VARIOUS - 'GASTONIA GALLOP: COTTON MILL SONGS & HILLBILLY BLUES'

Formats

• OHCD1007 - CD

  670725100721

Details

Gastonia Gallop is a vivid portrait of music heard in the mill villages of Gaston County, North Carolina during the years 1927-1931. Amid an emerging world of factory whistles, clattering machines, and low-wage labor, local textile workers created a vibrant new music that provided the foundation for today's country music. Included are protest songs, ragtime tunes, Tin Pan Alley songs, minstrel pieces, ballads and blues by masters of the guitar, banjo, harmonica, and mandolin. Here are 24 tracks, expertly remastered and accompanied by a 24-page full-color booklet with detailed history, rare photographs, and full discography. "The massive brick hulks of many of the old textile mills now stand silent, boarded up and abandoned, but echoes of the distinctive hillbilly music that millhands in Gaston County and all across the Piedmont South forged on radio and records during the 1920s and 1930s continue to reverberate throughout the United States and, indeed, the world." -Patrick Huber, author, Linthead Stomp, The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South

Tracks

1. DAVID McCARN / Gastonia Gallop
2. THREE ?BACCER TAGS / Get Your Head In Here
3. CAROLINA TWINS / Gal of Mine Took My Licker From Me
4. DAVID McCARN / Cotton Mill Colic
5. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES / Been On The Job Too Long
6. CAROLINA TWINS / Southern Jack
7. DAVID McCARN / Everyday Dirt
8. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES / Bonnie Bess
9. GEORGE WADE & FRANCUM BRASWELL / Think A Little
10. DAVE & HOWARD / Bay Rum Blues
11. WATTS & WILSON / Walk Right In Belmont
12. FLETCHER & FOSTER / Red Rose Rag
13. DAVID McCARN / Poor Man, Rich Man (Cotton Mill Colic No. 2)
14. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES / She?s A Hard Boiled Rose
15. CAROLINA TWINS /I Want My Black Baby Back
16. THREE ?BACCER TAGS / Ain?t Gonna Do It No More
17. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES /Sleepy Desert
18. DAVID McCARN / Take Them For A Ride
19. FLETCHER & FOSTER / Charlotte Hot Step
20. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES / Cotton Mill Blues
21. GEORGE WADE & FRANCUM BRASWELL / When You Go A Courtin?
22. CAROLINA TWINS / A Change In Business All Around
23. WILMER WATTS & The LONELY EAGLES / Working For My Sally
24. DAVE & HOWARD / Serves ?Em Fine

Press

N/A

Audio & Video

BRENT LEWIS ENSEMBLE - 'THREE CHRISTS OF YPSILANTI'

Formats

• SB131 - LP

  N/A

Details

As part of the 25th anniversary of the Butte County Free Music Society, Three Christs of Ypsilanti follows Induced Musical Spasticity 4xLP (BUFMS, 2009) and roughly coincides with The Bren't Lewiis Ensemble's At the North Pole, Easter Day, 1982 (upcoming on What The...?) and, if the master tapes rescue succeeds, the soundtrack to Esther's Brother Is Missing by Maria Estevez. Recording and performing primarily in the mid- to late 1980s, with sporadic efforts in the early 1990s, this barely organized enclave based in rural Northern California ingests and disgorges outsider free music ? la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK's A Band, 5 Starcle Men, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema. Members of the Bren't Lewiis Ensemble later migrated to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Each side of Three Christs of Ypsilanti is dominated by tracks whose lengths meander into double digits. On Side A, "Take It Out and Kill It" is a murky glance at mortification via caninicide, with its ancillary fleas, cockroaches, and especially worms. This is the only large group recording on the album, and as such whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner that one backwater critic long ago described as "schizophrenic muzak." A completely different version of this track was previously released on the Maggie Is a Dot cassette in 1984. On Side B, "Dark Surprise," a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn't happen until 2008). In contrast to the group's usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks at hand, the recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice, and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are shorter tracks (average length: two minutes); these four excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience guerilla action were recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. All were previously released on the Mary Jane cassette in 1983. "[As] secretive as a posse've Masons bidding in a goat auction ? a weird, befuddlin storm comin' outta the night ? tryin' to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow." -Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

Tracks

1. The Gaseous
2. Take It Out and Kill It
3. Memories of Foam
4. Mirror Therapy
5. Dark Surprise
6. Hair or Helmet?

Press

N/A

Audio & Video