C'mon Puss--Spotlight on The Old South Quartette

[cripes]

'Ow how
Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
C'mon puss (meow) c'mon puss (meow)
Just a little bit
That's enough of it!'

In August 1928 The Old South Quartette recorded 7 songs for QRS records in Long Island City, NY and invented Doo Wop without knowing it. I'm gonna spotlight my three new favorite songs.



The Pussy Cat Rag is one of the wildest things I've ever heard. It sounds so lascivious. Thing is, it's just a story about an 'old maid sister' who has a lot of cats.

It also turns out that Pussy Cat Rag was originally recorded in 1914 by The Peerless Quartette with Ada Smith. The original is an annoying music hall skit, but in the hands of The Old South Quartette it becomes delightfully perverse.

Ada Smith

It had been 19 years in between studio dates for The Old South Quartette. They had previously recorded 7 songs with their then leader Polk Miller in 1909-10.

Polk Miller was a banjo playing civil war veteran (Confederate) and later a veteranarian. He had a dog named 'Sergeant' who he named a pet remedy company after--yes, what became the 'Sergeant Flea Collar' company.



Polk Miller seemed like a good old fellow. His act Polk Miller & The Old South Quartette toured extensively around the US. We've read stories about the difficulties integrated musical touring acts had in the 1950's, but imagine the problems they faced back in ought nine.

The Bonnie Blue Flag is a rousing example of the Polk Miller sound. This is from a 1909 cylinder.


"I think that Polk Miller and his wonderful four is about the only thing the country can furnish that is originally and utterly American. Possibly it can furnish something more enjoyable , but I must doubt it until I forget that musical earthquake, 'The Watermelon Party'."--Mark Twain

Polk Miller's story is fairly well documented. But it's The Old South Quartette I want to focus on. We don't even have the names of the members except for the tenor James L. Stamper who wrote 'Watermelon Party'. There are two known photos of the group, one from the Polk Miller days, and another from the later years. It looks to me like at least two of the original members remained for the QRS label sides.


The Watermelon Party has everything I want in a song--lyrics about food and a guy with a deep voice occasionally interjecting 'yeahhhh'. I've transcribed some lyrics:

'There's a watermelon party gwine be given here tonight (yeah)
All you darkies won't you come along with me
Be on your good behavior and do not start no fight (yeah)
All you darkies won't you come along with me

They'll be nice rolls, possum, pears, some sandwiches and ham
Some ice cream, mackerel and some huckleberry jam
With vittles and persimmons and some California grapes...

Watermelon nice
Hurry up and cut a slice
Watermelon fine
Hurry up and give me mine
Watermelon nice
Hurry up and cut a slice
All the watermelons
Won't you give it all to me



My absolute fave of this batch is No Hiding Place Down Here, a bouncing toe tapper call and response spiritual that'll make you get right with yourself. Too bad Dylan didn't cover this back in the Chuck n' Larry live years. It would have been the best thing ever.

I swiped the fotos from here. Some great info here too.

[manho]

woulda been a good thread but you fucked up the size of the jpeg.

[Steve]

I like songs about food too. Bob needs a food show.

[david]

Cool mp3s there. Watermelon Party is a gem.

[manho]

"i cannot be persuaded that he is not a genuine negro talking"

yeah right, the guy has a fucking irish accent.

[Steve]

I want 5 stars like cripes.

[cripes]

I can't seem to disable that star/chocolate supreme poster rating thing.

In the meantime, respect my stars.

ETA--the stars and rankings are gone--I'm just plain old cripes again. Rank & file--that's me. Don't think of me as cripes the mod. Think of me as cripes the pal.

[owen]

great stuff. call and response songs are the best. (think of early who)

[cripes]

Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette just got nominated for a Grammy for Best Historical Recording of 2008.

I call a watermelon party.

Remember--you heard it here first.

[manho]

Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll

Gin, shrimp and sobbing women - there's a lost generation of US artists whose lives we can only know from the minutaie they sang about

Laura Barton
The Guardian, Friday December 5 2008


These last few weeks I have been housesitting for someone I have never met. I've used his pans and borrowed his bicycle, I've watered his plants and played his melodica. And when I have been waiting for the kettle to boil, I have looked at the art on his walls, the contents of his kitchen cupboards, the photographs of nameless faces stuck to the door of his refrigerator. I have browsed his bookshelves, and found a small paper-back reprint of the Industrial Workers of the World's Little Red Songbook.

Of course, the most interesting thing has been perusing his record collection: an assembly of field recordings, jug bands, Lead Belly and cafe music from Liberia. Among them I found a brilliant compilation named American Primitive Volume II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939), put out on Revenant Records, the label founded by the late John Fahey and Dean Blackwood.

The liner notes explain that the songs hail from a time when people were recording pretty much anything and everything, and its tracklisting runs with unfamiliar names: Pigmeat Terry, Homer Quincy Smith, The Bubbling Over Five. And so, to listen to its two discs is a little like listening to the contents of someone's pockets. There are tales of gin and Kalamazoo, wax cylinder recordings, warblings, wailings; there are shrimp, bed bugs, sobbing women.

There is a recording by the Nugrape Twins, which begins like an advertising jingle: "I got Nugrape nice and fine/ The rings around the bottle is a-genuine/ I got your ice-cold Nugrape." So far, so soda-pop. But in the next verse it becomes something that hovers between the spooky and the spiritual: "Way down yonder in the promised land/ Run and tell your momma here the Nugrape man/ I got your ice-cold Nugrape." By the time they're propounding grape juice as a cure for the blues, we're bewildered as to whether Nugrape is a drink or a metaphor for God or sex or drugs, or perhaps even music itself.

This is one of only two tracks the twins recorded, set down in Atlanta, Georgia in 1926. Who the Nugrapes were is now lost. We know their names might have been Matthew and Mark, and we know they sang together with one twin lagging just a little behind, as if his voice walks with a limp. Other than this, we know pretty much nothing about them.

What little I already knew about Geeshie Wiley began with the track Last Kind Word Blues, which appeared on the soundtrack to the 1995 documentary, Crumb, and pops up here, too. It's a great ploughed-up song, about love and loss: "What you do to me baby, it never gets out of me," she sings. "I mean to see you, if I have to cross the deep blue sea."

Geeshie (or Geechie) was a blues singer and guitarist, whom Blackwood describes as, "Perhaps the most tantalizing phantom of Mississippi blues." She maybe came from Natchez. She might've played in a medicine show in Jackson. She was possibly discovered by HC Speir, and perhaps was married to Casey Bill Weldon. We have no photographs to accompany her voice, and only a handful of her original 78s exist.

She's here on several other tracks, too - playing with guitarist Elvie Thomas on Over to My House and Pick Poor Robin Clean, recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930. Mostly she sounds tough and rough and raw, many of her songs talking about sex: twisting and tumbling in Eagle On a Half, noting how, "Ashes to ashes and sand to sand/ Every married woman's got a back door man," in Over to My House, and in the strange sexual violence of Skinny Leg Blues, threatening to slit a man's throat, despite being "a little bitty Mamma, baby, and I ain't built for speed".

If we want to know Geeshie Wiley was - who all these revenants were - all we can really do is piece them together from the things they left behind, the Nugrape bottles, the gin and the sobbing women. And for Geeshie, it's that voice, that guitar, those lyrics, that make, I suppose, the musical equivalent of the bookcase and the bicycle, the kitchen cupboards and the photographs on the refrigerator door.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[cripes]

The Nugrape Twins are longtime faves in the Cripehouse.

I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape--The NuGrape Twins