Dock Boggs

[Admin]

Thanks to Petway for bringing Dock back to my attention. Of all the old original country/blues artists, Dock epitomizes how closely related the Appalachian style of country music is to Piedmont style of Blues. Dock was born in Norton, Virginia, which is along The Crooked road which incidentally is very close to the home of the Carter Family. Take a listen to "Oh Death" by Dock and see why Petway and I both see the very close relationship between blues and country.

[Admin]

Dock Boggs

Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs was an influential old-time singer, songwriter and banjo player. His style of banjo playing, as well as his singing, is considered a unique combination of Appalachian folk music and African-American blues.

Born: February 7, 1898, Norton


Died: February 7, 1971, Norton


Albums: His Folkways Years (1963-1968), Country Blues (1927-1929)

N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 8

Music Corn Bread When I'm Hungry
Spirit of Boggs

Dock Boggs and rock criticism

by William Hogeland

HERE'S Dock Boggs, an Appalachian banjo player and singer born in 1898: "Give me corn bread when I'm hungry, good people,/Corn whiskey when I'm dry,/Pretty women a-standing around me,/Sweet heaven when I die." That's lucid. Here's Greil Marcus, Dock Boggs's best-known interpreter, writing a century later: "But always, the sound the banjo makes pulls away from the singer, discrediting him as a fact, his performance as an event: the sound is spectral, and for seconds at a time a specter is what it turns the singer into. When this happens, to the degree that he has made himself felt before you, it's as if you can see right through him, as a physical fact, to a nowhere beyond."
THE career of Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs was divided into two phases by a long period of retirement during which American music -- and America itself -- underwent rapid and fundamental change. In the late 1920s Boggs made several powerful, idiosyncratic 78s for the Brunswick and Lonesome Ace record companies, accompanying himself on five-string banjo and sometimes backed by guitar. The records gave him notoriety around Norton, Virginia, where he lived. He briefly quit loading coal and moonshining; for a few months he traveled the mountains of Kentucky and Virginia with a band, performing and selling 78s. But the Depression deepened, and Boggs was forced back to the mines near his home. Soon he pawned his banjo, partly at the insistence of his wife, who like many others associated the instrument with rowdiness and sin. Apparently by the mid-1930s Dock Boggs had stopped making music.

His records, however, which had drawn the admiring attention of northern musicologists, were rediscovered in the 1950s and taken up by the second wave of the urban folk movement. In 1963 the revivalist Mike Seeger found Boggs laid off from the mines and living in poverty in Norton, and encouraged the sixty-five-year-old singer to pick up his music again. What a strange bunch his new fans must have seemed after the hard-bitten coal miners and sorghum farmers who, more than thirty years earlier, had given commercial country music its first boom. Clean-cut collegiate refugees from rock-and-roll were drawn to folk festivals in the early sixties, eagerly seeking correctives in Appalachian music to teen-pop slickness and their own privilege. Dock Boggs late in life became an important member of a folk scene that before shriveling would engender the period in rock now called classic. He died in 1971. Now he is having a third career, and the latest Boggs revival raises questions about the politics and the aesthetics of revivalism in American popular music and the mixed blessings of ambitious pop criticism.

Happily, it also gives us Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings (1927-29),on Revenant, a new label presided over by the musician, composer, and veteran iconoclast John Fahey. The disc brings together the seminal recordings of Boggs's first career, for many years available only by special order from Smithsonian Folkways. That label, too, has furthered the Boggs revival, by re-releasing last month many of the late-period Boggs recordings that Mike Seeger produced in the sixties. Seeger, who is one reason that many of us have any firsthand experience of the deepest sources of American music, has written important new notes for the Smithsonian Folkways release.

Country Blues beautifully summarizes Boggs's early work. Revenant's package includes twelve tracks from 1927 and 1929 and five alternate takes, never before released; it appends revealing bonus tracks by a banjoist and a fiddler from Boggs's region. The package comes with a sixty-four-page book, so informative and artfully designed (yet only double-CD-case in size) that it is comparable to a catalogue for a major exhibition of paintings. The book contains useful session notes by Barry O'Connell, a thoughtful and witty reminiscence by Jon Pankake, and remarks about the bonus tracks by Charles Wolfe.

Its most substantial contribution, however, a long essay by Greil Marcus, complicates appreciation both of the package and of Boggs's music. A pioneering rock critic when that term drew snorts of derision from establishment writers, Marcus has for three decades been an important and provocative voice in discussions of popular music. Last year he published Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes,from which his essay on Boggs is adapted. Invisible Republic called attention not only to Dock Boggs but also to the other early recording artists featured in Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music,which Smithsonian Folkways recently reissued. The anthology presented early 78s by professional country, blues, Cajun, and gospel musicians rather than field recordings by amateur folk artists, and thus had the effect -- fateful to the future of rock -- of challenging snooty ideas about professionalism and rural music.

Yet in his Country Blues essay Marcus seems to find Boggs's music transcendently odd: "Already, he had created a small body of work so dissonant that like black gravity it can seem to suck into itself whatever music might be brought to bear upon it." Even that oddness can't be clearly described; it can only be imitated or approximated in loosely constructed, elaborately associative prose. An unfortunate result of the mystification is that Marcus is so busy being spooked by Boggs's life and music that he fails to see clearly the musical background to Boggs's work. He thus risks leaving false impressions about the style and significance of the recordings.

The music on Country Blues does compel attention. That its strengths and drawbacks go largely unnoticed in Marcus's essay reflects a peculiar mixture of glorification and trivialization -- a mixture that haunts the entire "roots" revival in American pop.

PART of the problem in dealing with Dock Boggs's music lies in the natural fascination of Boggs's life. The definitive Boggs autobiography can be derived from the series of interviews Boggs gave Mike Seeger in the 1960s. (Excerpts from those interviews can be ordered from Smithsonian Folkways; fragments can be heard at www.si.edu/folklife/folkways/harry/dock.htm.) Marcus presents Boggs's life as having been marked to an almost preternatural extent by anguish and turmoil, and it is true that Boggs was often beset by financial and alcohol troubles, in-law tensions, and outlaw temptations. But aren't such problems common among young men -- and among older men and nonmusicians? The lives and music of poorly educated rural southerners born in the past century will naturally be strange to most of us who read and write articles on roots music. Shouldn't "strange" mean not fully understood, intriguingly different, even initially forbidding? Must it mean only titillatingly exotic? Critics who glibly endorse the strangeness in older music, associating it with the blurry auras of anxiety now in vogue (Dock Boggs in an X-Files cameo),may be trying to rob that music of its actual unfamiliarity. Marcus insists on hearing in Boggs's recordings from the 1920s what he imagines about Boggs's personal pain and anxiety; he describes Boggs's singing and playing as if music were always literally reflective of the life of the musician.

Mike Seeger, when interviewed for this article, offered a more focused vision than Marcus does of Dock Boggs's personality and its relation to his music. Of the interviews Seeger conducted with Boggs over six years, Seeger said, Marcus relied mainly on "the last of it, [when Boggs] tended to be saddened" and was "closing down some." Resuming performing "gave Dock something to live for," Seeger said. "Then, as he wasn't able to travel so much, he was getting disappointed again." Seeger made the hardness of Boggs's life real and specific: "This man had been in the mines for forty years, some of it when he was drinking or hung over. And of course he caroused. He loved to fight with people, just for fun -- he wasn't trying to beat up anybody, at least from what he said. Then, in the ten years before I met him, he was living in penury, laid off by the mines but too old to get a job. That was an awful time for him." Nevertheless, in his relationship with Seeger, Boggs was "engaging and thoughtful," Seeger said. "He wanted to express what he believed straightforwardly and have it back from you that way. And in the years before I met him, he was totally sober, living a retired man's life.

"Dock, I think, liked to have a good time. He also had a dark, worried side that brought him to the serious songs. He didn't sing comical banjo songs the way a lot of people did. He was from the darkest theatrical end of music, but in his life he loved to drink and he liked good jokes. He had wonderful stories about the good times."

Seeger made the crucial distinction between theater and life that is absent from Marcus's essay and from so much other discussion of music. Certainly there is no sense in Marcus's essay that Dock Boggs or Bob Dylan or anyone else has drawn from music a measure of relief from the pain and frustration of life, some extra space in which to play, create, discover truths, and -- dare one say it? -- have fun. To contemplate with furrowed brow Dylan's basement tapes is so obviously misguided that it is harmless: a miraculous degree of fun thrived in that basement, some of it at the expense of sobersided critics. But Boggs's work is older than Dylan's, more remote and fragile. Because Boggs sometimes expressed depths of anger and grief, it's all too easy to avoid the real demands of his music, to make him into a stereotype of an impressively tortured artist. A listener should be free to hear sprightliness and resilience in Boggs's songs where another listener hears anguish and darkness and yet another hears all that, or nothing, or something new on each hearing.



Record labels: Brunswick Records, Folkways Records

[razzgospel]

This is one of my favorite albums. I love Bogg's picking.

[Admin]

OK...I've tried to translate your post Patrice. I hope I have done it justice.

For anyone interested in the translation I'm attaching what I did. Patrice, please correct if I've screwed it up. I've omitted the pictures.



Dock Boggs
Legend of the Blues ... white?

Date: May 23, 2001
From: Patrice Champarou <[e-mail]>


Dock Boggs

As noted Gérard Herzhaft, the name "Old Time Music" was first and foremost a commercial label, the mountaineers of Appalachia do not concern more than the "songsters" black give a name to the music they interpret. The diversity of sources from which they borrowed their already well démarquait styles of Irish-English heritage, and the legendary recordings of the twenties were the basis of what was known a few years later under the name of "folk" and of "country music" .

We now know that black artists have greatly influenced the music, the discrimination they were subjected by the record companies were not so blatant among the musicians themselves, and the blues was represented as such in 1927 by some of the first singers "country".

However, the southern Appalachians, near Nashville, which is the cradle of banjoïstes most of the time, seems to remain away from this movement. The most talented ( Clarence Ashley, Bascom Lamar Lunsford ...) will adhere strictly to timeless ballads or songs heavily influenced by the European tradition.

This is why music Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs is exceptional. Disturbing the listener from the first listen, the high-pitched voice, intonations and the conviction of one who was considered one of the most outstanding representatives of this tradition is reminiscent of both what can be known of music "minstrel" and the heartbreaking inflections of the first exponents of rural blues. Boggs singing "as if the bones crossed his skin every time he opened his mouth" , says Greil Marcus .

This approximation is somewhat subjective, of course reinforced by biographical coincidences: like so many others, Dock Boggs led a brief career, recorded a few sides in the first half of the century, and is the subject of a "rediscovery" in the sixties. But the parallelism does not result exclusively from the relative longevity of the singer, or confused enthusiasm which animated the founders of the "folk boom", prompting many "legends" as Son House, Robert Wilkins or Mississippi John Hurt to resume way to the stage and studio.

Born in 1898 , Boggs is primarily a character with exceptional control. The town of Norton can hardly fund the school only three months per year, and the young Morgan entered the mine at the age of twelve years, while continuing his learning to read with a Bible and a dictionary. He patiently climbed the ranks, occupying successively all workstations, and considering music as a hobby incommensurate with a real source of income.

According to Mike Seeger, in this region there was a relative coexistence between blacks and whites, who often found themselves elbow to elbow since mining had supplanted agriculture. Dock Boggs obviously inherited the family musical tradition, but do not hesitate to follow the singer "Go Lightning" and spend weeks in the black community of Dorchester , watching avidly string bands and especially a certain Jim White which he definitely borrows the idea of playing the banjo in "picking" highlighting the melodic line.

This technique is opposed to gambling agreements was certainly in tune with the times, but Boggs will concentrate on playing the melody in unison singing, approach more clearly linked to the blues tradition than its contemporaries.

At twenty, "Dock" married, having set aside the tidy sum of $ 600 and acquired professional status provides an income comparable to that of a foreman. Unfortunately, the fragile health of Mrs. Boggs will force the couple to go back to Lechter , placing Dock in a situation of dependence vis-à-vis his wife's family, compounded by the loss of his job and debt which he seeks to escape through all means.

At that time, popular music traditionally reserved for village festivals and family circle begins to explode dissemination album. Dock has a serious local reputation, his repertoire goes beyond that of an amateur and extends to the blues Sarah Martin . But to get substantial income, he prefers to engage in trafficking contraband alcohol, ensuring at the same time the disapproval of his wife and the condemnation of his wife's family.

This activity also dangerous qu'illicite did not introduce any real change in his life. "Everyone was armed, some shooting in the air as you pull firecrackers on July 4th" , said Boggs, who had himself escaped of little unexpected shot on his doorstep. Having emptied his own gun in the direction of the alleged shooter, Dock was the subject of an attempted arrest, the lawyer did not hesitate to use his wife as a "shield".

This climate of violence contribute to Dock Boggs a man not only outraged by social injustice, arbitrariness and pride of institutions, but also aware of its difference, aspiring to a degree of dignity higher than that were authorized by the condition. Dock Boggs, 1927

In 1927 , he decided to attend an audition in New York, dressed nine feet to the head and very anxious about being confronted with a hundred musicians. The surprise was so great for the minor and self selected for the firm Brunswick , who sought in vain to persuade him to record more than eight sides of this session. As Skip James a few years later, Boggs aware of his talent feared fraud, even though the idea of meeting success allowed him to cherish the hope of finally leaving the mine.

It was obviously not counting the disastrous consequences of the crisis of 1929 . In the meantime Dock Boggs began a musical career, founding the group of Cumberland Mountain Entertainers , but its hard not sold that much where it occurred, and a second session unhooked almost by accident enriches its pre-war production of four other titles, but it was soon missed appointments due to financial, hearings unlikely for firms on the verge of bankruptcy, contacts for which he tirelessly traveled roads, drinking more than reason to despair of his wife until a final opportunity presented in the studios Okeh Dock Boggs paralyzed by fright and unable to leave a note.

Therefore complying with the wishes of his devout wife's family, Dock renounced music and returned to the mine. Mechanization will lead to a wave of layoffs that leave no resources for several years, but that did not prevent him from joining the local religious congregation and devote himself to charity. Dock Boggs, 1964

However, having finally gained his right to retirement, Boggs will quickly recover the pledge banjo left some thirty years ago, and this is a young old man softened by time but still obsessed with his two favorite themes - violence and death - surprised to have never killed anyone with his own hand, modest and proud at the same time, which entrust Mike Seeger and agree to record three albums for Folkways between 1963 and 1966 .

The perpetual tug of Dock Boggs between the Church and the music that is found in many black artists of the time, the brand was not a particularly tortured mind. Anonymous letters from his dear religionists began to flow, accusing him to continue practicing the "devil's music" and welcome in him doubtful young people with long hair. Health fragile Dock, reached silicosis, did not allow him to meet all the proposals together following his rediscovery, and interviews with Mike Seeger, sometimes marked by a state of high intoxication, reveal a man full of contradictions, sometimes amiable, sometimes violent, but also much more humanist revolt that Mance Lipscomb [see LGDG No. 25 ] , not considering themselves better or worse than another, but energetically demanding the right to respect. He died in 1971 , the same year that the firm Folkways which allowed him access to the fame finally cease its activities.

Blues singer, Dock Boggs? The stylistic point of view, it would obviously an exaggeration. Despite the power of his voice, somewhat nasal tone has nothing in common with that of Charley Patton and his melodic lines very clearly articulated are just around the melismas that are characteristic of the genre.

Yet this conscious imitation, which places the ascents and descents specifically voice over the syllables most relevant, is the same approach as that of blues singers.

His first recording, Sugar Babe is just like Mance Lipscomb version of a "collage" of traditional couplets: All I can do, all I can say, Gonna send you to your next payday Papa (...) Who'll rock the cradle, who'll sing the song, Who'll rocke the cradle when I'm gone?

In addition, we find in his writings the same reflex of ownership, winning the first person immediately regardless of the origin of the song he plays. Even though he has never been in prison or murdered a rival, New Prisoner's Song or Wild Bill Jones are amazing sincerity: I drew a revolver from my side for one poor boy And destroyed's soul (...) My money's in my pocket and my pistol's in my hand, Lookin 'for the man who'll make old Wild Bill stand

In the ballad "Rowan County Crew" which recounts an endless vendetta local, it can not help but insert comments to the address of the listener as if it had been a direct witness of every event: The death of him was dreadful Never Saw Such a terrible sight

Although the term appears rarely in its securities and does not necessarily correspond to a defined structure, Dock Boggs consciously inspired blues. Two of his most outstanding creations, Country Blues and Blues Down South , are at the point marked by the redundancy of the first person Boggs seems whenever relate a personal experience.

Curiously, these two themes are built on eight measures, while his version of the ballad Pretty Polly has in twelve, with repetition of the first verse - introducing incidentally, beside the usual dialogue form, a change of narrator. John Hurt and Dock Boggs

Dock entrust Mississippi John Hurt he regretted not having adopted the guitar, which he appreciated the flexibility. Himself never used capo, but gave his banjo five or six different ways depending on the song he sang.

Exceptional artist, Boggs was certainly not the professionalism of a jovial Uncle Dave Macon and his sincerity imprint of a certain stiffness was far from a false naivety. The morbid obsessions were one of his main sources of inspiration ( "Aw, get out of the graveyard, Dock" says Mike Seeger ...)

One of the most beautiful texts, Oh Death , revolves around a petition which meets a nagging prosopopoeia: What is this That I can see With icy hands taking hold of me? (...) I'll lock your feet so you can not walk I'll lock your jaw so you can not talk (...) Oh Death, oh Death, can not you spare me over 'til another year?

Another common with the blues, this relationship feelings, fears and personal experience does not preclude a degree that humor helps to "distance": Cyclone come for to make it good, Blew the place where my house Stood, Mortgage man cam around he harshly Claimed for the hole in the ground

We find this cynical and disgusted at Woodie Guthrie : "Some rob you with a six-shooter, others with a fountain-pen"

The blues and the music of Dock Boggs join primarily insofar as they contribute to raising the level of awareness and sensitivity to the lives of ordinary people. No more blues in the claim that human dignity is not explicitly expressed, but like the blues, musical inventiveness and narrative, the energetic conviction Dock Boggs are themselves far more than testimony: the affirmation of a social identity.

Discography:
Dock Boggs: Country Blues (1927-1929) Returning 205
Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years (3 CD) Smithsonian SF 40108 A see: Gerard Bremond Herzhaft-Jacques: Guide to country music - FAYARD 1999 Lawrence Cohn: Nothing but the blues - ABBEVILLE PRESS 1994 Websites

[Admin]

Boggs was also widely influenced by blues music. He eventually signed a recording contract with Brunswick Records after auditioning for them in Tennessee. While he recorded a number of songs for Brunswick, he stopped making music after the stock market crashed and his wife fell ill.

He went back to working in the mines until New Lost City Ramblers banjoist Mike Seeger found him in 1963 and convinced him to start playing music again. As a result, Boggs became an influential member of the mid-century folk revival, as his banjo playing was so heavily influenced by the blues.

[Admin]

On Dec. 13, 1963, The Friends of Old Time Music in NYC presented Dock Boggs and John Hurt in concert at NYU. These notes are by Peter Siegel, from Smithsonian Folkways CD SFW40160

[Admin]

Interviews with Mike Seeger - Smithosian folkways

[JamesP]

Interesting:

Corn Bread When I'm Hungry
Dock Boggs and rock criticism

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/11/corn-bread-when-im-hungry/377294/