Harry Oster
Oster published a long list of articles on Cajun folk music, religious folksongs of the South, spirituals, and prison blues. And he had begun a prolific lifelong practice of recording, distributing, and preserving the music and folk tales of America which were in danger of becoming lost (he was a professor English at LSU Baton Rouge and at the University of Iowa - Department of English).
I have already told you some things about Oster on an earlier page.
You will find a list of all of Harry Oster's recordings on Stefan Wirz's American Music Site.
Video notes
Butch Cage And Willie B. Thomas - Since I Layed My Burden Down
Recorded in 1959 by Harry Oster, probably in Zachary, Louisiana
Rosalie Wilkerson - Lead Vocal
James "Butch" Cage - Vocals, Fiddle
Willie B. Thomas - Vocals, Guitar
Photography by Russell Lee; Bert Hardy; Carl Mydans; Roy DeCarava; Butch Cage & Willie Thomas: from notes to Arhoolie F 1005 (1960)
Lawrence Gellert
Lawrence Gellert (László Grünbaum, the family adopted the surname "Gellert" after a Hungarian Catholic saint who had championed the poor), was a music collector, who in the 1920s and 1930s amassed a significant collection of field-recorded African-American blues and spirituals and also claimed to have documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States.
He moved around 1924 to Tryon, North Carolina, and began writing down the words of African American spirituals and then making audio recording of them, using at first a makeshift, wind-up recording machine and paper-backed zinc discs (now inaudible). After 1930, he used a Presto disc recorder.
From 1933 to 1937 Gellert was back in New York City but made short trips through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, collecting folksongs of black Americans. Selections from Gellert's recordings were released in 1973 and 1982 by Rounder Records as vinyl LPs and 1984 on Heritage Records (HT-304). In the 1990s these were reissued on two CDs by Document Records, edited by University of Michigan folklorist and ethnomusicologist Bruce Conforth.
During his lifetime, Gellert was suspected by other folklorists and colleagues of doctoring or even of having fabricated the songs he presented as "Negro protest songs", since they were unable to find parallels anywhere. Gellert also refused to share any information on the identity of the singers he recorded nor the dates on which he collected this material, ostensibly to protect the singers from reprisal.
Bruce Conforth believes that Gellert's large collection, which comprises predominantly blues and devotional songs, is of great historical importance nevertheless. According to Conforth, Gellert had no interest in politics himself. Nor was he interested in white folk music, which he despised.
You can find an overview of his recordings on Stefans Wirz American Music Site.
Bruce Jackson
From an article by Brian Wallis (writer and curator based in New York).
Breaking through the prison barriers, folklorist and photographer Bruce Jackson has, for over fifty years, tried to get inside the penitentiary walls to tape-record, film, and photograph inmates, not only to document their unique cultural forms and social microcosms, but also to make a clamorous case for prison reform and prisoners’ rights.
Between 1964 and 1979, following in the footsteps of early folk song collectors like Alan Lomax and Paul Oliver, Jackson was gathering the remnants of a rapidly disappearing African cultural tradition lingering in the diaspora in the forms of oral histories, toasts, spirituals, gospel music, blues, and work songs.
Cadenced work songs were a survival technique, intended to synchronize the prisoners’ labor, pace them under the scalding sun, and keep slower workers from falling behind. In the free world such music had been forced away or co-opted by commercial interest, but in the isolated prison work crews and chain gangs this anachronistic music survived.
“I was interested in the black convict work songs,” Jackson recalled, “because they go back to a slavery-time musical tradition which in turn goes back to an African musical tradition.
It’s a pure, unbroken line of musical performance and style, and the way music and physical labor integrated with one another.”
In March 1966, Jackson joined with folk singer Pete Seeger and his family to film the last vestiges of African American work songs at Ellis prison farm, near Huntsville, Texas. The mesmerizing thirty-minute, black-and-white documentary film they produced, Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison, records the chants and the rhythmic chopping, with very little narration. It’s the only known film record of a tradition that, by the following year, had literally vanished.
Video notes
Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit.
Samuel Charters
While recording in the South in the early 1960s, producer, writer, and music historian Samuel Charters was inspired not only by the sound of Furry Lewis’s guitar, but by the patterns of movement in his hands and fingers as he played. Thus Charters decided to make a film that would document aspects of the blues that couldn’t be put on a phonograph record.
In the sweltering summer of 1962, Charters journeyed through St. Louis, Memphis, Louisiana, and South Carolina to shoot the film The Blues and record the soundtrack. Artists featured in addition to Lewis are J.D. Short, Baby Tate, and Sleepy John Estes.
Video notes
The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture at the University of Connecticut spans the entire 20th century, beginning with African-American spirituals and the ragtime of Scott Joplin and other early composers, and ending with Snoop Doggy Dogg and the rappers of the late 20th century.
Robert "Mack" McCormick
Unlike the Lomaxes, who were tied to academia and the Library of Congress, McCormick was an amateur obsessive. To support his habit, he drove taxis and worked for the U.S. Census Bureau in Houston’s Fourth Ward in 1960, just so he could learn more about barrelhouse pianists in the neighborhood. In addition, he did contract work for the Smithsonian in the late 1960s and early ’70s, scouting the South for talented musicians to perform at the institution’s summer music festival.
Of all the musicians McCormick studied, none captured his attention more than Robert Johnson. In May, the Smithsonian published McCormick’s much-anticipated Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey about the influential Mississippi Delta blues guitarist and singer who once recorded 42 songs at sessions at the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio in 1936 and the Warner Brothers/Vitagraph building in Dallas in 1937 before dying in 1938.
On Aug. 4, 2023, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings releases "Playing For the Man At Door", a 66-song box set of field recordings made by McCormick between the 1950s and ’70s.
The field recordings are McCormick at his obsessive best—on the street, being so bold as to request someone perform for his recorder (a request usually fulfilled), taking notes, occasionally interjecting a question, trying to capture the moment, in living rooms, porches, backyards, bars, and even prisons.
There are some familiar names: Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins. But most of the performers of these recordings were neither famous nor notorious outside their communities: barrelhouse pianist Robert Shaw, the ethereal Roosevelt "Grey Ghost" Williams, and drummer-rapper Bongo Joe Coleman (what may be his first recordings), Joe Patterson (features one of the last players in Texas skilled in blowing handmade quills), Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas (blowing pan pipes made of cane).
Video notes
Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack Mccormick, 1958–1971.
2023, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
David Evans
Dr. David Evans is an academic musicologists specializing in blues music and is the author of the seminal "Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues" (1982), "The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Blues" (2005) and many other publications. He has produced more than 50 albums of field and studio recordings, many of them for the University of Memphis's High Water Records.
While studying at UCLA in the 1960s, Evans began making trips to the southern states to research and record blues, gospel, and folk musicians. He first recorded the singer Jack Owens in 1966 and later produced records by him, Jessie Mae Hemphill, R. L. Burnside, and many other musicians. As a performer (blues vocal and guitar) Evans has made over seventy international tours to twenty-three countries and has recorded six CDs.
George Mitchell
In 1961, Mitchell started recording and photographing blues singers, including Furry Lewis, Gus Canon, and Sleepy John Estes. In 1963: Peg Leg Howell and Buddy Moss. He worked for Delmark Records (Chicago), and with Michael Bloomfield, produced concerts at the Fickle Pickle. From 1967 until 1984, Mitchell recorded many unknown blues singers in Georgia and Alabama, including Precious Bryant, John Lee Ziegler, and J.W. Warren.
In 1967, Mitchell travelled with his wife Cathy and a Wollensak tape recorder to Mississippi to document blues legends: Fred McDowell and Robert Nighthawk (his final recordings), and became the first to record R.L. Burnside, Jessie Mae Hemphill, and Othar Turner.
In Atlanta in 1984, he produced the National Downhome Blues Festival. The most recent albums are available on the Fat Possum Label.
Video notes
George Mitchell recordings of Cecil Barfield.
Cecil Is A true Blues original. One of the few active Bluesmen remaining in Georgia at that time, Cecil lived in a shack with no running water or electricity and learned to play on a one stringed cooking oil can. His distinctively accented vocals can remarkably contort from a moaning hum to wrenched squeeze in the space of a few bars, miraculously morphing from track to track with the effect of sounding like a different singer each time.
Tary Owens (from an article by Ruth K. Sullivan)
The area of Texas known as the Golden Triangle, formed by the cities of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, has been fertile ground for important developments in blues, country, Cajun, zydeco, rock-and-roll, and other music genres.
In 1963, Owens received a Lomax Foundation grant to research and record roots folk musicians in Central Texas.
In 1987 Owens went to see the exhibit, “From Lemon to Lightnin’: An Exhibit of Texas Blues” at the Barker Texas History Center. His field recordings from the 1960s were prominently displayed, including the barrelhouse blues pianist the Grey Ghost (Roosevelt Williams). Owens drove him to view the exhibit, and Williams (84 at that time) was overwhelmed, not believing that anything would come of those recordings. The Grey Ghost and Owens both embarked on new phases of their respective music careers starting that day.
He also produced the special recording, Texas Piano Professors, with the Ghost, Lavada “Dr. Hepcat” Durst, and Erbie Bowser. Owens sought out recording deals for the performers, arranged personal appearances, and accompanied many Austin area musicians to blues festivals around the United States and overseas.
Throughout the 1990s Owens produced some thirty to forty CDs of all kinds of blues and other Texas music, including the well-known album "Lone Star Shootout" with Long John Hunter, Phillip Walker, Lonnie Brooks, and Ervin Charles (1999).
Another 1999 release "Catfish, Carp & Diamonds: 35 Years of Texas Blues", contained a sampler collection of some of the best of Owens’s 1960s field recordings.
Yet another historical compilation album, Ruff Stuff: The Roots of Texas Blues Guitar, featured, among other artists, the music of Owens’s guitar mentors Mance Lipscomb and Bill Neely.
Video notes
Texas Blues Reunion - Austin, TX 1987
An historic reunion concert was held on Juneteenth (June 19) 1987 at the Victory Grill on East 11th Street. Musicians who had played there decades earlier gathered and shared their stories. Blues greats B. B. King and Bobby 'Blue' Bland also shared their memories of the Texas Blues scene.
Event and video was conceived of and produced by Tary Owens. Scriptwriter and interviewer was Martha Hartzog. Paul Congo directed and edited the video production.
Peter B. Lowry
Teaching biology for a few years after obtaining a Master's in zoology, he changed his focus to blues and jazz with a primary focus on the Piedmont blues of the south-eastern United States. He wrote extensively on blues and jazz music, founded Trix Records, and moved to live in Australia in later life.
Lowry traveled through the South Eastern United States for over a decade in the 1970s and 80's doing field recording and other research in the Piedmont region of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, including interviewing, photographing, and recording blues and gospel musicians between 1970 and 1980.
In the early 1970s, Tarheel Slim was "rediscovered" by Peter, and emerged to play solo, with acoustic guitar in the style of Brownie McGhee, at festivals and for college audiences. He recorded an album, No Time At All, released on Trix Records in 1975, with pianist Big Chief Ellis on some tracks.
His field research also took him occasionally to the Midwestern US, where he recorded local Michigan pianists for the album Detroit After Hours – Vol. 1 and on to Chicago to record the blues albums Goin' Back Home (Homesick James) and I've Been Around (David "Honeyboy" Edwards).
Peter B. Lowry Collection, 1969-1987 on website of UNC (University Libraries - Wilson Special Collections Library).
Video notes
Recorded at Cottekill New York on September 28 1974 for Trix Records (an independent record label which Lowry founded in 1971)
Tarheel Slim - Vocals, Guitar (Tar Heel was often applied to the poor laborers who worked to produce tar, pitch, and turpentine, the nickname Tar Heel was embraced by Confederate North Carolina soldiers during the Civil War and grew in popularity as a nickname for the state and its citizens following the war)
Big Chief Ellis - Piano