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Folk Songs Of The Hills
''Folk Songs of the Hills'' is a 1947 album by American singer Merle Travis. It is a collection of traditional songs from his home of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, including original compositions evoking working life on the railroads and in the coal mines. Each song, accompanied by Travis on his own acoustic guitar, is introduced by a short narrative. Because of these characteristics, the album can be considered an early example of the concept album in popular music, along with Woody Guthrie's ''Dust Bowl Ballads'' and Frank Sinatra's ''In the Wee Small Hours''. First issued as a 78 rpm box set album in 1947, this collection has remained in print in LP and CD reissues up to the present, with additional tracks from the same period added in later editions (the original album had eight songs, the most recent edition has 13). ''Folk Songs of the Hills'' is widely regarded as one of Travis' finest achievements. A seminal work in his career, it brought him fame as an interpreter of tr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merle Travis
Merle Robert Travis (November 29, 1917 – October 20, 1983) was an American country and western singer, songwriter, and guitarist born in Rosewood, Kentucky, United States. His songs' lyrics often discussed both the lives and the economic exploitation of American coal miners. Among his many well-known songs and recordings are "Sixteen Tons", "Re-Enlistment Blues", " I am a Pilgrim" and " Dark as a Dungeon". However, it is his unique guitar style, still called "Travis picking" by guitarists, as well as his interpretations of the rich musical traditions of his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, for which he is best known today. Travis picking is a syncopated style of guitar fingerpicking rooted in ragtime music in which alternating chords and bass notes are plucked by the thumb while melodies are simultaneously plucked by the index finger. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977. Biography Early ye ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sixteen Tons
"Sixteen Tons" is a song written by Merle Travis about a coal miner, based on life in the mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Travis first recorded the song at the Radio Recorders Studio B in Hollywood, California, on August 8, 1946. Cliffie Stone played bass on the recording. It was first released in July 1947 by Capitol on Travis's album ''Folk Songs of the Hills''. The song became a gold record. The line "You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt" came from a letter written by Travis's brother John. Another line came from their father, a coal miner, who would say: "I can't afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store." Tennessee Ernie Ford version The best known version was recorded in 1955 by American singer Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the ''Billboard'' charts, while another version, by Frankie Laine in 1956, was released only in Western Europe, where it gave Ford's version competition. On March 25, 2015, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Back Home (Merle Travis Album)
''Back Home'' is a compilation LP consisting of Merle Travis's album, ''Folk Songs of the Hills'' (1947), with four previously unreleased tracks. This album marked a new turn in Travis's career, bringing his Kentucky-style fingerpicking and down-home vocal style to the attention of a broad public of country and folk music enthusiasts at the onset of the American folk music revival. Together with another Capitol release the following year, '' The Merle Travis Guitar'', it introduced the style of guitar playing that came to be known, in simplified form, as Travis picking. The album includes traditional country songs such as " John Henry", "Muskrat", "Lost John (from Bowling Green)", " Barbara Allen", and Travis's signature gospel song, "I Am a Pilgrim". Also included are the original compositions "Dark as a Dungeon" and " Sixteen Tons". All songs are introduced by a spoken narrative. This was Travis's first LP featuring entirely acoustic guitar rather than electric. The cover show ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Folk Music Revival
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Billie Holiday, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music. Overview Early years The folk revival in New York City was rooted in the resurgent interest in square dancing and folk dancing there in the 1940s as espoused by instructors such as Margot Mayo, which gave musicians such as Pete Seeger popular exposure. The folk revival more generally as a popular and commercial phenomenon begins with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 194 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tennessee Ernie Ford
Ernest Jennings Ford (February 13, 1919 – October 17, 1991), known professionally as Tennessee Ernie Ford, was an American singer and television host who enjoyed success in the country and western, pop, and gospel musical genres. Noted for his rich bass-baritone voice and down-home humor, he is remembered for his hit recordings of "The Shotgun Boogie" and "Sixteen Tons". Biography Early years Ford was born in Bristol, Tennessee, United States, to Maud (née Long) and Clarence Thomas Ford. He spent a lot of his time in his early years listening to country or western musicians, in person or on the radio. Ford began wandering around Bristol in his high school years, taking an interest in radio and began his radio career as an announcer at WOPI-AM in 1937, being paid 10 dollars a week. In 1938, the young bass-baritone left the station and went to study classical music at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in Ohio. He returned for the announcing job in 1939 and did it from 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Golden Gate Quartet
The Golden Gate Quartet (a.k.a. The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet) is an American vocal group. It was formed in 1934 and, with changes in membership, remains active. Origins and early career The group was founded as the Golden Gate Jubilee Singers in 1934, by four students at Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, Virginia. According to the group's website, the original members were Willie Johnson (baritone; d. 1980), William Langford (tenor; d. 1970), Henry Owens (second tenor; d. 1970) and Orlandus Wilson (bass; 1917–1998); other sources state that Langford and Wilson replaced earlier members Robert "Peg" Ford and A.C. "Eddie" Griffin in 1935. From 1935, the group sang in churches and on local radio, gaining a regular spot on radio station WIS in Columbia, South Carolina in 1936.Seamus McGarvey, ''The Golden Gate Quartet'', in ''Juke Blues'' magazine, no. 71, 2011, pp. 42–45 They began as a traditional jubilee quartet, combining the clever arrangements associated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lead Belly
Huddie William Ledbetter (; January 20, 1888 – December 6, 1949), better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk music, folk and blues singer notable for his strong vocals, Virtuoso, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "In the Pines", "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special (song), Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil (song), Boll Weevil". Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and diatonic accordion, windjammer. In some of his recordings, he sang while clapping his hands or stomping his foot. Lead Belly's songs covered a wide range of genres, including gospel music, blues, and folk music, as well as a number of topics, including women, liquor, prison life, racism, cowboys, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. He also wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Josh White
Joshua Daniel White (February 11, 1914 – September 5, 1969) was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor and civil rights activist. He also recorded under the names Pinewood Tom and Tippy Barton in the 1930s. White grew up in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. He became a prominent race records artist, with a prolific output of recordings in genres including Piedmont blues, country blues, gospel music, and social protest songs. In 1931, White moved to New York, and within a decade his fame had spread widely. His repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, traditional folk songs, and political protest songs, and he was in demand as an actor on radio, Broadway, and film. However, White's anti-segregationist and international human rights political stance presented in many of his recordings and in his speeches at rallies were subsequently used by McCarthyites as a pretext for labeling him a communist to slander and harass him. From 1947 through the mid-1960s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Burl Ives
Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives (June 14, 1909 – April 14, 1995) was an American musician, actor, and author with a career that spanned more than six decades. Ives began his career as an itinerant singer and guitarist, eventually launching his own radio show, ''The Wayfaring Stranger'', which popularized traditional folk songs. In 1942, he appeared in Irving Berlin's ''This Is the Army'' and became a major star of CBS Radio. In the 1960s, he successfully crossed over into country music, recording hits such as "A Little Bitty Tear" and "Funny Way of Laughin'". Ives was also a popular film actor through the late 1940s and '50s. His film roles included parts in ''So Dear to My Heart'' (1948) and ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' (1958), as well as the role of Rufus Hannassey in ''The Big Country'' (1958), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Ives is often associated with the Christmas season. He did voice-over work as Sam the Snowman, narrator of the classic 1964 Christma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Jacob Niles
John Jacob Niles (April 28, 1892 – March 1, 1980) was an American composer, singer and collector of traditional ballads. Called the "Dean of American Balladeers," Niles was an important influence on the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, with Odetta, Joan Baez, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, among others, recording his songs. Biography Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Niles learned music theory from his mother, and began writing down folk music as a teenager. He became a serious student of Appalachian folk music by transcribing traditional songs from oral sources while an itinerant employee of the Burroughs Corporation in eastern Kentucky, from 1910 to 1917. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I, in which he was injured, he studied music in France, first in Lyon, then in Paris at the Schola Cantorum, also meeting Gertrude Stein. Returning to the United States in 1920, he continued his studies at the Cincinnati Conservator ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre Setting (narrative), set in the American frontier and commonly associated with Americana (culture), folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada. It is commonly referred to as the "Old West" or the "Wild West" and depicted in Western media as a hostile, sparsely populated frontier in a state of near-total lawlessness patrolled by outlaws, sheriffs, and numerous other Stock character, stock "gunslinger" characters. Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, Manifest Destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States. History The first films that belong to the Western genre are a series of short single reel silents made in 1894 by Edison Studios at their Edison's Black Maria, Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. These featured vet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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