VA - Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers and Hoss Hair Pullers (2014)

For the traveling recording men of the late 1920s, Arkansas offered enticing pickings. The region was thronged with vigorous, idiosyncratic stringbands. This album carries the listener from the hillbilly music craze of the 20s to the song-based country music of the late 30s. Scarcely more than a decade, but a period, in music as in all American life, of galvanic change. This CD serves as the soundtrack album to the newly-released photograph book, Making Pictures: Three for a Dime by Maxine Payne. All of the photos in this package are from the same cache of photographs taken by the Massengil family in their mobile photo-booth trailer throughout rural Arkansas in the 1930s-1940s. CD Digipak with 32 page booklet/Liner notes by country music scholar Tony Russell/Newly remastered 24-bit audio transfers from the Music Memory archive/Features original 78 RPM recordings made between 1928-1937 It is indeed gratifying to know our program has made so many minds and hearts drift back to the earlier days when all was well, when the hoss hair pullers of old were in due form and all parties concerned were in a receptive mood for tipping of the fantastic toe... My aggregation from this district claim that their music and songs are not suggestive of anything except good and wholesome exercise... So everybody come to the Arkansas Ozarks, where you can eat the best fruit in the world; where home-cured meat is found in the smokehouse and corn and hay in the barn; where you can juice your own cow, feed your own chickens, fish in the wonderful White River, meet these men of the Missouri Pacific and natives, and you will then say, Yes, indeed, you have the most wonderful country in the world. Henry Harlin Smith, March 1926 on Hot Springs radio station KTHS