Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia

Down Yonder: The Tanners of Dacula, Smoky Joe Miller, Uncle John Patterson: Skillet Licker Music of the Piedmont [Contains Image Plates]

Down\bnder THE TANNERS OF DACULA, SMOKY JOE MILLER, UNCLE JOHN PATTERSON: SKILLET LICKER MUSIC OF THE PIEDMONT : ORDON TANNER welcomed his old friend Smoky Joe Miller and Uncle John Patterson, the "Banjo King" from Carrollton , into the "oblong concern of a chicken coop" back behind his home on the outskirts of Dacula, Georgia. He had converted it into a music room, and he explained, "We run the chickens off, brought some half-stumps in." "I'm a country boy and feel right at home," said Uncle John. Actually the now-famousbuilding is well fitted out, with a carpeted area at one end for the musicians , old photos and more recent trophies lining the walls, and an assortment of upholstered chairs and two oil-drum wood stoves provided for the comfort of the folks who gathered on Friday evenings to hear Gordon fiddle the tunes he had recorded with his father's renowned string band, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. In these sessions Gordon was joined by his son Phil on guitar and friends of Phil's on bass, banjo, and electric guitar—this group, which they called Skillet Lickers II, was "hard to classify" in Phil's words, as their music had become an amalgam of the old-time style and bluegrass , with some contemporary country ideas thrown in. Yet Gordon kept returning to the ebullient Georgia fiddle-band music that his father and others played on some of the first commercial country, or "hillbilly," recordings back in the 1920s; and this warm Saturday afternoon in 1979 he had set up before our microphones the typical old-time string band, with "one on the fiddle, one on the banjo, and one on guitar," as Uncle John declared. "This is the first time I played with Gordon Tanner, but I played a thousand times with his dad." John was explaining why he had no trouble falling in with the old numbers. He was in typical form, his bare feet patting out a beat, his bare fingers picking and strumming hisold S. S. Stewart, the banjo muted but not dulled by a towel behind the head. Gordon's fiddle began to wail out, then whispered, then chopped out a breakdown rhythm, and he smiled and cocked his head back in a pose reminiscent of his father's old photographs. Joe Miller's guitar line was well salted with runs learned first hand from Riley Puckett, the guitar picker of the original Skillet Lickers—runs that, as Gordon put it, "give you a blood transfusion!" These three veterans of Georgia's great age of old-time string music were putting their lifetimes' experience into some of the finest recordings of that style to come out of the red-clay hills and pine woods of the Piedmont in years. We eventually produced the tapes recorded at this session into an LP for Folkways records (Down Yonder, FTS 31089), and this recording, a half-hour television documentary ("Down Yonder," produced for Georgia Public Television by Clate Sanders), and folk festival performances, were bringing Gordon Tanner much-deserved recognition in his last years. In 1980 Gordon and Phil performed at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife on the Mall in Washington , B.C. In July 1982 Gordon and Phil, along with Joe Miller, appeared at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm, and then Gordon and Phil went up to the Brandywine Festival in Delaware, where Gordon was to have been reunited with Lowe Stokes and Bert Layne, two veterans of the original Skillet Lickers, whom he had not seen in over fifty years. The day before the festival Gordon suffered a heart attack, and two days later he died. The sorrow felt by Gordon's family and musical friends on his passing was to a degree tempered by the knowledge that he had died doing what he loved the most, keeping the old-time music going. 88 Down Yonder G Uncle John Patterson, Gordon Tanner, and Smoky Joe Miller Taking a Break During Recording Session. (Dacula, 1979.) Born in 1916, Gordon Tanner lived most of his life in Gwinnett County, where his father was a farmer, Saturday-night fiddler, and frequent participant in the fiddlers' conventions in nearby Atlanta. Gordon remembered the time in 1924 when he heard his parents discussing a proposition by Frank Walker of Columbiarecords that Gid go up to New York and cut some recordings; Gid...