Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 09/23/2008
When
Victor Records field engineer and A&R man
Ralph Peer arrived in Bristol, TN, in the summer of 1927, he had a mission to record every rural Southern musician he could find. By the time he left Bristol,
Peer had recorded 76 songs by 19 different acts and had set the cornerstones for the future of country music, a genre that had yet to be recognized or defined. The Bristol Sessions, the so-called Big Bang of
country music, yielded the first recordings from both
the Carter Family and
Jimmie Rodgers, as well as historic recordings by names less familiar, but no less important, including some restyled and rewritten traditional rave-ups by a previous
Peer discovery, harmonica and autoharp player
Ernest V. Stoneman.
Stoneman had turned up on
Peer's doorstep some three years earlier, and
Peer, impressed by the musician's ability to generate original material, had steered him to
Victor, and
Stoneman's first release, a two-sided original epic narrative called
"The Titanic," was an immediate and huge hit, selling thousands of copies in 1925. It was, alas, to be
Stoneman's first and last trip to the charts, making him, as well as arguably
country music's first true songwriter, also one of the genre's first one-hit wonders. This delightfully conceived two-disc set covers
Stoneman's early recording career between 1925 and 1934 (with sides attributed to his various groups
the Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers,
Frank Jenkins' Pilot Mountaineers,
the Sweet Brothers,
the Ernest V. Stoneman Trio, and others) with the
Gennett,
Paramount,
Edison,
Victor, and
AR imprints, and what emerges is a revelatory look at how
Stoneman turned an assortment of
gospel hymns, hillbilly raps, and square dance reels into an often wry, ironic, and completely original view of the world turning through its mysterious affairs.
"The Titanic" is here, as well as reconfigured fiddle romps like
"Old Joe Clark," the poignant
"All I've Got's Gone" (in early and late versions), odd, ornate narratives like
"The Fate of Talmadge Osbourne," and eerily modern-sounding pieces like
"Nine Pound Hammer," all of which show, given the times, an uncommonly sharp musical sense. It's comforting, somehow, to think that
Stoneman, who started out recording to wax cylinder, now has a defining collection available on CD in the 21st century. Some voices don't get lost. Thank God for that.
~Steve Leggett, All Music Guide
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