Fans of SFC streaming radio will be happy to hear we have two new streams up and running:
Jimmie Rodgers, The Father of Country Music, will be streaming in concurrence with the exhibit of the same name (on view at Wilson Library until July 13th). This stream features original recordings by Rodgers, cover versions, and songs by Rodgers-inspired contemporaries .
New Orleans, the first in an upcoming series of geographically-oriented radio streams, features the distinctive jazz, R&B, barrelhouse boogie, and brass bands of New Orleans, Louisiana, and surrounding areas.
The links work best with iTunes, Winamp, or VLC media players. Happy listening!
Category: Music
A Stack o’ "Stack O’Lee"
Well, it seems there really was a Stetson hat. And one cold night in 1895, William “Billy” Lyons and Lee Shelton (otherwise known as “Stack Lee”) fought over that hat in what would become one of the most infamous altercations in folk history. You know which one of them walked away, because Mississippi John Hurt, Ma Rainey, Champion Jack Dupree, Woody Guthrie, The Fruit Jar Guzzlers, Furry Lewis, and countless others immortalized the story in song.
The Southern Folklife Collection has recordings of the grim tale by at least 30 different musicians; there’s a version for every taste. In the mood for a little Hawaiian guitar? Sol Hoopii recorded an instrumental version in 1926:
Sol Hoopii – Stack O Lee Blues clip
(Clip from SFC FC-4006, Master of the Hawaiian Guitar)
Want something with a little more blues flavor? Try Ma Rainey’s iconic 1925 telling of the tale:
Ma Rainey Stack O Lee clip
(clip from SFC CD-3845, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)
Mississippi John Hurt got in on the act in 1928, and brought the song to live audiences throughout the country in the 1960s:
Mississippi John Hurt Stagolee
(clip from SFC CD-4025, Before The Blues: The Early American Black Music Scene)
Maybe that’s where Doc Watson heard it – he recorded his own old-timey version in 1967:
Doc Watson Stackolee clip
(clip from SFC FC-14460, Ballads From Deep Gap)
Many more versions can be found in the Southern Folklife Collection’s online catalog, and you can read more about the true story in Cecil Brown’s Stagolee Shot Billy.
Leadbelly: The Hindenburg Disaster
73 years ago today the German airship Hindenburg exploded in flames while attempting to dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 and pretty much ruining transatlantic zeppelin rides for everyone. Since the sinking of the Titanic almost exactly 25 years earlier had generated a raft of folk ballads on the subject, one might think the Hindenburg disaster would have received similar treatment. However, the world had changed a lot in that quarter century, and apparently there wasn’t great demand for folk ballads on a disaster that had been covered extensively by live radio reports and newsreel footage (you can watch a Pathe newsreel of the disaster here).
But folk singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, gave it a shot. Recorded by Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in June of 1937, here’s a clip of one of Leadbelly’s takes on “The Hindenburg Disaster”:
Hindenburg Disaster
(Clip from Leadbelly: The Library of Congress Recordings, FC-188 in the Southern Folklife Collection.)
Irish Fiddlers in the Kevin Delaney Collection
From 1970 to 1974 Kevin Delaney, a Duke University graduate with a keen interest in folk music, traveled across Ireland and the United States recording scores of local fiddlers and old-time musicians, including many whose music may have otherwise gone undocumented.
These field tapes, now preserved in the SFC’s Kevin Delaney Collection, contain hundreds of tunes performed by traditional Irish musicians, primarily fiddlers from the counties of Clare, Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Meath, Sligo, and Tipperary, as well as Irish fiddlers working in the US. The collection is an invaluable resource for students of Irish and American fiddling traditions.
Listen below to clips of Irish fiddler John Kelly, of Dublin, performing a tune recorded by Delaney as “The Humours of Castlefinn” on July 31, 1972:
Humours of Castlefinn
and Paddy Glacken, also of Dublin, performing “The Apples in Winter” a few days later:
Apples in Winter
Both clips from field tape FT-272 in the Kevin Delaney Collection.
New Addition: The David Holt Collection
The SFC is proud to announce our latest addition: The David Holt Collection, containing material relating to the career of musician, storyteller, and historian of Appalachian music David Holt. The collection includes correspondence, photographs, and press clippings documenting four decades of Holt’s performing career, as well as audio-visual material relating to the many television and radio shows he has hosted since the 1980s, including TNN’s Fire on the Mountain and American Music Shop, Public Radio’s Riverwalk Jazz, and UNC-TV’s long-running Folkways program.
The collection also contains documentation relating to Holt and Doc Watson’s 2002 Grammy award winning album of performance and conversation, Legacy.
Listen below to clips from the Legacy album (SFC CD-7936), wherein the old friends discuss the proper term for a guitar-banjo hybrid instrument and Holt plays his arrangement of “Don’t Get Weary”:
bantar vs gitjo
Don’t Get Weary
Celebrate Black History Month with SFC Streaming Radio
In celebration of Black History Month, we’ve added a new channel to the Southern Folklife Collection Streaming Radio project:
Channel 6: Southern Folklife Collection – African-American Music
While there are many examples of the African-American music of the South streaming on our other channels, this is the only stream that focuses solely on black musicians, with an emphasis on the string bands of the ’20s and ’30s, plus gospel quartets, country blues, jug band music, sacred steel guitar, the folk songs of the civil rights movement, and more.
Tune in all this February for a unique musical celebration of Black History Month, and happy listening!
The purpose of the Southern Folklife Collection Streaming Radio project is to make our holdings available to the general public for educational use. Links work best with iTunes, Winamp, or VLC media players.
Happy Groundhog Day From Tom T. Hall
There aren’t a lot of classic songs about Groundhog Day (as opposed to, say, Christmas), but Nashville singer -songwriter Tom T. Hall made a valiant effort with “Happy Groundhog Day” from his 1977 album About Love. It’s not so much a song about Groundhog Day as it is, like many Tom T. Hall songs, a sad song about desperately lonely people. While there’s nothing unusual about a sad country song, something about Hall’s lyrics always struck me as more desperate and lonely than most. Ron Peterson, then-President of the Nashville Songwriters Association, addressed it in the original liner notes for About Love:
He’s got a built-in sadness… T.’s sadness is kind of like one fiddle trying to play over a whole band. When you finally get your ear where you can hear it, you wonder how you missed it before.
Listen below to a clip of Hall’s “Happy Groundhog Day”, from SFC LP # FC-16049 and have yourself a happy/sad February 2:
Happy Groundhog Day clip
Carl Smith, 1927-2010
Country Music Hall-of-Famer Carl Smith (pictured here in a 1953 Columbia records publicity shot) came to prominence in the 1950s as performer on WSM’s “Grand Ole Opry”, and scored 30 Billboard top-10 country hits that decade, including “Let’s Live a Little” and “Hey Joe!”. From 1952 to 1956 Smith was married to June Carter, and their daughter Carlene Carter would go on to have a successful music career of her own.
Smith was also a familiar face on television, first on ABC’s country music variety series Ozark Jubilee and later as the host of Carl Smith’s Country Music Hall on Canadian TV from 1964-1969.
In the late ’70s Smith and his second wife, the country singer Goldie Hill, retired from the music business to raise horses on their ranch in Franklin, Tennessee, where Smith died on Saturday at the age of 82.
Listen below to a clip of Carl Smith performing 1954’s “Loose Talk”, his last #1 country hit, from one of the dozens of Carl Smith records in the SFC: Loose Talk (Carl Smith)
SFC Streaming Radio Is Here!
Southern Folklife Collection Streaming Radio is finally live! Below are links to five (loosely genre-based) radio streams from the holdings of the Southern Folklife Collection.
(Links work best with iTunes, Winamp, or VLC media players):
Channel 1: Southern Folklife Collection – Old-time Music
Channel 2: Southern Folklife Collection – Country and Bluegrass
Channel 3: Southern Folklife Collection – Folk Revival
Channel 4: Southern Folklife Collection – Rhythm, Blues, and Boogie
Channel 5: Southern Folklife Collection – SFC Mix
The purpose of our radio stream is to make our holdings available for educational use. These streams are still in an early stage of development and will continue to be curated, tweaked, and updated in the coming weeks, so keep coming back (the links will also be on our homepage and in the “Streaming Radio” tab at the top of this blog). Happy listening!
New Addition: The Erik Darling Papers
With the new year the SFC is pleased to announce our newest addition: The Erik Darling Papers.
Songwriter and musician Erik Darling (1933-2008) first came to fame as a founding member (with Bob Carey and Alan Arkin) of the 1950s folk group the Tarriers, whose 1956 recording of “The Banana Boat Song” (aka “Day-O”) sparked a national craze for calypso music. When Pete Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, Darling was asked to take his place. Darling remained a Weaver until 1962 when he formed the Rooftop Singers with Bill Svanoe and Lynne Taylor. Their version of Gus Cannon’s “Walk Right In” spent 3 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963.
Darling also released several solo albums and wrote many instrument instruction books, as well as a 2008 autobiography, I’d Give My Life: A Journey by Folk Music .
The Erik Darling collection contains correspondence, scores, sheet music, song lyrics, dozens of photographs, audio recordings, and other items related to Erik Darling and his musical career. Of particular interest are recordings of phone interviews conducted by Darling while compiling his autobiography, including interviews with Guy Carawan, John Cohen, Billy Faier, Bess Hawes, Pete Seeger, and Mary Travers.
Listen to clips below of the Tarriers performing “The Banana Boat Song”:
Banana Boat Song
and the Rooftop Singers performing “Walk Right In”:
Walk Right In