Re: [Harp-L] Was Any 1920s; Now Coalfield Blues

[David Payne <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

WVa Bob added: 
 Of course this cultural interchange will not come as any surprise to any of you; the point isn't that something was happening in the West Virginia coalfields that wasn't happening elsewhere; the point is that  what was happening elsewhere was happening here, too, which is a fact that I'm under the impression isn't well-known, and which guys like Dave and I are proud of. There's much more to West Virginia than you might expect...
WVa Bob



Very proud of it. That's awesome you know Nat Reese. Extremely awesome. West Virginia was an exciting place musically in the 1920s, look at the white bluesmen of the era... Gwen Foster, Frank Hutchison, Clarence Ashley, Dick Justice, we might even put Doc Boggs in there, many of the first white men to record blues were from Virginia, WV and North Carolina mountains. As far as I know, our Frank Hutchison was the first white man to record a blues song. You see the same thing in the South on the railroads, Jimmie Rodgers is the ultimate example of this. In West Virginia, I think, this was magnified. You often couldn't tell whites from blacks when covered in coal dust and they were united against a fearful enemy, coal operators who machine gunned striking miners in their tents, not to mention a government plane dropping bombs on miners (only time an airplane bombed the U.S. mainland, by the way). 
I've always been amazed at the exchange of musical ideas between the races in the early 1900s. This is a time when they operated as separate societies. Look at Bill Monroe in Kentucky, as a boy, he learned the blues from Arnold Schultz, who never recorded, but was supposedly Robert Johnson's equal. I think many would be surprised to learn that bluegrass is largely based on Monroe's fusion of Schultz's blues with other styles. Anytime you hear Monroe hit a flatted Five lick (all the time), you are hearing Schultz. Hank Williams was usually singing about Audrey tormenting him, but he got the tools to do that musically from a black bluesman named Rufus Payne (no relation to me). Frank Hutchison learned the blues from an old black man who lived in the mountains in the 1910s. Frank is one step removed from pre-blues blues. 
That's why I'm so interested in this period. It is so exciting. For some reason, after centuries of of largely ignoring each other, blacks and whites began freely exchanging musical ideas in the early 20th century, I'd guess it's a product of the industrial age, railroads and coal. This brought about the explosion of American music styles in the 20th century. I remember watching the W.C. Handy biographical movie, St. Louis Blues with Nat King Cole, and hearing Handy introduced with "Blues is the only truly American form of music" Just look what has happened since then. I like listening back and hearing the revolution unfold. I get so excited listening to Jimmie Rodgers and hearing the elements that will later become various genres. Or Bill Monroe from the 1940s, Bill was recording stuff that IS fundamentally rock n' roll on acoustic instruments while Hitler was still alive (Rocky Road Blues, for example, in 1945). 

It's all very exciting.

Dave
__________________
Dave Payne Sr. 
Elk River Harmonicas
www.elkriverharmonicas.com