Sitting on the Dock of the Boggs

 From the Recordings Vault Dept.: Every so often, while browsing through my files, I find a piece that I wrote on spec, or possible, as I suspect is the case with this one, for Metroland. That publication liked to stockpile a cluster of CD reviews and run them some weeks later. If this one ever ran, I have no idea. But the recording it describes is a foundational set for a collection of true American roots music.

                                                                           

EVERY NOW AND THEN a small, seminal stream of music bubbles up amidst the roar of the pop machinery. Thanks to a recent Smithsonian-Folkways re-release, we can again hear the voice and banjo of Virginia-born Dock Boggs, who recorded a series of LPs for Folkways in the mid-60s after working in obscurity in Kentucky coal mines for 44 years.

His repertory comprised songs learned from relatives and recordings, typically old songs that already had transformed in the re-singing, transformed again by Boggs during his early years of playing and singing, and changed once more when he prepared them for these recordings. Old songs like “John Henry,” “Pretty Polly” and even “Turkey in the Straw,” along with many tunes that Boggs assembled from bits of verse and music.

They’re played in a deceptively simple style – typically, Boggs accompanies himself by playing the melody against a style called up-picking, only rarely using the more boisterous clawhammer style. And his singing voice is reedy and strident, wailing with nasal intensity through one mournful ballad after another.

Which is what makes the pleasant effect of these songs all the more surprising. They’re absolutely unaffected, the essence of why we sing. An emotion becomes too compelling for mere words, and suddenly you’re lamenting the death of a friend, or recounting a tale of imprisonment, or imparting an evangelical lesson.

He made a few recordings in the late 20s that enjoyed almost no success until two of them were included in Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. That set was incredibly influential, its primitive urgency fueling the music of rock and folk performers in the 60s. Mike Seeger, of the New Lost City Ramblers, was so taken with Boggs’s music that he found the man, recently retired from coal mining, in a little Virginia town.

Boggs’s hard life and the success he finally enjoyed is a romantic story well documented in the accompanying booklet. The 50 songs on these two CDs were taped at various folk festivals and private homes, many of them with Seeger on guitar. It’s lean stuff, but – just as the annual Dock Boggs Festival has endured for 30 years – this music is not only enjoyable but also adds an essential thread to the complete story of American song.

Dock Boggs
His Folkways Years: 1963-1968
Smithsonian Folkways

– Possibly unpublished, c. 1998