Dollar Country Newsletter, April 2024
Johnny Hill, Mack Novak, Olin Berry, The Smith Trio, The Equality Chapel Aires, Darwin Lee Hill
News From Dollar Country
Last month’s newsletter lived up to my expectations. My audience shrunk quite a bit, but my interactions were more meaningful. Although with social media I never felt like I really knew what my reach was despite them giving me tons of statistics. Over the last month I’ve had multiple interactions with people who read my newsletter and enjoyed it, and I’ve had many, many interactions with people online who also feel disillusioned with social media and what it’s evolved into. Now the real work begins. Making one newsletter is easy, coming up with ideas every month is a lot more intimidating. My plan is to trust that I’ll have things to say and when ideas form I’ll write them down. In school I was always the type to wait until the night before a paper was due to start writing and it looks like I never really broke that habit. I also had the chance to buy some really cool stuff this month, for more information about that check the “Collection Notes” section.
The family news is that Wyatt is cruising into 4 months on planet earth and he’s starting to get a bit more interactive, we think he’ll start laughing any day now. I’ve experienced more joy in the past four months than in any other time of my life I can remember. In early March I got sick with norovirus, which has been making the rounds, and it was no joke. I’d take a round of covid again over norovirus any day. Before and after my sickness we had three different visits from family members. So almost all of our immediate family has met Wyatt with the last set visiting in April. My wife also went back to work part time. March was a busy month!
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►The Southern Music Research Center Presents: Darwin Lee Hill's Real Hillbilly Interviews
For twenty years, from 1995 to 2015, collector, DJ, and deep-country digger Darwin Lee Hill hosted Darwin Lee’s Real Hillbilly Radio Show on Poughkeepsie, NY, radio station WHVW (950 AM). Along the way, Hill developed relationships with many of the original “old-timers” who created the music, and his in-depth interviews with those pioneers became regular features of his three-hour Sunday afternoon broadcasts.
Now, the Southern Music Research Center—a 501c3 nonprofit based in Birmingham, Alabama—has collaborated with Hill to make his massive trove of interviews available for streaming online. Hill’s collected interviews represent a significant oral history of classic country music and give voice, in particular, to some of the genre’s often overlooked personalities. Guests include such honky-tonk heroes as Big Bill Lister and Vernon Oxford; “King of the Yodelers” and country TV’s “Jumping Cowboy,” Yodelin’ Kenny Roberts; electric hillbilly pioneer Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith; several members of Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys, including Hank’s early mentor Braxton Schuffert, comedian Lum York, and steel guitarist Don Helms; the prolific and trailblazing songwriter Liz Anderson; and numerous veterans of the Louisiana Hayride, Big D Jamboree, Wheeling Jamboree, Grand Ole Opry, and other classic radio shows.
Hill’s interest in regional country scenes and artists results in many fascinating glimpses into “hillbilly” acts from New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other areas often overlooked in portraits of country tradition. Hill’s own home of Poughkeepsie itself produced its share of traditional country artists, and a few of this collection’s conversations celebrate the local legacies of such unsung performers as Gil Rogers and Tex Roy. (For his own part, Hill came naturally to his lifelong obsession with this music, influenced by his country-loving parents; his mother, as “Jean the Record Queen,” hosted an old-school country radio show of her own and, around 1950, recorded a handful of unreleased acetate discs with Moe’s Hillbillies, a group she formed with her uncles.)
The Darwin Lee Hill collection of 60-plus interviews—with even more, still to come—is available now at the Southern Music Research Center’s online archive, where you’ll also find a growing repository of rescued recordings, rare photos, artifacts, and ephemera from a wide range of genres and eras. Check it all out at www.southernmusicresearch.org.
-- Burgin Mathews
**Note From Frank: I’d like to give a big thanks to Burgin for writing this guest column for the newsletter. Also I think people who like Dollar Country might enjoy the Howard Vokes and Don Pierce interviews from this collection.**
►Collection Notes
Incoming: Acetate Collection From Dario Smagata-Bryan
I bought a collection of around 75 acetates, home recorded discs, and lathe cuts. These sorts of discs are one of a kind and often uninteresting, but I like to keep and archive them because they’re unique. Most of these were home recorded discs from the 40s and 50s consisting of people talking or playing. Sometimes there is music on them, but most of all these are just the cassette tape recordings of the 40s.
Incoming: Box From Jason Chronis
Got a nice box of around 90 7” singles from Jason. I’ve bought probably close to a dozen boxes from him over the past 4 years and they’re always full of great stuff. A lot of Texas country records and gospel records.
Incoming: Box From Paul Solarski
Box of 86 7” singles and ten 10” acetate master singles. The masters are really interesting because they’re 45s etched into 10” discs. They are also all deteriorating because of the type of substance used on them.
Incoming: Books From Dave
Five book donation from Dave who sends me books rom time to time. Deep Enough and Workin Class Country both look great.
►Records From The Archives
Johnny Hill - Stranger In Our Town / Don't Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide
Year: Unknown
Label: Hill
Genre: Country
Format: 7”, 45rpm
Stranger In Our Town:
Don’t Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide:
This is one of those singles I wish I could tell you more about but I can’t find a trace of anything. It doesn’t help that Johnny Hill isn’t unique enough to search for online or in newspaper archives. My last resort is to check runout grooves and tie it to a pressing plant or mastering house, but even the runouts resulted in nothing. So I guess we’ll just have to let the music speak for itself, and it speaks in reverb and guitar. The recording quality is poor in the best way. Just an acoustic guitar, bass, electric guitar playing lead, and vocals make up the whole of both sides but somehow it feels like more. In the background there’s a hum that had me checking my mixer to make sure it was on the disc and not a loose connection. Everything but the bass has a great echo to it as well. It’s the sort of sound a modern garage band might wish they could get.
In Stranger In Our Town he sings about coming home from “the great wars overseas” and even though everyone knows him he still feels like a stranger. The lyrics are basic but tell the story of a very relatable and deep philosophical idea. Can you ever really come home? Is home like a river where each time you return to it it’s a completely new set of water molecules or is it the pond on your homestead farm that stays forever unchanging? When I moved to Cleveland from Kansas I remember the first time I returned things were mostly the same, but I hadn’t kept up with the day to day of everyone and everything, so it felt like I was removed. The next time I visited it was more pronounced, but I also didn’t feel at home in Cleveland yet, so there was a period of feeling like I didn’t quite feel at home anywhere. This feeling is one that almost any human will feel at some point, but in this story the reason he feels like this is because of having gone to war. He’s singing about a mass coming home that large groups of people have felt since the invention of warfare. Before writing this I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes and really listened to this one. It’s a sad song, delivered with melancholy, and with the dank sound of the music you can imagine it being sung in a paper thin walled beer joint through thick smoke and humid air. “Everybody knows me, yet I’m a stranger in this town. I know I’m not alone boys, look around.”
The flip side is Hill’s take on a classic honky tonk trope, being in a relationship with someone who’s running around on you. It’s more upbeat and quicker than Stranger but didn’t give me the satisfaction of thinking too deep about it. A solid tune but, for me, Stranger In Our Town is the star on this disc. Both sides feature lot’s of guitar breaks between vocal stanzas and I really enjoyed the guitar tone and playfulness of the licks. If there’s more where this came from I sure hope I find it someday.
Mack Novak - I Will / Oyster Man Blues
Year: 1978
Label: Central Sound Studios
Genre: Country
Format: 7” 45rpm
Oyster Man Blues:
I Wish:
“According to a local legend, this song was played so often on a jukebox in a fishermen’s bar that a customer paid the bar owner a high price for the record so that he could break it!”
(Florida Folklife Reader, 2011)
There’s a surprising amount of literature about about Oyster Man Blues, probably because there aren’t many songs about oyster men. The song covers a day in the life of someone out collecting oysters with enough specific jargon that you would assume Novak knew the ins and outs of doing it himself. Let’s review some: hickory sticks are wooden oyster tongs, a cull iron is a hammer instrument used to break apart oysters, a grouper trooper is a state fisheries officer, and an oyster ruler is a tool to make sure oysters are of legal size to collect. All in all it sounds like a thankless job, one that probably was much better before modernization hit. It’s a fun song, jaunty and quick, and has the feeling of making fun out of a bad situation. Of course I love any song about an odd profession, so this hits the spot.
Mack Novak was originally from Eastpoint, Florida and the label was in Auburndale. Eastpoint is right on the gulf in the panhandle of Florida and Auburndale is over by Orlando. Central Sound Studios is a mixed bag, it seems to have been one of those labels that released things based on location rather than genre. There’s everything from psychedelic rock to gospel to country and funk on LP, 45, and tape. The flip side, I Will, is a ballad, and I really get the feeling that Mack went to the studio to record Oyster Man Blues and I Will was just an afterthought to fill the extra space. If both sides of the single sounded like I Will then we wouldn’t be here talking about it.
Olin Berry - Sick And Tired (Of Getting Up Sick And Tired) / Unfaithful Heart
Year 1968
Label: Back Forty Records
Genre: Country
Format: 7” 45rpm
Sick And Tired (Of Getting Up Tired And Sick):
Unfaithful Heart:
“I tell myself I’ll be home by nine, the shuffleboard game is so much fun and I’ll be doggone, it’s almost one”
Sick and Tired tells the very relatable story of going out saying you’ll only have one drink and waking up the next day with an aching head and a woozy stomach. “I feel like they beat me with a stick.” Olin, I’ve been there buddy. The song starts with a great pedal steel flourish and goes straight into two minutes of honky tonk goodness. If I didn’t see the label I would have sworn it was Eddie Noack singing, it really sounds like him. While I was doing research I half expected to find some kind of Starday or Noack connection, but it didn’t materialize. What I did discover was that around the same time that this label was active there was also a steak house called the Back Forty operating at the same address as is on the label. It would seem that whoever owned the steak house thought maybe they would make a few records too, and I’m glad they did.
Unfaithful Heart starts off again with a nice pedal steel line, almost sounding like the slack guitar common in Hawaiian music. This song plods along while the narrator sings to a woman about how she can’t be faithful. He tactfully leaves out anything about his end of this relationship leading us to believe that this person is just unfaithful no matter what. It’s 2024, and I’m not falling for that anymore, but that’s besides the point. It’s a nice song, it would be great for a room full of people to dance to. Outisde of a few concert announcements in 1968 and 1969 I couldn’t find any information about Olin Berry.
The Smith Trio - O Mother Sweet Mother*
Year: 1971
Label: Gospel Recordings
Genre: Country Gospel
Format: 12” LP
Silver And Gold Have I None
Heaven Must Be A Wonderful Place
This record is from 1971 and according to the jacket the Smiths have “been singing together occasionally since 1950.” That’s 21 years of singing, if this was a rock and roll band they’d be an outlier, one who had really tested their meddle and made it through, but they’re not a rock band. In Gospel music some of the acts started singing together when they started to learn to talk, and some don’t ever break up until air no longer passes through their lips. Gospel is such a different type of music. I’ve read of indigenous cultures in Africa and North America where singing isn’t something you do but something that just is, like talking or walking. Just another part of our communication with others. Rural gospel music is a window to that kind of life, where you start singing because that’s what everyone in the family does on Sunday not because you showed talent and someone said you’d have a chance to perform on stage. All this is to say that the Smith Trio sound great together, like they’ve been doing it for 20 years.
The other side of this coin is that when singing is another part of our communication process, whether it be with others or with god, then it often doesn’t stand out. The same way that we don’t often appreciate the sound of each others voices unless they are drastically different from the norm, competent gospel music can blend in with the pack. If god is up there listening I reckon they don’t much care if it stands out or not, and I guess I don’t either. A good gospel record is like hearing a conversation, and conversations are an important part of our day to day existence. You can clean your house to this record, you can put it on while you’re making food, in the morning with coffee, it’s a companion that doesn’t ask much of you and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The Smith Trio is like the new friend you met that feels like an old friend. The relative you sit on the porch with and don’t have to talk to. So pull up a chair, there’s coffee in the kitchen. Lee, Charlie, and Iva are gonna sing us some songs from before they were born that they’ve been singing since they were kids. You can join in if you’d like and no one will care if you can’t sing because everyone can sing.
**Note: The Smith Trio are Lee on lead guitar and vocal, Charlie on rhythm guitar and bass & tenor vocals, and Iva Nell Smith singing alto. They are from Scott County Virginia.**
The Equality Chapel Aires - I'll Have A New Life*
Year: 1973
Label: Self Released
Genre: Country Gospel
Format: 12” LP
I’ll Have A New Life
Living In Canaan
The Equality Chapel Aires were from rural southwest Ohio and were based out of the Equality Church Of God. The back of the jacket says Lynchburg Ohio, although newspaper clippings say they are from Wilmington, it’s mostly just splitting hairs though since they’re only a few miles from each other. Newspapers also suggest the group was active in 1973-1974. This album is a mid-paced affair with a lot of vocal harmonies. I found myself really enjoying the first side but growing a bit tired of it through the second, that’s not to say the quality of the compositions suffered, in fact it had more to do with the recording quality. The Chapel Aires consist of four women (Linda Green, Martha Trochleman, Mildred and Linda Thompson) and one man (Bob Green) so the harmonies tend to be very treble heavy and the mixing engineer didn’t do them any favors. I don’t know much about the ins and outs of vocal harmonies but it sounds like a few people all sing in the same range, and with Mr Green not singing on all tracks that makes the vocals wear out their welcome. That being said, I never turned the album off and listened to it at least 3 times for this review.
Most of the tracks are the base group consisting of the people mentioned above doing vocals with Martha and Linda playing guitar and piano respectively. However there are a few more upbeat, almost bluegrass feeling, songs that include Gene Fetters on electric guitar, Tim Trible on banjo and Larry Goble on bass, although for the life of me I can’t hear more than a suggestion of a banjo anywhere in the mix. It’s a shame because the instruments would really help cut through the treble heavy mix. The standout tracks for me were I’ll Have A New Life and I’m Living In Canaan, both are full band numbers in the first half of the record.
This LP, along with many others, was pressed in Cincinnati at QCA, a custom record manufacturing company. Many, many country, bluegrass, and gospel records were pressed in Cincinnati over the years, many of which at QCA and the other budget pressing plant Rite Record Productions. Cincinnati was where a lot of rural music flourished because it straddled the border of Kentucky and Ohio, and was the nearest industrial jobs city for a lot of rural people in the region.
►Upcoming Events
April 23rd: Grog Shop w/ Nick Shoulders
May 7th: Country Night at Little Rose (Cleveland)
June 3rd: Country Night at Little Rose
June 19th: Little Rose w/ Chris Acker
►Upcoming Radio Shows
April 17th: DC Episode 242
May 1st: DC Episode 243
May 15th: DC Episode 244
Thanks for reading this, I put a lot of work into it and I hope you enjoyed it.
-Franklin
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