Among the music that gathers in my space you’ll find a lot of vintage tunes. I have about forty CDs that collect the blues and related music recorded between 1910 and 1950. Thirteen of those came my way through a series titled When the Sun Goes Down: The Secret History of Rock & Roll. The series was released between 2002 and 2004 on RCA’s Bluebird label (the same long-gone label on which most of the included tracks were released in the long-ago). Most of the thirteen focus on genres like Delta blues or gospel; a few focus on individual performers like Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
I don’t really listen to those CDs as whole units. The music on them is all on my so-called digital shelves, and they pop up on occasion when I run the whole 100,000-plus catalog on random. But unlike other CDs – works by Bob Dylan, the Beatles and many others (including the occasional listen to, say, Sonny & Cher or maybe Ray Conniff) – they don’t get played in their entirety. I do tap into them when I burn CD mixes or when I’m looking for covers of tunes. But there’s a whole wealth of stuff there. I dug into those CDs when I was writing in April and again last week about Geechie Wiley and her “Last Kind Words Blues.”
And there are six CDs that are kind of vintage music and kind of not. They’re collections of tunes that were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, but the CDs were recorded in the last thirty years or so. They are:
Songs of the Civil War, a 1991 collection inspired by Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary. It includes, of course, “Ashokan Farewell,” the plaintive modern fiddle piece by Jay Ungar and Molly Mason that underscored some of the series’ most poignant moments. Other performers on the CD, offering songs that were popular during the 1860s, include Sweet Honey in the Rock, Richie Havens, John Hartford, Kathy Mattea and Kate & Anna McGarrigle. (I had a copy of the actual soundtrack to the series on cassette during the ’90s and I thought I had it on CD, but I evidently don’t. This album is a good substitute.)
Dark River: Songs of the Civil War Era is obviously a similar album and duplicates a couple of the titles from the first album listed above. This one, though, was recorded solely by musicians based in Austin, Texas, folks who aren’t as well-known as the folks who recorded the first album. Nevertheless, there are a few names that I recognized when I found the album, like Rita Hosking, Jimmy LaFave and Eliza Gilkyson. This one, from 2011, has more of a country/folk feeling (along with, understandably, a Texas orientation), given the inclusion of titles like “Red River Valley” and “The Streets of Laredo.”
A third collection of Civil War era tunes is Divided & United, a two-CD package from 2013 that includes some of the same tunes as the two earlier collections. The draw here is the larger number of tunes – 32, as opposed to 25 on Songs of the Civil War and 13 on Dark River. Also making the collection attractive are the names of the artists: Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Lee Ann Womack, and many other country music stars.
We move away from the Civil War when we get to The Beautiful Old, a 2013 collection of tunes that were written during the years from 1839 to 1918. The collection is based on the idea that these were songs from the years when most music was performed in the home, not listened to passively from the phonograph or the radio. And the producers recorded the nineteen tunes – “The Band Played On” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” are likely the most familiar – with only the instrumentation that would have been available at the time the various tunes were written or popular. Again, there are numerous familiar names in the credits including Garth Hudson of The Band, Graham Parker, Dave Davies of the Kinks, Richard Thompson, Christine Collister and more.
The work of America’s first great songwriter, Stephen Foster, is the focus of Beautiful Dreamer, a 2004 collection of eighteen of Foster’s compositions, some of them familiar, like the title track and “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” and others – like “Gentle Annie” and “Comrades Fill No Glass For Me” – less well-known. And some of the performers are again familiar, like Roger McGuinn, Suzy Bogguss and Mavis Staples.
The last CD I’ll mention here today is – as much as the word is overused and misused – unique. A Tribute to Charles “Pa” Ingalls, a 2006 release by fiddler Bruce Hoffman, is a collection of songs mentioned in the Little House series of books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Most children of my generation read or heard at least one of Wilder’s books and anyone who consumed popular culture in the 1970s was aware of the Little House on the Prairie television show. The kicker to the CD is that Hoffman recorded the sixteen tracks at the preserved home in Mansfield, Missouri, of Laura and Almanzo Wilder, and he played them on Charles Ingalls’ fiddle. Many of the tunes on the CD are well-known, like “Buffalo Gals” and “Oh Susanna,” but others – like “The Gypsy’s Warning” – were more obscure. Hoffman enlists a few vocalists, including Pam Tillis, for four of the tunes.
All of that may be more than anyone else needs to know about those CDs. Do I ever listen to them as albums? Sometimes, most frequently to Beautiful Dreamer, the Stephen Foster collection. But they’re all good work. And if I had to pull a favorite track off the six, it would be Mavis Staples’ take on “Hard Times Come Again No More” from Beautiful Dreamer:
– whiteray
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