“Here’s one of the old timers we got picked out here for you today, that I’ve heard ever since I was just a little bitty boy down in the country there …….” This was how Earl Taylor introduced Short Life of Trouble on a recording in 1959, and it is typical of the way that early bluegrass musicians would acknowledge the sources of their material when playing to audiences. Short Life of Trouble can be traced back to an old-time recording by Grayson and Whitter in 1928, and who knows where it came from before that?
The pre-eminent role of the Carter Family in collecting and re-arranging old songs from earlier generations is well researched and documented. Many of the staple songs in ‘classic’ bluegrass music come from the Carter Family, and have been adopted and adapted by generations of bluegrass performers.
One of my favourite Carter Family songs is Mid The Green Fields of Virginia. It was recorded for Victor on 23rd February 1932 in Atlanta, GA at the same session as another Carter Family classic, Amber Tresses, together with Happiest Days Of All and Picture On The Wall.
The song is about memories of “a happy home so dear….. where I spent life’s golden hours in the vale of Shenandoah”. The recording exemplifies the Carter Family’s singing at its finest, with Sara’s powerful lead voice and Maybelle’s harmony on the verses, with A.P. adding his unmistakable bass voice in the choruses. I love the characteristic pronunciation of ‘Virginyee’ in this performance. The pace of the music is steady and purposeful, driven along by Maybelle’s guitar which she plays in clawhammer style, adding a lilting swing to proceedings.
It’s a lovely recording, and I used to think that the Carter Family might have written it themselves to express their feelings about their own Virginia home in Maces Spring. So I was quite surprised recently to discover that the song has a quite different origin. Searching on Google revealed that Mid The Green Fields of Virginia had been copyrighted in 1898 by Charles K. Harris. Tony Russell’s Country Music Originals – the Legends and the Lost describes him as “the vastly prolific Charles K. Harris, who… grew up in Saginaw, Michigan….. Harris’s compositions – There’ll Come A Time, Fallen By The Wayside, Mid The Green Fields of Virginia, and many others – litter the repertoires of old-time country singers like golden leaves in fall (also one of his themes). In the words of his publisher, “Others strive for ragtime art, Harris reaches for the heart.””
Charles K. Harris was well-known as a mainstream composer of sentimental songs, and you can read all about him on Wikipedia and other web pages. Hello Central, Give Me Heaven was another Harris composition which found its way into the Carter Family repertoire, and Charlie Poole recorded both Fallen By The Wayside and There’ll Come A Time. The last-named song was later recorded by the Blue Sky Boys and Bill and Cliff Carlisle and has subsequently found its way into bluegrass music, with notable recordings by Jim Eanes, the Lilly Brothers, and Reno and Smiley.
It is illuminating to realise that these earlier styles and fashions of music have provided an important foundation for the bluegrass music which we know and love.
John Baldry
