Photo-Jody HammockSwingbilly Swagger- Five Mile Mountain Road The term refers to Billy’s regional musical history. Older players that Billy met in his youth—figures that included Clark Kessinger, Burke Barbour, Jim Eanes, Clinton Gregory, Willie Gregory, Raymond Neighbors, and Bob Riley, as well the earlier presence on recordings of the Blue Ridge Highballers led by Charley La Prade, and above all, the legendary Charlie Poole—drew from a rich American songbook. They brought their music to the new media of radio broadcasts, phonograph records, and live public performances. On this album Billy and his bandmates—Brennen Ernst, Seth Boyd, Caleb Erikson, JC Radford, and their guest Danny Bureau—play, as Billy explains, “a music meant to be danced to.” Their swingbilly repertory encompasses old-time reels, rural ragtime, blues, Western swing, 1950s-era country, and early bluegrass, in addition to more recent compositions and original tunes. Billy’s masterful fiddling, Brennen and Caleb’s virtuosic guitar breaks, Brennen’s stride piano stylings, and Seth’s facile and adaptive old-time banjo, propelled by JC’s walking bass and Danny’s washboard accompaniment all urge us to the joy of the dance. To an old refrain that tells us that “If it ain’t got that swing, it don’t mean a thing,” Billy comments, “that’s a real thing.” |
Five Mile Mountain Road
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Billy Hurt, Jr. – fiddle, vocals |
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The Train That Carried My Girl from Town
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Billy recently discovered that swingbilly also finds a literal precedent, validating what he and his bandmates had already intuited: In 1931, Charlie Poole’s son, James, put together a band called The Swing Billies. A recording and performing ensemble, they drew from an older country repertory that they inflected with newer sounds. “See, we was playing ‘corn stuff,’ but we were swinging it,” Poole explained (from Patrick Huber’s Linthead Stomp, p. 157). His band put to use what Five Mile Mountain Road came to know themselves: that mountain music has long translated popular styles into its own vernacular. Billy notes that the tributaries that get to this river are many and diverse. ____________________________________ “The Train That Carried My Girl from Town,” arose almost spontaneously in the studio, each of the players bringing in their “Blue Sunday.” From age 13 to 18, Billy played with country and bluegrass star Jim Eanes, a vocalist so compelling that Billy found it “hard to pay attention to what you were doing because of his singing.” “Noëlle.” Banjoist Seth Boyd composed this lilting tribute to his daughter. To close the album, the band explores “K. C. Railroad Blues.” Their rendition comes from Buck Ryan, who played it in 1954 on the Jimmy Dean Show, with added words from the African American father-and-son team of Andrew and Jim Baxter who recorded the song in 1927. Yet another instance of the route Five Mile Mountain Road has taken for its terpsichorean adventure down the byways of tradition.
CD-315
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