How do you listen to music? Through your phone with an app like Spotify? In the car on a radio station like Thunder 104.5 FM? Since their invention, radio and the recording industry have transformed the way we listen and learn to play music. The music that Pick & Bow teaches has lived on in large part through the recordings and radio broadcasts of musicians, many of whom were from Georgia. Let’s take a closer look at how their music has helped shape what we call Appalachian music today.

The Power of Broadcast

Before radio, music was a form of in-person entertainment, performed at dances, contests, or a casual jam on someone’s porch. When someone physically moved away from a place, they naturally lost the ability to listen to music there. So when the South’s first radio station, Atlanta’s WSB, first went on the air on March 15, 1922, it completely transformed the way that people listened to music. Owned by the Atlanta Journal newspaper, the radio station’s daily broadcast featured weather reports, market information, news, and, of course, music. For those who didn’t have radios of their own at home, “radio trucks” broadcast shows through loudspeakers to crowds of people outside. Musicians featured on the air came from a variety of backgrounds—some played music every day, others formed a band for the first time just to play on a one-time radio broadcast or live radio programs like WSB’s Barn Dance. Some musicians had already become well known for their talent by performing at fiddling contests like the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention.

History of WSB: Georgia’s first radio station in Atlanta (produced by GPB’s Georgia Stories)

The Recording Industry

One of the musicians who frequently won the state fiddling contest and was a popular performer on WSB was Fiddlin’ John Carson. Born in Cobb County, Georgia, Carson became the first musician to release a commercial country music record after his playing was captured by the Okeh Recording Company in 1923. Record companies called music that people like Carson played “hillbilly music,” a term that referred to the old-time stringband music that was associated with rural life. Many listeners were rural people who were familiar with the music from where they lived or had moved from, as many rural people moved to cities for jobs at textile mills at the turn of the twentieth century. North Georgians who moved to Atlanta likely lived in one of the three textile mill neighborhoods of Cabbagetown, Chattahoochee, or Scottdale. From those neighborhoods emerged a new tradition of old-time stringband music that combined rural music traditions with influences from urban music like ragtime, blues, and jazz. Some people even learned to play instruments through textile mill-sponsored music lessons and bands. Many of the songs written were related both to rural experiences that people held in their memory and the new experiences of living in the city, driving automobiles, and enduring the poor working conditions in mills. Bands of this type included the Skillet-Lickers, the Scottdale Stringband, and others that formed out of textile mill communities.

Fiddlin’ John Carson playing Fare Thee Well Old Joe Clark (recorded 1923/24)

Scottdale String Band (from Scottdale, one of the three textile mill communities of Atlanta) playing Stone Mountain Wobble (recorded 1927)

A drawback of the “hillbilly music” recording industry was that its limited portrayal of rural music didn’t extend beyond white, typically male musicians. Segregation shaped the recording industry’s genres, which in turn limited African Americans to recording under the category “race records,” the majority of which was blues music. A rare exception to this history are African African musicians Andrew and Jim Baxter, a father-son duo from Calhoun, Georgia who recorded fiddle-guitar duets. In addition to their recordings that include string band playing, Andrew Baxter (who was also half Cherokee) was part of the first racially-integrated recording, the song “G Rag,” recorded with the Georgia Yellowhammers, in 1927 in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s also important to recognize that musicians who weren’t allowed to be recorded had formative influences on the playing styles of musicians who were recorded. Fiddlin’ John Carson’s short-bow fiddling was one of the musical styles he borrowed from African American musicians. He worked in many environments, like railroads and cotton picker rooms, where he heard African American workers singing work songs and ballads, as well as the music of songsters and bluesmen performing on the street near the textile mill where he worked.

Andrew & Jim Baxter playing Forty Drops (recorded in 1928)

A few women did have the opportunity to be recorded, including Carson’s daughter Rosa Lee (also known as “Moonshine Kate”) and Roba Stanley of Gwinnett County, both of whom sang and played guitar. And at the same Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention of which Carson was a three-time champion, a woman named Anita Sorrells Mathis Wheeler of Powder Spring, Georgia, took the top prize in both 1931 and 1934. Not all women were welcomed at the fiddlers’ conventions—they posed a threat to territorial past winners like Carson—but Wheeler (named Mrs. Mathis in the article below) recalled fellow musicians standing up for her right to participate with the rest of them in the contest. Although Wheeler didn’t have the opportunity to be recorded, her legacy lives on and has been a source of inspiration for many later generations of fiddlers.

Anita Sorrels Wheeler (Mathis) interview excerpt from The Devil’s Box (magazine article, 1982) 

Interview and performance by Anita Sorrells Wheeler (at age 82)

Georgia Stringband Music Today

The recordings and radio performances of musicians from this time period were profoundly influential on countless genres of music that developed later on in Appalachia, from country to bluegrass and old-time. Today, musicians and events that celebrate this history, like the Georgia Stringband Festival (also known as the Gordon County Fiddlers’ Convention) in Calhoun, continue the rich legacy of Georgia old-time stringband music. For a living source of early Georgia old-time music, listen to Mick and Evan Kinney’s Dear Old Georgia Vol. 1 and 2, an album collection that features a range of styles, tunes, and songs of Georgia from that period.

2020 Georgia Old Time Revue (hosted by Harris Arts Center), part 1

REFERENCES

Daniel, Wayne W. Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia. Urbana ; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 

Daniel, Wayne W. “Women’s Lib and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Conventions: The Story of Mrs. J.P. Wheeler, Georgia’s Reigning Woman Fiddle Champion”. The Devil’s Box, Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Association. Vol 16, No 1. March 1982.

Huber, Patrick. Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.