Watermelon Smiling on the Vine

Summer’s finally settling in over the Twin Cities in a heavy canopy of soaking humidity and brazen heat. And did I mention the ticks and mosquitoes? Here at Rancho de Taylor that means it’s time to dust off the box of Old Timey music and bust out sides by the likes of Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb and a slew of others. A pitcher of iced mint julep and well-strung hammock goes nicely with the tunes, but it’s always been a bit of a lonely prospect.

My immediate friends and acquaintances view my music tastes as peculiar enough. But there’s something about Old Timey & string band strains in particular that really seems to rub them wrong. Near as I can figure the antipathy stems largely from the music’s backwoods hillbilly, read “racist”, stereotypes. Telling thing is, even surface listening reveals how much of the music is a faulty fit for that sort of knee-jerk mold. White string bands borrowed heavily from their black brethren, but most weren’t least bit ashamed about admitting the debt. If anything the majority promoted an attitude of preservation and respect while adding their own indelible personal stamps to the cultural currency.

Uncle Dave Macon was arguably the most popular and prolific of these early recording artists. Though he didn’t start his music career until the age of 48, lost time dissolved in a flash as a cascade of shellac sides continually spilled from the Vocalion Records studio. JSP’s Macon box quickly became a cornerstone of my collection. One hundred sides cut by the banjo raconteur 1924-1938 offer a lavish cross-section of the man’s songbook and voluminous output. About half feature him alone belting out nail-biting banjo runs and singing in with a high mountain yawp. The string work is often breathtaking and the impulse to get up and stomp-feet consequently irresistible. I dare anyone to resist the magnetic pull of cuts like “Old Dan Tucker” or “Going Across the Sea” packed as they are with spirited whoops, cackles and ringing banjo rhythms. Listening to them as I clickety-clack at the keys the toes instinctually tap and the neck reflexively nods. “Way Down the Old Plank Road” registers as another classic with the hilarious verse, shouted out over a racing claw hammer & clodhopper beat:

“My wife died Friday night; Saturday she was buried; Sunday was my courting day; Monday I got married.”

Yeeeeeee-fucking-haw!

Frequently as entertaining as the music are Macon’s spoken prefaces, more like a mix between mini-sermons and non sequitur spiels than scripted bon mots, loaded with rustic wit & revealing history. A taste:

“Now good people & the sweet golden babies, I’m gonna give you something from the land of hope & harmony, pumpkin & possum, & where whiskey’s made out of corn & the women don’t smell like talcum powder, let’s go bud!”

The raucous square dance calls of “Sleepy Lou” fixate on another facet of his talent. Fidelity varies wildly from the scratchy hiss of “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” to the relative spic-and-span of later Opry platters, but JSP does a decent job with its masters and all are more than listenable.

Religious and social relics of Macon’s era interlace various tunes. Truncated to an innocuous “Run” on the tray card, Macon’s reading of “Run, Nigger, Run” might raise an eyebrow or two, but he’s careful to presage the off-color lyrics with an anecdote describing his many years toiling in the fields with his colored neighbors. The epithet recurs on later tunes like “Hop High Ladies, The Cake’s All Dough,” but again seems more an artifact of the times than any sort of intentional pejorative. “Uncle Dave’s Beloved Solo” spotlights some of his most lyrical and adroit picking via an improvisation based on the old spiritual “Rock of Ages.” The resplendent tumbling harmonics conjured recall other banjo savants like Margaret Barry and Hobart Smith. “The Bible’s True” finds Macon playfully railing against the suppositions of secular thinking, professing:

“Now I don’t believe in evolution or revolution, but when it comes to the good ol’ Bible from Genesis to Revelations I’m right there.”

Macon was a staple of the Opry stage, his tenure stretching from the institutions beginnings in 1926 to just months shy of his own death in 1952. The band sides, featuring Macon in the company of crews like the Fruit Jar Drinkers and the Dixie Sacred Singers dilute a bit of his brio and zing under a lattice of additional strings and harmony vocals by the likes of the Delmore Brothers (Opry stars in their own right) and guitarist Sam McGhee, but there’s still nary a bum track in the bountiful bushel. The only set that surpasses it in terms of scope is a plentiful Bear Family box that costs nearly 13x the price for 2.5x the music. This stuff boasts a bite, raw and tangy just like the sour mash liquor that was purportedly Macon’s libation of choice. Little of the spit and polish that would pasteurize later sides by the Stanley Brothers and others ever enters the equation. Puzzled friends’ faces may be a byproduct, but Uncle Dave’s joie de vivre makes it a damn sight hard to give a damn. A summer of jubilant listening lies ahead.