Newsletter
Fall
2002 Volume XXXII, No.
1
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Reviews
Country and Gospel Notes |
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Country and Gospel Notes
by Charles Wolfe
Like most folk song
collectors in the 1920s and 1930s, Alan Lomax struggled with the problem of how
commercial phonograph records were impacting the repertoires of his singers.
As early as the 1ate 1920s, recorded songs by popular figures like Vernon
Dalhart, Jimmie Rodgers, and The Carter Family were starting to show up next
to traditional American and British ballads in collections. Lomax himself,
traveling into remote mining camps of eastern Kentucky in the fall of 1937,
complained that songs from commercial sources had pretty well taken over the
repertoires of miners, and that only a handful of them knew snatches of
ballads. The trouble was that few collectors had much knowledge of the extent
of the record industry catalogues. There was no available database of the
various recordings, no discography or checklist to use as a reference. By
1938 jazz fans had such a tool in Charles Delaunay’s Hot Discography, but
nothing existed for blues, country, or gospel records. To partially remedy
this, Lomax himself compiled a checklist of commercial records in 1940, but
it was not widely circulated. Lomax and his colleagues would have been
delighted to see the publication of this generation’s most important
reference book, Country Music Sources: A Biblio-discography of
Commercially Recorded Traditional Music, compiled by Guthrie T. Meade
(University of North Carolina Press, 2002; $95.00). In over one thousand
pages of dense type, the book lists entries for hundreds of commercially
recorded songs. Each entry starts with a paragraph of printed sources,
composers (when known), dates of first appearance in print, and citations to
major folk song collections. Next comes a list, in chronological order, of
all the commercial recordings of the song, giving the record company, place
of recording, date of recording, catalogue release number, and date of
release. Full indexes giving song titles (including alternate ones) and
artists allow easy navigation through the data. There are a few caveats, however, in using
this reference. The reader must understand that there are certain parameters
for the collection. First is the fact that the recorded citations cut off in
the early 1940s—the years that correspond with the long recording ban in 1943
and 1944. It has become a convention in discography to use 1942 or 1943 as a
watershed to separate classic and modern styles, and jazz and blues
discographies generally follow suit. Thus Country Music Sources
conforms well to this accepted system of classification. But as a result, one
will not find the post-1943 records by Doc Watson, Flatt and Scruggs, Grandpa
Jones, and others performers who continued to record traditional music well
into the 1950s. The second limitation involves the
arbitrary criteria for selection of the traditional songs included in the
work. Meade notes: “The definition of traditional song for the purpose of
this discography includes all of the recorded songs that have appeared in
published folk song collections, as well as those songs copyrighted or
appearing in print prior to 1920.” Admitting that this date is “somewhat
artificial,” Meade points out that there were occasions when he did violate
it. But as a result, some songs written and performed by artists after this
date—such as Jimmie Rodgers’s “When It’s Peach Picking Time in Georgia”—do
not appear. A third problem involves gospel songs—not
the older nineteenth-century ones, but the newer ones published by companies
like Stamps-Baxter, Vaughan, Trio, Teachers, Henson, and others. Since many
of these regional publishers did not bother to copyright their books, the
Library of Congress has only a spotty run of them. Furthermore, songs were
traded back and forth by these publishers to the point where one song might
appear in a dozen books. It is a bibliographical mare’s nest that challenges
even these skilled compilers, and some of the gospel printed entries are incomplete. Country Music Sources is primarily the lifelong project of pioneer
scholar and discographer Guthrie T. Meade. He was uniquely suited for the
job. A native of Kentucky, he grew up listening to fiddle music and collecting
old records. A brilliant computer programmer, he later took a job in
Washington, D.C., working at the Library of Congress, the National Archive,
and the Government Services Administration. In his spare time he learned to
use the huge collections at the Library of Congress, the Copyright Office,
and other repositories to do his research. For several years he circulated
copies of his manuscript-in-progress and generously helped other researchers;
even as a manuscript, the “Meade discography,” as it came to be called, won
an enviable reputation. Then Meade died suddenly in 1991, at age fifty-eight,
and the fate of his work was unclear. It was only months from completion, and
Meade’s long-time friend and colleague Dick Spottswood, working with Meade’s
son Douglas, stepped forward to finish it and see it through to publication.
The result is a handsome, definitive reference book that should be on every
library shelf and in the hands of any serious student of American music. |