Alton Stitcher – Everybody’s Tuned To The Radio: Rural Music Traditions In West Georgia 1947-1979 — I Hear A Sweet Voice Calling

There’s “folk music,” and then there’s music actually made — and made well — by some folks. These intriguing and enjoyable CDs put together at the State University of West Georgia focus on the latter.

Everybody’s Tuned To The Radio gathers broadcast performances recorded from WLBB, a lively and imaginative little 250-watt station out of Carrollton, Georgia, along with charming chatter and promos (one by Webb Pierce, another by actress Susan Hayward, a local resident), then adds some home recordings of the same set of Georgia performers for good measure — 33 tracks in all.

A few of these varied twang artists managed to make a bit of a name for themselves, including fiddler Red Tyson, who’d been with the Blue Sky Boys; banjoist Uncle John Patterson, who’d been a partner of country pioneer Fiddlin’ John Carson; and J.N. & Onie Baxter, a harmonious husband-and-wife guitars-and-vocals duo who pioneered bluegrass in the area.

But for more of these practitioners of old-timey, western swing, gospel and more, appearances on this little station and at local events would be about as much stardom as they’d see. Nominated here for “should have been stars,” and a real find, are the Storey Sisters, Nellie and Rhoda, who deliver a charging cover of the Delmores’ “Freight Train Boogie”, a fast fiddle hoedown, and a memorable proto-rockabilly “New Depression Blues”. They also appear as part of Charles Cole & His Southern Kinfolks, nailing some Bob Wills and Roy Acuff tunes.

The charm of such covers is seeing how the semi- and non-pros who knew the tradition adapted them for less pyrotechnic but working, homestyle playing. You remember all over again how much bluegrass has always been challenging music for practiced pros when you hear several turns on Bill Monroe here that strip the songs down to old-time string-band simplicity in order to handle them — which generally works out pretty well. (Of special note is a turn on Monroe’s “Blue Grass Special” by the Akers trio with W. J. Snow, who takes leads on Hawaiian steel — previously no part of bluegrass.)

One of those Monroe adopters, the gentle, deliberate, expressive-voiced millworker balladeer Alton Stitcher, has accumulated enough of a body of work — ballads, gospel, faster tunes too — over the years to warrant his own 28-cut CD. He’d been in a brother act and has been performing one place or another from the ’50s to this day. The songs go back as far as “Froggy Went A Courtin'” and “Old Dan Tucker” through everything from Lulu Belle and Scotty’s “Remember Me When Candlelights Are Gleaming” to the Blue Sky Boys’ “Kentucky” — all with simple acoustic guitar, fiddle and occasional harmonica. He adds some tradition-minded tunes of his own, too, though the tradition is as likely to be country boogie as old story songs. Sweet stuff.