Charlie Poole: You Ain't Talkin' To Me: Charlie Poole And The Roots Of Country Music
Tony Russell, Maverick, May 2005
THE PAST IS another country music: they do things differently there. In a rural school hall, dancers execute their circle-lefts and allemands, the fire in their feet kindled only by a fiddle and a guitar. At a Midwestern county fair, hundreds hush for a cowboy singing songs of the range. To imagine old-time country music in its prime we must first imagine a vast quiet. Few airplanes fly over the fastnesses of Appalachia in 1920. No container trucks shatter the stillness. No ringtones.
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