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If this guy was alive today, he'd be true GL material...

This guy was the great-grandfather of bluegrass music. Credited with the invention of Clawhammer Banjo style and a true misfit.

The North Carolina Ramblers

Charlie Poole and his brother-in-law, fiddler Posey Rorer - whom he had met in West Virginia in 1917 and whose sister he married - formed a trio with guitarist Norman Woodlief called the North Carolina Ramblers. The group auditioned in New York for Columbia Records. After landing a contract, they recorded the highly successful "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues" on July 27, 1925. This song sold over 102,000 copies at a time when there were estimated to be only 600,000 phonographs in the Southern United States, according to Poole’s biographer and great nephew, Kinney Rorer. The band was paid $75 for the session, which would be approximately $1,012.68 in 2014 dollars (Consumer Price Index).

Poole played the banjo. The guitar was played by Norman Woodlief, and later by former railroad engineer Roy Harvey from West Virginia. Fiddlers in various recording sessions were Posey Rorer, Lonnie Austin and Odell Smith.

The North Carolina Ramblers, a banjo-guitar-fiddle trio with Poole's plain-spoken tenor voice in the lead, in great part created the musical templates for two giants: the bluegrass of Bill Monroe and, by extension, the lyrical aspects of the modern country music of Hank Williams. Bill C. Malone, in his important history of country music, "Country Music, U.S.A." says, "The Rambler sound was predictable: a bluesy fiddle lead, backed up by long, flowing, melodic guitar runs and the finger-style banjo picking of Poole. Predictable as it may be, it was nonetheless outstanding. No string band in early country music equaled the Ramblers' controlled, clean, well-patterned sound."


Since these guys worked on the railroad and cotton mills so the timing of the music suggests a familiarity with the cadence of the machines.

 
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