A celebration of the legacy of Bluegrass and a great introduction to the genre.
In May 1925, Mountain City, Tennessee, hosted the first major Old Time Fiddler’s Convention. The Old High School auditorium was packed so tightly that the floor threatened to collapse. What brought some of the founders of Bluegrass, like Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Fiddlin’ John Carson, G.B. Grayson, and Henry Whitter? A $20 gold piece prize sponsored by the Buster Brown Shoe Company. The event was broadcast on what we might now call a pop-up radio station, giving bluegrass the same boost that The Beatles’ appearing the Ed Sullivan show would give to pop 40 years later.
The same auditorium, now renovated as Heritage Hall, continues to host performances and celebrated the event’s centenary over Labor Day weekend. Johnson County Center for the Arts, under its Long Journey Home guise, brought together Old Crow Medicine Show, Molly Tuttle, and in homage to the focus of the original concert — fiddle players like Becky Buller, Stuart Duncan, Bruce Molsky, and Tim O’Brien—to contribute to a tribute album.
Featuring many tunes which were in circulation at the time, the album leads with Stuart Duncan, known for playing with Dolly Parton, and Guy Clark. His version of ‘Cumberland Gap’ starts as though it is a 1925 recording before diving into a high-speed reading of the song, with Duncan’s fiddle playing leading. From there, the album reaches forward to the cutting edge of contemporary Bluegrass with Molly Tuttle’s guitar sounding like a full band on ‘Always Been a Rambler,’ and Tim O’Brien’s traditional take on ‘Old Molly Hare.’ That is one of the album’s highlights and shows how far bluegrass has come while remaining true to the traditions of a hundred years ago.
The project is led by John McCutcheon. He has released albums celebrating the centenaries of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in recent years, and his contribution to the album is ‘Cuckoo’, a virtuoso banjo song which demonstrates the shared roots of country and blues and was the song that turned his head towards bluegrass back in the 1970s. Other well-known names contributing include the Old Crow Medicine Show, whose typically energetic ‘What You Gonna Do with the Baby’ is another tune that illustrates the development of the genre over the last hundred years. Becky Buller and O’Brien offer two songs each, with Buller’s best being the closing tune ‘Forked Deer.’ The Old Timey folk feel to this tune could have been recorded in Bristol, England, as easily as Bristol, Tennessee.
Other names are less known, especially away from the bluegrass heartland in the Southern States, but still bring some brilliant performances. Tray Wellington’s ‘Cluck Old Hen,’ and The Earl White String Band’s ‘Boatin’ Up Sandy.’
McCutheon has chosen to use a famous photograph taken at the original event as the cover art. He does acknowledge that “an inconvenient truth about the 1925 convention is that it was co-sponsored, in part, by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. That famous photograph contained no Black or female fiddlers,” McCutcheon observed. “But this collection shows just how much things…everything…have changed. Here we have nearly equal numbers of men and women featured. Black and white musicians playing together. This is a picture of the old-time and bluegrass music community today. Song titles are changed, lyrics are rewritten, and some songs are simply excised from the repertoire because they are outdated, offensive, or just plain wrong. This is what happens in culture. It grows and changes, evolves and resurrects.”
And that is the point of the 16 songs recorded for this tribute. It’s “a project about continuity and change. It honors the past but lives and breathes today.” If you haven’t caught up with Bluegrass lately or think it’s all about “yee haw” and hay bales, then this is the place to start.
Kody Norris explains a bit more about the 1925 event:
