Friends of Old Time Music: the folk arrival 1961-1965

John Cohen, Ralph Rinzler and Israel Young, three middle-class New York guys around 30 years old, formed the nonprofit group Friends of Old Time Music in 1961. You could spend years tracing the extents to which these three preserved and influenced traditional and popular American (and extra-American) music throughout their lives. Rinzler alone founded the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and helped save Bluegrass from starving near-death in the shadow of Rocknroll. What these Folkie impresarios and a few pals did in New York between 1961 and 1965 was to feature traditional American musicians -- black and white, mostly elder, overwhelmingly Southern -- on NYC stages, and then drummed up an audience for them.

A guy named Peter K. Siegel recorded the New York concerts. (A cursory lap around the Web didn't reveal much to me about Siegel, so any comments illuminating his larger role in this bizness are welcome.) Earlier this year he compiled and produced a three-disc boxed set of highlights called Friends of Old Time Music: the folk arrival 1961-1965. Americana patri- and matriarchs anchor the selections: Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Maybelle Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, a then-unknown Doc Watson. The familiar names and tunes ("Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"; "Frankie and Albert") act as reference points, a sort of base camp from which to explore obscure artists as disparate as a cappella Tennessee balladeers, Georgia Sea Island gospel choirs and Bahamian scat-singing guitar pickers.

Listeners familiar with Harry Smith's Anthology, or with scratchy old banjo and bottleneck records, will find here a feast of previously unreleased recordings by a bunch of the greats. A top-form Dock Boggs moans his signature strangled banjo blues, while John Hurt sneaks in his wry and placid dirty old man act on the wiley ragtime "Coffee Blues." The puckish Clarence Ashley stomps across a surprisingly loose and hard-driving "Cuckoo," laced through and tinseled by Doc Watson's sterling flat-picked guitar breaks.

Folk Revival field discoveries give memorable turns here as well. Mississippi Fred McDowell smolders with Old Testament fury on his stabbing bottleneck blues, "Write Me a Few of Your Lines." And the inimitable east Kentucky mountain songster Roscoe Holcomb picks his weird droning blue banjo and guitar arrangements with signature steam-engine intensity. His unusually restrained vocals (intimidated maybe by a concert audience?) deliver nuance you don't hear on his Cohen-recorded albums. It's exciting listening for newcomers, and fascinating for the initiated.

My favorite new discovery here is Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller. At once manning a 12-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo, hi-hat and a pedal-driven string bass he invented and called the fotdella, he rolls up the Country Blues, 1920s Jug Band stomps, and early Rocknroll into a funky lonesome and joyful joint that he proceeds to smoke the hell out of. Also new and exciting to me -- the Georgia Sea Island Singers, whose tambourine-jangling and ebb-flow shifting and soaring polyphony on "Before This Time Another Year" give encroaching mortality a sense of boundless joy that I'd never exactly experienced. These two acts are worth the cost of the whole set.

Stacked high in the middle of these revelations, a preponderance of Bluegrass in the set irks me some. Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys occupy seven slots, including three straight tunes on Disc Two, the only such run in the set. I'm irked partly because the cynic in me smells a marketing move -- targeting Bill Monroe completists with new material. But also because, on the other side of that coin, how many thousands of Monroe records are available anywhere at any time?--while I'll bet you a Coke that you won't pick up a Georgia Sea Island Singers CD at your Best Buy. There are no Georgia Sea Island Singers CDs. History just doesn't thirst for another major-key rendition of "Shady Grove" when how many Roscoe Holcomb or Jesse Fuller originals were culled away from the master tapes to languish another 40 years in the Smithsonian stacks? (It's also a prickly point that Bluegrass figures disproportionately in a collection explicitly positioned as "Old Time Music.")

The bundled booklet is workmanlike, light on synthesis and analysis. Siegel sketches the rise and fall of the F.O.T.M.; John Cohen phones in a remembrance of his participation in the group (including a peculiar and unexplicated maybe-snipe at Israel Young's departure from the group "with the checkbook"); relatively obscure Folkie Jody Stecher provides a broad appreciation of the concerts. Siegel's notes for each track give the most interesting read in the book: a deadpan free association that ping-pongs across his clearly encyclopedic familiarity with the music. Reading these notes, with a jolt of music-nerd adrenaline, I tripped over the claim that a clawhammer banjo solo by Maybelle Carter, a tune called "Sugar Hill" near the end of the set, marks her first banjo performance since she had taken up guitar more than 30 years before. I'm not aware of any other recordings of Maybelle on the banjo, and it's over in a flash, but in this flash an obvious but long-missing straight line is drawn from traditional clawhammer banjo, an African-American music, to the "Carter scratch," Maybelle's self-taught guitar technique that incorporates both melody picking and rhtyhm strumming. The Carter scratch echoes across country music into Rocknroll; it echoes on down into your Clear Channel Oldies radio: "Maybelline" and "You Can't Catch Me." It runs from there into DNA of the Beatles, Otis Redding, The Clash, P-Funk, Franz Ferdinand, Wu Tang -- reminding that as alien eccentric archaic as any of this music sounds today, at some time and place it was someone's pop music. Clarence Ashley and Mississippi Fred McDowell played what folks danced to, worked to, fucked to, died to. What was on the radio, what the kids were into.

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Note: For in-depth analysis on the contributions and influence of Cohen and Rinzler, and of others in their orbit, and on the complicated relationship between Old Time music and Bluegrass, and on a bunch of related topics, you can't do much better than a blog called The Celestial Monochord.