock Boggs, a man whose cd I previously reviewed, Ashley is white, but is able to not only play the blues with the best of them, but also feel it. And his feelings come across loud and clear on this album. His feelings transcend space and time. This isn't hype; Clarence "Tom" Ashley is indeed a legend of American folk music.

Undertone of death throughout. Puts all artists, country or otherwise, to shame. I just can't describe the brilliance of these recordings.