New Roanoke Jug Band Play It For A Long Time CD

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 S.E. fiddle-oriented music, along a different stylistic path
Last April in Virginia, Jake Henry and I shared a bill with The New Roanoke String Band, but because of the festival scheduling, all we heard from them was a few minutes of warming up. So it was a pleasure to receive their new release, "Play It For A Long Time" (Copper Creek CCCD 2003). The band features Scott Baldwin on guitar, banjo, slide guitar, vocals, and jug; Jay Griffin on fiddle, washboard, and vocals; Andrew Thomas on bass and vocals; along with a good many guests, including the old-time luminary Kirk Sutphin. When I think of old time music from the southeastern U.S., my mind goes to fiddle tunes, usually executed in some revivalist version of a Round Peak style, and most often in the driving contexts made popular by The Highwoods and, twenty-odd years later, by The Freighthoppers. What the NRJB is doing is definitely southeastern, fiddle-oriented music, but it follows a different stylistic path. Their repertoire draws heavily on the blues-influenced white and black musicians of the early 20th century, and in place of a string-band drive they tend rhythmically toward a slower, more rollicking swinginess. As a result, their music pushes the imagination more toward a "wrong side of the tracks" factory-town dance hall than toward the porch of a mountain cabin. Many bluegrass fans might be tempted to give the first few cuts a quick listen and consider it too loose and too nearly out of tune. But a different set of artistic standards is at work here. The apparent looseness creates a groove of its own, and the almost dissonant fiddle is consistently just what it is. All of this signifies, I think, the possibility that what is being done here is something of a recreation of an older style instead of an attempt to further express a living musical form. And in keeping with the old-time revivalist sub-genre, some of the stylistic rawness seems to me, at least to a degree, affected. That isn't necessarily bad, by the way. The long and the short of it is that this was good music in the 20s and 30s, and it's good music now, too. Highlights for me were "The Georgia Pause," a dance tune with a rhythm so deep in the pocket that it earns its title; the band's version of Hobart Smith's nearly gothic fiddle tune, "Black Annie; and the intense sincerity of the gospel-flavored "We Are Almost Down to the Shore," complete with bowed bass. In the best of the revivalist tradition, the CD includes a well written booklet which identifies the historical recorded source of each number. An unexpected bonus, however, is the inclusion on the CD of the only four recorded tunes of the original Roanoke Jug Band, recorded 18 October 1929, all of which had also been covered by the NRJB. (Ten bonus points to whoever had this idea!) It is fascinating to see the distance the music might travel in space and time, and I found it anachronistic or ironic or both that the original band was more driving and tighter--closer to the front of the beat--than the heirs to their name. As it happens, their instrumentation was crisper and their intonation less stereotypically "old-timey," at least to my ear. I don't know what cultural historians will say about the revival of old-time country music among educated folks in our time, but the NRJB is part of that history. This CD is a good contribution to that record--and it's a good listen, particularly on the road home from a bluegrass festival when something other than "the bluegrass" is on your mind. (Bill Jolliff, reviewer, Nwbluegrass Yahoogroup)
Submitted by a reviewer (Newberg, OR, USA)
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