Customer Reviews

Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South

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As the son of a linthead mill worker, I was raised in the North Carolina Piedmont area. My father worked in Belmont for over 40 years and was a fiddler for a relatively unknown square dance band. Obviously, Huber's Linthead Stomp attracted my immediate interest. This book provides a rare and overlooked review of the influence of the Piedmont music of the South. I had heard of Dave McCarn but knew little or nothing of him. Huber's ability to tie the cotton mill era to the culture of the music and people gives us a three dimensional view of the "real" people of that era. I was called a linthead many times during my childhood, and the label was not meant as a compliment. It's a pleasure to be able to take some pride now in knowing the full contribution of these people who carved out a meager living but kept alive their love of music and as well as their personal dignity.
Ted Whisnant

I would highly recommend this study for anyone interested in the history of country music in the U.S. The author has done his homework, but goes beyond the general histories of country music to give details and a nuanced treatment of the topic. Very highly recommended!!

The most interesting "old time music" book I have read in quite some time. The author manages to place several icons of early country music into a cultural context not done before... the millhands of the Southeast United States. Another reason to lament the loss of the cotton mills. I was also introduced to Dave McCarn, a hard living and seldom heard artist. A wonderful study, and I have added "linthead" to my vocabulary.

Jim Linderman "Dull Tool Dim Bulb" Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950

Linthead Stomp is, as the subtitle says, a story of how country music was created from a musical core in the Southern Piedmont of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The subtext is that contrary to the popular imagination the music that was before country was created by mostly urban workers employed at one time or another in the numerous textile mills in the area. The book does this by profiling four artists who recorded before World War II; "Fiddlin'" John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn. and the Dixon Brothers.

The book makes it's case easily enough. Fiddlin' John Carson spent most of his life living and working in Atlanta. The Dixon Brothers and Dave McCarn worked, when the they worked at all, in the mills. Charlie Poole, whose main occupations were music and alcohol, worked at some point in the mills. These artists, and many others, were not backwoods hillbillies ecking at a marginal subsistence, brewing moonshine, and spitting tobacco. The musical influence of the mountain hollows actually came later with the advent of the Lomax family and the folk revival of the 1960's.

It's for this reason, the musicians were urban, more or less, they recorded in urban centers, very often in New York, they were employed in the mills, that beyond stating the facts of the musicians lives the author has had to work at it to get to book length. There is a lot of repetition. The same facts are stated again and again for each artist as in the case of Dave McCarn his recording career was very limited. Charlie Poole, who had a prolific recording career during his short life in a alcoholic haze, gave, as the author says, no interviews and left no personal writings.

Still this book is recommended to all who want to understand where country, bluegrass, and old time music came from. Each of the artists is treated with great respect and put in the context of their time some of which is both surprising and should not be so surprising. These artists were categorized in the Hill Billy category when none of them were mountain folk. That is how their music sold. Charlie Poole was heavily influenced by the jazz, blues, and popular music of his time, and yet his recording company would not record him outside of his category and his attempts to obtain a wider audience and expand his music met with indifference. The artists were frequently publicized in clothes they never wore in order to be portrayed as some part of an older, simpler, and better time in the past. A lot of the big hats and big hair that's part of modern country music is undoubtedly derived from this yearning for a past that never existed.