For a man whose recording career lasted barely six years, Hank Williams casts an immense shadow. I’m currently doing a show called Tennessee Walt’s Hanks a Lot!—and most of the audience members seem to come in assuming that it’s a show of Hank Williams songs. When they learn that I’ll be doing songs not … Continue reading The Shadow of Hank Williams
I did a great show last weekend in Deer Park—and I should emphasize that I did a show I’d done many times before, something like the 25th performance of Tennessee Walt’s The Other Great American Songbook, and did it neither better nor worse than usual; it was the audience that made it great, by being … Continue reading My Favorite Things
It’s been nine years since I started listening to country music and, unwittingly, placed my feet on the path that led to the birth of Tennessee Walt. (For further details of this story, check here.) The people who have known me longer than that are, for the most part, baffled by my new taste in … Continue reading Love Is Blind, in 4/4 Time
by Gary Graff c.2012 Gary Graff Glen Campbell gets a warm but wary reception as he strides onstage at the University of Michigan's Hill Auditorium. It's no secret that the five-time Grammy Award winner is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He announced it himself, in June 2011, and has said that his latest album, "Ghost … Continue reading Glen Campbell Faces the End with Guitar in Hand
On August 6, 1927, Ralph Peer left Bristol. By Monday, August 8, there weren’t many people who even remembered that the Bristol Sessions had happened. Most of the musicians who had auditioned for him were already back in their everyday lives, scrambling to get by. Peer returned to New York, Bristol went about its business … Continue reading ‘The Most Important Event in the History of Country Music’
On August 4, 1927, Jimmie Rodgers—free of his entanglement with the Tenneva Ramblers—made his first recording as a solo act. Commercial country music, which had been born, unheralded and unnoticed, on August 1, when the Carter Family made their first recordings, came into focus at that moment. (The Tenneva Ramblers—free of their entanglement with Jimmie … Continue reading I Walk the Line
It’s easy enough to see why Jimmie Rodgers caught Ralph Peer’s eye in Bristol. A show-business veteran with the gift of the gab and a zest for self-promotion, Rodgers was a dapper dresser with a fine, flexible voice, brimming with self-confidence, and he had that yodel to set him apart from the crowd. The songs … Continue reading Straight from Clinch Mountain
The Bristol Sessions looms large in history for artistic reasons: They launched the careers of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, whose music would define the parameters of country music for generations to come. However, the Sessions were not primarily an artistic exercise, but rather an economic one. Ralph Peer wasn’t in Bristol looking for … Continue reading If You’ve Got the Money: The Economics of the Bristol Sessions
By July 28, 1927, the Bristol Sessions were looking like a bit of a dud. Ralph Peer had been recording for three days, and though he’d heard some good music—most of it from Ernest Stoneman and his friends and family in various combinations—he hadn’t heard anything that sounded like a game-changer for Peer or for … Continue reading El Watson and the Ghost of Esley Riddle
The standard mythology about the Bristol Sessions has it that Ralph Peer drifted into Bristol on July 22, a stranger in town; that he placed an ad in the local paper and, as a result, hordes of aspiring country musicians came down from the hills to audition; and that among those hordes were Jimmie Rodgers … Continue reading Spreading the Word
