Roane County Ramblers – Complete Recordings 1928-1929
Long before country music came to be dominated by guitar-picking crooners, the fiddle was king. Throughout the 1930s, radio barn dance programs, among which the Grand Ole Opry quickly rose to prominence, featured numerous string bands and fiddlers, playing hoedowns and a few old-time songs.
Show fiddlers such as J.E. Mainer, Arthur Smith, Curly Fox and Pappy Sherrill could be heard daily across the southeast playing on the radio and barnstorming across the countryside. Besides being some of the hottest hillbilly fiddlers of their day, they had another thing in common: All were greatly influenced by the playing of a fiddler from Roane County in East Tennessee named Jimmy McCarroll.
McCarroll was a poor and illiterate man who eked out his living as a miner, tenant farmer, prison guard or mill worker. Nonetheless, McCarroll always managed to feed his family, and was always able find ways to play music, in the process leaving an impressive musical legacy.
McCarroll assembled the Roane County Ramblers around 1927. In three separate recording sessions in 1928 and 1929, the band recorded twelve classic sides for Columbia, all of which are included on this disc. While many of their peers focused on vocal numbers, McCarroll and his bunch played string-band instrumentals. The Ramblers featured an unusual instrumental lineup as well — McCarroll on fiddle, with a guitar (or two), mandolin and tenor banjo all providing backup.
McCarroll grew up in a musical environment, learning the old traditional tunes from his parents, both of whom were renowned fiddlers. Despite his firm grounding in that tradition, his specialty became composing new, hot tunes, or reworking old familiar numbers into fiddle showpieces, several of which are included here. (“Johnson City Rag”, for example, is McCarroll’s re-working of “Jordan Is A Hard Road To Travel”.)
His best-known composition may be “Hometown Blues”, cut by Grayson & Whittier (under the title “Going Down Lee Highway”) a year after the Roane County Ramblers had recorded it. The tune was subsequently taken up by Arthur Smith as “The Lee Highway Blues” and later recorded by others, eventually becoming one of the best-known of all fiddle pieces.