Charlie Poole
You Ain't Talking to Me (Columbia/Legacy)
In his book The Old, Weird America, critic Greil Marcus refers to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as "a bizarre package [that] made the familiar strange, the never known into the forgotten, and the forgotten into a collective memory." That impression helped push post-World War I rural performers like Blind Willie Johnson, The Carter Family and banjoist Charlie Poole, who were featured on the Anthology, into a kind of Americana ghetto, a kitschy, intellectual realm of so-called oddities that includes snake oil, Madame Blavatsky's baboon and, recently, the cottage industry known as "alt-country."
If anything, though, the old sounds are as stirring today as they ever were. Crowds flock to stringband festivals like Uncle Dave Macon Days, which last year drew over 40,000 attendees. (Uncle Dave Days is this weekend, July 8-12, in Murfreesboro.) And groups like Old Crow Medicine Show and the Hackensaw Boys have introduced old-time music to a new, diverse audience that includes fans of alternative rock, Southern rock and jam bands, as well as country music purists. OCMS' performance at Bonnaroo this year was one of the event's most captivating and well-received. In an era of digital recording and American Idol-style prefabrication, people are responding to music that keeps technological and promotional interference to a minimum.
The appearance of a new boxed set of Charlie Poole's recordings, You Ain't Talkin' to Me, likewise challenges the assumption that stringband music is arcane. Poole's scratchy vocals and lined-out repetitions might sound esoteric to postmodern ears, but for audiences who attended Poole's barn dance shows or shelled out 75 cents for one of his records, he and his band, the North Carolina Ramblers, were just damn fine entertainers.
Decades before Harry Smith's collection became the sacred text for urban folksingers from Buffy Saint-Marie to Bob Dylan, Poole was a hard-drinking mill worker who played his frailing banjo melodies on an instrument he'd made from a gourd. It was the turn of the century, and the mill towns of North Carolina were vast repositories of a musical repertoire that included old Anglo-Celtic ballads, vaudeville show tunes, slave chants, hymns, Tin Pan Alley love songs, Civil War laments and songs of local color.
In 1918, Poole settled (if that word can be used to describe an inveterate rambler) in one such town, Spray, where he met fiddler Posey Rorer, his future brother-in-law and partner in the North Carolina Ramblers. Along with guitarist Norman Woodlieff (and, later, Roy Harvey), the pair embarked on a career that led them from the gin mills of Appalachia, west to Montana, north to Canada and, eventually, to the halls of the Columbia Phonograph Co. in New York City.
That career was over, however, in a little more than a decade. By 1931, Poole was dead from a 13-week drinking binge. (His career flagging, he'd been celebrating big news: a Hollywood producer wanted him to contribute songs to a film.) But during the interim, Poole and the Ramblers recorded some of the greatest songs in the American canon, including some of country music's first certifiable hits—"May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight, Mister," "The Girl I Loved in Sunny Tennessee" and "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues," the last of which sold over 102,000 copies. These songs appear on You Ain't Talkin' to Me, a three-CD set, as do 40 more by Poole and 29 others by related artists like Uncle Dave Macon and Gid Tanner.
Though Poole wasn't a songwriter as such, You Ain't Talking to Me shows why his adaptations of traditional and popular tunes are innovative. "Coon From Tennessee," for example, a blackface song by the Georgia Crackers, is preceded on the collection by the version that Poole recorded four months later. Offensive lyrics aside, Poole drops the "coon" dialect, personalizes the lyrics ("I'm 'gonna' live on the highway till I die"), and delivers the song in an unadorned style that's more country-blues than vaudeville camp or hillbilly yodel. Poole would intentionally obscure a song's lyrics to pique his audience's interest. From The Kingsmen to Bob Dylan to Michael Stipe, the tactic continues to serve singers well.
Significantly, Poole's banjo on "Coon From Tennessee" is picked like a guitar, as opposed to The Crackers' version, on which the instrument is strummed, or frailed, riverboat style. Though a hand injury that he suffered while drunk cut down on the speed of his playing, Poole wasn't the only banjoist experimenting with classical, finger-picked styles at the time. But as much as any of his peers, his repertoire presaged bluegrass, even as his natty suits, blues-steeped vocals and reputation for being a rogue entertainer served as a template for future country stars like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.
Given the high mortality rate among country and rock 'n' roll singers, it goes without saying that Poole's premature death was also prototypical. In Poole's world, though, death was considerably closer than it is in ours. During the 1920s, urban America was experiencing unprecedented prosperity and liberalism, but in rural Appalachia, illness, hard work, poverty and violence were still matter of fact. Conditions worsened with the Great Depression, which by the time of Poole's death had robbed the North Carolina countryside of its mill and factory jobs. The era's song titles—"Oh Death," "Man of Constant Sorrow"—paint the picture. Bleakness and imminent death lay behind the unfathomable strangeness that Marcus hears in The Anthology: "Here both murder and suicide are rituals, acts instantly transformed into legend," he writes. "Here is a mystical body of the republic."
For Poole and his audience, though, suffering wasn't mystical or weird, and neither was music. Life was grim, and music and dancing were necessary strategies for dealing with its harshness. You Ain't Talking to Me demonstrates that Poole was a musical genius, a historian, a humorist and a tortured soul. Most of all, he was a powerful entertainer—so much so that many bought his records even though they didn't own phonographs. By all accounts, a Poole show was something to see: he'd dance on tables, berate the crowd, tell bawdy jokes—do just about anything to hold the attention of his audience. Poole's music was a tonic, and like a snake oil salesman, his skills as a showman were the most curative part of the product.
