Old-Time Music of West Virginia, Volume One: Ballads, Blues & Breakdowns

They Say...

Review by Steve Leggett, All Music Guide

Greil Marcus has written repeatedly about that "old weird America." Well, this is it, folks, 19 tracks of music that is both comfortably familiar and alien as hell. These recordings from the 1920s and 1930s feature careening string bands, white bluesmen, and other obscure oddities from the mountains of West Virginia, and listening to them pulls you into a world that the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack could only begin to hint at. "Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand," by The Williamson Brothers and Curry, is a case in point. It sounds familiar because it is a version of "John Henry," but this wild, exuberant, string band take of it pulls it in unexpected directions, and the fiddle breaks warble like frustrated ghosts. Their version of "Warfield," included here, is even wilder, so manic it appears to lift off into space. Blind Alfred Reed's "Explosion In The Fairmount Mines" also sounds familiar at first listen, with its relatively generic melody, but it is an eerie song about precognition, and Reed's mountain fiddle scratches along, keeping the whole song on edge. White bluesman Frank Hutchison (probably best known for his "The Train That Carried The Girl From Town," often covered by Doc Watson) has two tracks here, "The Miner's Blues," and "West Virginia Rag," which is an instrumental version of another Hutchison song, "Coney Isle." Hutchison was a fine guitar player, handling both ragtime fingerpicking and bottleneck slide with apparent ease, and like fellow bluesman Dock Boggs, he seems to straddle two worlds at once: black and white, familiar and unfamiliar, a place that turns out to be that "old weird America" Marcus keeps talking about.