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It has been a great week at the Southern Folklife Collection. We kicked off our series of symposia and concert tributes to American blues masters with an evening of Howlin’ Wolf to great success. We cannot thank our participants–Peter Guralnick, Knox Phillips, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Eddie Shaw and the Wolf Gang, Jody Williams, and Henry Gray–and the Friends of the Library organization at UNC enough.  Our second event in the series, a tribute to Gary Davis, is scheduled for November 17, with a keynote by author and scholar Elijah Wald, and featuring musicians Stefan Grossman, Ernie Hawkins, and Jorma Kaukonen.  More details to come but for now see this facebook event page.
This morning we were looking through negatives of images photographed by Robert Bolton at the Downbeat Jazz Festival at Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois,15 August 1965 to choose an item for an upcoming exhibit. While doing so, we were reminded that today, September 23, is John Coltrane’s birthday. Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23, 1926, and grew up in High Point, NC, attending William Penn High School (now Penn-Griffin School for the Arts).  A successful effort to purchase and restore his childhood piano was completed in 2006 and the instrument now resides at the High Point Museum.
Besides tuning in for some excellent programming (24 hours of Coltrane) by Columbia University’s WKCR, we wanted to share a few of Bolton’s photographs of Coltrane from that day. These photos document an extraordinary performance–Coltrane invited Archie Shepp on tenor sax to join the quartet of himself, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones–that marked a distinctive turning point in Coltrane’s career.  Often compared to Bob Dylan’s “plugging in” at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963, Coltrane’s quartet plus Shepp closed the night, free and ferocious and in stark contrast to the more straight forward bebop played throughout the day.
These two images are held as part of the Robert Bolton Collection, 1955-1980 and undated, collection #20408.  The Robert Bolton Collection consists chiefly of photographic materials documenting the social landscape of the eastern United States from the mid 1950s through the early 1980s. Bolton’s photographs examine everything from common street scenes found in and around many southern cities during the 1960s to cultural gatherings, such as the Downbeat Jazz festival in Chicago, Ill. and the Ole Time Fiddler’s & Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, N.C. In addition, Bolton photographed numerous performers including Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and many others. Other materials included in the collection are 8mm films depicting Sports Car Club of America auto races from 1960 to 1961 and drawings and paintings created between 1959 and 1967.

 
 

Wade Mainer [ca. 1950], Call no. P925, Southern Folklife Collection, UNC Chapel Hill

Country music lost one of it’s greatest practicioners this week when Wade Mainer passed away at the age of 104. Mainer developed a two-finger banjo style using finger picks, playing leads and melodic lines on the instrument previously used primarily as rhythm accompaniment. Beyond his musical abilities, Mainer long held a reputation as a skilled entertainer, generous mentor, and gracious to his fans.
The Southern Folklife Collection is the repository of many materials related to Wade Mainer, including a 1980 interview by David Holt, call no. FS-10717 in the David Holt Collection, research and recordings in the Bob Carlin Collection, as well as interviews, recordings and radio programs featuring Mainer produced by Paul Brown in the Paul Brown Collection.  We were honored to host a program and tribute to celebrate the publication of Mainer’s biography last year, the excellent Banjo on the Mountain: Wade Mainer’s first 100 years, by Dick Spottswood. The SFC also holds many of Wade Mainer’s commercially released recordings.  His career spanned most of the history of recorded music, a sonic record of his of his immeasurable influence on country, bluegrass and American music.
For an all to brief history of Mainer’s early career, we turn to music scholar and friend of Wade Mainer, Dick Spottswood, who wrote a touching obituary for his friend.  Read the whole piece at WAMU’s BluegrassCountry.org:

“Wade was one of the most remarkable musicians of his era.  With his fiddling brother J.E. (1898-1971), Wade played music informally with and for fellow cotton mill workers in Concord, North Carolina starting in the 1920s.  When they played over WSOC in Gastonia in 1932, the Mainers began a new career that would eventually allow them to become full time musicians, performing at night by gaslight in rural schools and getting up in time for 5 and 6 AM daily radio shows designed for working farmers to enjoy at breakfast before heading out for the fields.  They graduated to WBT (Charlotte) in 1934, becoming Mainers’ Mountaineers when they were sponsored by Crazy Water Crystals, a Texas mineral water-derived concoction that hosted live country music from Oklahoma(Bob Wills) to Halifax (Hank Snow).  The brothers split up in 1936 when J.E. elected to stay with Crazy Water and Wade chose to move on, calling his new outfit Wade Mainer and Sons of the Mountaineers.  In 1937 he wed Julia Mae Brown of Mocksville, who had performed on radio herself as “Hillbilly Lily.”

Before World War II, Wade, along with band members Zeke Morris, Steve Ledford, and Clyde Moody worked at ten more stations from Danville to New Orleans, and recorded more than a hundred titles for RCA Bluebird, including versions of Little Maggie, Little Birdie, Maple on the Hill, Old Reuben, Wild Bill Jones, John Henry, Down in the Willow Garden, On a Cold Winter’s Night (The Wreck of Number Nine), and Riding On That Train 45.  The last four were selected by John Lomax for the influential 1941 RCA record album Smoky Mountain Ballads that introduced music from Wade Mainer, Uncle Dave Macon, the Monroe Brothers, Dixon Brothers and Carter Family to folk music fanciers up north.  Wade’s records also sold well in the south, keeping his songs in repertory well into the bluegrass era, and keeping the unique sound of the fiddle and banjo alive all but single handedly until Bill Monroe hired Stringbean (1942) and Earl Scruggs (1945) to complement fiddlers and Bill’s own mandolin.

John’s son Alan Lomax liked Wade’s records too.  He and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish invited the Sons of the Mountaineers for an “Evening of American Folklore,” at the White House on February 17, 1941.  Wade liked to tell about being accidentally hit by a swinging door and spilling a dish of ice cream on Eleanor Roosevelt.  As he related,” I was standing right there and Mrs. Roosevelt went out for something.  And when she came back she pushed the door open and it hit me and it knocked the bowl of ice cream out of my hand and knocked it on her.

“So I run my hand down in my pocket and pulled out a big old red bandana handkerchief, I was going to wipe the ice cream off of her.  She said, ‘No, you just forget about that.’  She disappeared for a few minutes and directly she came back, she had on a different dress and everything.  The concert went on and it was a very lovely evening we had down there with them at the White House.”

Alan Lomax then went to Asheville, where Wade and the band were broadcasting daily from WWNC.  With staff announcer Marty Lyles, they recorded a simulated broadcast that concentrated on traditional material.  In the fall, famed Life magazine photographer Eric Schaal went toVirginia,Tennessee and North Carolina to document Wade, the Carter Family and Bascom Lamar Lunsford for an article on country music, scheduled for the second week in December 1941.  ButAmerica entered World War II that week, and the photo essay never appeared.

On November 19, 1941, Wade received a telegram from WSM’s George D. Hay inviting the Sons of the Mountaineers to the Grand Ole Opry inNashville.  At the time they were the featured band on the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round on WNOX inKnoxville.  Producer Lowell Blanchard had the band under contract, and, after initially agreeing to let Wade go, held him to the contract’s terms. Wade never got to play the Opry until 2002, when he was hosted by Bill Anderson and Eddie Stubbs.”

Wade stepped back from music in the 1950s and relocated to Flint, Michigan, preferring to raise his family with a steady paycheck from General Motors. After his children were grown, however, he picked up the banjo again, performing with his wife Julia to new generations of fans and receiving the National Heritage Award in 1987.
We’ll share some more Wade Mainer material next week, but take a moment and remember one of America’s greatest musicians. Paul Brown wrote and recorded an obituary for NPR and William Grimes wrote for the New York Times.

Five poster artists who have helped define the Chapel Hill music scene will see examples of their work on exhibit in Davis Library beginning Aug. 25.
From the Cradle to the Cave: 18 Years of North Carolina Poster Art will be on view on the main floor of Davis Library through Jan. 25, 2012. The exhibit will feature 40 reproductions of posters by Casey Burns, Matt Hart, Ron Liberti, Jason Lonon, and Chris Williams, dating from 1993 onward.
An opening program Aug. 25 at 5:30 p.m. will feature the artists in conversation about their work, following a 5 p.m. reception. The free public event will conclude with a concert by Chapel Hill band The Kingsbury Manx.
The artists have played an important role in advertising local concerts. Many of their posters and fliers have promoted events at venues such as Cat’s Cradle, Local 506, and the now closed Go! Room 4.
The Southern Folklife Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library holds the archives of all five artists, including original poster art. The Burns, Liberti, and Lonon collections are currently available for use; those of Hart and Williams will be available in 2012. Burns is a 1998 graduate of UNC.
The event is sponsored by the Southern Folklife Collection in Wilson Library, the University Library Public Art Committee, and the Friends of the Library,.
From the Cradle to the Cave: 18 Years of North Carolina Poster Art
On view Aug. 25, 2011 – Jan. 25, 2012
Exhibit Opening: Thursday, Aug. 25, 2011
Davis Library Gallery
5 p.m. Reception
5:30 p.m. Panel with Casey Burns, Matt Hart, Ron Liberti, Jason Lonon, Chris Williams
6 p.m. Concert with Chapel Hill band The Kingsbury Manx
Free and open to the public
Information: Steve Weiss, Southern Folklife Collection, (919) 962-1345
View the Facebook event for this program