VA - The Rough Guide To Hillbilly Blues (2017)

Early record labels assumed that black audiences listened to black performers and white audiences to whites, but among the early musicians themselves, there was so much sharing of ideas, so many crossover sounds and techniques, that definitive identification of any stylistic origin is highly complicated. Look into the process of how the banjo evolved from a gourd instrument brought to North America by African slaves to one now stereotypically attached to hillbilly identity for a fascinating glimpse into this complex history.

Series producer Phil Stanton and compiler Neil Record add sonic insight to this historical examination with The Rough Guide to Hillbilly Blues, an excellent follow up to the two volumes of The Rough Guide to Country Blues, which they oversaw for World Recording Network in 2016. Like those, the generous collection of songs presented here were all recorded during the commercial music industry's first great wave, between 1925 and 1934. Where the 2016 collections focused upon black performers, this new Rough Guide presents their white, "hillbilly", contemporaries. Listening to all of the collections, the cross-cultural interplay of musical ideas becomes obvious. All of these musicians were playing the blues, pure and simple, in its many regional iterations as it had been handed down to them by a previous generation of 19th century-born musicians for whom the end of the Civil War brought expanded opportunities for cross-cultural exchange through shared poverty but who did not themselves live into the recording era.

Dick Justice's version of "Cocaine" demonstrates the influence that extended across racial lines, his version being a line-for-line copy of the version Luke Jordan recorded only three years earlier. But Justice was no Pat Boone cleaning up "Tutti Fruiti" for a white audience; he had a deep appreciation for the music and identified with it personally. So, too, Lester McFarland's "K.C. Whistle Blues," a song made popular by many black Southern jug bands, and Frank Hutchison's "Stackalee", one of the most famous among early blues songs with origins among early black singers. Harry Smith chose Hutchison's version of "Stackalee" for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, where he deliberately allowed the lines to be blurred between whether the featured performers were white or black. Smith wanted to erase racial identity as a source of differentiation and conflict.

Where an earlier progressive ideology sought the erasure of race as a means of addressing the historical conflict, our contemporary progressivism seeks resolution through the empowerment of distinction, identifying and celebrating difference as a means of strengthening the collective.

The Rough Guide editors' decisions to clarify identity distinctions where Smith sought to obscure them is possible a nod to the current political moment. In the least, it is a historical service to provide these clarifications, given that one of the overall effects of the method is to amplify the nature of cross-cultural influences at work among these diverse musicians. So much of our problematic separation has come later.

The editor's smartly, as well, include intimations of the racial unrest of the times on the Hillbilly blues collection. It's an oddity that many of these white musicians admired contemporary black performers and shared openly with them, yet still unquestioningly subscribed to the cultural attitudes of their time. For instance, Riley Pucket's instrumental, "The Darkie's Wail", where the performer opens by crediting "an old Southern darkie" for the song, acknowledges the white musician's debt to a black artist yet does so in the demeaning language of its time. It is a fact that in exploring the less-collected among many of these performer's works, one will encounter the free use of this and other derogatory racial epithets. It's a complicated and troubling subject, but one that should be explored openly and critically rather than ignored and thereby left to foster deeper resentments.

Laurence Cedar's mastering brings a new brightness and depth to these tracks, many of which have been previously anthologized. Surface noise is cleaned up without sacrificing the finer points of the performance. The Allen Brothers' "Bow Wow Blues", for instance, resonates with hokum kazoo and rattling bones; the sound is crisp and immediate. The equalization -- often a challenge when jumping between old tracks recorded in less than acoustically pristine conditions -- is balanced and clean; the collection flows from song to song with a strong, consistent sound. In all, the sound quality itself makes picking up this and the other Rough Guide blues anthologies worthwhile, even if a listener already has many of these cuts in their collection.

In restoring the sound and reframing these works for continued examination and re-appraisal Stanton, Record, and Cedar are engaged in an important and hopefully ongoing service to any audience, new or old, interested in America's folk and blues heritage.