Country's Big Bang, Revisited
By Barry Mazor
Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2011
Even people who know little about the lives of country music pioneers the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers seem to have heard of the historic midsummer 1927 recording sessions at Bristol, the town straddling the Tennessee-Virginia border where Ralph S. Peer, a seminal music producer and publisher, first recorded both acts for Victor Records. (He also recorded 17 others, among them such important early hillbilly stars as Ernest V. Stoneman and Blind Alfred Reed.) The eventual recognition of the Carters as progenitors of country music's more harmonious, domesticated, Sunday-friendly side, and of "Singing Brakeman" Rodgers as the father of country's more individualist, slier, more raucous Saturday-night music, led the Bristol Sessions to be referred to as "The Big Bang of Country Music."
"The Bristol Sessions 1927-1928," a lavish, elucidating boxed set of five CDs and a hardbound book marketed globally by Germany's Bear Family Records. For information on how to purchase yours, contact Birthplace of Country Music Alliance at 423-573-1927.
