The Old Home Place: Bluegrass and Old-Time Mountai

Various Artists (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 15, 2003)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Rounder / Umgd
• ASIN: B00008WI7V
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #567,847 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars home, sweet home, April 28, 2003

By 

Jerome Clark (Canby, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Old Home Place: Bluegrass and Old-Time Mountai (Audio CD)

First, an expression of small irritation: The subtitle notwithstanding, there is no, or at least hardly any, "old-time mountain music" here, unless you count the Nashville Bluegrass Band's version of the Carter Family's "My Native Home." That, however, is resurrected in a more or less contemporary bluegrass setting. The selections here are not, with a couple of exceptions, those 19th-Century home-sweet-home songs that found their way to the Southern mountains and other parts of rural America, to be rediscovered as "old-time" folk music. It is obviously true, of course, that without that background this particular genre of bluegrass wouldn't exist.

The songs and arrangements here mostly represent state-of-the-art bluegrass as it explores the once-staple subject of home, otherwise missing from nearly all popular music these days. What's "old time" here is the sense that where you come from and dream of going back to one day matter even now. The "home place" is always rural or small-town. You don't have to have rural roots, or to have moved to the big city and then, many years later, come back home (as I, for example, did), to relate to these fine songs and performances. (Modesty should exclude me, but won't quite, from including among the just-mentioned Suzanne Thomas's "Leaving This Land," which I co-wrote. I confess, though, that whatever the composition's inherent virtues or flaws, I love what she did to it.) Many of the songs either are hymns (the Cox Family's reading of the standard "Little Whitewashed Chimney") or hymnlike (Laurie Lewis's powerful "Who Will Watch the Home Place?"). The most strikingly original song is the Rice Brothers's "This Old House" -- not the old gospel tune, but a more recent song, told from the point of view of a house as the family that has lived within it for many years moves out. It could be mawkish, even preposterous, but it turns out to be as heart-wrenching as Hazel Dickens's uncompromising "Hills of Home," which is as devoid of sentimentality as a song of this kind could be.

Among other high points, Vern Williams does a hard-driving, trad-bluegrass romp through Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home" and restores it blazingly to life. Still another plus is the liner notes, by the revered country-music historian Bill C. Malone, who puts America's musical homes in context of our culture and history. The CD is good enough to make you homesick even if you're already there.