Country made before 1940

Search: the Carter Family, the Blue Sky Boys. Destroy: Hollywood cowboy songs.

Jimmie Rodgers owns this. Carter Family & Bob Wills too - but better known for their 40's stuff, I think (?).

I like some of those old Hollywood cowboy songs. In fact the first name that popped into my head when I saw this subject heading was The Sons of the Pioneers. They did a few movies, but they're probably most well-known for recording the most famous version of "Tumbling Tumbleweeds". Bob Nolan of The Sons is one of country music's fine songwriters, I think. The best Sons of the Pioneers records (the best songs of Bob Nolan) have a remarkably eerie, ghostly quality to them. Stuff like "Cool Water", "Blue Prairie". Starry skies, crackling campfires, loneliness, delicate vocal harmonies, sighing melodies. It's beautiful stuff.

I also like the 1930's Western Swing band, The Light Crust Doughboys. Their goofy double entrendre song, "Pussy, Pussy, Pussy" from, I think, 1938 should be heard.

Foy Willing. I think most of his stuff was 40s tho

search for Mr Smokey Wood, the Houston Hipster. Cut some good boogie- woogie piano country/jazz. "everybody's truckin", for example, in 1937. Apparently Fats Waller was the big influence there. In a similar vein to Ella Mae Morse & Freddie Slack, who were, like, after 1940.

also search for a good new book by Nick Tosches, called "Where Dead Voices Gather" about Emmett Miller, who was an apparent inspiration to Jimmie Rodgers, and another country/jazz crossover in the days before 1940. Really good book, with lots of digressions.

Has anybody here actually heard any Emmitt Miller? Everything I've read has made him sound really interesting.

I've had to settle for buying that Beyond Nashville CD since I can't find any of the old stuff anywhere else. It's a good cd though I guess. I do have some 40s stuff, Woody Guthrie and the like. Good old labour songs.

I know Emmett Miller's stuff (Columbia Legacy put a CD out a few years ago, which is deleted but still possible to find if you look carefully). I think he's very fine, sitting somewhere in the middle of early country, jazz/swing and the minstrelsy. I remain a bit uncomfortable with the latter. Some of the records are 'comedy' turns involving his blackface character, for example, which stick in the craw rather.

But his "Lovesick Blues" is the version which Hank learned and is marvellous and bizarre thing. It's not all as good as that, but it's good stuff.

That version of "Lovesick Blues" turned up on a German compilation called "American Yodeling 1911-1946" a couple of years back, which also (amongst various yodelling gems) a song by the DeZurik Sisters which is like nothing I've heard before or since.

The same company (Trikont) stuck out a comp called "Prayers From Hell" full of spooked material from the same era. Dock Boggs and the like. Also good stuff, though neither an easy listen nor a barrel of laughs. And if no fun is your cup of wotsit, try Kelly Harrell.

For a break from the misery, search for Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies. "Down at the O-H-I-O" is one of the greatest records ever made, yes it is. Especially the verse about the piano.

search for Cowboys, Doughboys & Playboys: Golden Years of Western Swing, a supercheap 4CD box (got mine for about $30 new) on a German label, Proper, that put out supercheap, high-quality boxes w/scads-o-liner notes/photos etc. It is, as the Germans put it, der shit.

Leadbelly. Woodie Guthrie. Why not Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Lemon Jefferson? Any reason? They played "country blues" but so did Bob Wills et al from time to time. The distinctions between genres were blurry then, and shifting, and no one really cared except for the Lomaxes and, eventually, record executives who'd discovered this new thing called "marketing".

search: the unrecorded stuff. Which was most of it.

Good point, Tracer. Pre-WW2 American music seems harder to neatly categorize into neat little slots: blues, jazz, pop, country, gospel etc. all overlapping and cross-pollinating. More blur between religious & popular music too? Part of what makes it so interesting, I think.

Hell. How about:

We'll build a bungalow big enough for two
Big enough for two, my darlin, big enough for two
When we are married, how happy we will be
Underneath the bamboo, underneath the bamboo tree

If you'll be M-I-N-E mine, I'll be T-H-I-N-E thine
And I'll L-O-V-E love you all the T-I-M-E time
You are the B-E-S-T best of all the R-E-S-T rest
And I'll L-O-V-E love you all the T-I-M-E time

(sung to the tune of "I Saw the Light")

I have just run into an upstairs neighbor named DJANGO who plays GUITAR and who thru varied ways and means has acquired 40 CDs from the Rounder issues of the Lomax collection!! I haff laid temporary claim to several of these. Lomaxes C or D? It's too complicated to even think about. Some are just fucking how-you-say 'chancers' fumbling shrilly through the motions. It's hard to say the Lxes were interested in getting the best (or even passably competent at times) performances. 'oh they're just RUSTIC' - PLEASE spare me your condescension. All's it takes is a listen to the performances that are simply AWESOME in every aspect to know what I'm saying. I'm listening to "Soungs of Outlaws and Desperadoes", a meaningless title that purports to describe a group of unrelated songs and performers, just scattershot. Whatever they could get their hands on. They wanted SONGS, like nuggets of gold to be scooped out of the water as they floated by. [that's how some songwriters describe writing the essential nugget of a song, too. does that make the lomaxes songwriters??] But dud, because there's some pretty maudlin [shit] to wade thru.

I know what you mean, based on the couple of Lomax collections I've heard. There is something unsatisfying about them, generally. But wasn't their purported intention to collect a scattershot representation of folk music - they considered themselves primarily ethno-musicologists not record producers, right? Actually, haven't the Lomaxes been widely criticized for having presented the material as an objective representation of folk traditions, when in fact their recordings reflect their tastes & prejudices? I vaguely remember reading something along these lines, but maybe I'm way off.

in fact their recordings reflect their tastes & prejudices

I am actually all for this - in fact my problem is that there's not enough of it!

The set from their trip thru the south down highway 61 I think is mag. It rilly does feel like an authentic ethnomusical chart of the region & the history of music.