Structured around a three-and-a-half-week solo road trip that took the author (a 28-year-old staff writer at Pitchfork and contributing editor for Paste) across the American South, from Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., to the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of Appalachia, “It Still Moves” is a contemplative journey through the history of folk, country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Petrusich’s tale unfolds in the first person, complete with uncomfortable moments, delicious home-cooked meals, and long, dreamy stretches of highway. She tells stories about legends like Elvis and obscure figures like W.C. Handy, another Memphis musician whose 1909 song, “Boss Crump Blues,” may have launched the genre. Petrusich traces the divergent strands of Americana through the 20th century and into the 21st, finding the tradition alive and well in free folk’s unofficial headquarters of Brattleboro, Vt., where the first free-folk festival was held in 2003.
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John Wesley Work III was a voracious and careful listener and student of music, able to analyze different styles and discuss their components and qualities with learned insight and sensitivity. Fortunately for us, nearly 70 years after the fact, he not only paid close attention to the music, but also lugged around a bulky tape recorder to capture it as it happened.
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There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.
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Records Revisited was packed floor-to-ceiling with discs of a vintage and variety that drew a steady stream of record buffs to 34 West 33rd Street. The shop, more like an archive than a store, held approximately 60 tons of swing, big band jazz and other style, forming one of the largest collections of 78s in the world. The shop has been closed since Mr. Savada’s death in February. Last Thursday, his son, Elias Savada, was poring over a cardboard box, one of 1,300 being filled with records and put on waiting trucks. The collection will be sent to Syracuse University’s Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive, which will now have the second-largest collection of 78s in the United States, after the Library of Congress, university officials said.
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The Dockery Farms Foundation is getting ready to begin phase one of an estimated $800,000 refurbishing and revitalization project. “The buildings have some deterioration,” said Bill Lester, executive director. “Phase one of the project will allow us to restore and repair those buildings.” The buildings to be preserved include the seed house, cotton gin, cotton storage shed, hay barn and fertilizer shed as well as the old service station. The foundation would also like to rebuild the commissary, which was part of the original Dockery Farms property but was destroyed by a fire years ago. “Dockery is considered the birthplace of the blues,” said Lester. “Charley Patton, Pops Stables, Willie Brown and others are all folks who played the blues that has influenced popular music. It all started right here.”
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Time Life under an exclusive agreement with Jett Williams and Hank Williams Jr., announces the release of what many fans know as the ‘Mother’s Best’ recordings. The 143 never before released recordings are from a radio series sponsored by a milling company in 1951. The show went out every morning at 7:15 AM, and when Hank was scheduled to be out of town, he would prerecord the show… He performs with his band and the sound quality is favorably compared to his studio recordings.
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Dana Jennings’ new book, Sing Me Back Home is trying to do a number of things at once. It is a personal history of Jennings’ childhood in New Hampshire. It’s a love letter to country music. It’s an attempt to change the myth of regionalism that surrounds country music, to take it out of the South and claim it as part of not a region but a nation. It’s an ambitious list of goals for such a slim volume. But, for the most part, Jennings is successful in chasing these ideas down.
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Hayes in Middlesex doesn’t offer much to the sightseer, but the town itself may well be the world’s biggest metaphor for the decline of the music industry. EMI starting building factories here in 1906, when it was still called The Gramophone and Typewriter Company. In the 60s, its factories covered 150 acres and it employed 14,000 people. Today, however, the factories and recording studios are gone or in the process of being demolished. EMI’s Hayes workforce is in single figures, all of them employed in the company’s last remaining building, a vast archive. From the outside, the archive looks as melancholy as the rest of Hayes. Inside, it’s just bizarre, an apparently endless steel vault containing not just records and master tapes, but aged recording equipment, gramophones, memorabilia and files of press clippings. “They’ve kept everything,” notes Mark Ainley, co-founder of Honest Jon’s, the acclaimed record label born out of the legendary Notting Hill record shop.
A vast collection of 78 rpm records — valued at $1 million, weighing 50 tons and representing more than a half-century of American music history — is being donated to Syracuse University by the estate of a prominent New York City record shop owner. The more than 200,000 records represented the entire inventory of “Records Revisited,” a landmark Manhattan store owned by Morton Savada, who died in February from lung cancer at age 85.
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