Archie Green, RIP

Click the title of this post to read the NYT obit for Archie's obit.

Archie was the guiding light for the creation of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in 1976.

Please join us in the word of mouth effort to create, in Archie's honor, a new Federal Writer's Project to document the experiences and viewpoints of everyday Americans during the current upheaval.

News: We've moved!

Here's the latest.  As of the first of the year, my old website and email address are no more.  My family and I have moved to Staunton, where my wife works, and now a lot of stuff on this blog is out of date.  

I reckon most of the links to Picasa slide shows and YouTube videos still work.  But I've had to move the my mp3s and personal stuff to a new Google website.  Here's the link.

Come see me play on the first Fridays at the Stone Soup Bookstore in Waynesboro, VA.  I like the grown-up suppertime gigs!  Home when my wife's still awake, and I don't smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke like in the old days.

As I can get the time, I'll update all the old, dead links on this page.  In the meantime, visit the new website.

Slim Eppinger, Fats Hardy, Thomas Bumpas, et al

Here is another video snippette from fieldwork and documentary projects I've conducted over the past 30 years or so. It's on YouTube here.

This is part of the Ninth Street Revival project in Chattanooga in 1994 (see earlier post).



I'll put a link to (a fully-mixed and professionally recorded) mp3 of the concert later. Check out Slim Eppinger, an important blues and R&B and soul guitarist in Chattanooga.

You can also go to my website and find a pdf file of a semi-scholarly/general-reader magazine article I wrote, "Doing Fine on Big Nine," from ETSU's Now and Then Magazine.

One big connection with Virginia and all this Black music from Chattanooga is that many of these guys played in Virginia, at clubs and frat parties, during their bands' heyday. They played colleges all up and down the mid-Atlantic. Easter's Weekend at U.Va. would not have been the same without the Coachmen or the Inclines in the 1960s, or later groups into the '70s. Clyde Stubblefield played drums for James Brown in University Hall back in the day.

Ninth Street Revival Chattanooga

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From around the turn of the 20th Century until roughly 1970, old Ninth Street in Chattanooga (now Martin Luther King Boulevard) was a hot bed of Black musical innovation and small business entrepreneurship. From the days when young Bessie Smith sang and danced on the street in the 1890s, until the 1960s, when a national policy of "urban renewal meant Negro removal," as the folk saying goes, old Ninth Street was an oasis of African American culture in the region. (The "urban renewal" movement in southern cities during mid-century thus takes its place alongside the Trail of Tears and the removal of farmers for the TVA lakes as another devastating social and cultural upheaval in the name of "progress.")

In the early 1990s, a small group of local non-profits and African American musicians participated in a fieldwork, documentary and performance project called "The Ninth Street Revival." Local musicians remembered and told stories about "Big Nine," and about the community of Black musicians whose classical, blues, jazz, jump, swing, big-band and combo, soul and funk music embodied and defined a folk cultural milieu for thousands of Southern colored people, Negroes, Blacks and African Americans, through the eras of Jim Crow and the Black Power movement.

The Ninth Street Revival project was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. My salary was paid for by Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga. Partners included the Chattanooga African American Museum and the Mary Walker Foundation.

Just some of the musicians: Willie "Poppa" Stubbs, "Dog" Davis, "Slim" Eppinger, Marvin and Lenell Glass, Vivian Lee, Johnny Starr, Gene Covington, Clyde Stubblefield, the Gospel Inspirers, Skin Deep, the Gospel Songbirds, and many others.

I'm going to start uploading scores of photos and music samples from this project to this blog, and to my website over the next few weeks. (the first picture I uploaded is me on the left, next to guitarist Slim Eppinger, soul singer Johnny Starr, and band leader and trombonist Willie "Poppa" Stubbs, and was taken by the late Reggie Days, a gifted amateur photographer from Chattanooga.)

In the meantime, read the article, "Doin' Fine on Big Nine," in Now and Then, The Appalachian Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 2, published by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, East Tennessee State University, Summer, 1995.

Hellfire and banjoes

The last two clips from my fieldwork videos from 1988-91:

Excerpt #14: Taped at a revival meeting at the Boiling Springs Baptist Church, Cherokee County. Unidentified preacher. I have many times used this clip as an illustration of oral narrative and what folklorists call "formulaic composition" in traditional southern mountain sermon style. Like African American sermon style, traditional Appalachian "shouted" sermonizing is often misread by the uninitiated as "angry." This style of preaching goes back, in both Black and Anglo traditions, at least to the Second Great Awakening.

Excerpt #15: Banjo player Hobby Whitener, with gospel piano player Ruby Russell. The two are neighbors in Marble, North Carolina. I'm on the far left on guitar, and local tree surgeon Scott Ferguson, on my left, plays fiddle. This is a program we put together for public school teachers from Chattanooga.

When Suzy Was a Baby; 100 year old quilts

JCCFS fieldwork excerpt #4. (See other video posts below for more information).



Segment #11: Martin's Creek Elementary School third-graders demonstrate children's folk rhyming game "When Suzy was a Baby."

Segment #12: I visited 94-year-old master quilter Blanche Conley Young, her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter in Maryville, Tennessee. Mrs. Young was originally from Peachtree, North Carolina.

Mountain looms; shaped notes; split-oak baskets; bluegrass

Installment #3 of fieldwork from a three-year residency as a folklorist at the Campbell Folk School.



Excerpt #8: Wilma Hatchett McNabb, at age 94 the winner of the 1990 North Carolina Folk Heritage Award. Mrs. McNabb had learned to weave as a small girl on the old mountain loom of her mother's, but became a serious weaver in the early years of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and the craft revival of the 1920s-30s.

Excerpt #9: The Tuesday Night Singing at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Hanging Dog, North Carolina. The group was a remnant of the Cherokee County Singing Convention, which disbanded in 1948, and included several veteran shaped-note gospel song leaders.

Excerpt #10: Bill and Bonnie Barker of Upper Peachtree, North Carolina. Bill was the last traditional maker of split-oak baskets in Cherokee County, having learned from his mother and his father-in-law.

Excerpt #11: The Mashburn Brothers bluegrass band, of Union County, Georgia, at a benefit concert at the Hanging Dog Community Center. With banjoist Don Fox of Hiawassee, Georgia, and fiddler Red Roberts, originally of Owl Creek, North Carolina.