Hollerin' CD

HOLLERIN', originally released in the mid-1970s, spotlights the 1969-1975 winners of the National Hollerin' Contest in Spivey's Corner, North Carolina. It features hollered songs, animal hollers, just plain hollers and hollering anecdotes by the performers.

With so many music publications publishing lists of records various people would want to have with them in lieu of contact with the rest of civilization or in case of some other extreme emergency, the time has to come to figure what type of album might make all such collections obsolete. Better yet, what about an album that might actually lead to someone being rescued from their desert-island doom? Hollerin' is this record. Played on a large enough stereo system, this is a record that will summon the Coast Guard, several dozen private rescue operations, and rows of native paddling dugouts with fruit baskets in them. In the vast Rounder discography there is no other record that so justly deserves the over-used adjective "awesome." Everything about this record in indeed awe-inspiring, beginning with one of the great covers of all time, the album title Hollerin' coming out of the mouths of one of the hollerers. The listener will meet the latter breed here -- folks such as Leonard Emanuel, hollering champion in 1971. The annual hollering contest held in Spivey's Corner, NC, has been reported enough as an oddity on evening news programs that it is safe to assume most Americans are familiar with the idea, while for people growing up in many rural parts of the country the idea of strange loud voices carrying messages of some sort in the distance isn't so unusual. These are a type of virtuoso vocal performance, and one could be tempted to say this represents technical skill and is fraught with an intensity of performance that exists apart from the concert stage and the world of art music, but that would be ignoring the competitive nature of the hollering contest and the zest with which its participants throw themselves into bettering each other. All of which, of course, is similar to ...