On February 9, 1889, Norman Edmonds was born in Wythe County, Virginia. Edmonds recorded four songs at the 1927 Bristol Sessions, playing fiddle alongside J. P. Nester’s singing and banjo on “Train on the Island,” “Black-Eyed Susie,” John, My Lover,” and “Georgia.” Their version of “Train on the Island” was included on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Music in 1952.
Only two sides from the Sessions recordings were released (“Train on the Island” and “Black-Eyed Susie”), but Ralph Peer was impressed with their sound, a wonderful throwback to earlier stringbands that were made up of just fiddle and banjo together. Peer invited them up to New York City – all expenses paid – to record further; however, Nester refused to leave his Blue Ridge Mountains home and so a continuation of their partnership “on record” didn’t happen.
Edmonds, who played the fiddle in the “old-time” way, where he held it against his chest rather than underneath his chin, may not have gotten another chance to record in the 1920s and 1930s, but his fame as a fiddler saw him become a local star in his later years. He performed at the Galax Old Fiddler’s Convention (amongst others), played on several LPs made in Galax and also one for independent label Davis Unlimited, and had his very own radio show called The Old Timers.
As with so many traditional musicians, whose music and instruments were passed down through the generations, Edmonds learned his playing from his father, who learned it from his father. And today, Edmonds’ grandson Jimmy Edmonds of Galax, Virginia, has also come to music and instrument building the old-fashioned way: through his family. He is a 5th-generation Edmonds fiddle player – he started playing at four years old, picking up other instruments along the way – and his father was a luthier who passed on his skills, tools, and craftsmanship to his son. Jimmy started off helping his father repair instruments and working on finishes, moving on to making his first fiddle under the encouragement of luthiers Wayne Henderson and Gerald Anderson. A busted Wayne Henderson guitar while he worked at the Myrtle Beach Opry led to guitar building.
The legacy of this mountain music, and the craft that makes it possible, is wonderfully on display through Jimmy’s work. A visit to Jimmy’s workshop gives you a real insight into the traditions that come together when luthiers make their instruments – the choices of wood, the techniques used, the influences from past luthiers and the innovations of present-day ones, the decorative touches that hold meaning and beauty. And it gives you the chance to see the huge amount of work, love, and care that goes into crafting each and every instrument, and why those who are lucky enough to own an instrument by Edmonds are pretty passionate about them! This video from a February 2013 Fretboard Journal article serves as a great introduction to Jimmy’s work:
Jimmy mostly makes guitars – he is almost to his 300th guitar – but he also makes fiddles, mandolins, Dobros, and dulcimers, and he helps with the fretwork, pearl inlay, and the finish on his workshop partner Kevin Fore’s banjos. He does not copy any set style or type of guitar, but he is a big fan of 1930s and 1940s Martin guitars and therefore many of his builds reflect those iconic instruments. He has crafted some of his own innovations and decorative touches in the guitars he builds. Henderson views Jimmy’s finish work as some of the best out there – he uses varnish rather than lacquer – and he often does the finish work on Henderson’s guitars.
The passing down of tradition amongst families and from luthier to apprentice is what keeps this craft and this music alive. And so today, we celebrate that passing on from grandfather to grandson, and from father to son, as an appropriate way to mark the anniversary of Norman Edmonds’ birth!
Jimmy Edmonds is featured in our current special exhibit The Luthier’s Craft: Instrument Making Traditions of the Blue Ridge. The exhibit is open through March 4, 2018. He is also a member of the Virginia Luthiers, alongside other luthier band members Wayne Henderson, Gerald Anderson, and Spencer Strickland.
“Instrument Interview” posts are a chance to sit down with the instruments of traditional, country, bluegrass, and roots music – from different types of instruments to specific ones related to artists, luthiers, and songwriters – and learn more about them. Ten questions are posed, and the instruments answer! Today we talk to one of Maybelle Carter’s guitars:
What model are you, and when were you made?
I’m a 1928 Gibson L-5 guitar, made at the old Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Lloyd Loar, the famous engineer who redesigned a lot of Gibson’s product line in the early 1920s, introduced my model in 1922 as the top-of-the-line guitar. Unlike most earlier guitars, I have a carved arched top and violin-style F-holes instead of the round sound hole in the middle. You might say I’m like a guitar that thinks it’s some kind of oversized violin. But at least Maybelle didn’t try to play me with a bow!
Well, speaking of Maybelle Carter, when did you become her instrument? Did she play you at the famous Bristol Sessions when The Carter Family made its first recordings?
Well, no, Maybelle didn’t have me yet when she did those recordings in Bristol in 1927. That was actually a year before I was built in Kalamazoo. On those first six sides that Maybelle recorded with Sara and A. P., she was playing a cheap Stella flat-top guitar. That would have been a good enough instrument for most early country musicians, but Maybelle was no ordinary player. She deserved something bigger, louder, with a more authoritative voice. So after their records started selling well and Ralph Peer invited them to come to New Jersey to make new recordings with better equipment, Maybelle and her husband Eck (A. P.’s brother) went out and bought her the best guitar they could find. I cost $275, which was an awful lot of money in 1928.
What did Maybelle do to bring out your true and distinctive voice? What made her such a great player?
The biggest thing, I guess, is that she played me with such command and authority. She was the driving force of the band’s instrumentation, since Sara just played some lighter second guitar or autoharp, and A. P. hardly ever played any instrument on record. Sometimes Maybelle was the whole band! So she took some of the existing folk guitar styles and made them strong, polished, and professional. She made the guitar into a solo instrument in the country band, playing melody between vocal refrains and also providing a driving rhythm.
Really? How on earth did she do that?
Mostly it was her powerful right hand. It still makes me shudder to think about how clear and purposeful she was when she played. She commanded the sound out of me. Her most famous method was a thumb-lead style, which some people call the “Carter scratch.” I never did quite understand that, since it wasn’t really scratchy sounding at all. She wore a thumbpick on her right hand and used that to play bass notes and all those wonderful melodies on the bass strings of the guitar, and meanwhile she had a metal fingerpick on her index finger and used that to strum those great, driving chords on the upper strings. A real one-woman band!
How did that style suit you, as an instrument?
It suited me perfectly. Because I have an arched top and F-holes, my bass strings have more punchiness and less sustain than flat-top guitars. With all the activity of Maybelle’s right thumb and forefinger going on simultaneously, it was much better that my notes were shot out like cannon balls without any ringing sustain to muddy it up. In her hands, I was a melodic rhythm machine.
That idea of using your thumb and one finger reminds me of the clawhammer banjo style. Is it similar?
Hey, I’m a guitar! You’re going to make me talk about banjos? I’m just kidding. You know, Maybelle did play banjo in that clawhammer style, so that may have given her some notion of using her thumb. But really the styles are very different, because in thumb-lead guitar, the thumb is the one playing the melody. The motion of the right hand is totally different, too.
Did she always play using that thumb-lead style? Or did she use any other styles?
No, although it was her main style and the one that influenced younger players the most. Maybelle also developed into a really fine flatpicker, using the kind of pick that most guitar players favor nowadays and which used to be called a “straight pick.” With a flatpick she was able to play more on my treble strings, a predecessor to the way later bluegrass guitarists play their lead solos. She really liked to do this on blues songs like the “Coal Miner’s Blues,” but she also used this approach on songs like “You Are My Flower.” Boy, she made me sound amazing on that one. As for other styles, she didn’t do much of what people call fingerpicking, since that wasn’t a strong enough sound for her. And Maybelle did play slide guitar, but she didn’t use me for that.
This Carter Family songbook was published by Ralph Peer via his Southern Music Publishing Company in the late 1930s. Again, Maybelle is pictured with her Gibson L-5. Image reproduced with permission from peermusic; songbook in the collection of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University
What happened to you after the original Carter Family disbanded in 1944?
Maybelle continued playing me with the Carter Sisters, who were really her daughters, and in all of her music-making up to the time she died in 1978. She hung on to me until the end, even when money was tight and she could have sold me. We had a special bond, and I never sounded the same when somebody else tried me out – not even Chet Atkins. Maybelle played me on her solo records in the 1960s and 1970s, when she went on tour with the New Lost City Ramblers, and when she did “Keep on the Sunny Side” on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken? album.
What about “Wildwood Flower” from the Circle album?
No! Even though that was probably her most famous guitar song, with the Dirt Band she wanted to play it on autoharp just because she’d never recorded it that way.
Today I’m proudly on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Nashville, alongside Sara’s autoharp, Bill Monroe’s mandolin, Earl Scruggs’s banjo, and Barbara Mandrell’s pedal steel. Back in 2004 I was almost sold off by my owner who had loaned me to the museum, but Maybelle’s family really wanted me to remain. I’m so glad they figured out a way to buy and keep me there in such illustrious company. I just wish I could get played more these days, but then again it’s OK. Nobody will ever play me the way Maybelle did.
Guest blogger Gregory Reish is the Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University.He is a scholar, teacher, and performing musician with expertise in a wide range of American vernacular styles.
The enormous influence of women in country music is evident in every era, most certainly in the early days of country music. Sometimes women’s contributions are overshadowed in the historical record, and the story of the Stoneman family is no different. Without the support and encouragement of Hattie Stoneman, her husband may have never recorded in 1924 and never been instrumental in shaping the dynamic of hillbilly recordings forever afterward. The incredible Hattie Stoneman made an impact on early country music – and she did this all while bearing 23 children, facing sadness and grief due to several miscarriages, stillbirths, and children passing, and finding ways to keep her family going through hardship and poverty.
For most people, the first person they likely think about when they hear the word Stoneman is Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, leader of a host of musicians made up of family and friends, who recorded at the 1927 Bristol Sessions, and then patriarch to his family group who later performed and recorded together, played on the radio, and even had their own musical TV show. But there were two parts to this successful musical equation, and the other one was “Mom”: Hattie Stoneman, wife to “Pop” and mother to their children, all but two of whom played music themselves. As Roni, one of Hattie’s daughters, said: “The first thing you heard was music; you were raised in it. I probably heard her playing music when I was in her body. You’re just a part of music after that.”
Today is Hattie Stoneman’s birthday – she was born on September 28, 1900 in Pipers Gap, Virginia. Hattie came to music through her own family: her mother was descended from pioneer fiddler Green Leonard, and her father Bill Frost was one of the finest fiddle players in Virginia at the time. Frost often played at “frolics,” local gatherings of music and dancing (sometimes participants kept a bit of alcohol in the springhouse water to keep cold, adding to the frolicking). He showed Hattie how to play the fiddle and the banjo, and she became a fine musician herself, often accompanying her father on the banjo. Frost also passed on his love of jokes and humor to Hattie, and her children remember her making them laugh even when they were in deep trouble.
Pop met Hattie when he was just a boy, and she was just a baby – as Pop said, “I heard her give her first cry when she was born.” Their first meeting is related in the story about Pop’s father Elisha Stoneman, a preacher, coming to the Frost house to pray with the family during a difficult birth. He brought along little Ernest, and once the baby was born, Elisha brought her out to where Ernest was waiting for him, putting the baby in his arms and telling him to pray for her to have a long life. Little did he know at the time that it would be a long life together.
Several years later, they met again at a memorial service in a church cemetery – when he saw her again this time, he decided right then and there that he was going to marry that “golden-haired girl.” Music was a central part of their lives – and later their family – and family legend tells us that not only did Pop love Hattie, but he also loved the musical talent she had gained from her father. After a long courtship – and after Pop won out over several suitors – they wed on November 10, 1918.
Hattie on her wedding day. Photograph courtesy of Roni Stoneman
After their marriage, Hattie often played fiddle in performances with Pop and other musicians. And in 1927 and 1928, she was with him for the Bristol Sessions recordings. At both sessions, she played fiddle and sang on several sides with Pop’s Dixie Mountaineers and The Stoneman Family, along with several sides by Uncle Eck Dunford. Hattie was also featured specifically on the 1927 recording of “What Will I Do, For My Money’s All Gone” (again with Dunford). And “The Spanish Merchant’s Daughter,” recorded at the 1928 Bristol Sessions by The Stoneman Family, was featured on the influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by Harry Smith.
Stoneman’s configuration of musicians was known by different names, including The Stoneman Family, the Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers, and Ernest V. Stoneman & His Dixie Mountaineers. Hattie is seen here in the back row with her fiddle. From the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records, #20001, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Stonemans saw musical success before and immediately after the Bristol Sessions, but the Depression was on the horizon, and they would soon feel the hardship that came to so many during that period. Before the stock market crash of 1929, Ernest and Hattie were living well in Galax, Virginia – they had bought some land in 1927, and he built them a fine home with modern conveniences. Hattie was very much a southern belle, taking care over her appearance and keeping a neat and tidy house. However, by the early 1930s, hard times were firmly upon them – they were facing the illness of their young daughter Nita (she would die soon after at the age of six) and the loss of their house, and Ernest was having to travel far and wide to look for work, leaving Hattie home alone to cope with her family’s needs.
When they lost their house, Hattie moved with their children into her parents’ three-room house for a while, but soon Ernest sent for them to come to Alexandria, Virginia, where he had found work. However, things continued to be hard, with Pop losing his job and Hattie and the children moving back to southwest Virginia for a while. This routine marked much of this period – Ernest finding work, the family moving into a host of different houses, many of which were falling apart and cold, and Hattie sometimes taking the children home to Galax for periods of time. At least back in rural southwest Virginia they could grow some food in the garden, and the vegetables and fruits were often canned up and used to fill the hungry mouths of her children when they were back in northern Virginia and Maryland with Pop.
Indeed, daughter Roni tells stories about how her mother fought hard to keep her family going during the Depression. Once, on a cold winter night when they were living up near Washington, DC, Hattie went out to the local railyard to look for stray coal to fuel their fire at home. Back then, railroad cops – known as railroad bulls – patrolled the tracks and railyards to keep “hobos” out, and a couple of them came across Hattie in her search for coal. Even though it was late at night and she was a woman on her own, she stood up to them, telling them that they could kill her and bury her in the ground if they wanted, but she was taking some coal to bring warmth to her children. The men admired her gumption and saw her real need, and they helped her gather up the coal she needed.
Son Oscar James (known as Jimmy) was born when the family lived up north, one of only a few of the Stoneman children born in a hospital rather than at home. When the nurse brought the baby into Hattie’s room soon after the birth, Hattie exclaimed that “he wasn’t her baby; he didn’t have the Stoneman nose.” The nurse, of course, assumed hysteria, but around the same time a laundry worker in the basement of the hospital heard a baby crying and found Hattie’s baby in a pile of clothes! Jimmy was named after Oscar Anderson, the captain who commanded the fire station across the street from where the Stonemans lived. Even though it was hard to move past her Appalachian independence and pride, Hattie had accepted his help when the family was really struggling — Anderson and his men were kind and helped them out over the years, bringing them food and Christmas presents when they saw the need. As Roni says: “Mommy showed us how to take the hard times and how to be strong in the sad times. She kept us all together.”
Despite all the hardships they faced during the Depression, and how this affected Pop’s musical aspirations, the family still found pleasure in music, and Hattie still played her banjo and her fiddle occasionally with Pop. Later, when things got better and the family developed a music career as The Stoneman Family on radio and television, and in live performances and recordings, she often took a back seat to Pop and her children.
However, in 1947, she stepped back in the spotlight for a talent contest at Constitution Hall. Roni relates how her older brothers didn’t want to play with their father and the rest of the family because they viewed his music as “old-fashioned,” and so they entered the contest on their own. When Pop told Hattie that her sons thought he was outdated and wouldn’t play with him, she pulled out her fiddle and said she’d play with him and that they’d “take that prize from those boys.” She was mad as a hornet and so she fiddled hard and strong, and they won the contest, giving them six months of local TV time, which ultimately led to a host of other opportunities. This story mirrors the tale told of Hattie pushing Pop to go record for the first time back in 1924 and really underlines how influential Hattie was in the Stonemans’ musical success.
Hattie fiddling with the family band. Photograph courtesy of Roni Stoneman
There are many more stories of Hattie as mother and performer, and her surviving children, Roni and Donna, look back on those early hard times as rich in love and family, and they view the later musical success as being as much about their mother as their father. And so today, on Hattie’s birthday, let’s celebrate her talent and the contributions to the success of this wonderful musical family made by “The Girl from Galax.”*
René Rodgers is the Curator of Exhibits & Publications at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum. A huge thank you to Roni Stoneman for sharing stories of her mother with me, and to Tom Connor for his help facilitating the interview and images for this blog post.
*”The Girl from Galax,” an instrumental piece written by daughter Donna Stoneman, is a tribute to her mother.
Today marks what would have been the 120th birthday of America’s Blue Yodeler, the Father of Country Music – Jimmie Rodgers.
Take a second out of your busy day today and listen to just one song from Jimmie Rodgers. Any song. I promise you’ll be happy you did. That’s what I’m doing right now, listening to “I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now,” a sentimental heartbreaker of a tune, a song so powerfully delivered that in the past it has moved me to tears.
It’s hard to not become immersed in the scenes Jimmie paints through his ease of delivery and phrasing, his smooth yet edgy and warbled vocals, the sincerity of a person who truly believes in what he’s singing. But what amazes me more than anything about Jimmie’s music is how relevant and fresh it still seems today. I guess many would call his music timeless, which it certainly is – but more than that, his music has a depth that has seldom been captured on record. Jimmie’s music hits you right in the gut. It has the ability to make you laugh out loud and then make you cry; it makes you yearn for the past and look forward to the future. His music is music for the heart and soul. It’s alive. Every time I put a needle to one of his records or when the sound of his signature blue yodel cuts through my car radio speakers, I can’t help but think Jimmie is giving me a wink and a nod.
As you may already know, Jimmie Rodgers is one of the most celebrated country musicians of all, and deservedly so. Possibly no other country artist has been so heavily imitated or influential. He was much more than a hillbilly artist that could yodel (though his yodel was top of the line). Jimmie was an innovator, and a walking musical juxtaposition in the most beautiful of ways. When I think of Jimmie I think of the complex and often conflicting images he portrayed through his music – the rambler, the sentimental crooner, the caring son, and the rounder, just to name a few. Many speculate that had he lived longer, and as his appeal and development as a musician continually grew, he would have been one of the most celebrated American musicians without the constraints of genre.
Publicity shots of Jimmie Rodgers, including one where he is in “cowboy” persona. From the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records, #20001, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Many of us in Bristol and central Appalachia are familiar with Jimmie’s story and his music. One of the reasons our organization, including the radio station, museum, and festival, exists is in large part due to the impact Jimmie had on the world. Of course, he had his first big break here in Bristol recording two sides: “Sleep Baby Sleep” and “The Soldier’s Sweetheart.” That record, just an average seller, was recorded on August 4, 1927, part of what would eventually become known as the celebrated Bristol Sessions.
Let’s be honest: those two sides didn’t exactly turn the world upside down upon their release. But the music that would soon follow sure did. Lucky for us Victor Talking Machine Company executive Ralph Peer had insight and vision, and he followed a hunch that Jimmie had a lot more to offer, inviting him for a follow-up session just a few months later at the Victor studio in Camden, New Jersey. Jimmie would hit his stride at the next session, which would yield a massive seller – “Away Out on the Mountain” and “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” – and from this point, he didn’t slow down. He even appeared in a movie short called The Singing Brakeman, released in 1929 for Columbia Pictures; this short is the only known video footage of Jimmie singing and features three of his well-known tunes: “Waiting for a Train,” “Daddy and Home,” and “Blue Yodel No 1.” His distinctive sound continued to develop up to his final recording session just a few days before his death from tuberculosis on May 26, 1933 at the age of 35.
But instead of giving you a recycled history lesson of the greatness that is Jimmie Rodgers, I thought it would be much more interesting and fitting to mark this day by talking to musicians who love his music like I do. And so in celebration of Jimmie on his 120th birthday, I asked some of today’s greatest country and roots musicians to reflect on his music, to talk a little about how Jimmie Rodgers influenced them and how he might be found in the music they create today. A huge thanks to all those musicians for taking the time to share their thoughts on the genius of Jimmie Rodgers:
“Jimmie Rodgers just had the juice. He guided Ralph Peer to a real sweet spot in southern music. He played the part of the rake and ramblin’ boy and may not have needed to act that much to do so. Listen to most of the other Bristol Sessions singers and you’ll hear that swagger break through the pops and crackles. Jimmie Rodgers knew he was cool, and every recording gave him a way to show everyone.”
“I was initially struck by Jimmie Rodgers’s yodeling, which I still find to be amazing. As I explore his recordings, however, I am captivated with the immense variety of accompanists he recorded with and the range of musical emotions he was able to express. He sounded great whatever the setting, from a full orchestra to just his own voice and guitar.”
“The music of Jimmie Rodgers has gone across culture since it was introduced to the world. There are musicians all the way in India that have copied Jimmie Rodgers’s sound note-for-note. While record companies marketed him towards white and hillbilly audiences, his records often found their way into black homes. The irony that a person who was rumored to have gotten the ‘blues’ in his blue yodel from listening to Tommy Johnson as he entertained white patrons at hotel parties in Mississippi and have it repackaged and purchased by people in the black community is of a particular queerness that can only exist in America. With the conversation being had at the present time about white people playing blues and other forms of black music, I wonder if we would be having this conversation if they sounded as good as Jimmie. His respect and take on music from outside of his culture should be an inspiration.”
“It seems as though Jimmie and his songs have been part of my musical life as long as I can remember. That bluesy voice, that yodel, and those songs…. I never much liked the Swiss type of yodeling but Jimmie’s made sense to me and was so much more accessible. Plus it had so much feeling in it.”
“First heard Jimmie Rodgers back in the ‘60s… I was really getting into old-time country blues…and was a fan of Emmett Miller. Jimmie Rodgers was a white guy who played and sang some blues, he was a yodeler, a singer of sentimental ballads…you name it, and he could make it his own! I admired that, he was hard to categorize! I do believe in some ways Jimmie Rodgers had an impact on my approach to building a pretty eclectic repertoire.”
“Jimmie Rodgers made his way into my music most directly through Bill Monroe and his interpretation of those songs. Of course, a serious study of Rodgers himself has followed over the years. Anyone studying modern 20th-century western music will realize just what an influence Rodgers was on almost every form of popular music, including rock n roll.”
“I think Jimmie Rodgers exists. Perhaps he’s a reclusive ghost who lives somewhere beyond the edge of the universe. Of course, proof that the Father of Country Music walked among us can be found in his Victor recordings made in the early days of the 20th century. His guitar hangs in a vault in Meridian, Mississippi. I once sat in a chair he made. I’ve held his striped railroader’s hat. I have one of his brakeman’s lanterns, and the briefcase that contained his songs and was laid inside his casket on the funeral train from New York City back to Mississippi. As his marker in Meridian reads: ‘His is the music of America.’ Although the average American doesn’t know his name, Jimmie Rodgers is an integral part of our atmosphere. He is synonymous with country music.”
And so this brings us full circle – if you’re taking the time to read this, I urge you to spend just a few more minutes today and seek out Jimmie’s music. Listening to a Jimmie Rodgers record is much more powerful than anything I can possibly write. Seriously. Put on a song of his you’ve never heard. He has a surprisingly vast catalog for having a recording career of only five and a half years. Listen to “Gambling Polka Dot Blues” or “Prairie Lullaby” or “Blue Yodel No. 9” or “I’m Sorry We Met” or “Never No Mo” or…really any of his songs.
Take it from someone who has listened to his catalogue back and forth on repeat for years – there’s always something new to discover. And if you listen close enough, you’ll soon find the Singing Brakeman can still be heard in the voices and sounds of musicians across the country, and for that matter across the world.
Happy Birthday, Jimmie.
Kris Truelsen is the Producer at Radio Bristol. Tune into the stationtoday to hear Jimmie Rodgers on the hour all day long.
