Greenback Dollar: 1929-1933

Clarence Ashley

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 1, 2002)
• Original Release Date: 2001
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: County Records
• ASIN: B000058TA8
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,396 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Those harboring illusions that old-time music is a quaint, primitive entertainment will be shocked, if not disturbed, by Clarence Ashley. These 20 songs survey the original prewar recordings of the legendary banjo picker, black-faced minstrel, and stinging Appalachian vocalist, and make the case that his music is as mysterious and troubling as his more heralded contemporary Dock Boggs. Like a great character actor, Ashley sinks into the identities of rakes and rambling blades, delivering lines like "All I want's my 32-20, just to shoot out your dirty brains" with all-too-human malice. Some tunes, like the original "Coo Coo Bird" (featured on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music), capture just Ashley and his oddly tuned banjo; others, like his influential version of "Corrina, Corrina," find him backed by some fine early country musicians, especially the virtuoso harmonica player Gwen Foster. Collectors of ancient 78s know what it's like to rediscover such long-neglected American music; thanks to this collection, the rest of us can share the same thrill. --Roy Kasten

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not what you think it is, but what it is, October 23, 2003

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

Go to the Clarence Ashley official web site. Look at the picture of a young Tom Ashley (he was actually known as Tom)holding his TROMBONE in a marching band uniform.

Listen to his banjo playing. Incidentally his instrument is not ODDLY TUNED but played in one of the most popular of the scores of alternate banjo tunings necessitated by the nature of the instrument, tunings well known by banjo players across the country in Ashley's time and our own. He sings ballads hundreds of years old, and blues like Corrine Corrine that had been made popular by black bluses stars like the Mississippi Sheiks. He sings pop songs. He sings in groups whose name and appearance speak to the Jazz Age he was part of such as Byrd Moore and His Hot Shots (in whose publicity picture the cover picture of Tom in a boater comes from).

Ashley, like so many of the other exemplars of this socalled old time music played music that came out of a mix, not a purity, a mixture of then current pop music, the great growth of the blues and other black music--including the blacks who had brought the banjo to the region in the previous century--and the old time ballads.

Ashley isn't that unique. He is good and fun.

What I like here besides the fine banjo playing is his work as a guitar player. When Ashley began to be recorded again in the 1960s (he never went anywhere, it simply took Ralph Rinzler going to a Virginia fiddlers convention and asking for him, just as Dock Boggs was found by Mike Seeger simply looking Boggs up in the telephone book!) he initially believed his arthritis and other problems made it impossible for him to play guitar, though he had always thought of himself as a guitarist first and banjo player second. Most of the recordings he made in the 1960s featured him either singing only or singing and playing banjo. Only in the last year or so of his life did he realize his disability didnt prevent him playing guitar and there are one or two cuts of him playing guitar. It is nice to hear more of old Tom on the guitar here.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars On one hand, epic. On the other, disappointing. Essential., November 3, 2002

By	Pharoah S. Wail (Inner Space) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This collection is both brilliant and disappointing. If it were me, I would have made this collection all about Clarence's best music... the haunting, lonely, "solo banjo and vocals" mountain murder tunes and ballads. This is what the scariest music of the upland South is all about. Tortured, disjointed, hypnotic melodies and a voice that can crawl right into the deepest corner of your soul and stay there.

For me, that's the heart and soul of this disc. The mountain music.... Li'l Sadie, Coo Coo Bird, House Carpenter, Old John Hardy, Omie Wise, and Dark Holler. That's it.

Everything else on the disc is just the commercial pop-country of the day. This stuff is just not nearly as emotional or hard-hitting as the unadulterated mountain music. The melodies and rhythms are rather bland, Clarence's voice isn't evil like it is on the mountain music, etc....

House Carpenter, Dark Holler, etc... demand your attention, won't let it go. The pop-country tunes with sappy little harmonica playing are just there, taking up space. It's for this reason that I gave this collection 3 stars. 5 stars for the brilliant stuff that you absolutely need to hear, and 1 star for the filler. Make no doubt about it though, even with the filler, this is an essential disc. The 6 great songs are perfect.

This disc goes even better with some of the other discs that share partial repertoire with it, such as Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia, Hobart Smith's Blue Ridge Legacy, etc... and for the full effect, I highly recommend the book, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia.

Hearing the personal and cultural differences among different versions of these same songs is fascinating, and all have things to offer that the others do not.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars justice to a giant of American music, June 10, 2001

By	Jerome Clark (Canby, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I first heard Clarence "Tom" Ashley's music, like most people, after I'd been introduced to Doc Watson and was seeking out his recordings. These included, I learned, a couple of Folkways albums called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's, eventually reissued in a two-CD, expanded edition in the 1990s on Smithsonian/Folkways. I thought of Ashley as, of course, a fine musician, but more as an older mentor to the younger Watson. In later years, hearing the occasional Ashley cut on anthologies of 1920s/30s old-time music, I began to realize that he was more than that. So this long-overdue Ashley-only reissue of his early recordings is both welcome and revelatory. You might almost say close to overwhelming: here are 20 songs in the deep-Appalachian tradition, performed by one of the masters, solo or in the company of other gifted musicians. There are the songs from the Anglo/Celtic tradition -- "Coo Coo Bird," "House Carpenter," "Rude and Rambling Man" -- and the not-so-familiar versions of native American ballads, lyric songs, and blues. The blues are a particular delight. I did not fully appreciate just what an accomplished blues singer Ashley was, putting the lie (yet again) to the canard that a white man can't sing the blues. Among them are the gleefully raunchy "Farm Girl Blues" and the forlorn "Drunk Man Blues," both performed with harmonica player/guitarist Gwen Foster. Ashley's readings of the murder ballads "Naomi Wise" and "Old John Hardy" are more intense, more explicitly violent than most versions, and intensely affecting. This is a CD awash in stirring and unforgettable performances, and not a boring or mediocre moment is to be had. Ashley was a giant, and this lovingly fashioned reissue does him all the justice he deserves.