Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963-1968

Dock Boggs

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 15, 1998)
• Original Release Date: October 20, 1998
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Smithsonian Folkways
• ASIN: B00000AFQO
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #113,426 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Dock Boggs champions will look back at 1998 as a monumental year for the Virginia-born banjo-playing songster who, but for a few years in the late '20s and the early '60s, lived in obscurity. His first recordings have been beautifully reissued in Revenant's Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings package. His shadow looms over Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic--the critic's best book since Mystery Train. And Smithsonian Folkways has brought back 50 recordings made by Mike Seeger during the autumn of Boggs's life. Together with the Revenant material, this two-CD reissue--including a brilliant essay by Barry O'Connell--details one of the most mysterious voices in American music. When Boggs sings he tears each line to pieces and, in turn, the language of his death-obsessed blues rends his voice into a scratchy, painful tremolo. This is not folk music for the timid. "Oh, I've got no sugar baby now," he wails in one of his best-known songs. "It's all I can do for to see peace with you / And I can't get along this-a-way." Along with celebrated material from the '20s, Boggs also chose for these '60s sessions a few gospel tunes, which are sung with the revealing intensity. And on every track, even on the shaky, jagged instrumentals, Boggs captures the darkest and resiliency of a man's soul. --Roy Kasten

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darkness and redemption, June 4, 2000

By	Rob Damm (Brick, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This is dark music. Not stagey, Marilyn Manson dark, but really the deepest dark of the soul. All the tunes here sound even better-- more tortured, sadder, lonlier than they did on Boggs' original recordings from the 20's. Best are the "new" gospel tunes he chose for this session... the conviction and passion is just awe-inspiring. Sit in a dark room and listen to these recordings alone. It is a life changing experience. The quality of the recordings (especially with HDCD gear) is spectacular... you can almost believe Dock is in the corner, singing his soul out... just for you...and the demons.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blues Old Timey Blues Old Timey, banjo, banjo, banjo, January 6, 2004

By	Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Dock Bogg's music is typical of old time music by white appalachian performers, particularly banjo players. In this forum, his grand neice points out that he has one of the best combinations of Blues and country ever found. He was a singularly personal performer.

In many ways he is more like the Skip James of old time banjo than the Robert Johnson, particularly if you listen to the haunted original recordings James made in the 1930s. In fact in the 1960s when he joined the folk revival and performed along with a lot of the old blues musicians who had similarly been "rediscovered" Dock Boggs said if he had to do it all over again, he would have learned to play guitar and sing the way Mississippi John Hurt played and sang!

The bluesiness of this all may be more pronounced in Boggs' work, but it was really typical of the white Southern banjo players of his era. They are playing an African instrument, transmitted into their area by African Americans, their repetoire ranges into blues, their musical styles on the instruments even in non-blues are influenced by blues music. They lived in a society where the formal racial separation of Jim Crow Segregation and Lynch law existed because of the actual integration of the lives and cultures of white and black workers and farmers and above all musicians was greater than what we have today.

Dock Boggs was quite explicit. He recalled the names of the black banjo players he saw in childhood who played banjo finger style, rather than in the claw hammer style that his brothers played. From childhood he wanted to play like them. Many of the tunes he recorded he said he got from listening to Black blues records. Anyone who cares to read the many interviews with Boggs that have been published or listen to the cds and lps of his memories can learn about this.

Bogg's skills as a singer, as a banjo player, and, above all, as a performer who throws himself entirely into his songs,are unique. But the mixture of African and European American music he represents is hardly unique.

He may collide with the rather false, sometime boring, washed white fantasies about old time white country music nourished by folkies and post folkies and with what white racists who cling to as something purely "white," but Boggs' bluesyness is part of being real old time and not a suburban 60-90s fantasy of old time life.

What about the other great finger picking discovery of old-time banjo playing, Roscoe Holcomb. When he was rediscovered though Holcomb's repetoire included all kinds of music played on banjo, guitar, harmonic, and fiddle, he said he was a blues singer and one of the better ones around his area of Kentucky!

The mixture is real. If you go back and listen to say the Carter family (whose guitar style came from a black man Leslie Riddle who performed on several of their cuts) or to Bill Monroe (who along with fellow western Kentuckian Merle Travis learned much of his music from Black bluesman Arnold Schultz) they sound so much blusier, so much more black influences, than the Allison Krauses and Nickel Creeks reared in suburbia and not the world of racial cultural mix that Dock Boggs comes from.

Just a point of fact, Bogg's banjo style is closer to bluegrass than most other banjo players of his time. Most of Boggs contemporaries were frailers of various kinds, whereas Boggs was a finger picker for the most part. Bluegrass banjo involves precisely adding in the bluesier licks and sounds to the music in an systematic fashion. It is a finger style with just the kind of synchopation that Boggs was a master at.

Particularly the initial bluegrass recordings of Bill Monroe at the end of WWII are obviously a reaction to the rhythmns of Swing. The setup of the tunes, playing the melody first and then opening for improvisational solos by virtuosi musicians, comes from the combo swing and bop then prevelant and has nothing to do with how old time music functioned. As the greatest Bluegrass Fiddler Kenny Baker said, to play Bluegrass Fiddle you need to think like playing Jazz.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars harrowing beauty, March 1, 2000

By	Hayden Childs (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This album is rough, beautiful, chilling, warm (yes, both chilling & warm), spare and rich, terrifying and funny. Dock makes his banjo sound alternately like Judgment Day & payday. Necessary for fans of old-time music.