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Before TV and radio, many people made their own entertainment and played music for fun, not profit or fame. John Cohen, a folklorist and founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, met a bunch of these people when he traveled to Madison County, North Carolina in 1963 in hopes of recording old ballad singers. These performers sang old songs (some of them dating back hundreds of years) unaccompanied, just the human voice in all its naked glory.
At the time, ballad singing was dying out. The kids were moving to the cities for better jobs and easier lives. They weren't interested in traditional music. When these performances came out on Folkways in the 60s, it gave the old singers a sense of pride and woke up some of the young folks to the treasure in their own backyards. As Cohen says in his liner notes, traditional singing is still alive and well, and a source of pride for the folks of rural North Carolina.
If the idea of an hour of unaccompanied singing puts you off, start with Dillard Chandler's chilling version of "Matty Grove," a famous tale of infidelity, murder, and revenge. Dillard's razor-sharp tenor ornaments the melody with little yelps and grace notes. He also inserts non-rhyming words into the lyric that add to the musical tension, giving the tale an immediate drama. The 14 tracks that Chandler sings are the soul of this album, stark performances that will knock you flat with their plainspoken power.
Cohen recorded six other singers and they're all as remarkable as Chandler, delivering ballads in a style that combines singing with speaking and a touch of yodeling, usually on the last note of a line, something Hank Williams Sr. incorporated into his style. Berzilla Wallin, 70 years old when she was recorded, sings "Love Has Brought Me Despair" in a resigned voice that makes your heart ache. George Landers performs "Scotland Man," and accompanies himself on banjo with an irregular style the follows the rhythms of his singing. This cut made it onto Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music.
The End Of An Old Song, Cohen's film about Dillard Chandler and the other hill singers, is as stark and lonesome as the songs themselves. Chandler lives in a dark, one-room shack so poorly built the sun shines through the cracks. He tells us that he can't read so he "doesn't fool with the mail box," and that he's gotten by in life on hard work, mostly gardening. The thing that hits you the hardest is the lost weary look on the faces of Chandler and his friends. Even when they're singing they look shell-shocked and expressionless, the result of a life of hard work lived with few, if any, of the conveniences we all take for granted.
The film lacks a narrative thread and stops abruptly as Chandler's hitting on a young woman in a diner while the juke box plays George Hamilton IV's "Tobacco's But An Indian Weed." Cohen got Chandler an invitation to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, but he never got on the bus out of Ashville, the nearest big town. This film and the Dark Holler CD are the only traces he left behind.
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