Search - Various Artists :: Bluegrass in the Smokies

Rural Rhythm is proud to release this special new Heritage Collection title, BLUEGRASS IN THE SMOKIES 30 Traditional Classics .

More than three hundred years ago, the Great Smoky Mountains thrilled and exulted the first explorers. A ridge in the southern Appalachians, the Smokies straddle the Tennessee-North Carolina border. They were named for the blue haze that often hangs over them, the result of hydrocarbons from decomposing vegetation trapped in the humidity.

Inevitably, the music changed along with broader culture. During the First World War, British folklorist Cecil Sharp visited the Appalachians and found hundreds of old British songs, many of which were no longer sung back home. In the years after Sharp left, the culture of the Smokies and the southern uplands changed out of all recognition. Radio and the phonograph brought parlor songs, minstrelsy, hymns, jazz, and blues into the area, but the advent of bluegrass music in the mid-1940s came just in time to save many of the old songs, reels, and breakdowns that Sharp had heard. Uncle Jim O Neal, the founder of one of the preeminent bluegrass labels, Rural Rhythm Records, was, in some ways, Cecil Sharp s kindred spirit. He sought to preserve the old songs, although Uncle Jim didn t care whether they came from the old country or were authentic expressions of American life and culture.


The beauty of bluegrass music is that it is simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary. It preserved the old music of the Smokies and elsewhere, but forever changed it in the act of preserving it. And fortunately, some of the Smokies have been preserved as well. Since June 1934, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has preserved and restored this vital part of the southern uplands to the point that we can now see some of what the first explorers and the Cherokee nation have seen and marveled at for one thousand years.


This new collection album contains 30 TRADITONAL BLUEGRASS CLASSICS, (many lost but not forgotten), including East Virginia Blues , Muleskinner Blues , Footprints In The Snow , Uncle Pen , Molly & Tenbrooks , Sunny Tennessee , Wondering Boy , Cindy , Little Maggie , We Can t Be Darlings , by some of the biggest Bluegrass stars during the heyday of Bluegrass Music including DON RENO, RED SMILEY, VASSAR CLEMENTS, HYLO BROWN, EARL TAYLOR, MAC MARTIN, BILL HARRELL, TATER TATE, etc.


Each song was remastered from the original master tapes by Steve Hoffman, (a leading mastering engineer in the High End Audio market). The end results are some of the best sounding authentic Traditional Bluegrass music available today!


BLUEGRASS IN THE SMOKIES 30 Traditional Classics, is a new HERITAGE COLLECTION on Rural Rhythm that takes the BEST OF song masters by BLUEGRASS LEGENDS that will be a must for listeners who cherish Traditional Bluegrass Music !