Clarence Tom Ashley - Greenback Dollar

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Music reviews of Greenback Dollar

Music Review: Not what you think it is, but what it is
Rating: 4 Stars

Listen to his banjo playing. Incidentally his instrument is not ODDLY TUNED but played in one of the most popular of the scores of alternate banjo tunings necessitated by the nature of the instrument, tunings well known by banjo players across the country in Ashley's time and our own. He sings ballads hundreds of years old, and blues like Corrine Corrine that had been made popular by black bluses stars like the Mississippi Sheiks. He sings pop songs. He sings in groups whose name and appearance speak to the Jazz Age he was part of such as Byrd Moore and His Hot Shots (in whose publicity picture the cover picture of Tom in a boater comes from).

Ashley, like so many of the other exemplars of this socalled old time music played music that came out of a mix, not a purity, a mixture of then current pop music, the great growth of the blues and other black music--including the blacks who had brought the banjo to the region in the previous century--and the old time ballads.

Ashley isn't that unique. He is good and fun.

What I like here besides the fine banjo playing is his work as a guitar player. When Ashley began to be recorded again in the 1960s (he never went anywhere, it simply took Ralph Rinzler going to a Virginia fiddlers convention and asking for him, just as Dock Boggs was found by Mike Seeger simply looking Boggs up in the telephone book!) he initially believed his arthritis and other problems made it impossible for him to play guitar, though he had always thought of himself as a guitarist first and banjo player second. Most of the recordings he made in the 1960s featured him either singing only or singing and playing banjo. Only in the last year or so of his life did he realize his disability didnt prevent him playing guitar and there are one or two cuts of him playing guitar. It is nice to hear more of old Tom on the guitar here.

Description of Greenback Dollar

Country CDs

• Music > Styles
• Folk
• World Music
• Pop