Recorded period music

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

All well and good, but also bear in mind, the majority of fiddle music was still performed informally as solo music - solitary performers - in the 19th century, though, of course the minstrel shows and groups were an up-and -coming phenomenom, co-existing with the rich solo tradition.

[Amtmann]

Re: Recorded period music

All well and good, but also bear in mind, the majority of fiddle music was still performed informally as solo music - solitary performers - in the 19th century, though, of course the minstrel shows and groups were an up-and -coming phenomenom (did I spell that right?)

By the time of the Civil War, Minstrel shows had already been around for close to two decades... not exactly an "up-and-coming phenomenom".

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

What I am simply saying is, that fiddle music existed on its own merits, with thousands of fiddlers across the nation, north and south, city and rural, and dozens of tunebooks of American, Irish, Scottish, English collections published, and tunes learned in the oral tradition outside the relatively few professional groups and shows put on in the large cities. People did not have to go to New York City, etc to hear and enjoy fiddle tunes. The fiddle was still primarily a solo instrument, played by thousands of amateurs as well as the comparatively few professionals. See Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy , by Hans Nathan 1962 University of Oklahoma Press., and the William Sidney Mount Music Collection (Stony Brook)., Catching the Tune - Music and William Sidney Mount -Janice Gray Armstrong -1984 - Museums at Stony Brook, Musicians Omnibus - Elias Howe 1863 - Boston, - Winner's Violin Primer - A new and Complete Method of Learning to play the Violin Without a Master by Septimus Winner 1860 - Firth , Pond & Co. New York. I simply don't don't think people should feel inadequate by being part of the then existent and rich solo tradition of fiddle playing (even though the majority of recordings made in the 20th and 21st centuries are of large groups of instrumentalists)- simply enjoy it for what it is and was, and enjoy the minstrel tradition as well!

[Danny]

Re: Recorded period music

Dan'l, that wouldn't be a problem if you could pull yourself out of the mainstream.

Carl -

True, it's more a mainstream phenomenon.

- Dan Wykes

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

I just remembered another recording that maybe some people would be interested in - it actually can be found in the classical music section. its by a group called tafelmusik and i believe the album is called "bach meets cape breton" - it includes many traditional tunes - 18th and 19th century, and a few classical - played on period instruments with gut strings (interspersed with a few on modern instruments as well) if i can find my copy i will post info - i also recorded 29 period tunes on period fiddles years ago, but its currently out of print.

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

"Close to two decades" could be considered and up-and coming phenomenom, when compared to a solo fiddle tradition stretching back almost 200 years before the civil war.

[amity]

Re: Recorded period music

Your theory about "coherent abrupt beginnings and endings" developing in the 20th century I feel is wrong. The thing you mention, I feel, should only apply to the late 19th vs. early 20th century string band development.
- Dan Wykes

Mr. Wykes, I don't know enough about this to discuss it more intelligently. My husband was an old-style fiddler (mainly contra) and a big fan of traditional fiddle music and had dozens of albums of early 20th century recordings. As a living historian I became intrigued by the fact that so many of the truly old time players (people born before or during the civil war) had this "foggy" start-and-end technique, or rather lack of technique, that I asked questions of him and other traditional musicians, who also realized this was the case and steered me in the direction of some print sources to read up on it. I wish I could remember what they were (Alan Lomax might have been one?), but not being a musician I didn't keep any notes. At any rate, of course music has been performed for millenia, and I didn't mean to imply that the very idea of getting up on a stage was a post-civil war phenomenon. As I remember, at issue was when traditional music took to the stage and should not apply to minstrel or other types of performed music. The start of Galax, Virginia as a venue for traditional music seems to have made quite a few changes in I believe it was 1890s. BLUEGRASS with standing bass and multiplication of other instruments from other traditions, etc., definitely dates from that period. Traditional music is only one of bluegrass' many influences. So profound was the sway of the Galax bluegrass style that the so-called "traditional bluegrass music" we hear today sounds very little like its pre-Galax antecedents, evidently. Other factors have to do with the loss of the old style "just tuning" and modes other than major and minor keys that were preserved in traditional music up until Galax. I can barely read music (or only if it is set in shapenotes) and would be lost trying to discuss this any further, honestly. It has to do with notions of what constitutes a musical scale. At any rate, my comments should not be taken to apply to other forms of music, sorry.

For sources on singing and songs, one might read books by an early 20th cent. scholar named Cecil Sharpe. He made field recordings of ballads and other songs in Appalachia before WW1! Like 1915 or so, I think. Lots of his subjects could remember the civil war, I am sure. There is also the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago to consult. They probably could supply a list of early 20th cent. recordings.

Edited to say:
Eureka, ! I did a search on Carter Brothers and Son and came up with this album, which has little sound bites of CB&S and some other early traditional musicians fer yore lissnin' plesur. I just love this stuff:

http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1040703/a/Mississippi+String+Bands+Vol.+1.htm

Note, I have not listened to all these recordings, but even I can hear the bluegrass and ragtime influences in most of it. The Carter Brothers and Son, in contrast, are noted for their pure early Mississippi style. They really cook. I also love the one called Indian War Whoop by another artist. We are listening back quite a ways. You can hear that the tuning, etc., sounds quite a bit different from modern bluegrass. Unfortunately because these are just little snippets of what the company is hoping to induce us to buy, the foggy beginnings and endings are not included. Most of these bands are two or at most three instruments. No bass. Also, I don't doubt this album has been cleaned up electronically. It is a much clearer sound than the versions my husband had.

[amity]

Re: Recorded period music

I was also able to find one tinny sounding old MP3 of Jenny on the Railroad that includes the beginning and ending:

http://www.juneberry78s.com/otmsampler/137%20Carter%20Brothers%20And%20Son%20-%20Jenny%20On%20The%20Railroad.mp3

Now that one is fairly tight and not as "incoherent" as many are, but it at least illustrates what I was talking about. You can hear one fiddle lead, a second fiddler jump in a second later, and finally the guitar hops on. Same at the end. Just peters out. No four potatoes. No "one-and-a-two.." Rarely will a modern old time band do it that way today with performance values being what they are now.

BTW, has anyone done any research or given much thought to the revolution that railroads must have made in vernacular music? That clackety rhythm is imitated in so many old pieces. By 20th century the novelty of it seems to have worn off.

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

One of the biggest differences between traditional music of the 1850's/1860's and its descendents in the early 20th century is use of guitar. The guitar was not commonly used to accompany fiddlers in the earlier time period, but became very popular in the early 20th century, which is also one of the reasons that many (but certainly not all) fiddle tunes in the 20th century were changed from flat keys to the "guitar-friendly" sharp keys.
As to railroad songs and sounds, William Sidney Mount,(1807-1868), a very prominent painter, fiddler, teacher and music historian, composed an interesting (and odd) fiddle tune entitled "In the Cars of the Long Island Railroad" on December 4th and 5th, 1850, in Stony Brook, Long Island. It appears to be a "novelty" tune, not suited to dancing. See "The Cradle of Harmony - William Sidney Mount's Violin and his Fiddle Music " Folkways, 1976, and "Catching The Tune - Music and William Sidney Mount" Janice Gray Armstrong 1984 - Museums At Stony Brook.

[amity]

Re: Recorded period music

Thanks. I will look for that tune.

And I would have expected banjo and fiddle to be a more common accompaniment than guitar in the mid-19th cent. Is that correct?

[eric marten]

Re: Recorded period music

Yes - banjo and fiddle was quite common, especially in the minstrel "plantation" genre, while guitar and fiddle was not common until the turn of the next century. Still, at the time of the mid 19th century, (outside the minstrel tradition), solo fiddle still the most common overall in the mainstream American, Anglo-celtic tradition - but of course one can find exceptions.

[amity]

Re: Recorded period music

I just read one reference that said banjo was uncommon until post-civil war in Appalachia. Are a lot of the details regionally specific?

Anyway, I have spent an interesting afternoon reading and listening. Thanks.

[Danny]

Re: Recorded period music

Whoa... I mean Whoa...

This discussion is getting WAY off base for CW period. Even if we take in the 1890's discussion, it's not until 30 years after 1890 that Bluegrass style would gell. String bands yes, some. Clawhammer (frailing, rapping) and old-timey from the Appalachian mountains yes, some. Classical tunes played on banjo yes, some.

Don't take my word for it though. Read your sources a little closer. For that matter, Carl Anderton of this forum is a good source because he is both a state Bluegrass banjo champion and has become a champion of the CW-era style of banjo known as Minstrel banjo. He better than I can better explain it musically, but I'll try.

In the 19th century there were no three-finger banjo rolls and licks, no guitar flat-pickin' fast breaks, no individual instrument breaks. In short the style that would become "Bluegrass" didn't "gell" until records and radio became big in the 20th century. CW-era banjos in particular weren't even strung with steel, and neither were fiddles much, and only rarely guitar. Guitars were very small and not very loud, and played by finger style, not strummed too much. Mandolins were rare in this country, and the idea of using a plucked bass viol in a folk or popular band setting, well, just no. We know because of the piles of sheet music and the few instrument tutors that survive from the CW time.

I agree that the 20th century old-timers and their early recorded music did employ some of the songs and manners from the CW period. As noted, some of them were old vets or children of vets from that war. Minstrel Shows and medicine shows themselves still were playing into the 1930s. But none of those sounded much like a CW-era performance. Folks had moved on by then. Popular singing styles and instruments had changed too much.

If this is off topic for the AC so we should probably drop it soon.

- Dan Wykes

[amity]

Re: Recorded period music

Mr. Wykes, I will surely agree with every word you say about bluegrass!

I just wanted to make the point that even in the first decade of two of the 20th century, long before there was a commercial market for recorded performance music, there were researchers (not commercial record producers) deliberately seeking out the music of decades earlier and saying "play it just the exact way your momma/daddy taught you." They were doing it specifically for documentary purposes, to record dying forms of music, not to sell records to a new audience. They were playing the original tunes on the original instruments, in the original modal renditions, without conscious alterations. I don't think they bought new fiddles or newfangled steel strings for their old fiddles or in any way altered their music to appease early 20th cent. tastes. They had no motive, since it was recorded for research purposes and not seeking a sales or performance market. What survives of this body of recorded music from the early 1900s (a tiny bit even back in the 1890s) can be a valuable primary source for 21st century reenactors.

Cecil Sharpe for example was actually a proto-anthropologist who was attempting to document early British folk song. The songs he was interested in had essentially died out or been morphed into other forms in England/Scotland/Wales, so he toured the Appalachians, recording the survivals of 16th cent. British folks songs he found still being regularly sung there. Obviously what he recorded would be valid for the civil war period, would it not?

I sought out some of Uncle Macon's recordings, on the other hand, and they sound like they might well have been altered to suit early 20th cent. tastes, and that would make sense for him to do, since he was on a stage playing to a contemporary audience. I had never heard him before, and I definitely enjoyed it, but it smacked of a different era altogether than Carter Bros and Freeny's Barn Dance Band to me. Much of it sounded pretty 1920s-30s, in fact. So I think what I am speaking of is really in a different category, and much more representative of the mid-19th century than Uncle Macon.

My only point is that for anyone who would like to hear what music sounded like in civil war, there are recordings that can get us back pretty close. County Records is a good place to start, even though one will hear later musical idioms mixed in with much of it. Others are pretty pure renditions. There are other companies out there that distribute them, too, or just spend time in Library of Congress if you are close by. There are probably altogether several hundred of these recordings available.

[Danny]

Re: Recorded period music

...I just wanted to make the point that ... long before there was a commercial market for recorded performance music, there were researchers (not commercial record producers) deliberately seeking out the music of decades earlier

Terre, you are correct in that these early 20th century researchers were seeking out the music of decades earlier, but it was the music of a lost Anglo tradition they were after, not the popular music that originated in America in CW era and before. Not the music of the typical CW soldier. BTW rent the movie "Songcatchers" - it's about exactly that 1900's research and the Soundtrack from the movie is a real treat to boot.

and saying "play it just the exact way your momma/daddy taught you..."

Yes, "the way your momma / daddy taught you" -- but momma / daddy were brought up in a period years after the Civil War. After 1910's when most of the recordings were made only a rare surviving grandpa (grandma) or two could have played CW music as he (she) heard it first hand. If you read about the artists on the records they weren't that old.

They were playing the original tunes on the original instruments, in the original modal renditions, without conscious alterations... I don't think they bought new fiddles or newfangled steel strings for their old fiddles or in any way altered their music to appease early 20th cent. tastes...

Yes, songs played from the CW era certainly, whether original from Pilgrim times up to the war, but instruments original to the CW era were mostly too old to use by the 1900's. I'll grant you some violins and guitars survived in playable condition but it's a sure bet most were made or bought from factory or mail-order after the Civil War, and were of newer construction and sound. Even homeades were of quite different construction and sound - Google "Frank Proffit, banjo"

... What survives of this body of recorded music from the early 1900s (a tiny bit even back in the 1890s) can be a valuable primary source for 21st century reenactors.

FLAG. Definitely not a primary source for reenactors. As I mentioned before, some 20th century string band recordings had aspects and mannerisms of Civil War era performance -- but not in any way did they actually sound like a CW performance. Wrong keys and singing style, steel strings etc.

Cecil Sharpe for example was actually a proto-anthropologist who was attempting to document early British folk song. The songs he was interested in had essentially died out or been morphed into other forms in England/Scotland/Wales, so he toured the Appalachians, recording the survivals of 16th cent. British folks songs he found still being regularly sung there. Obviously what he recorded would be valid for the civil war period, would it not?...

No that doesn't follow at all. Those recordings of lost Anglo music would be a record only of certain traditional songs from the Appalachian area where they were preserved. I'll grant you some soldier boys from those mountains might have sung those in camp but it was the popular music sold on song sheets that should be sung more often in reenacment.

I sought out some of Uncle Macon's recordings, ... and I definitely enjoyed it, but it smacked of a different era altogether than Carter Bros and Freeny's Barn Dance Band to me...

That's Uncle Dave Macon. I have recordings of him and actually his performing antics are very like a CW era Medicine or Minstrel show and he should be listened to for that. His repertoire of songs inclucing CW era songs was amazing. But again, with the instrument he used (A Gibson open-back, steel-strung fretted banjo) he didn't sound much like a CW player.

My only point is that for anyone who would like to hear what music sounded like in civil war, there are recordings that can get us back pretty close...

By my research, not all that close. There are better sources - sheet music and tutors.

- Dan Wykes