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Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley Dna of Country Music 1892-2017
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About Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley Dna Of
Product Description PROTOBILLY: THE MINSTREL AND TIN PAN ALLEY DNA OF COUNTRY MUSIC 1892-2017! This 3 CD reissue anthology is the first to track twentieth century American vernacular music of old time country, bluegrass, jazz and blues by tracing their beginnings in 19th century blackface minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley. Country Music is a genre driven by songwriting and publishing. This fact alone has given opportunity for songs to be refashioned again and again showcasing stylistic as well as lyrical changes over the past 100 years. The foundation of the American popular songbook traces its beginnings to the Vaudeville, Circus, Minstrel, Music Hall and Theater stages of the mid-late 1800s. The songs spread throughout the country and world creating a new musical tapestry that included both black and white performers of all backgrounds. Their songs and styles are presented in this three CD anthology. By aligning performances from the earliest cylinder recordings with later 78 rpm, LP and CD versions, PROTOBILLY brings to life 81 historic recordings more than half never before reissued -- all brilliantly remastered by award winning engineer DOUG BENSON to vividly demonstrate the checkered and enormously powerful elasticity of American music. Produced by renowned recording music historians HENRY H. SAPOZNIK, DICK SPOTTSWOOD and DAVID GIOVANNONI, the set comes with 76 pages of song annotations, sheet music covers, photographs and period graphics, biographies and discographies by SAPOZNIK, SPOTTSWOOD and ''The American Songster,'' DOM FLEMMONS. Review Some aspects of America's popular roots music story are certainly better and more widely understood than used to be the case: Yes, country music leaned heavily on the blues, swing jazz and soul, and Latin sounds, too. And, yes, African-Americans throughout the South were indeed often regular Grand Ole Opry listeners before radio stations oriented toward them took to the air--and even after. That history can be mentioned today without controversy. Suggest, however, that much rural, 'down home' music sprang not full-blown from the hearts and lungs of untutored music makers strumming away in hollers and plantations, but from big-city songwriters writing for the Broadway stage and Tin Pan Alley music publishing in the 1890s, and you're likely to sustain serious emotional kickback. Whether based on sentimental family and regional mythology, or on long-outdated folklore education that romanticized and overstated rural musicians' isolation from pop culture, attachment to that cherished 'country to city' mythology remains for country and blues alike. The fine accomplishment of 'Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music 1892-2017' (JSP Records) is that this new 3-CD set responds not with argument, but with revealing, entertaining and freshly compiled evidence of those urban origins. The 'country music' in the title refers not just to the commercial genre eventually marketed under that name, but to multiple lines associated with rural styles. The set presents successive versions of a given song--generally beginning with a now obscure, sometimes never-before-reissued cylinder disc or early platter released between 1892 and the end of World War I, and then proceeding with hillbilly, jazz, pop or blues adaptations that followed. Two sagas of heroes of transportation that begin the collection are excellent examples. Songs about celebrated but doomed Tennessee railway engineer Casey Jones emerged soon after the real Jones's train-wreck death in 1900. The one so many of us learned in grade school was composed by T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton and, as we hear, recorded in 1910 in an oompahing, horn-backed version by Billy Murray, a minstrel-show performer turned frequent recording artist. Early hillbilly star Fiddlin' John Carson adopts that for a (naturally) fiddle-driven version in 1923; then, in an even greater leap, boogying piano player Jesse James transf
