His Folkways Years

Two new collections of old-time mountain singer Dock Boggs reviewed by Brian Peters

Country Blues

There are few musicians in the field of old-time mountain music as individualistic as Dock Boggs. With his idiosyncratic banjo style, which involved picking rather than frailing and made use of several distinctive-sounding tunings, Boggs also - unusually for a white mountain musician - learned material directly from black sources. His singing style was wild and impassioned, full of unpredictable slides, slurs and hollers, and his material often dwelt on the dark side: death, drink, false lovers. "Ragged clothes droppin' from my body, the wolf growlin' round my door / The man who won my darling girl will feel the bite of my forty-four", he sings on "False Hearted Lover's Blues". The rawness and anguish of the delivery recalls none so much as Robert Johnson, though they're worlds apart musically. Boggs was an East Kentucky coal miner, a hard man who knew how to look after himself, was steadfast in pursuit of worker's rights, and whose fondness for the bottle sometimes left him on the wrong side of the law. His story, related in some detail in the lavish booklets that accompany both of these releases, is almost as gripping as the music itself. These aren't just a bunch of songs, they're a testament to the life of a complicated but burningly powerful individual.

Country Blues (Revenant / revenant1@earthlink.com) comprises the twelve songs Boggs recorded commercially in 1927 and '29, before the collapse of his record company put paid to any thoughts of escaping the toil of the mines through a career in music. These are augmented by alternative takes of four of the same songs, and four rare cuts from Hayes and Bill Shepherd, musicians from the same neck of the woods whose excellent banjo-playing, fiddling and singing are a welcome bonus.

His Folkways Years 1963 - 1968 (Smithsonian Folkways / www.si.edu/folkways) contains material from the period during the 1960s when Dock Boggs was sought out by Mike Seeger and, after many years of separation from his music, found himself performing publicly for the burgeoning folk revival. For breadth of material you couldn't beat the fifty songs on the Folkways set, which include new versions of several of the old 78s, plus Boggs classics like "Oh Death" and "Prodigal Son", together with standards such as "John Hardy" and "Careless Love", and several banjo instrumentals. The Revenant material, though, shows the young Boggs at his most hard-driving and uncompromising, particularly on the bluesy minor-mode songs with their unworldy, dissonant banjo accompaniments, that represent the most distinctive music Dock Boggs produced. To really get to grips with Dock Boggs' music, of course, you have to own both. And who could claim an interest in old-time music and fail to be captivated by this mighty musician?