String Bands: Complete Recorded [Import]

String Bands | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 2, 1994)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Document
• ASIN: B000000J6R
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,724 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Black string bands at the crossroad, a great mixture, April 8, 2009

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: String Bands: Complete Recorded (Audio CD)

Black vernacular music was not recorded until the mid and late 1920s. Musicians had not yet formered the current pressured customs of constantly updating their repertoires to suit fashion, and the homegenization that the recording industry, travelling shows, radio, television, the Internet, and much else has wrought on regional and local styles of music had not come. So we are treated to string bands that play several different kinds of music from different areas of the Black and white south, different kinds of music that reflect different stages of the evolution of Black music.

Taylor's Kentucky Boys and the Booker Orchestra are not really Black string bands, but string bands that include African American and European American members playing great Kentucky fiddle music in the old time dance repertoire. The guitar playing on these recordings are among the best accompaniment of old time fiddle Black and white that was recorded in the 1920s and 1930s.

About African American guitarists, fiddlers, and mandolin players appeared on more than 100 records issued as European American music in the recording company's old time series. Black musicians also issued such old time records under assumed names that were issued as supposedly 'white" records in this time of segregation. There may be many other old time recordings that included Black musicians that we have not learned of. Black people had been playing the old-time string band repertoire since the 19th Century and influenced the white string band tradition.

Part of this had to do with laws and customs that forbid African Americans and European Americans from playing together (not just in old time music recorded in the South but even in Jazz and pop music recorded in New York or Hollywood at that time). Part of this had to do with the waning market for old time dance repertoire among African Americans who had seen Ragtime, Blues, and Jazz music replace the older music across the first decades of the twentieth century.

Black Georgia Fiddler Andrew Baxter is featured here with the Georgia Yellow Hammers, one of the leading wild North Georgia bands, which shared some personnell with the more famous Skillet lickers.

Baxter is also represented by several recordings with his son on Guitar. Note how these recordings are infused with the spirit of popular ragtime and Blues with hints of early Jazz that Black Southern dancers of the time, rural and urban demanded.

The four selections by Nap (misspelled on the Amazon Mp3 list) Hays and Matthew Prather include selections by Scott Joplin--Something Doin' and Easy Winner--but a folk rag "Nothing Doin." Musicologists have pointed to these recordings as recreating the type of 19th Century Black folk string band music that inspired ragtime.

This collection begins and ends with string bands that played the Blues, the dominant music of working class and rural African Americans in the early 20th Century, especially in the urban South, and the cotton growing areas of the Deep South where the blues arose in the late 19th Century. The Alabama Sheiks are fun, but they are a pale imitation of the Great Mississippi Shieks whose great song "Sitting on Top of the World," they do a less than stirring version of. If you want to hear a great Black string band play the blues, get every single Mississippi Sheiks side you can.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite a good disc., September 27, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: String Bands: Complete Recorded (Audio CD)

This is quite a good disc and well worth owning. The Austrians at Document are incredibly thorough at assembling many bizarrely esoteric tracks; however, they are not quite as good as the French on Chronological Classics at the transferrs from 78s to CD: some tracks have alot of surface noise; still, this may add to the interest, i.e. it really sounds like you're playing a real 78 on your hi-fi. Fun in a quirky way. Real Americana.