78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South

Chapter Three: Let’s Get This Dance Started

44 Hello, folks, now I’m with you once again. I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old Southern darkey I heard play coming down Decatur Street the other day because his good gal done throwed him down.” It’s April 2, 1927. The speaker is Riley Puckett, sometime Skillet Licker, presently recording solo at Columbia Records’ Atlanta studio on Peachtree Street. But Puckett and his listeners are imagining him out busking on another of his favorite street corners. In adapting folksongs for phonographs,Southern performers often framed records as depictions—but only depictions—of traditional music-making, describing a few activities or interactions from such events to evoke the total experience . Puckett’s brief monologue on “The Darkey’s Wail” (Columbia 15163-D, 1927) illustrates one approach.“Alabama Square Dance” (Broadway 8234, 1929) by his fellow Georgians Chumber, Coker, and Rice—actually mandolinist Archie Lee Chumbler, fiddler Howard Coker, and guitarist Hoke Rice—typifies another.1 As the record begins, Rice casually fingers his instrument, mimicking an impatient audience. Rice [stRumming guitaR]: Let’s get this dance started here, good night! They been out fifteen or twenty minutes. Where’s the musicians at? cokeR: Uh, Archie, he stepped out. Rice: Stepped out? cokeR: Yeah. Rice: Gonna get him a drink, I guess. let’s get this dance staRted Chapter Three “ let’s get this dance started | 45 cokeR: I suppose so. Rice: Well, it’s time he’s getting back in here. cokeR: Well say, big boy, what about you singing a song? Rice: What do you wanna hear,“Alabama Jubilee”? cokeR: Yeah. “All right,” replies Rice, who obliges by flailing his guitar and crooning “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here and it’s a Alabama Jubilee.”Not quite all the gang, but the words are hardly out of his mouth when Coker gushes with relief,“Here he comes now, let’s get started! Where you been, Archie?” Archie’s coming sure enough, and they’re both suddenly drowned out by Chumbler, who stumbles in, violently clearing his throat, hiccuping and slurring drunkenly. chumbleR: Boy, that was fine stuff I had out there. Rice: Fine stuff? chumbleR: Yeah, that was something else, big boy, that was good—, drink I had, hic! “alabama square dance.” Recreation evening at community school under direction of WPa (Work Projects administration) recreational supervisor. coffee county, alabama. april 1939. Photo by marion Post Wolcott. Farm security administration, office of War information Photograph collection, library of congress. 46 | let’s get this dance started Rice: Somebody give you a drink? chumbleR: Oh boy, they didn’t miss it, hic! Rice: Well listen, don’t you drink too much. chumbleR: Oh well, I don’t never drink too much. Rice: No, but we got a dance here to play for tonight. chumbleR: And they don’t make that much, hic. Rice: We just on the second set now. chumbleR: Oh well, that’s all right. What does anybody wanna dance for when we got this—, stuff around, hic? Rice: Well, let’s get started here. What are you gonna play? cokeR: “Rabun Gap.” Rice: “Rabun Gap.” Let her flicker! Launching into an uptempo fiddle tune, the band members simulate a rowdy hoedown, alternating dance calls with shouts of encouragement from their imaginary audience: “Get your partners, boys, get your partners, let’s go.” “Promenade the hall.” “Swing that good looking girl, right then left.” “Swing her all around. Left then right.” “Hear that fiddle boy play!” “Play it, boy, play it.”“Ain’t that good music!”“Swing that girl in red calico. All around and about. Promenade home.” Eventually the music ends, and Coker pipes up in falsetto, “Say mister, you’ll have to excuse me standing on your feet.”“Aw that’s all right,” Chumbler drawls. “I stand on ’em most of the time myself. Fact is, little girl, I wouldn’t mind you staying on ’em.” And there the side ends. Though they have received scant attention, such dramas appeared with remarkable frequency on old-time records. Many were fanciful set pieces deriving more or less directly from the phonograph’s commercial forebears: blackface minstrelsy, the medicine show, vaudeville, and so forth.2 Of greater interest here are items like “Alabama Square Dance,” contrived specifically to re-create live musical events on record. Given traditional dance music’s role in old-time records, reenactments of public...