Winter 2024 Acquisitions Part 2 ･ﾟ✧

March 20, 2024. Show and tell again. Not because my wallet slipped or anything.

Since it's only March, I’m morally required to squint at the weather, but I think I saw our first green grass blades of the year walking to the grocery store this week. Birds are warbling. The weather was spectacular the last few days, with that subtle tinge to its warmth which feels like spring. Winter is, hopefully, coming to a close - though I can’t say that definitively for two more months.

Guess what! Winter wasn’t over when I made my Winter 2024 Acquisitions post, so we get an exciting (well, I think it’s exciting…) show-and-tell part two. I’m thinking that, once or twice a season, I’ll make casual show-and-tell-style blog posts.

Maybe that’ll motivate me to wrestle the rest of this site into order… ahhhh, Aspirations, how I reach so high unto Thee.

LEM FOWLER’S WASHBOARD WONDERS COLUMBIA 14111-D Salty Dog / The Florida Blues (1925): Please welcome my second 78 that’s properly jazz. I’ve prioritized hillbilly since I began collecting in 2019, but I love prewar blues and jazz. Problem is: the interesting ones cost moolah and I am comparatively brokelah. I’ll get there, eventually. When I can. But I’ve been chasing this record like a madwoman from the get-go, and I couldn’t be more stoked I can give it a loving home.

I fell in love with Lem Fowler’s Salty Dog when I was researching the history and variations of Salty Dog Blues. There’s a fiery spark to this recording. Across all renditions of Salty Dog I’ve heard, this is singular. Lemuel Fowler likewise is a fascinating character: a prolific pianist and composer in New York during the 1920s, pounding out piano rolls, Shellacs, and sheet music under multiple aliases, who then vanished from public view and contemporary records from the 1930s onward. The musical explosion, then mysterious self-imposed obscurity of Fowler (he wasn’t dead - he lived to 1963), adds intriguing lore to already intriguing talent.

BURNETT AND RUTHERFORD COLUMBIA 15209-D Billy In The Low Ground / Ladies On The Steamboat (1928): These recordings from Burnett and Rutherford introduced me to authentic old-time banjo and fiddle duets. Since Burnett and Rutherford initiated me into this wondrous sound, I wanted to honor them. Dick Burnett (1883-1977) was a folk singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and traveling entertainer. Blinded in his twenties by a gunshot explosion to his face after fighting off a mugger, Burnett subsequently made ends meet through music. He traveled with the younger fiddler Leonard Rutherford, who played sweet, smooth fiddling for the country 1920s.

GEORGIA SLIM AND HIS TEXAS ROUNDUP MERCURY 6201 Fisher’s Hornpipe / Little Brown Jug (1949): Georgia Slim is an accidental acquisition to my collection, but no less appreciated! A seller I was working with shipped this in addition to the Paul and Roy record I ordered. While trying to learn about and date this Mercury record*, I was amused realizing that I own Flatt & Scruggs’s Mercury 6200, sequential with Georgia Slim’s Mercury 6201, which helped me conclude it's a 1949 release.

Robert “Georgia Slim” Rutland (1916-1969), true to his show business epithet, was born in Georgia. A well-learned fiddler, he was active primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, performing in traveling shows and on the radio in Tulsa and Dallas (ergo how we get Georgia Slim and his Texas Roundup). In his later years, he ran a music store in Georgia. Both of these sides are enjoyable fiddle fare, fiddle tunes I know but don’t have on 78s yet. With material like this and my Bob Swerer, I should host an at-home square dance like ye days of olde.**

PAUL AND ROY, THE TENNESSEE RIVER BOYS MERCURY 6406 The Shape My Heart’s In / Only Pretending (1952): This is my third Paul and Roy record. Since they are early but lesser-known bluegrass-adjacent performers, it’s unsurprising I’m targeting them. They released eight discs total from 1951-1953 and 1959. Paul Boswell was a blind guitarist and Roy Pryor a mandolinist. Boswell also once played as a session musician, while Pryor composed or co-wrote songs for other musicians. According to Pryor’s son, Roy wrote some gospel music while stranded in a grain elevator during a hurricane…

CARL SAUCEMAN CAPITOL 2314 I’m Not Worth Your Tears / Goodbye My Love (1952): MY CARL SAUCEMAN CURSE IS BROKEN!!!! I’ve purchased two Carl Sauceman 78s in the past, including their October 1948 release Your Trouble Ways Keep Me Apart / Please Don’t Make Me Cry, which has some of my favorite music of all bluegrassdom. However, neither seller shipped the records correctly, and they arrived in pieces.

Carl Sauceman, as with his brother J. P., comes from the earliest fringes of bluegrass and performed alongside Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers in the late 1940s at WCYB Bristol’s Farm and Fun Time. However, unlike the other two acts, the Saucemans remained regional and prioritized live performance over professional recordings. This means that Sauceman records aren’t all of everywhere. I’ve been rolling on the floor for years, and roaming the internet for years, searching, searching, searching, searching like a beast in the night for another Sauceman 78. Therein I could break my curse of the broken 78s.

The same seller that gave me Georgia Slim and Paul & Roy a week earlier arises as my savior. The second I saw a Sauceman record listed, I scrambled for my wallet and gift cards. I did not hesitate, bitch.

THE ARMSTRONG TWINS 4 STAR 1244 MOTHER’S ONLY SLEEPING / MANDOLIN RAG (1948): More insanely early bluegrass / adjacent! To remind people about the timeline of bluegrass: Bill Monroe organized the seminal bluegrass band in December 1945. This group first recorded in studio in September 1946. Groups like the Stanley Brothers began imitating in the second half of the 40s. Several members of Monroe’s seminal band departed and formed their own group as Flatt & Scruggs in early 1948.

Meanwhile, the Armstrong Twins recorded one of these sides in December 1947, while the seminal band was still together. This is freakishly, delightfully early. The A side treatment reminds me, slightly, of the brother duets of the 1930s. But the upbeat rhythmic treatment of Mother’s Only Sleeping (released by Monroe’s band in late March 1947… look at that timing…) and the advanced, blues-infused Mandolin Rag provide sounds that, to my conspiracy-theory-ready ears, imply Monroevian influence.

When brother duets were in vogue, acts dubbed themselves “brothers” even when they weren’t. But the Armstrong Twins were twins, with names to match: Floyd (guitar) and Lloyd (mandolin). I already have one record with them, entitled the Armstrong Twins and Patsy, roping in their sister on vocals.

MULESKINNER NEWS VOL. 3 NO. 6 (August 1972): Bluegrass began its own publications with Bluegrass Unlimited in 1966. Muleskinner News released its first issue in 1969. Both publications were amateurish; Muleskinner News’s first release was in fact a glorified festival program. While I enjoy Bluegrass Unlimited’s current, fancy magazine releases, I adore the early materials - getting a glimpse into “the action” in its heyday. This issue hits two subjects near and dear to my heart: Lester Flatt, and the spread of the Folk Revival into Japan with the interview of Bluegrass 45.

(Why is it called Muleskinner News? A reference to Jimmie Rodgers’ Muleskinner Blues, a song which commenced Our Father in Bluegrass Bill Monroe’s illustrious bandleader career.)

* I should write a future post about the fun nuances of dating records.

** Or, erm, another. I just remembered I tried to host square dancing in a one-room schoolhouse in Phnom Penh. I stunk as a caller but I hope folks had fun. One of my best memories of my Cambodia trip was hearing my English students surprise me by singing O Susanna, which they’d translated into Khmer.