OLD HAT RECORDS - Quality Reissues of Vintage American Music

The biography of Blind Blake remains sketchy, but his recorded legacy is rich and his status as a guitar master is unquestioned. Blake’s repertoire of blues and ragtime was showcased by a string of popular releases on the Paramount label between 1926 and 1932. After that, Blind Blake simply vanished from the historical register.

Blind Blake’s music has long been enjoyed by blues enthusiasts through a series of reissues beginning in the LP era. There were gaps in his body of work, however. One disc that eluded collectors was Paramount 13123, recorded at Blake’s penultimate session of January 1932, a time when Paramount’s fortunes were fast crumbling. By then the company was shipping only minuscule quantities of records to select dealers and distributors, and few have survived to the present day.

Paramount 13123 finally came to light in 2007 when it was retrieved from an old steamer trunk in a trailer park in Raleigh, NC, and acquired by Marshall Wyatt of Old Hat Records.

Click on record labels to hear music samples (Windows Media Files).

CLICK HERE to read about the “Trunk Full O’ Blues".

Bob Dylan Talks About The Medicine Shows

Hunt's Remedy “The American medicine show became popular shortly after the Civil War. This was the golden age of those patent medicines I was telling you about before. The medicine show was played on what was known as the kerosene circuit of rural America. The rise of other forms of entertainment and the passage of the 1906 Fair Food and Drug Act made medicine shows obsolete, but you still see their fruits. I mean, think about it. A medicine show offered so-called free entertainment to attract the audiences and then would have intermissions to sell product. Sounds a little bit like TV and radio to me.

Kickapoo Salve “If you want to hear some of the range of music that could be heard on medicine shows, there’s a compilation called Good For What Ails You. I got nothing against downloads and MP3s, but getting this CD with all the pictures and liner notes, well, it’s not as good as having it on the big 12” record, but at least there’s a booklet there, and believe it or not, folks, you can even read it in a power failure—as long as it’s daytime.”

-Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour, “Doctors,” February 20, 2008

CLICK HERE to read about Good For What Ails You.

— UPCOMING PROJECTS —

Old Hat Records is launching a series of anthologies that will highlight the traditional music of the state of North Carolina. The first CD of the series, entitled In The Pines: Tar Heel Folk Songs & Fiddle Tunes, 1926-1936, is due for release in 2008. Second in the series will be Gastonia Gallop: Music of Gaston County, NC, 1927-1931, followed by Crazy Barn Dance: String Bands and Brother Teams on North Carolina Radio, 1933-1941. Other CDs will encompass the state’s pioneer recording artists (including Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis); traditional gospel music (including the groundbreaking recordings of the Biddleville Quintette); and artists under the management of entrepreneur James Baxter Long (including Lake Howard, Blind Boy Fuller, and Sonny Terry). Together, these anthologies will create the most comprehensive survey ever assembled of North Carolina’s vernacular music of the prewar era. Stay tuned for updates.