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Chapter Seven: A Corn Licker Still in Georgia
- University Press of Mississippi
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149 Remember, brother,”crows Clayton McMichen,“our fiddling is just exactly like our licker—high, wide, and handsome.” McMichen is addressing Atlanta radio promoter, singer, and Columbia Records A&R man Dan Hornsby, at that moment playing Tom Sly, an Atlanta bootlegger seeking booze for his gin mill. McMichen is playing himself (but so, arguably, is Hornsby): Clayton McMichen, champion fiddler and Skillet Licker, the group’s chief spokesman on their immensely popular fourteenpart dramatic series “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia.” That title’s pun on the name of Georgia’s preeminent old-time fiddle band confirms that, if only in word play, the Skillet Lickers’ downhome music is indeed like moonshine. So are their fiddle records, since in the idiom of the day, “canned corn” connoted both. Their friend and contemporary John Carson made this same point. A few years before, his own groundbreaking records were heralded in an Atlanta Journal article (June 15, 1923) reporting that “‘canned music’ recorded by local musicians will be made for the first time in Atlanta.” When Carson’s initial releases proved successful beyond all expectations—almost single-handedly launching the country-music industry—Fiddlin’ John quipped to Atlanta A&R man Polk Brockman, “I’ll have to quit making moonshine and start making records.”1 That the Corn Licker skits ranked among the best-selling of all old-time records is beyond dispute. Their artistic character is tougher to place, conflating folksongs and fiddling, regional humor, and medicine show farce, tempered by commercial media hype and the techniques of radio theater, then filtered, A Corn LiCker StiLL in GeorGiA Chapter Seven “ 150 | A Corn Licker Still in Georgia 1928 Columbia records catalogue featuring the Skillet Lickers and two of their stars, riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen. John edwards Memorial Foundation/Southern Folklife Collection, University of north Carolina at Chapel Hill. [35.153.170.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:58 GMT) A Corn Licker Still in Georgia | 151 with more than a little self-conscious irony, through outsiders’ stereotypes of fiddle-playing, gun-toting, moonshine-’stilling hillbillies. The same might be said of hillbilly records as a whole, of course. As a matter of fact, it was said, and quite often: in themselves old-time records constantly remark the contradiction inherent in the very idea of commercially processed folk music. We have already met the Skillet Lickers through just such recorded commentaries, as no old-time artists offered more—or more pointed—discussion of this quandary. It should come as no surprise, then, that McMichen’s quip about fiddling lickers is no idle wordplay: whatever else they may be about—making moonshine, for instance—the Corn Licker skits are also very much about making old-time records. Nor is it particularly surprising that their authors would be preoccupied with the curious collaboration of folksongs and phonographs. While all of the Skillet Lickers were well-known local entertainers before recording, the group as such was really an illusion promoted mainly by their records, which concealed a loose, shifting personnel more typical of their community’s casual, ad hoc ensembles than the world of show business professionals. As fiddler and sometime Skillet Licker Bill Shore recalled, “so far as Gid [Tanner] was concerned , anyone who played with him was a Skillet Licker—even John Carson.”2 Not only did they suggest more unity or stability than ever really existed: Skillet Licker records also concealed—but just barely—no little personal and musical friction. In fact, the labels on most of those records never read just “The Skillet Lickers.” Instead, they enumerated the key players in this ongoing drama: “Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers with Riley Puckett and Clayton McMichen.” With banjoist Fate Norris, these three are now popularly regarded as the Skillet Lickers, a latter-day label that is nonetheless more than merely convenient: together, Tanner, Puckett, McMichen, and Norris encapsulate nearly the entire vocational and avocational range of old-time music—and with it the tension they and their musical epoch embodied. That uneasy alliance is even the subject of one of their skits, introducing the fiddle tune “Nancy Rollin” (Columbia 15382-D, 1928). The record begins with that tried-and-true contrivance, the knock at the door.“Ah there’s somebody at the door,” responds McMichen,“let me see who that is.” MCMiCHen: Hello there, Riley! Well, I declare, yes. Gid and all of you, ain’t it? Say, uh, we—, I just had a little argument of what you fellows done. Uh, I wonder...