Customer Reviews

Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette

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This is just an amazing album. I'm not sure where all to start. The first half of this album is cylinder recordings from about 1910 or so. Cylinder technology had advanced a lot from its beginnings in the late 1890s, but there wasn't a ton of material like this, old-time banjo and guitar music.

The material from the late 1920s is also great, there's more of an edge and jump to the songs, when they're recorded in the absence of the by now deceased Polk, and the Old South Quartette, which carried on without him - for at least two decades later!

Polk Miller grew up in a family that held slaves. He was a Civil War confederate veteran, adding a little more gravity to the opener song Bonnie Blue Flag. He toured the north and south with the quartette, but audiences weren't ready for an interracial group - and they let him know about it. He eventually disbanded it for this reason.

Polk must have been a complicated person, trying to represent and remind audiences of some of the old south, in a new, one would imagine, more sophisticated way. I doubt he was trying to be subversive, but I'm sure he was interpreted as being just that.

I love this old time music from a time when the world was so different. Fascinating step back in time. Loved by Mark Twain, these recordings have good music in addition to being very interesting.