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Thanks to all for the great discussion so far. I'm going to focus my comments on 1920s and 30s music that I know at least a little about. Others have already pointed out that the instrumentation we associate with the music of southerners, especially fiddle and banjo, was common throughout North America. Then again, Quebec's Isidore Soucy sounds considerably different than Eck Robertson of Texas. Regional fiddle styles certainly are definable. However, I agree that we tend to conflate "Old Time" music with "Southern Music" and that certainly wasn't the case at the time. A better question might be: why did so many Southern old-time musicians get recorded and so few Northern old-time musicians (Mellie Dunham and Uncle Joe Shippee are a few that come to mind)? I certainly believe that southern artists had a wide popularity in the rural North through records and radio. On my trips home to NH I have found 78s of the Carter Family, Fiddlin' Powers, Ernest Stoneman, Eck Robertson, and the Kessinger Brothers, to name a few. Maybe the Southerners simply sold better. But, again, why? I also found the post on Sacred Harp interesting. Most intriguing to me is the fact that by the early twentieth century most Southerners were singing out of song books based on the seven-shape system, not the four-shape Sacred Harp, and these later books of James D. Vaughan, Ruebush-Kieffer, Showalter, etc., probably had far more influence on twentieth century old-time and country performers than the Sacred Harp. Some may not find these later books and their close harmony and gospel songs as musically exciting as the Sacred Harp, but their historical influence is more profound, in my view. Others have already made some very good points on authenticity, which, by its nature, implies an established "canon" of sounds and style by which an artist's music can be measured. As many have already indicated, the sometimes rapid and radical evolution of musical forms makes establishing such a canon dicey, let alone the fact that southern music seems by nature hybrid. Gregg D. Kimball Library of Virginia
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