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Topic: You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music Return to archive
January 28th, 2005 09:54 PM
Ten Thousand Motels New Release: New Release: You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music

BMNN wrote: on Thursday, January 27 2005:

Charlie Poole was a hard-driving, hard-drinking Depression-era character – mill-worker, bootlegger, scalawag – who lived fast and died young, at age 39. In the process, Poole left his mark on a century of musicians from Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams to Earl Scruggs and Don Reno, from Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott to the New Lost City Ramblers and Bob Dylan, from the Holy Modal Rounders, Jerry Garcia and the group whose name paraphrases a Poole song – Old & In the Way – to John Mellencamp and today's generation of alt-country rockers who are embarking on their own rediscovery of Charlie Poole. What Robert Johnson was to blues and rock and roll, Charlie Poole was to bluegrass, folk, and modern country music.

The man who is rightly called the patron saint of C&W spent virtually his entire recording career – from July 1925 to September 1930 – as a Columbia artist. For the first time since the onset of the digital era, a deluxe 3-CD box set finally puts his life and music in historic perspective, as You Ain't Talkin' To Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music arrives in stores May 10, 2005, on Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG Music Entertainment. The release precedes the tenth annual get-together on May 20-21 of "The Charlie Poole Festival" in Poole's old hometown of Eden, North Carolina, and anticipates the upcoming 80th anniversary of Poole's first Columbia recording date in New York City.
Over the course of 3 CDs and 72 tracks (clocking in with more than 222 minutes of music), You Ain't Talkin' To Me presents the music of Charlie Poole in four distinct contexts. First, there are the timeless Columbia sides, as 40 of the near-70 tunes recorded by Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers are collected here (along with three others from 1929, in a slightly expanded lineup under the pseudonyms of the Highlanders for Paramount, and the Allegheny Highlanders for Brunswick).

The remaining 29 tracks explore three facets in which a wide range of Poole's contemporaries (and a handful of his predecessors) are featured on several other record labels: Earlier singers and groups from whom he borrowed material on which to apply his unique stamp (ranging from Victorian ballads and Tin Pan Alley pop, to coon songs and country blues); banjoists who exerted a significant influence on Poole's innovative instrumental style (or from whom he also merely borrowed material); and banjoists, singers and groups who were influenced by Poole during his reign, and who helped incorporate his progressive ideas into the evolution of hillbilly music. These tracks are drawn from 78s and cylinder recordings originally made for the Bluebird, Busy Bee, Edison, Gennett, Little Wonder, Okeh, Victor, and Vocalion labels. Transferred from rare original 78s by Grammy Award winning sound engineer Christopher King (for the Charlie Patton box set in 2003), these are the first digital transfers of many of these sides, and bring out a sound quality even Poole's most ardent fans have never before heard.

You Ain't Talkin' To Me was compiled and produced for reissue by Henry Sapoznik, who brings to the project his expertise as a professional musician (adept at banjo and guitar) in the old time and klezmer fields. As an award-winning author, producer, archivist, historian and radio producer he also wrote the definitive 6,000 word liner note essay that completes the package.

Note: Anticipated street date is May 10, 2005


Cybergrass - The Internet Bluegrass Music Magazine at www.cybergrass.com
January 29th, 2005 03:22 PM
Ten Thousand Motels Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers were one of the most popular string bands of the 1920s. If they didn't have the foot-stomping

exuberance of their chief competitors, Georgia's Skillet Lickers, they offered a debonair precision that was equally infectious. Infused with ragtime and pop, their music almost seemed to swing at times (even though the use of that word to describe music was still several years in the future). Poole strongly influenced later banjo players, including those who would become the creators of bluegrass.


Poole was born in Randolph County, NC, and spent much of his adult life working in textile mills. He learned banjo as a youth and also played baseball. (He may have adopted his three-finger playing style, a version of classical banjo technique, due to a baseball accident involving his thumb.) When not working in mills, he would travel from town to town across the country, playing the banjo and taking what work he could get. He ended up settling in Spray, NC, in 1918 and married two years later. He and his brother-in-law, fiddler Posey Rorer, would often play together with other local musicians, and out of these performances grew a distinct group called the North Carolina Ramblers. Poole and Rorer teamed up with guitarist Norm Woodlieff in 1925, and the trio auditioned in New York for Columbia Records. They were accepted and cut four songs; all were successful, including the bluesy "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down." That became a bluegrass and country standard, and Poole and the Ramblers were soon a popular string band. The band's unusual sound remained consistent through several changes in personnel. As vocalist, Poole sang with a plain, uninflected style that complemented his complex banjo picking. Often, and perhaps intentionally, Poole obscured parts of the lyrics when he sang; record buyers sometimes purchased Ramblers recordings simply so that they could try to parse out what he was saying. The songs they sang were a mixture of minstrel songs, Victorian ballads, and humorous burlesques often delivered with Poole's straight-faced, dry wit. Several more songs' paths to popularity in the country tradition led through Poole's band, including "Sweet Sunny South" and "White House Blues," and his catalog is full of unexpected charmers like "If the River Was Whiskey," which deftly weaves that Irish tale of drunkenness with the then-up-to-the-minute "Hesitation Blues" (also known as "Sittin' on Top of the World"). Through the rest of the 1920s, the Ramblers recorded close to 70 sides for Columbia.

Like many country performers to follow, Poole lived a fast life; he was a hard-drinking man, rowdy and reckless. Poole was significant as one of the first country artists to gain widespread popularity through recordings, and when the Depression slowed record sales dramatically, he was hard hit. Around 1930 his self-confidence began to wane with his popularity, and he began drinking even more heavily. Scheduled to appear in a film in 1931, he unfortunately went on a bender and died of heart failure before he could get to Hollywood. After his death, Rorer (who had left the band in 1929) and guitarist Roy Harvey (who'd replaced Woodlieff around the same time) began leading the North Carolina Ramblers. (The group continued to record and perform for a quite a few years afterward.) Poole's music enjoyed renewed popularity during the folk revival of the '60s, and several reissue LPs followed. His complete recordings were issued on CD by the County label in the 1990s, and Kinney Rorrer wrote and published a biography of the great bandleader and banjo player. ~ Sandra Brennan & James Manheim, All Music Guide

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