Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio.
Every note of music, every voice that ever stirred the air prior to advent of the earliest sound-recording technology is gone forever. No one will ever hear Chopin playing his nocturnes, or an ancient Greek bard singing of the exploits of the gods as he strums his lyre, or hear the ringing voice of an 18th century Scottish balladeer. Because of a unique confluence of particular circumstances, though, tonight’s featured performer moves the line back – just a bit – and provides a tantalizing window into the pre-recording era sounds of mid-19th century American music.
David Harrison Macon was born in 1870 in Tennessee, the son of a distiller and former Confederate civil war captain. When he was 12 his father purchased Nashville’s Broadway Hotel, a famous hub for an assortment traveling minstrels and vaudevillians, where Macon would soak up hundreds of songs and lyrics and styles from older performers, some of whom had been playing their songs continuously since well before the civil war. After his father was stabbed to death the hotel was sold, and Macon began his 30-some year career as a muleskinner. Hauling goods between the towns of Woodbury and Murfreesboro, he always had his banjo with him as he sung to his mules and entertained passersby. By the time the voluble, musically deft and wisecracking Macon entered an early studio for the first time when he was in his mid-fifties, he was a real-life character, first and foremost; his recordings weren’t carefully-scripted studio creations but rather a documentation, replete with foot stomps and shouts and hollers, of a lifelong entertainer whose sensibility and music had been forged in an earlier era.
This wisecracking, entertaining, human-jukebox known professionally as Uncle Dave Macon takes us as close as we will ever get to hearing the sounds, styles and mannerisms of the US civil war-era music. In this 1926 recording mash up of “A-Monday Was My Courtin’ Day” and the 1844 song “Old Grey Goose”, he avows with a wink that he won’t get drunk no more Way Down The Old Plank Road.
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