jack_beuthin - Posted - 01/23/2018:  07:49:44

I don't think this has been posted here before, but if it has, pardon my duplication. The Blanton Owen collection of field recordings archived in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a treasure trove of recordings of Old Time players. This collection includes a digitized tape of a 1969 home recording of Oscar Wright. The recording can be streamed. It is raw and unprocessed, but I like it for that. You get to hear real "kitchen table" playing, noodling and conversation, not just the polished gems that we associate with Oscar Wright. He fiddles, sings, plays finger-style guitar, plays clawhammer banjo, and fingerpicks banjo. And his repertoire is not strictly "old time." As you will hear, Oscar loved Roy Rogers.

As many of you know, Oscar Wright lived in Princeton, West Virginia, which is about 16 miles west of Glen Lyn, Virginia, the home of Henry Reed.  Franklin George lived in Bluefield, West Virginia, about 12 miles southwest of Princeton. As told by Alan Jabbour, Frank George introduced Oscar to Alan, and Oscar alerted Alan to Henry Reed. As they say, the rest is history.

Here are the links to the streaming file, and also the Blanton Owen collection in general:

dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/...556/rec/1

finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/20027/

Here is the list of tunes played on the tape with approximate times each tune begins.  I lifted this list from the Owen Collection website, but made some modifications/corrections, with some help from Dan Gellert and BrooksMT(see Comments below).  I believe that Blanton Owen plays the banjo accompaniment on many of the tunes that Oscar fiddles.

Songs performed by Oscar Wright in the following order:

Shootin' Creek – 1:12 (fiddle)

Arkansas Traveler (performed twice) – 3:20 (fiddle)

(You) Got to see Mama - 5:44 (fiddle)

Aggravatin' Papa – 6:42 (fiddle)

Whistlin' Rufus – 8:05 (fiddle)

Ducks on the Pond – 9:20 (fiddle)

discussion of Henry Reed – 11:02

Jenny Lind Polka – 12:11 (fiddle)

Kitchen Girl – 14:00 (fiddle)

Gentle Annie – 17:40 (guitar and singing)

Wandering Cowboy - 20:15 (guitar and singing)

San Fernando Valley Home – 22:35 (guitar and singing)

story about meeting Henry Reed for the first time – 24:05

Wildwood Flower – 26:30 (guitar)

John Henry – 33:06 (clawhammer banjo)

Pretty Polly – 34:03 (clawhammer banjo)

Cluck Old Hen – 34:43 (clawhammer banjo and singing)

unidentified tune – 35:26 (clawhammer banjo)

Salt River – 36:00 (clawhammer banjo)

What You Gonna Do With the Baby – 37:35 (clawhammer banjo)

Shootin' Creek – 39:02 (clawhammer banjo)

Jake Gilly – 39:31 (clawhammer banjo)

Johnson Boys – 40:29 (clawhammer banjo)

Keep Off the Grass(?) – 41:40 (finger-style banjo)

Arkansas Traveler (part) – 41:54 (finger-style banjo)

unidentified tune – 42:15 (finger-style banjo)

Arkansas Traveler – 44:15 (finger-style banjo)

Gentle Annie – 44:52 (finger-style banjo and singing)

Sewannee River – 45:38 (finger-style banjo and singing)

What is what gets a bit wonky for me between 41:40-44:15.  If anyone can ferret this out better, please let me know. Also, starting at 6:42, Oscar fiddles a tune that was listed as Red Mountain Polka.  I don't think that is correct, but I can't name the tune either.  Again, any help appreciated.

Hope you enjoy.

Edited by - jack_beuthin on 01/25/2018 10:17:28

Dan Gellert - Posted - 01/23/2018:  11:07:17

He doesn't say "Red Mountain Polka", I'm pretty sure it's "Aggravatin' Papa". The one before it (@ ~5:40) he calls "(You) Got To See Mama".

and thank you for posting this!

Edited by - Dan Gellert on 01/23/2018 11:07:57

Dan Gellert - Posted - 01/23/2018:  11:17:33

Hoo boy the tape speed starts going straight to expletive deleted about the middle of the side, don't it?
Makes some really excellent banjo picking unfortunately difficult to listen to.

jack_beuthin - Posted - 01/23/2018:  11:47:51

Yup it jumps, repeats and gets wobbly after the first half. Too bad because I would really like to study the fingerpicking.

Thanks for the tune names Dan! I spent 16 years doing geologic field work in Mercer County WV and got to know the Princeton-Bluefield vernacular pretty well. This one busted me though. Good ear!

RG - Posted - 01/23/2018:  21:26:23

One of my favorite old-time banjo players, thanks for posting Jack!

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 01/24/2018:  07:52:18

Nice post, Jack. Thanks.

Blanton Owen’s name comes up a lot, at least it has for me as in recent years. Dwight Diller talked a bit about him, enough to make me curious about Blanton while I was writing a book about Dwight. Blanton’s name has come up a good deal in the context of my attempt to write about Tommy Thompson.

Jack is right: the Wilson Library is a treasure trove of old time music stuff. I spent a week in Chapel Hill last year working my way through the Tommy Thompson collection.

Near as I can tell, Chapel Hill had its share of countervailing views on how to acquire the old music, and its fair share of assertive authorities who spoke to issues of authenticity, the most effective way of learning and preserving traditional tunes, and the most efficacious way of utilizing the resource represented by aging local fiddlers and banjo players. The Hollow Rock String Band model was a critical early influence through at least the early 1970s. The musicianship of the Hollow Rock String Band, rather than any single individual, had come to occupy a place of central influence in the old time community in Durham and Chapel Hill.

Interestingly, though, at least as far as I understand things, Blanton Owen had by the early 1970s carved out his own special niche in that community, establishing his banjo approach as a “standard” and introducing Fred Cokerham and Kyle Creed’s music to the revival community.

Blanton Owen’s influence in the old time community suggested that more than one exemplar of clawhammer style banjo playing had emerged in the old time music community.

Blanton, in Tom Carter’s view, was the first to “go up the neck” with the Roundpeak style. Carter jokingly call it the “index-finger-knuckle dragging” style, to distinguish it from the middle-finger trailing style that Tommy Thompson used.

Blanton played what people (including his brother Malcolm) told me was a straight-ahead Round Peak style, unadorned and highly danceable.

It is my understanding that his only banjo was a Fred Cockerham style fretless that he'd made that had a pretty bad back-bow; at least one person told me they found almost unplayable, but Blanton made it work for him.

Blanton introduced several folks in Chapel Hill to what became the “default” style of revivalists that he had learned from Fred Cockerham and Kyle Creed, perfected, and passed it on to Ray Alden and many others. Tom Carter made the case that Blanton Owen was also involved in establishing the banjo-fiddle duet idea. In Carter’s view, Tommy played a big role in this notion of the banjo-fiddle pairing, though not stylistically.

I did not know Blanton. All I know about Roundpeak is what I’ve read about it. And all I know about Blanton is what I’ve read about him, and learned about him from others who knew him well and closely, so I was glad to see this post. Thanks for this, Jack. Looking forward to learning more about Blanton from BHO citizens via this thread!

Play hard,

Lew

BrooksMT - Posted - 01/24/2018:  09:35:46

Thank you Jack and Dan for the playlist timing chart.

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The tape is copy protected and won't download, at least for me.



However, I was able to record extracts using Audacity. I think this is permitted for private listening under copyright law.



My method for recording music using Audacity is described in this BHO thread, about half-way down the page:

banjohangout.org/topic/335995/

Edited by - BrooksMT on 01/24/2018 09:40:37

BrooksMT - Posted - 01/24/2018:  09:58:24

btw, to get this tape to play using Firefox Quantum, I had to click on the solid black bar below the Audio icon, then tell Firefox to go ahead and use the plugin. Then, the black bar showed the usual playback symbols that I could then click on to start and stop the tape. I could drag the round white symbol to the starting point of songs per Jack&Dan's list.



With Internet Explorer, the black bar showed the playback symbols w/o any additional instructions from me.

Edited by - BrooksMT on 01/24/2018 10:00:07

BrooksMT - Posted - 01/24/2018:  10:34:47

The unidentified tune between John Henry and Cluck Old Hen may be "Hard For to Love" ( which I learned off Erynn Marshall's Calico CD, Chris Coole banjo). The first part of Oscar plays well with Erynn's version, but I get lost in later parts of Oscar's version. The tape is wowing and the pitch is wavering, which does not help matters, at least for me. So, Oscar's version may be similar to Erynn's, or maybe it's just a song that starts the same and then goes in another direction :-) Michael Neverisky's "Sweet Sunny South" (Youtube) would be another candidate.



I had to drop the tape pitch by 1 semitone to get it close to key of G (and slow the song 30% to get it slow enough for me). Easy to do with Audacity :-)

Edited by - BrooksMT on 01/24/2018 10:49:36

jack_beuthin - Posted - 01/24/2018:  13:49:57

quote:

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Originally posted by BrooksMT

Thank you Jack and Dan for the playlist timing chart.

----------------------

The tape is copy protected and won't download, at least for me.



However, I was able to record extracts using Audacity. I think this is permitted for private listening under copyright law.



My method for recording music using Audacity is described in this BHO thread, about half-way down the page:

banjohangout.org/topic/335995/

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BrooksMT, thanks for all your technical comments, and in particular, the reference to your thread about using Audacity to capture music.  I've wondered about this but am just a "trial & error" user of Audacity.  Thanks to for suggesting what one of the unidentified tunes might be.

jack_beuthin - Posted - 01/24/2018:  14:27:06

Lew, Here are some observations and recollections that might bear on your research on Blanton Owen.

At 40:16 on the Oscar Wright recording (just before Johnson Boys), Oscar remarks about Owen's banjo, "Boy, she's true, ain't she." He had been tuning and noodling a bit before saying this. This doesn't seem to be something that would be said about a instrument with a badly bowed neck.

Here is a recollection that seems consistent with the thrust of your research on Blanton Owen, and his playing style/philosophy (and his divergence from the "Hollow Rock model"). My first Appalachian festival was Soldier's Grove in 1974. As serendipity would have it, there I met up with a group from Philadelphia (we just happened to be at adjacent campsites), and this is where I first met Jeff Claus (Jeff was a student at Penn, if I call correctly). Jeff was very influential, and really drew me into Old Time music. Jeff introduced me to another person of influence in the Philly contingent. This was Leonard Waks, a philosophy professor at Temple, and a banjo and mandolin player. In many ways, Len was my first true clawhammer mentor. Like yourself, Len was originally from Brooklyn. Jeff, Len, myself and a few others spent the summer of '74 living in the mountains of North Carolina just east of Asheville, playing music together, going to festivals and immersing ourselves in local culture. The main point though is that although I was hearing a lot of "Kyle Creed" style of playing (or more proximally, "Blanton Owen" style) among younger players at the festivals, Len had a very different style of playing characterized by well-chosen ornamentation, less of a hard-edged drive, and a lightness that was highly expressive. Len had a wonderful repertoire of southern Appalachian tunes, but he easily dived into other repertoires (Irish, New England, etc). Many other players I met had "double thumb fever," but not Len. His playing delighted me because it was so different than most of the playing I heard that summer (although I was sponging it all up as much as I could). And now for the punch line. It turns out that Len's mentor was one of his contemporaries--Bertram Levy.

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 01/24/2018:  14:53:56

That's very interesting - especially given the "Brooklyn" connection. And the Bertram Levy part of the story is intriguing, too, because to a certain extent he mentored your friend Len in a manner that allowed him, or encouraged him, to find some creative space - to listen closely to the traditional stuff and regional styles, but to feel free to mix and match, put his own touch on a style of playing, and to reach for other repertoires for inspiration.

The Hollow Rock String Band approach to the old tunes, galvanized by Alan Jabbour, was a very specific "model" focused on soaking up tunes from the elderly fiddler Henry Reed, for example, but often Jabbour and his band mates' efforts were challenged by Reed’s fading memory of specific tunes. Jabbour, over time, assembled fragments of tunes, and made some logical musical assumptions, as well as some informed and inspired judgments, about how these various pieces from Reed’s memory might knit together into a coherent tune that Reed remembered only imperfectly.

In effect, Jabbour’s approach relied on inspired deductions and musically informed judgment calls that were guided by what Henry Reed was able to summon from the depths of his memory of specific archaic tunes. That was a very particular, a very specific musical goal - one that yielded a tight band and some very enduring music.

My sense is that Tommy learned a great deal from this approach, and from Alan specifically, but by the time (probably around 1972) Tommy had turned his attention to forming a band - that is, a band that went beyond the loose associations of friends that got together to play in Chapel Hill bars in the late 1960s and early 1970s - he was looking for another model, one that might have provided for more creative space, so to speak, and thus reflected the kinds of things that Bertram might have communicated to Len as Bertram's way of thinking about music.

Thanks for sharing your story. It does, by the way, serve to deepen my theory that in the end all old time music traces its origin in one way or another to Brooklyn (insert smiley face here).

Play hard,

Lew

Dan Gellert - Posted - 01/24/2018:  20:06:56

The tune at 34:03 sounds like Pretty Polly to me.

I think the one at 42:15 is a reprise of the one that is called "Keep Off the Grass (?)", which to me sounds a lot closer to "The Darky's Dream". Both those pieces were recorded by Vess Ossman (and other classic fingerstyle players as well). Maybe learned off a mislabeled record?

Dan Gellert - Posted - 01/25/2018:  06:35:04

"Keep Off the Grass" would make the perfect title track for an album of classic banjo, wouldn't it? As long as it was all recorded post-WW2, of course.

jack_beuthin - Posted - 01/25/2018:  08:59:15

quote:

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Originally posted by Dan Gellert

"Keep Off the Grass" would make the perfect title track for an album of classic banjo, wouldn't it? As long as it was all recorded post-WW2, of course.

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Classic banjo for suburban boomers! So many possibilities for tune names: "Hank Aaron Hornpipe" "Duck-and-Cover Polka" "Eat your Peas" "New Schwinn" "Don't Tell Mom" "Five on a Buck" "Always Wear Clean Underwear."

Dan Gellert - Posted - 01/25/2018:  09:36:01

quote:

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Originally posted by jack_beuthin

quote:

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Originally posted by Dan Gellert

"Keep Off the Grass" would make the perfect title track for an album of classic banjo, wouldn't it? As long as it was all recorded post-WW2, of course.

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Classic banjo for suburban boomers! So many possibilities for tune names: "Hank Aaron Hornpipe" "Duck-and-Cover Polka" "Eat your Peas" "New Schwinn" "Don't Tell Mom" "Five on a Buck" "Always Wear Clean Underwear."

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Ha! You spun that off in an unexpected direction!

Or was I just more obscure than I thought I was being?

BrooksMT - Posted - 01/25/2018:  10:14:23

I agree with Dan, that 34:03 tune does sound more like Pretty Polly than my guess above. Well, they started similar, but did branch off in different directions :-). There are several nice youtubes of Dock Boggs singing Pretty Polly, here's one of them:
youtube.com/watch?v=kl1NPpg5XDg