Various Artists
RCA Country Legends: The Bristol Sessions Vol. 1
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The Okeh label booked time in a furniture store in Richmond to see what central Virginia had to offer (the Carters, like Dock Boggs and Ernest and Hattie Stoneman, lived just north of Bristol, in Virginia’s mountainous southwest). The cattle call attracted gospel musicians, fledgling jazzbos, grown men and women in grass skirts, and all manner of musical comedians. But Okeh’s search for a new pop sensation was interrupted by bad news from Wall Street–the sessions were held just a week before Black Thursday, when the stock market crashed, taking the music industry down with it.
It’s impossible to know whether any of the artists recorded in Richmond might have proved as influential as those in Bristol had the nation not gone into the Depression. Still, the largely forgotten styles documented here are tantalizing. Bela Lam & His Greene County Singers were a less savvy Carter Family, devotees of a form of singing called “shape note” or “sacred harp,” which taught sight-reading of sheet music to church choirs by assigning diamonds, squares, and circles to pitches on the staff. It evolved into a sharp, eerie harmonic style spread throughout the south by traveling pedagogues. The Monarch Jazz Quartet of Norfolk, who also recorded gospel numbers under the name Monarch Jubilee Quartet, sang in a kind of slow, syncopated four-part harmony (imagine doo-wop performed by a quartet of Vicodin abusers) that more or less disappeared by the 1950s, though some of its influence persists in modern gospel music. And the Tubize Royal Hawaiian Orchestra were a group of employees at a Hopewell, Virginia, rayon plant who donned leis and grass skirts to perform their renditions of Polynesian music.
