Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Taft, Michael

Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music. By Guthrie T. Meade with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade. (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries in association with the John Edwards Memorial Forum. Distributed by University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xxii 1,002, prologue, foreword, preface, introduction, acknowledgments, bibliographies, indices. $90.00 cloth.)

That local traditions are inextricably linked to mass media is no longer a new idea, but only a few decades ago, folklorists struggled with this concept. Many considered recordings, radio, and television as forms of contamination, rather than as conduits, in the transmission process. The John Edwards Memorial Foundation (now Forum) and like-minded students of popular culture played a large part in dispelling the bias against mass-mediated traditions, and the late Guthrie "Gus" Meade was among those who pioneered in this struggle.

Meade based his work on songs, rather than on artists, recording companies, or localities, which distinguishes the book from most other large discographies, and his intent was to list all recordings of traditional songs appearing on commercial recordings between the turn of the twentieth century and the early 1940s. As the editors admit, any definition of "traditional song" is bound to be arbitrary, and Meade's criteria included "all those recorded songs that have appeared in published folk song collections, as well as those songs copyrighted or appearing in print prior to 1920" (xii). But the discography also includes songs composed in "the traditional style" after 1920, which adds either flexibility or inconsistency to the work-depending upon one's perspective.

Meade's other major criterion was that a traditional song could be listed only if it had been recorded by "white country musicians for commercial consumption" (xv). Here again, Meade allowed some flexibility by including pseudo-country performers such as Vernon Dalhart. The result of these somewhat flexible criteria is that most songs likely to be of interest to scholars of early country music are found in the discography, and Meade has given each song full discographical treatment.

The problem with this presentation, however, is that it plays to the expectations of country music scholars, rather than broadening their horizons. Early country music was not an isolated phenomenon; rather, it was a part of the general growth of mass-mediated music and song that began at least as early as the widespread dissemination of broadsides, sheet music and songbooks, and which was greatly augmented by recorded sound. Thus, while Meade included many recordings by Vernon Dalhart, he did not include all of them-e.g., "Tuck Me to Sleep (in My Old Tucky Home)" (1921)-even though Dalhart was obviously a major influence in country music. By the same token, performers who were clearly not "country" were also influential and shared repertoire with country singers; for example, Meade lists the Kelly Brothers, the Dixie Demons, and the Hoosier Hot Shots as performing "After You've Gone" but does not include the rendition by Bing Crosby and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (1929).

I am, of course, asking the impossible. Establishing all the links between the songs and performers in Meade's book and the rest of North American and European popular music would amount to a discography of everything. My point, however, is that the very delimitations of Meade's discography work against his pioneering eclecticism. He was subject to the same trap of authenticity that captured earlier folksong scholars. In fact, Meade's book is an interesting blend of the old and the new. He divided his discography into 52 categories of song, based largely on theme-not unlike Malcolm Laws's Native American Balladry-and his list begins with Child ballads in the classic "Child-and-other" form of early folksong collections. An innovator in his search for sources of traditional song, Meade was nevertheless a conservative in the presentation of his material.

The printed reference resource is, itself, something of an old-fashioned medium, and Meade's book may well be the last major work of its kind to appear on paper. Discographies of this sort perfectly fit digital presentation, either as CDs or as websites. Websites are particularly fitting, since they allow continual updating of discographical information. For example, the "blues bible," Blues and Gospel Records, by Godrich, Dixon and Rye is now in its fourth edition (1997), and should have long ago been placed online as a subscription database. In fact, a project for the future would combine Godrich, Dixon and Rye with Meade and with a number of other discographies of popular music into an online resource that would allow the kind of lateral research connecting African American, country, pop, jazz, classical, ethnic, and other streams that make up the whole of North American popular music.