A century ago, OKeh Records made the first attempt at capturing and marketing the sounds of Appalachian musicians in Appalachia. These recording sessions, held on the rooftop of the George Vanderbilt Hotel in downtown Asheville, have been called "the fuse that lit the big bang of country music."
This week, they're being celebrated in Asheville with performances, panel discussions and a newly remastered reissue —Music from the Land of the Sky, on Rivermont Records.
Event co-organizer and former North Carolina Arts Council Executive Director Wayne Martin spoke with WFDD’s David Ford.
Interview Highlights
On why it’s so important to document this musical tradition:
"Because you need to keep place and people, and a region connected to performance. If you want it to remain a tradition, you need to have the local communities feel ownership of it, and that goes back to understanding what is the through line in the community that goes back generations. How does it connect to a particular place, to this spot, to this community?"
On Okeh sessions fiddler J.D. Harris:
"He played an older, beautiful, ornate style on a tune called "Cackling Hen," which, we hear it in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, up to now, it had morphed into a kind of a showpiece tune where you play the fiddle and the the fiddler makes all sorts of imitations of chickens and roosters with his fiddle and and it's a very entertaining piece. When Dedrick Harris played it, it's deep. The solo fiddle piece where he carries the rhythm with his bowing while he plays the melody, it's absolutely ethereal."
On Okeh sessions banjo player Wade Ward:
"He played the banjo, both in what we call clawhammer style, which is a rapping style with your hand, or he could finger pick it. He plays a really beautiful clawhammer style in that recording. And he later became a kind of an icon in the folk music revival in the 60s, and a lot of influential people were inspired by his banjo style."
On the country music businessman, recording pioneer and music publisher behind the Okeh sessions, Ralph Peer:
"Peer decided to come to Asheville, and in the newspaper accounts of the time, it says, 'These are test recordings where you could come and audition.' I think what he was testing, in a sense, were there enough artists of quality that he felt like he could, you know, issue records of their performances, and would people buy them. So, Asheville was the first time that these record companies came to the southern Appalachians."
The music is preserved today in the remastered Okeh Records recording: Music from the Land of the Sky. The Asheville Sessions: Celebrating 100 years of Americana & Appalachia runs November 6-8 in Asheville, with panel discussions and concerts linking the groundbreaking work of 1925 to today’s modern music scene, a century later.
