MON., MARCH 05, 2007
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From the Vault: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
by Michael James McGonigal
Few compilations are as deserving of a gorgeous R. Crumb cover image and a weighty Shakespearean allusion as this collection from Yazoo.
The album caused quite a stir among collector circles when it was released in 2006, but hardly a word was written about it in the regular old music press — not in the urban alt-weeklies, nor the national magazines, or even the blogs of the spheres. More's the pity.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is subtitled The Dead Sea Scrolls of Record Collecting, and most of these tracks really are as rare as the title implies. There's only one known copy of the majority of these sides, quite a few of which appear here digitally for the first time. Compiled by Richard Nevins, the music runs a pretty wide gamut: deep Delta blues, rough-hewn shape note singing, backwoods fiddle tunes, weird wartime story-songs, squeezebox-driven Cajun reels, punch cowboy songs, drunken-sounding jug band numbers and rousing sanctified singing. The whole enterprise feels like a natural extension of Harry Smith's vaunted 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music.
You may not exactly be amazed by this statement — especially if you've seen Ghost World or High Fidelity or American Splendor — but record collectors can be an awfully obsessive bunch.
And nothing can match the obsession of hunting for 78s of which there are no known copies. How many garages, flea markets, back rooms, cellars and thrift stores have been turned upside-down searching for them? One of the rarest surfaced in September 2003: Paramount 13096, a Son House disc with "Clarksdale Moan" backed with "Mississippi County Farm Blues," recorded in the same May 1930 sessions in Grafton, Wisconsin, that yielded brilliant music by Charley Patton and Willie Brown. The Son House record was clearly pretty beat but it's been cleaned up well enough to enjoy the hell out of it; the A-side is killer. Lottie Kimbrough's lovely "Don't Speak to Me" ranks as one of the greatest outlaw blues songs ever recorded.
Just as interesting to connoisseurs of hillbilly music as the Son House sides will be to blues freaks, there's the Georgia Pot Lickers' long-lost and super-vibrant "Up Jumped the Rabbit" / "Chicken Don't Roost Too High." The Grayson & Whitter sides are equally excellent and singular, while Dock Boggs' "Old Rub Alcohol Blues" is one of three copies that allegedly were pressed onto shellac made of ground-up copies of thrown-away 78s.
That so many previously unissued test pressings are collected here for the first time is impressive; clearly Nevins is super connected and trusted by record geeks. Next time you dream about finding an ultra-rare record only to awaken and be super bummed that it was just a dream, perhaps you'll feel better if you play this collection. My favorite of the acetate tracks is the rollicking "Ain't That Trouble in Mind," performed by hillbilly act Grayson County Railsplitters. Rarity in and of itself doesn't mean much, of course. But the fact is, every song on The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is a time portal to an old, odd, wonderfully backwater America. Before the Interstates and Wal-Mart, America was a place of great geographical divides that gave rise to dozens upon dozens of idiosyncratic, distinctly regional sounds. A lot of them are here.
The album caused quite a stir among collector circles when it was released in 2006, but hardly a word was written about it in the regular old music press — not in the urban alt-weeklies, nor the national magazines, or even the blogs of the spheres. More's the pity.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is subtitled The Dead Sea Scrolls of Record Collecting, and most of these tracks really are as rare as the title implies. There's only one known copy of the majority of these sides, quite a few of which appear here digitally for the first time. Compiled by Richard Nevins, the music runs a pretty wide gamut: deep Delta blues, rough-hewn shape note singing, backwoods fiddle tunes, weird wartime story-songs, squeezebox-driven Cajun reels, punch cowboy songs, drunken-sounding jug band numbers and rousing sanctified singing. The whole enterprise feels like a natural extension of Harry Smith's vaunted 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music.
You may not exactly be amazed by this statement — especially if you've seen Ghost World or High Fidelity or American Splendor — but record collectors can be an awfully obsessive bunch.
And nothing can match the obsession of hunting for 78s of which there are no known copies. How many garages, flea markets, back rooms, cellars and thrift stores have been turned upside-down searching for them? One of the rarest surfaced in September 2003: Paramount 13096, a Son House disc with "Clarksdale Moan" backed with "Mississippi County Farm Blues," recorded in the same May 1930 sessions in Grafton, Wisconsin, that yielded brilliant music by Charley Patton and Willie Brown. The Son House record was clearly pretty beat but it's been cleaned up well enough to enjoy the hell out of it; the A-side is killer. Lottie Kimbrough's lovely "Don't Speak to Me" ranks as one of the greatest outlaw blues songs ever recorded.
Just as interesting to connoisseurs of hillbilly music as the Son House sides will be to blues freaks, there's the Georgia Pot Lickers' long-lost and super-vibrant "Up Jumped the Rabbit" / "Chicken Don't Roost Too High." The Grayson & Whitter sides are equally excellent and singular, while Dock Boggs' "Old Rub Alcohol Blues" is one of three copies that allegedly were pressed onto shellac made of ground-up copies of thrown-away 78s.
That so many previously unissued test pressings are collected here for the first time is impressive; clearly Nevins is super connected and trusted by record geeks. Next time you dream about finding an ultra-rare record only to awaken and be super bummed that it was just a dream, perhaps you'll feel better if you play this collection. My favorite of the acetate tracks is the rollicking "Ain't That Trouble in Mind," performed by hillbilly act Grayson County Railsplitters. Rarity in and of itself doesn't mean much, of course. But the fact is, every song on The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is a time portal to an old, odd, wonderfully backwater America. Before the Interstates and Wal-Mart, America was a place of great geographical divides that gave rise to dozens upon dozens of idiosyncratic, distinctly regional sounds. A lot of them are here.
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