Search - Blind James Campbell :: blind james campbell & His Nashville Street Band (Reis)

Incredible Black Old Time String Band Music

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 10/23/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is good fun rootsy music, bluesy everywhere. I especially love the scrapping rocking, blues fiddling here that got me to buy the CD after hearing one cut on the radio. You get the idea that these guys really were having a good time, and you really also wish you had been let in on the good times by recordings of musicians like this when they were young.



Unfortunately, the Nashville Street Band is a survival of black string band music in the South that was neglected left unrecorded by commercial recording companies and folklore recordings during their heyday in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. It is great that someone came along in the 1960s and got these musicians together for this great session before they left us.



There's an almost pathological racist approach that simply excludes African Americans from the category of old time string band music, when, in fact, we were central to its development in the first half of the previous century and before. African American banjo and fiddle styles are decisive for the white players recognized by most Old Time revivalists.



However, for various reasons in the 1920s through the 1960s, white folklorists neglected Black string band music. Similarly in the heyday of recording white string bands, ion the 1920s and 1930s, commercial recording companies similarly neglected black string band unit unless they felt they could release the music as jug band music or as white string band music under assumed names as they did with well known artists like Lonnie Johnson and the Mississippi sheiks. Moreover, researchers continue to find black fiddlers and banjo players actually played on sessions by some of the best known white string bands of the era like the Georgia Yellow Hammers. Of course, such mixed sessions were illegal in the Jim Crow South.



It is a sad history, but this is great great music. The tip of the iceburg. Hopefully, there will be more unearthings of black string band music!"