{"id":4025,"date":"2020-11-02T10:05:54","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T15:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4025"},"modified":"2020-11-02T11:00:59","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T16:00:59","slug":"earnest-bogus-enter-the-time-warp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4025","title":{"rendered":"Earnest & Bogus enter the Time Warp"},"content":{"rendered":"

This bit of brilliance arrived a few days ago: Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music 1892-2017<\/b><\/a>. The Amazon précis:<\/p>\n

\nThis 3 CD reissue anthology is the first to track twentieth century American vernacular music of old time country, bluegrass, jazz and blues by tracing their beginnings in 19th century blackface minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley.<\/p>\n

\nCountry Music is a genre driven by songwriting and publishing. This fact alone has given opportunity for songs to be refashioned again and again showcasing stylistic as well as lyrical changes over the past 100 years. The foundation of the American popular songbook traces its beginnings to the Vaudeville, Circus, Minstrel, Music Hall and Theater stages of the mid-late 1800s. The songs spread throughout the country and world creating a new musical tapestry that included both black and white performers of all backgrounds. Their songs and styles are presented in this three CD anthology.<\/p>\n

\nBy aligning performances from the earliest cylinder recordings with later 78 rpm, LP and CD versions, PROTOBILLY brings to life 81 historic recordings, more than half never before reissued…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Assembled by collectors and music scholars Henry Sapoznik<\/a>, Dick Spottswood<\/a>, David Giovannoni<\/a>, and Dom Flemmons<\/a>, this wowed me from the first cuts. I hadn’t realized that those Edison cylinders (and other brands too) had any relevance to the music recorded in the 78 era, or that the material captured in cylinder recordings had itself a considerable pedigree in sheet music and mid-19th century stage performance. Dom Flemmons puts it beautifully:<\/p>\n

…songwriters, black and white, performed in the streets, theaters, music halls, medicine shows and circuses of a budding America reimagining the American Dream through song. The songs reflected and exaggerated the social climate of the world at that time. Like the internet memes of the digital era, Tin Pan Alley was not limited to unapologetically featuring songs that included ethnic humor lampooning working class people whether they be Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, African-American or Asian-American for the amusement of a paying audience. But it would be blackface minstrelsy, the songs that lampooned African-American experience, that would reach worldwide fame much to the chagrin of modern culture…<\/p>\n

Black songsters pull songs of black buffoonery inside out and create humorous toasts of black ingenuity and excellency. Rural hillbilly singers take Broadway harmonies and give them the “high lonesome sound” of the Southern Mountains…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s an example from Protobilly: The Arkansas Traveler seems to be datable as music and text from the 1850s, and was popularized on the vaudeville stage by Mose Case from the 1850s to 1880. There was a piano roll version by 1900, credited to Case. Here are three versions from Protobilly: Len Spencer<\/a> (Edison cylinder 1902), Jilson Setters<\/a> (Victor 78RPM 1928), and Clayton McMitchen & His Georgia Wildcats<\/a> (Crown 78RPM 1932). And here’s a New Lost City Ramblers rendition: