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Interest in America’s musical past is almost as old as American music, but since the Anthology of American Folk Music, the legendary box set assembled by Harry Smith and first released in 1952, was reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways a decade ago, there has been a more or less steady effort to uncover and make available just about every blues, old-time, gospel, and country record made prior to World War II. Labels like Revenant and Dust-to-Digital, to say nothing of longtime standard-bearer Yazoo, have put out one gem after another. Recently Tompkins Square Records got involved by releasing the three-CD box set People Take Warning, a wonderfully annotated collection of murder ballads and “disaster songs” that breaks down the violence and death into three distinct categories: man vs. nature, man vs. machine, and man vs. man.
Making sense of these old-time and early country reissues remains tough, despite the great number of them coming out–dozens of artists recorded just a handful of tracks apiece, a situation that means the tunes are often scattered across compilations. This difficulty is just one reason I’ve been so taken with a new reference book by British music historian Tony Russell. Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (Oxford) isn’t a landmark work of scholarship–most of the shortish entries were written for specialist magazines–but as a single volume it does an excellent job briefly discussing the lives and work of some of American’s best- and least-known musical pioneers. He’s done his research, and reading some of the 110 entries has left me hungry to track down the actual music, a task made much easier by the handy discographical information that details where various tunes can be found on CD.
