“You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me”: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music
There’s nothing like self-destruction and a premature exit to get a legend going. Sometimes it seems like the archivist class thinks it’s more interesting and honorable for an artist to succumb to his demons than overcome or at least survive them: Hank Williams may not be more revered than Johnny Cash, but he got his turn a lot sooner.
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Much of Poole’s catalog has been out of print for decades, but his recordings have never been especially hard for fans of early country to track down. In 1982 Kinney Rorrer, a history teacher and the grandnephew of Poole’s fiddler Posey Rorer, published a biography of Poole, and the man’s music has long been a standby on the ubiquitous old-timey radio shows of western North Carolina and Virginia. What makes the three-CD set “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me”: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music (Columbia/Legacy) valuable isn’t that it digs up any dusty forgotten gems–there’s nothing previously unissued here–but that it creates a context for Poole’s innovations.
Still, for most of the 20th century, the culture of the rural south has been seen as a museum piece, a tourist attraction, something delicate and endangered–the maintenance of historic sites along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina started way back in the 1930s. Many a young player has studied the music of Poole and his contemporaries to pay homage to the past, and often the ones born and raised in the hills–sometimes relatives of the great figures of yore, or working in decades-old string bands whose names have outlived all their founding members–are just as guilty of this nostalgic oversimplification as outsiders. But Poole himself was very much a man of his present, and seemed more than eager to project himself into the future. The restless, flashy, freewheeling music on this collection of 78s often seems more modern than anything on Ralph Stanley’s latest T-Bone Burnett-produced museum piece.
This compare-and-contrast approach displaces both the Great Man theory and the notion of traditional musics as static and isolated, alluding instead to a much richer reality: that of a culture reacting and responding to itself in a time of great stress and transition. You might think Poole would be making like Johnny Cash if he were alive today, seeking out “edgy” material from Trent Reznor and Nick Cave, but from what I can tell he’d be just as likely to make off with a Justin Timberlake tune or some sappy Elton John ballad from a Disney movie–and I get the feeling he’d approve of Dolly Parton’s attempt at “Stairway to Heaven.” It all goes to show that there’s no way to lock your song away and keep it pure. If the North Carolina Ramblers don’t get you, somebody else will.
