Customer Reviews

With the North Carolina Ramblers & The Highlanders

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I got this set just so I could have "all" the Charlie Poole sides. Big mistake! The Sony set has much better sound quality and very high production values. The County CDS do a decent job of sound and sort of cover the gaps. This sounds like basically a copy of inferior sources and the stuff that the above labels don't cover really sounds bad. I really wouldn't recommend this, even for the die-hard Charlie Poole fan.

Here is another bargain box from JSP and here, too, is another mess (which I have come to expect from this fly-by-night label). On the surface this appears to be the complete Charlie Poole with assorted recordings by others, but it is not complete.

Banjoist Charlie Poole is truly one of the all-time greats in old-time country music and fans of his work have been well served with 3 excellent anthologies on the County label (featuring 48 tracks) and a great new, affordable box set on Sony/Legacy.

The sound quality of the material in this box set varies. Most of it is good but several sides on the last disc sound terrible. Liner notes are okay, but they are jumbled (the notes for the first and second discs got placed in the wrong booklets). The discography is error-ridden (mostly in regard to the artist/band name used on the various 78 RPM releases). "Coon From Tennessee" is mistitled as "From Tennessee." The discography lists dates, locations, and musicians but does not give label information.

In summary, there is a good deal of essential old-time country music here mixed in with marginal recordings, all presented in a haphazard fashion. I highly recommend the new Sony/Legacy release "You Ain't Talkin' To Me" instead.

The roots of American folk music are not depleted by Child ballads, the blues, city or country, mountain music, cowboy songs or topical Tin Pan Alley tunes as the artist under review, Charlie Poole and his various bands, proves conclusively. Old Charlie took a little from each tradition and created some very nice sounds and arrangements that have been called the direct precursors to what we today call bluegrass music. I agree.

Some of the melodies are very familiar and repeated in various renditions on this four disc CD compilation of Charlie's "greatest hits". It is interesting to compare some different versions like "Bill Mason" that are compiled here. While this CD is hardly strictly for the aficionado both that type of listener and novices to bluegrass music will be tapping their feet on many of the tracks on this one. Googling a list of Charlie Poole's lyrics indicated that almost all of them are contained here, in one form or another. Thus, this may be the definitive collection, although as noted by others more familiar than I with the intricacies of record production the technical quality of this compilation is uneven.

Here are the stick outs on each disc: Disc One -"Wild Horse", "Budded Rose", "Goodbye Booze"; Disc Two "Bill Mason", "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down","Blue Eyes"; Disc Three- "George Collins", " I Once Loved A Sailor", "Baltimore Fire", "Sweet Sunny South"; and, Disc Four- "Under The Double Eagle", "San Antonio", "If The River Was Whiskey"