The Rural Route
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Part of the appeal of the 1952 anthology was that its oddball curator, Harry Smith, drew no lines based on color or geography, instead emphasizing similarities between American folk musics. Now the Yazoo label, which in the past reissued the sort of early acoustic blues that makes up a large portion of the Smith anthology, has expanded its horizon to include old-time country with a pair of superb two-volume sets, The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs and Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be: Early American Rural Music. Like Smith’s antho-logy, both are assembled from commercially available recordings. To yet more work by artists like Uncle Dave Macon and Cannon’s Jug Stompers, who made it onto Smith’s collection, Yazoo adds equally worthy numbers by folks like Wilmer Watts & the Lonely Eagles and Frank Jenkins & His Pilot Mountaineers.
Two of the most transfixing tunes on Smith’s anthology are by western Virginia singer and banjo player Dock Boggs. Just a few weeks ago John Fahey’s Revenant label released Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings, which covers everything Boggs did between 1927 and 1929. Lavishly packaged in a 64-page hardcover book, the reissue includes a dozen commercial tunes and five alternate takes, plus four cuts by Boggs’s Kentucky contemporaries Bill and Hayes Shepherd. A lengthy essay by Greil Marcus, expanded from a section of his most recent book, Invisible Republic, paints Boggs as a man perpetually teetering between heaven and hell, good and evil, pleasure and pain. The most evocative line of the essay is its first: “Dock Boggs…sounded as if his bones were coming through his skin every time he opened his mouth.”
On Walking Into Clarksdale (Atlantic)–recorded and mixed by Albini and due out in April–Jimmy Page and Robert Plant don’t break new ground either, but they do dig up some musty old bones while trying to evoke the sound of Led Zeppelin. At its best, however, Zeppelin had the songs to match the sound.
