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RECORDING IN THE SOUTH
Early Recorded
Rural & Country Music
In the American
South (Paperback
- 28 Mar 2011)
Robert D. Morritt
Availability
This book describes the history of country music in rural
America, by tracing recording sessions from the  earliest
fiddle recording made by a North Carolinian in New York City in 1916 over six
years before the stated ‘first country recording by Gilliland and Robertson
in 1922 as reported by most earlier sources.
There were no recording studios in
the south in the days before highways were built. The few that made the
effort to record rural music had to make their way from the hills to New York
City. This book describes the advent of this form of music and of these and
later sessions that produced records, which attracted a wider audience for
this type of music.
Eventually the industry realized
the need to be closer to the source and to attract local musicians and opened
recording studios in the South, namely Bristol, TN, Ashland, KY, Ashville,
NC, later in Louisville, KY, Atlanta, GA, Memphis, TN, Charlotte, NC and
other studios created further West (San Antonio, TX, etc) to attract the new
‘Western’ or ‘Cowboy’ music and later in Appalachia a newer style of rural
music, late known as Bluegrass music.
The book affords the reader a
convenient time-line as one can follow each session. In many cases where
known, musicians are identified as well as vocalists together with matrix and
catalogue numbers. Also Included are the earliest Country Gospel recording
sessions. With this time-guide, the reader can trace the transition of rural
music, from its (at first archaic ‘hill’ styles to its more flexible and
popular form prior to WWII
With the advent of radio,
‘country’ music adapted other styles influenced by popular music, and fusion
of other styles (urban, jazz and blues) that later metamorphosized into modern
country music after WWII and is outside the scope of this book.
The book is unique, because it not
only identifies this era and recorded history in-depth by containing an
extensive discography from the earliest period onwards. It also identifies
sessions, artists, and cases where a matrice would be used to press records
that were subsequently sold in retail stores bearing not only different
pseudonyms for the same recording artist. but issued on different labels depending on which dime-store one
purchased the same recording at.
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