Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963-1968

Amazon.com
Dock Boggs champions will look back at 1998 as a monumental year for the Virginia-born banjo-playing songster who, but for a few years in the late '20s and the early '60s, lived in obscurity. His first recordings have been beautifully reissued in Revenant's Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings package. His shadow looms over Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic--the critic's best book since Mystery Train. And Smithsonian Folkways has brought back 50 recordings made by Mike Seeger during the autumn of Boggs's life. Together with the Revenant material, this two-CD reissue--including a brilliant essay by Barry O'Connell--details one of the most mysterious voices in American music. When Boggs sings he tears each line to pieces and, in turn, the language of his death-obsessed blues rends his voice into a scratchy, painful tremolo. This is not folk music for the timid. "Oh, I've got no sugar baby now," he wails in one of his best-known songs. "It's all I can do for to see peace with you / And I can't get along this-a-way." Along with celebrated material from the '20s, Boggs also chose for these '60s sessions a few gospel tunes, which are sung with the revealing intensity. And on every track, even on the shaky, jagged instrumentals, Boggs captures the darkest and resiliency of a man's soul. --Roy Kasten

Tracks:

Down South Blues
Country Blues
Pretty Polly
Coal Creek March
My Old Horse Died
Wild Bill Jones
Rowan County Crew
New Prisoner's Song
Oh, Dear
Prodigal Son
Mother's Advice
Drunkard's Lone Child
Bright Sunny South
Mistreated Mama Blues
Harvey Logan
Mixed Blues
Old Joe's Barroom
Danville Girl
Cole Younger
Schottische Time
Papa, Build Me A Beat
Little Black Train
No Disappointment In Heaven
Glory Land

Tracks:

Banjo Clog
Wise County Jail
Sugar Baby
The Death Of Jerry Damron
Railroad Tramp
Poor Boy In Jail
Brother Jim Got Shot
John Henry
Davenport
Dying Ranger
Little Omie Wise
Sugar Blues
Loving Nancy
Cuba
John Hardy
Peggy Walker
I Hope I Live A Few More Days
Turkey In The Straw
Calvary
Roses While I'm Living
Leave It There
Prayer Of A Miner's Child
Coke Oven March
Ruben's Train
Cumberland Gap
Careless Love

Amazon.com

Dock Boggs champions will look back at 1998 as a monumental year for the Virginia-born banjo-playing songster who, but for a few years in the late '20s and the early '60s, lived in obscurity. His first recordings have been beautifully reissued in Revenant's Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings package. His shadow looms over Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic--the critic's best book since Mystery Train. And Smithsonian Folkways has brought back 50 recordings made by Mike Seeger during the autumn of Boggs's life. Together with the Revenant material, this two-CD reissue--including a brilliant essay by Barry O'Connell--details one of the most mysterious voices in American music. When Boggs sings he tears each line to pieces and, in turn, the language of his death-obsessed blues rends his voice into a scratchy, painful tremolo. This is not folk music for the timid. "Oh, I've got no sugar baby now," he wails in one of his best-known songs. "It's all I can do for to see peace with you / And I can't get along this-a-way." Along with celebrated material from the '20s, Boggs also chose for these '60s sessions a few gospel tunes, which are sung with the revealing intensity. And on every track, even on the shaky, jagged instrumentals, Boggs captures the darkest and resiliency of a man's soul. --Roy Kasten

Customer Reviews:

Otherworldly, unforgettable music Ground Zero.......2006-12-21

Dock Boggs is the quintessential haunting and haunted banjo player and singer. When I first heard his music a decade ago I felt a shock of recognition that I've never experienced with ANY other musician, regardless of musical style. Perhaps growing up in the backwoods of Mississippi in the 1960s lent me a familiarity to his musical & personal power that may be missing from more "modern" sensibilities. Every fibre in my body has been shaped and haunted by intensely personal innerworkings created by listening to & singing old-time songs and hymns and I find that my emotions are exactly reflected in Dock's music.

Upon hearing him for the first time, I immediately became a Dock Disciple and have incorporated many of his songs into my own banjo & guitar repetoire. It's a long shot that folks with more modern sensibilites will be as overwhelmed by Dock's vision as I, but I can only hope & pray that there are people out there (particularly the younger folks) that will be as moved by the awesome power of Dock as I have been. Dock represents a wisdom and strength of character that is becoming increasingly rare in the country's population today.

Several years ago, when I sat down on his grave in Norton, Virginia and played several of his songs to him on the banjo, the sun was beaming as bright as it could be; when I finished half an hour later with his devastating song "Calvary", it was pouring rain....which seemed so very fitting. Dock's playing & singing reflect an overwhelming quality of "terrible beauty".

It's difficult for me to put into words exactly what Dock's legacy means to me but, if you're ready & willing to give yourself over to an unparalled example of the vanishing strength of American character and the power of an absolutely unique, touching and simple-yet-complex life, Dock's music will thrill you and haunt you as no other. His biography reads like a parable straight from the Old Testement and every moment of his life, from his birth to his death, can be heard in his music.

ESSENTIAL listening; now more than ever, this CD set should be issued to every American upon birth.

GREAT CD!!!!!!!!!!.......2004-02-25

These are two vry good cds. Dock Boggs' work is amazing. I like his Prodigal Son so much. All the songs are good. So are the liner notes. Any one who likes Bascom Lamar Lunsfod, Uncle Dave Macon, Tom Ashley, Grayson & Whitter and all those old time guys will love these cds, Buy 'em now.

Blues Old Timey Blues Old Timey, banjo, banjo, banjo.......2004-01-07

Dock Bogg's music is typical of old time music by white appalachian performers, particularly banjo players. In this forum, his grand neice points out that he has one of the best combinations of Blues and country ever found. He was a singularly personal performer.

In many ways he is more like the Skip James of old time banjo than the Robert Johnson, particularly if you listen to the haunted original recordings James made in the 1930s. In fact in the 1960s when he joined the folk revival and performed along with a lot of the old blues musicians who had similarly been "rediscovered" Dock Boggs said if he had to do it all over again, he would have learned to play guitar and sing the way Mississippi John Hurt played and sang!

The bluesiness of this all may be more pronounced in Boggs' work, but it was really typical of the white Southern banjo players of his era. They are playing an African instrument, transmitted into their area by African Americans, their repetoire ranges into blues, their musical styles on the instruments even in non-blues are influenced by blues music. They lived in a society where the formal racial separation of Jim Crow Segregation and Lynch law existed because of the actual integration of the lives and cultures of white and black workers and farmers and above all musicians was greater than what we have today.

Dock Boggs was quite explicit. He recalled the names of the black banjo players he saw in childhood who played banjo finger style, rather than in the claw hammer style that his brothers played. From childhood he wanted to play like them. Many of the tunes he recorded he said he got from listening to Black blues records. Anyone who cares to read the many interviews with Boggs that have been published or listen to the cds and lps of his memories can learn about this.

Bogg's skills as a singer, as a banjo player, and, above all, as a performer who throws himself entirely into his songs,are unique. But the mixture of African and European American music he represents is hardly unique.

He may collide with the rather false, sometime boring, washed white fantasies about old time white country music nourished by folkies and post folkies and with what white racists who cling to as something purely "white," but Boggs' bluesyness is part of being real old time and not a suburban 60-90s fantasy of old time life.

What about the other great finger picking discovery of old-time banjo playing, Roscoe Holcomb. When he was rediscovered though Holcomb's repetoire included all kinds of music played on banjo, guitar, harmonic, and fiddle, he said he was a blues singer and one of the better ones around his area of Kentucky!

The mixture is real. If you go back and listen to say the Carter family (whose guitar style came from a black man Leslie Riddle who performed on several of their cuts) or to Bill Monroe (who along with fellow western Kentuckian Merle Travis learned much of his music from Black bluesman Arnold Schultz) they sound so much blusier, so much more black influences, than the Allison Krauses and Nickel Creeks reared in suburbia and not the world of racial cultural mix that Dock Boggs comes from.

Just a point of fact, Bogg's banjo style is closer to bluegrass than most other banjo players of his time. Most of Boggs contemporaries were frailers of various kinds, whereas Boggs was a finger picker for the most part. Bluegrass banjo involves precisely adding in the bluesier licks and sounds to the music in an systematic fashion. It is a finger style with just the kind of synchopation that Boggs was a master at.

Particularly the initial bluegrass recordings of Bill Monroe at the end of WWII are obviously a reaction to the rhythmns of Swing. The setup of the tunes, playing the melody first and then opening for improvisational solos by virtuosi musicians, comes from the combo swing and bop then prevelant and has nothing to do with how old time music functioned. As the greatest Bluegrass Fiddler Kenny Baker said, to play Bluegrass Fiddle you need to think like playing Jazz.

Applachian Best.......2003-01-27

My review is a "little" prejudiced since Dock Boggs was my great uncle but I think his music is the best combination of blues and folk around. He put all he had into his music and loved it. It will bring chills and good feelings to anyone who loves music for the soul done as he did! All his songs are good!

Too much of a good thing?.......2002-01-17

One man, one banjo. Boggs was to Old Timey music what Johnson was to the Blues. His simple, heart felt banjo playing accompanies his soulful singing wonderfully. Boggs bares his soul through his voice - the pain, loss and loves of his life can be felt clearly in every one of these traditional folk, bluegrass and blues songs. There are even a few of his own compositions that fit in amongst the classics very comfortably. A must for every Old Timey music fan. However, I feel this collection would be a better offering if the best of them were combined on to a single CD. There is more than two hours here - and it's a little too much.

Music Album:

Music Album