Starting in 1916 (six years before the alleged first country 78!), North Carolinian fiddler Don Richardson recorded a number of country sides for Columbia, Okeh, and other labels. Don's first recording happened in 1914,. but--as we discovered two posts back--it was not country. Very nice society orch. music, but not country.
Anyway, here's a great photo of Don, which I saved from Robert Morritt's now-departed Richardson page:
"Why am I not better-known?"--Don, puzzling.
Since we know it's Don, we're freed from having to wonder if this is a photo of (pick one): Art Garfunkel's dad, Seth Green's granddad, a time-traveling Don Most (Happy Days), and/or a lost Marx Brother.
Today, I offer two 1916 lively and excellent Richardson sides from my own collection in a handy zip file:
DR 1916
The Devil's Dream--Reel--Don Richardson, violin solo (Columbia A-2575; 1916)
Mrs. McLeod's Reel--Same.
Lee
3 comments:
I assume historians and journalists don't mention him because he was not a rural musician. Richardson came from the field of classical music and conducted orchestras before. I'm not quite sure if he learned those old reels from oral tradition or from books but that may be the cause of his missing popularity.
You're probably right. To the NYT/NPR/Rolling Stone/folk "purist" set, authenticity equals no musical training and a home life up in "the hills." (Minimum hill tenure: six years.) Such class snobbery never ends; it just multiplies. I dream of a day when the "historians" in question realize that the history of a musical form is far more important than the pedigree of a given performer or the out-in-the-field-ness of a given recording, but I may as well wait for Ohio to become a fully blue state.
In pop music journalism, especially, an obsession with particulars supersedes any general curiosity about what happened and when. That's the trouble with mass scholarship--it's all about shaping history to expectations, not vice versa.
By the way, I'm riffing on the aggravating NPR notion of authenticity, not your comment! Which I forgot to thank you for.
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