Charlie Poole – You Ain’t Talkin’ To Me: Charlie Poole And The Roots Of Country Music

Lord knows Charlie Poole deserves a box set; he’s only the father of country banjo, more or less. But at first I questioned whether he deserved this box set. That’s because Poole is on only 43 of the 72 tracks gathered here; the others are by people who influenced him and/or were the source of some of his material, and by people he influenced and/or who did versions of songs associated with him.

I don’t object to this conceptual world-of-Poole approach so much as I initially wondered whether it wasn’t a tad overdone, since it requires excluding nearly 30 of the 1925-30 Columbia sides on which Poole’s reputation is based. Some of the non-Poole material at first seemed more educational than enjoyable. I’d still prefer to hear more of Poole, whose star-crossed life and career was terminated at age 39 by one last drinking binge in 1931. (If you do, too, the four-disc Charlie Poole With The North Carolina Ramblers & The Highlanders — a recent low-budget JSP import organized in a somewhat similar manner but less insightfully — appears to contain nearly all the Columbia sides.) But what’s here is more than enough to make the case for his consistent greatness, and most of the outsider material is sounding less outsider all the time.

The onetime North Carolina textile mill worker is best-known for a sharp, nuanced three-finger banjo-picking style whose mother was indeed Necessity. A drunken bet that he could catch a hard-thrown baseball bare-handed resulted in broken fingers that became permanently arched, and forced him to adapt. Rather than playing banjo in the hard, repetitive and percussive frailing (or clawhammer) style of the African-Americans who first brought the instrument to America, he played it more like a guitar while retaining a solid rhythmic foundation.

Poole was not the first to do so — whites had been slowly but systematically appropriating and redefining banjo for nearly a century, mainly because of its role in minstrel shows. But it took the rise of radio to make that transition a certifiable trend, and Poole arguably had the most early success with it among country stylists. His was a simplified version of Fred Van Eps’ more virtuosic ragtimey style. But simple paid off when Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers sold 102,000 copies of their debut single, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues” b/w “Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister”.

On songs such as “The Letter That Never Came”, he could be downright bluesy, while “There Comes A Time” has an unusual sense of timing I relate to the Hawaiian steel guitarists storming the mainland during this era. Poole’s Ramblers, the best and most prolific version of which was filled out by guitarist Roy Harvey and fiddler Posey Rorer, were tight and precise compared to most string bands, which generally inclined towards the raucous, verging on anarchistic. Compared to, say, Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers, who were equally great in their way, the Ramblers sound rehearsed, their material arranged.

In a sharp, cutting voice that retained vestiges of country nasality and quaver, Poole cut each song as if he’d just discovered it and couldn’t believe his good fortune. Somewhat polished but firmly rooted, he and the Ramblers helped transform country from traditional songs in the oral tradition into commercial, recorded music. (Later, when they recorded a few sides for other labels under pseudonyms, they pioneered twin fiddles and instrumental breaks.)

In all this, Poole’s material was crucial. “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” has become a folk and bluegrass standard, while “Can I Sleep In Your Arms”, a variant on the B-side of that first Poole single, was a #6 hit for Jeannie Seely as recently as 1973. “White House Blues”, picked up by everyone from Bill Monroe to the Holy Modal Rounders to John Mellencamp, might be his best-known song today.

Though Poole didn’t write, he put his stamp on traditional and modern ballads, vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley material, Civil War and parlor ditties, heart songs and mother songs, drinking songs and “coon” songs (which he adapted to his own voice and phrasing, rather than using the exaggerated blackface dialect employed by virtually every other singer of such tunes, black or white). Sometimes he bent them to his will by rewriting lyrics and leaving out verses, whatever worked. He cut “Frankie And Johnny” (as “Leaving Home”), “Cripple Creek” (as “Shootin’ Creek”), “Hesitation Blues” (as “If The River Was Whiskey”), and “Oh Didn’t He Ramble” (as “He Rambled”).

The Depression and Poole’s own self-destructive ways led to a severe decline in sales even before his demise. But eventually his banjo style filtered down through Snuffy Jenkins and Wade Mainer to Don Reno and especially Earl Scruggs. Today, it’s echoed in the work of pretty much every noteworthy banjoist in country, bluegrass and folk music. Whether they know it or not, they’re all singing and picking Charlie Poole.