Salon
16 July 2001
2) Clarence Ashley: Greenback Dollar—The Music of Clarence Ashley, 1928-1933 (County). Ashley (1895-1967) was one of the greatest of the old-timey singers—those who, in the first third of the twentieth century, sang as if the new century was a trick that would disappear soon enough, as if only songs made long before you were born could hold your interest for more than a season. He was born Clarence and recorded under that name, but everyone knew him as Tom; when the bottom fell out of the old-timey market in the ’30s, the recording artist Clarence Ashley disappeared and the performer Tom Ashley kept on. In 1960, at a fiddler’s convention in North Carolina, he and guitarist Clint Howard and fiddler Fred Price were approached by folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who asked if they had knowledge of a Clarence Ashley, whose bottomless recordings of “The Coo Coo Bird” (1929) and “House Carpenter” (1930) had been collected on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. “Clint Howard recalls the moment,” one can read in the Greenback Dollar notes: “Fred and me had known Tom all our lives, but we just knew him as Tom. So I said, ‘No, I don’t. Do you know a Clarence Ashley, Tom?’ Tom started to say, ‘No,’ but then he had a second thought: ‘Hell, I’m Clarence Ashley!’” As a public artist, he began a second life, but musically there was really no change from his first.
Even as a young man, Ashley had a squeaky, baffled old-codger’s tone. He reveled in the deadpan mysteries of “Haunted Road Blues” and “Dark Holler Blues.” But those songs, like “The Coo Coo Bird” and “House Carpenter,” are the high culture of old-timey. On Greenback Dollar, drawn from Ashley’s various string bands as well as his solo recordings, low culture pulls harder; hokum rules. Ashley performed in blackface on the minstrel show- medicine show circuit; you can hear the blackface snigger in his remarkably obscene “My Sweet Farm Girl,” which gets cunnilingus and analingus into a single verse. You can hear the common, secret culture of the south in Ashley’s detailed versions of the true-crime ballads “Frankie Silvers,” “Old John Hardy,” and “Naomi Wise.” And in an extremely vicious reading of “Little Sadie” you can hear a man who might have had reason to forget his own name.
Legends of Old Time Music (Vestapol/Rounder). A video anthology notable for Ashley’s performance of “The Cuckoo”—recorded on the street in the early sixties. Accompanied by Fred Price, Clint Howard, and guitarist Tex Isley, Ashley explains to folklorist D. K. Wilgus what it meant to travel to New York in the twenties to record for Columbia: “How much did the people who making the records know about his music?” “Not anything,” he says, and then he cuts the cards.
The Other Side of the Mirror—Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965, dir. Murray Lerner (Columbia Legacy). Includes Bob Dylan singing the likes of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” (with Joan Baez on “With God on Our Side”) as Ashley, seated directly behind him, adjusts his hat, repositions an unlit cigar, moves his banjo from his knee to the floor and back to his knee, and altogether does everything he can to remain as polite as possible.