Charlie Poole
"You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music" (Columbia/Legacy)
By Ted Anthony, AP National Writer
Somewhere in the past, before sound was ever recorded, people sang the music of Appalachia's hills and valleys to each other and sculpted something that would eventually grow into country music.
Their names are lost to history, and their voices will never be heard. But in the 1920s, when what was pejoratively called "hillbilly music" started selling records, a few folks committed those traditions to acetate and became the first country musicians _ people whose talents would form an archive of inspiration for future generations.
For the blues, it was musicians like Son House and Charley Patton. Jazz remembers Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton. And for country music, no one was a better conduit of what came before than a man named Charlie Poole. Along with performers like Clarence "Tom" Ashley, the Skillet Lickers, Darby & Tarlton and the Carter Family, the hard-charging, hard-living, hard-drinking Poole became a first-generation country recording artist who carried the music of the hills to the rest of the republic.
Which makes it all the more puzzling why, outside country music circles, Poole's name and that of his string band, the North Carolina Ramblers, don't resonate as House's, Patton's and Morton's do with the general public. Fortunately, a marvelous new box set of his music, recorded in the mid- and late 1920s, is making sure that this cream of yesterday's music remains available to today's ears.
"You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music" is stuffed like a fat pork chop full of succulent material that shows cultures coming together in a dawning age of technology _ old Scotch-Irish ballad traditions, Southern songster innovations, black minstrelsy, even echoes of Tin Pan Alley that journeyed into Appalachia via sheet music and re-emerged wearing new coats.
It's misleadingly simplistic to brand Poole a purist, a mere spear-carrier of an age earlier than his own. We tend to do that with the earliest recorded performers simply because their music is the oldest available to us, so it's a natural conclusion that they are the wellsprings.
Not Poole. Though to many 21st-century ears his songs sound like weathered postcards from the 1800s, in his time he was a blender and an innovator, reaching backward into American yesterdays and harvesting them for the musical fuel he needed to charge forward. If Bill Monroe was the father of bluegrass, you could make a strong argument that Poole was its grandfather.
His performances were just that _ musically and lyrically calibrated to audiences and microphones, making them different from true front-porch "folk music." Some of the songs here, like the long-unreleased "Mother's Last Farewell Kiss," are unabashedly sentimental parlor tunes. Others, like "Leaving Home," a reading of the old "Frankie and Johnny" text, are raw and refined at the same time, managing to sound utterly white and rural while still incorporating the black influences that were pervading that earliest recorded country music. And "Sweet Sixteen," writer unknown, crackles with Tin Pan Alley lyricism ("I loved her well, but it's sad to tell, she'd chew her chewing gum").
Poole's three-finger banjo playing and the nasal exuberance of his voice _ itself a blend of old Appalachian ballad tradition and the energy and trajectory of 1920s modernism _ serve as tour guides through the 72 tracks. Also included: a passel of non-Poole recordings (including one from 1902!) that act as yardsticks to measure the evolution of Poole's style.
We visit arguing husbands and wives, girls left behind, outlaws headed for bad ends. His magnificent take on W.C. Handy's "Rambling Blues" carries us to Paris, to Broadway and to Memphis, Tenn., as Poole extols the joys of rambling around. "Talk about your whiskey and your bygone days," he says, and his voice is sentimental and laconic all at once.
Rarely do lives have climaxes, at least while they're in progress. The set's final track is "He Rambled," and he did. A broken Poole died in 1931 at age 39 after a weeks-long bout of drinking, living his music until the bitter end. With this astonishing collection, he lives again, singing his own brand of Appalachian awakenings to a world of music that he wouldn't recognize _ but that owes more than it knows to him. Sometimes recorded sound offers delayed immortality to the deserving. For Charlie Poole, "You Ain't Talkin' to Me" does exactly that.
