Fall 2002 Volume XXXII, No. 1

Alan Lomax: Citizen Activist by Ron Cohen Afro-Asian Crosscurrents in Contemporary Hip Hop by Ellie M. Hisama Musical Topics in Hale Smith's Evocation by Horace J. Maxile, Jr. Eileen Jackson Southern: A Tribute and a Mandate by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. ISAM Matters Reviews Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe Gendering Jazz Narratives by Susan C. Cook Rorem on Everything by Eleonora M. Beck ISAM Home

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.