The two main instruments of mountain music were the banjo and the fiddle. Picayne Butler adapted the African slaves' Ritis into "banjos" and popularized it in his tent shows. Mountain music had been around longer than even the blues and was of its own European origin separate from African-American influence. But by the 1920s when the blues first started taking shape and began to be recorded, this mountain music became influenced by it. The blues influenced mostly the vocals and lyrics--the guitar and banjo still retained their trademark sound. By the 1930s the press began calling this form "Old-Timey Music" or just plain "Country music". Though it was not the country music we are familiar with today.

Uncle Dave Macon in 1938. Inset shows Macon from 1886.

Uncle Dave Macon was one of the first pioneers in white country blues. Macon spent time working in fields as a youth and picked up on African-American traditions and music and became somewhat of a documentor of their songs as he played many of them and released them as sheet music. Macon went to New York to record his first sides in 1923. His most famous piece is "Hesitation Blues". He recorded all through the 30s and even lived to perform at the first ever Grand Ole Opry.

	Riley Puckett

Riley Puckett became one of the most popular white country blues singers of his era. Puckett's music didn't sound like the old time honky-tonk of Uncle Dave Macon or Picayne Butler, it was more blues-based. Puckett who was blind might have felt the same kind of pain that, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson felt leading him to display a sense of depression in his music. After all the times were hard for people, especially if you were blind, regardless of race.

In the late 20s and early 30s the South saw an emerging interest in "Old-Timey music". But by then Old-Timey music had been fused with blues. Though most singers still sang with a honky-tonk vocal they started employing guitars instead of banjos and even used slide guitar.The best white slide-guitarist was, without argument, Frank Hutchison.

Frank Hutchison

Hutchison was born in 1897 in West Virginia. In his region of Logan County whites and blacks were integrated. It was a mining town and both races white and black toiled day in and day out equally. They were doing dangerous work for little pay and they knew the blues just as much as any black farmer in the Mississippi Delta.

Hutchison was attracted to black music at an early age and one day at the age of 8 he met a black railroad worker named Henry Vaughn. Hutchison learned to play guitar from Vaughn and learned his techniques. He saw how Vaughn would use knives to bend strings and began adapting it to his own style of playing. From then on Hutchison mainly played the blues.

In 1926 Hutchison recorded his first record for Okeh, "Worried Blues" backed by his "The Train That Carried My Girl from Town". On these recordings Hutchison used his pocket knife to emulate a slide thus giving birth to the country "twang". In the 30s, Okeh wanted Hutchison to add a fiddler to give a more honky-tonk feel to the songs. Because of that request and the Great Depression, Hutchison stopped recording all together. He once told a friend that he would have recorded all blues songs if the labels would have let him. He later became a store owner and died in 1945.

Dock Boggs also was influenced by black vernacular music which he incorporated into his banjo-picking style. Boggs, like Hutchison, lived in a mining town in Virginia. Boggs worked full-time in a mine though, whereas Hutchison only occasionally faced the horrors of mine work. Boggs would also hang around black musicians and learn their stylings.

After a talent-scout audition, Boggs went to record for Brunswick in 1926. His first release was "Down South Blues" which he adapted from a blues record he heard in 1923. Though he played mountain music, Boggs sang with an emotive and raw passion that made him more blues than honky-tonk. His records did well for Brunswick but Boggs was afraid of being cheated by the companies and recorded no more. He went back to work in the mines and witnessed many horrors such as his friends being killed in collapsing mineshafts.

By the time Boggs decided to record again the Depression had hit and his chances were lost. He tried to raise money to travel to New York but he never could.

He finally got to Atlanta and was going to record for Okeh but when he sat at the mic on a local radio show he froze up and Okeh wasn't about to take their chances with him. He was later rediscovered in the 1960s and finally got the fame that had been eluding him for so long.

The two popular legends of white country Blues didn't arrive on the scene until the late 1920s: Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family.

Jimmie Rodgers

Jimmie Rodgers was born in 1897 in South Mississippi. He started working on railroads at the age of 14 and at the age of 15 contracted tuberculosis which would plague him till his death. Rodgers started his music career performing in black-face minstrel acts in tent shows in 1923. He played with various string bands until 1927 when he auditioned for Victor records talent scout Ralph Peer. Peer was looking to popularize "hillbilly" music and he saw Rodgers as his mouthpiece.

Rodgers unfortunately didn't pan out like Peer thought he would. Peer felt his style wasn't old-timey enough. Peer recorded two sentimental pieces from Rodgers, which did fair. As fate would've had it that would have been the end of Rodgers career but Rodgers telephoned Peer to say that he wanted to record more. Peer agreed and the rest remains history. Rodgers recorded several old-timey songs but none that Peer cared for all that much. There was room for one more song to be recorded in the session, so Peer let him record one more. That one more happened to a blues number that Rodgers had written, "Blue Yodel" or as Rodgers called it "T for Texas".

"Blue Yodel" with its blues stanzas and hillbilly yodel became a national bestseller. He recorded blues and country songs until 1933 when the tuberculosis finally caught up with him. One of his most popular songs was "In the Jailhouse Now". Rodgers music was a crossover hit. He did the very thing in the 30s that Elvis Presley would go on to do in the 50s, integrate black music into the white mainstream.

The Carter Family

The other find that Peer discovered during the auditions with Rodgers was the Carter Family. The Carters consisted of A.P. Carter on bass, his wife Sara on guitar and lead vocals, and their sister-in-law Maybelle on lead guitar and back-up vocals. Their sound was the epitome of "old-timey" music, with one exception. Though their guitar-playing was a gentle southern ditty, Sara's singing, which accented it, was a soft yet melancholy drone. Their tunes were mostly country honky-tonk but equally they recorded numerous blues numbers. Their biggest hits were "Worried Man Blues", "Keep on the Sunny Side", and "Wildwood Flower" among others.

They became immensely popular and their fame outlived Jimmie Rodger's to this day as they recorded over 300 songs. In 1939 A.P. and Sara divorced just as their popularity was in full swing. The group continued to perform all through the 40s though. In 1943, however, Sara retired, splitting up the original Carter lineup, while Maybelle Carter went solo and began touring.

A.P. and Sara reformed the group with their children in 1952 and still proved to be a success. In 1961 A.P. died which put an end to the group for a couple of years. In 1966 though, Maybelle persuaded Sara to reunite and they played numerous folk festivals and even recorded an album.

There were numerous white country blues artists like Charlie Poole & his North Carolina Ramblers who scored big in the 1920s with "White House Blues." Bill Monroe was another popular old-time music performer of his day as were the Stanley Brothers.

The white country blues by the 1940s and 50s were morphing into a different sound: Country Music. Unlike the bluesmen whose original roots music no longer exists in the popular conscious, old-time music, however, has survived. Though its now known as Bluegrass, all the elements remain intact with little or no modernization. The banjos of Uncle Dave Macon and Dock Boggs still live in the music of current Bluegrass artists such as Union Station, Dan Tyminski,John Hartford, Gillian Welch, and Norman Blake.

The white country blues is probably the only original southern folk music still alive and in practice today and thanks to documentation and recordings we can hear the originals and share one of America's National Treasures.

Through its survival we can let it take us back to a time when grandpa would pluck a banjo tune, sitting on his old wooden porch as the sun sets over the Appalachians.

The Coon Creek Girls