It Still Moves

"In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of the Appalachians or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few "dead Presidents" for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: "I've got a gal, she's long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!"

This is the opening graph of a very fine piece by Burkhard Bilger published in the April 28th issue of The New Yorker. "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?" traces the history of field recording in the U.S. from the pre-War days of the Lomaxes to the folk-revivalist era of Harry Smith and right up to the north Georgia doorstep of Sweet Petunia Bryant, where "one morning in December" Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum showed up with microphones and a flash recorder.

Rosenbaum is a folklorist, painter, and professor of art at the University of Georgia who has "spent fifty of his sixty-nine years traveling around the South and the Midwest, recording folk musicians." Ledbetter is the man whose Atlanta label, Dust-to-Digital, released a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum's work last fall titled "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1."
In this edition of Out Loud, Bilger discusses his recent article and samples tracks from "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1," and Ledbetter's gospel collection "Goodbye, Babylon."