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Henry Glassie, Clifford R. Murphy, Douglas Dowling Peach It's the right time for this set to appear. Some of Ola Belle Reed's tunes, specifically “I've Endured” and “High on a Mountain,” have become such standards at bluegrass and old time festivals that one might forget they were actually penned by someone in particular, instead of existing in that hazy realm known as the public domain. As recently as 2011, actress Margo Martindale's brilliant Justified character Mags Bennett belted out “Mountain,” from her home in that show's fictitious version of Kentucky's Harlan County. A year earlier, the film Winter's Bone, set in the ramshackle horror of the southern Missouri Ozarks, featured a scene where a local string band played the same tune. That same year, Folkways got around to releasing Rising Sun Melodies, which collected tracks from her two mid-1970s LPs for that label, as well as some live performances from around the same time. Around this period, recordings of other, various live performances in the early 1970s appeared as part of the Field Recorders Collective's ongoing series devoted to making sought after field recordings of old time music available. With her original Rounder and Folkways vinyl long out of print, it was good just to hear her again.
It's likely that all but the most hardcore devotees of Ola Belle and her extended family's career are unaware that her earliest recordings- her earliest professional experiences in fact- were as banjo player and singer in her brother Alex Campbell's band, The New River Boys, who specialized in high powered bluegrass and recorded two early 60s LPs for Starday. Yet, somewhere along the way, Ola Belle moved away from this music and back toward the tunes she recalled from her childhood in rural Western North Carolina, arriving at a style that, due to her own songwriting skills, mixed with her clawhammer banjo and steady, bluesy rhythm guitar, put her sound somewhere organically between the more archaic mountain styles and the type of music her brother's band cranked out. Anchored by her deep, stern yet warm voice, she created a sound that was somehow her own. Just when this transformation took place has been the source of speculation by many, but Folklorist Henry Glassie has known the answer since early 1966, when he recorded Ola Belle in multiple sessions, both solo and with various family and band members, playing the style most associated with her, but prior to this time put on the back burner due to her role in her brother's band. It was these recordings that made her decide to forge ahead with her own music, instead of playing a limited role in a popular band. And fortunately, an entire disc's worth of those '66 sessions can finally be heard here.
Dust to Digital's focus of late has been on books with accompanying music. They've revived old photographs made in all but forgotten traveling photo booths in Arkansas, published astonishing recollections of the uncannily diverse folk music found in the USA's upper Midwest circa 1946, put the spotlight on folklorists' random photo and 78 collections, and delivered the most comprehensive and well documented collection of 78 RPM-era music from SE Asia anyone will ever hear. So, aside from finally making Ola Belle Reed's first transformative recordings available, as well as devoting a second disc to contemporary recordings from singer-songwriters, fiddlers, banjo players, and gospel harmony quartets found in the area in and around the Pennsylvania/Maryland/Delaware border country where Ola Belle eventually called home, this set is also a 254-page book. As such, it captures Ola Belle's story in her own words, giving the most precise picture of her upbringing anyone has yet documented, and firmly capturing the fact that, thanks in large part to her nephews Zane and Hugh Campbell's oral and musical input, the traditional music of which Reed was a focal point has continued on. Through the accounts of the players, the reader gets an understanding of just how depression-era struggles drove mass movements of families north; the area right around the Mason-Dixon Line became home for many, as they found work on dairy and mushroom farms, in munitions plants, and at Dam sites, where construction was needed.
Needless to say, they brought their music with them, which helps explain how this area on the edges of the south as well as Appalachia itself, came to house so much deep, southern-rooted music. Aside from notes on Reed's recordings, which feature stellar takes on the gospel standard “Uncloudy Day,” old time pieces such as “Train 45” and “John Hardy,” ballads, Carter Family standards and one of Ola Belle's earliest compositions, “You Led Me to the Wrong,” the book sets out to deal with the changing nature of tradition by examining Reed's extended family. It draws on the story of Zane Campell's punk band, Hard Facts, who came into contact with Tommy Ramone after he'd quite The Ramones and ventured into production, where he came across Zane and found out he was related to Ola Belle, whose music Tommy was fascinated with, as it turns out. It also tells the story of Danny Paisley, his family, as well as the Lundy's, all of whom have connections by blood, music, or both to Alex Campbell, Ola Belle, and the New River Boys. Their stories are those of endurance, influence and determination. But the recordings, made in the field, as they should be, reveal, not unlike Ola Belle's, a style with one foot in bluegrass, another in old time, and a foundation in gospel.
While Hugh and Zane Campbell have emerged as first rate songwriters, they are also heard here honing in on old time gospel tunes such as “Over in Glory Land.” Indeed, the second disc shows a number of musicians capturing perfectly the spirit of Ola Belle Reed as well as tunes once played by various members of the New River Boys. The results of the second disc then, like the first, are full of natural warmth, driving rhythms and solid musicianship that never gets showy or slick. In some ways, the collection acts as an example of the best old-time/bluegrass hybrid most folks have never heard. Until now. - Bruce Miller
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