Description
Released in January 2023, ‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville: Revisiting The Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930’ distills onto a single CD the major recordings and the groundbreaking research found on Bear Family Records®’ Grammy Award-nominated 4-CD box set‚ ‘The Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930: Knox County Stomp’ (BCD 16097). 27 essential recordings from the historically significant location sessions conducted during 1929 and 1930 by the Brunswick/Vocalion labels in Knoxville, Tennessee.
* Influential releases of ‘hillbilly music’ as well as landmark recordings of Black Appalachian music.
*New essays by Jack Neely and James ‘Sparky’ Rucker in which those writers set the Knoxville
sessions into historical context.
* Detailed track-by-track notes by Grammy Award-nominated writer Ted Olson, who produced this
compilation.
* State-of-the-art sound engineering, these recordings – nearly a century old but painstakingly remastered in 2022 by Marcus Heumann – sound warm and clear.
‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville: Revisiting The Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930′ distills onto a single CD the major recordings and the groundbreaking research found on Bear Family Records®’ Grammy Award-nominated 4-CD box set‚ ‘The Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930: Knox County Stomp’ (BCD 16097), released in 2016.
‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville’ offers 27 essential recordings from the historically significant location sessions conducted during 1929 and 1930 by the Brunswick/Vocalion labels in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The recordings include such influential releases of ‘hillbilly music’ as Hugh (Ballard) Cross’ original recording of The Wabash Cannon Ball, the Appalachian Vagabond’s Peddler And His Wife, and Haskell Wolfenbarger’s Sailing Out On The Ocean, as well as such landmark recordings of Black Appalachian music as Will Bennett’s Railroad Bill, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops’ Vine Street Rag, and Leola Manning’s The Arcade Building Moan. ‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville’ contains new essays by Jack Neely and James ‘Sparky’ Rucker in which those writers set the Knoxville sessions into historical context and assess the enduring impacts of those sessions.
The album also features detailed track-by-track notes by Grammy Award-nominated writer Ted Olson, who produced this compilation. Because ‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville’ showcases the usual state-of-the-art sound engineering generally associated with releases from Bear Family Records®, these recordings – nearly a century old but painstakingly remastered in 2022 by Marcus Heumann -sound warm and clear. The album’s booklet offers memorable design work by Bear Family Records®’ longtime artistic director Mychael Gerstenberger and features 27 recordings by 25 different musical acts active in Appalachia at the cusp of the Great Depression.
‘Satan Is Busy In Knoxville’ presents a diverse and dynamic overview of Appalachia’s vernacular music from that era. Representing a range of music genres and styles and showcasing both secular and sacred
material, this album is thematically unified by the fact that all the recordings hail from commercial location sessions held in Knoxville, Tennessee, by the Brunswick/Vocalion labels. It documents timeless performances from the Knoxville sessions and makes a compelling case that key sides from those long-ago 78 RPM releases are among the most important recordings of American vernacular music from the period between the twentieth century’s two world wars.
01 Garbage Can Blues – The Tennessee Ramblers
02 Lost John – The Southern Moonlight Entertainers
03 Yellow Dog Blues – The Wise String Orchestra
04 Railroad Bill – Will Bennett
05 Sailing Out On The Ocean – Haskell Wolfenbarger
06 The Wabash Cannon Ball – Ballard Cross
07 Double Eagle March – Cal Davenport & His Gang
08 In My Savior’s Care – Senior Chapel Quartette
09 Cal West’s Yodel Blues -part I – Cal West
10 Back To Old Smoky Mountain – The Smoky Mountain Ramblers
11 I’m Sad And Blue – The Perry County Music Makers
12 I’m On My Way – The Kentucky Holiness Singers
13 Peddler And His Wife – The Appalachian Vagabond
14 Goodbye Dixie Dear – The Gibbs Brothers with Claude Davis
15 Lookout Valley Waltz – Clayton & His Melody Mountaineers
16 Vine Street Rag – The Tennessee Chocolate Drops with The Tennessee Trio
17 Asleep At The Switch – Robert A. Gardner & Lester McFarland
18 The Nick Nack Song – Ridgel’s Fountain Citians
19 It’s Funny What Whiskey Will Do – Louis Bird
20 The Arcade Building Moan – Leola Manning
21 Jack And May – Bess Pennington
22 Lynchburg – Uncle Jimmy Thompson
23 Walking With My Lord – The Etowah Quartet
24 Postage Stomp – Maynard Baird & His Orchestra
25 L & N Rag – Alex Hood & His Railroad Boys
26 Knox County Stomp – The Tennessee Chocolate Drops
27 Satan Is Busy In Knoxville – Leola Manning
GENRE: Rock N Roll
BARCODE: 4000127175939
