Mitch's Btown Blog

Take Me to the Land of Jazz – Columbia 15367
AKA, Take Me to the Intersection of Old Time and Jazz
Original Sheet Music

I had been listening to Lowe Stokes for years, as a fiddler in the Skillet Lickers recordings, before I found this 1928 recording of Stokes and his band the North Georgians. In this tune, and several others, they combined their old time fiddle band line up with distinctly jazz/blues tunes and instruments (as did Jimmy Rodgers, who recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1930).

This recording includes a guitar solo break, apparently the first ever recorded, played by either Hoke Rice (Stokes’ regular guitarist at the time) or Perry Bechtel, who went on to a career in jazz, playing guitar and plectrum banjo. I am leaning towards Bechtel as the guitarist on this recording, his jazzy style seems much more like him than Rice, who was more in the Riley Puckett/North Georgia bass run style of playing. In 1929 he recorded over a dozen tunes in his own name, and most of them fall into the Jimmy Rodgers tribute/imitation style. Still Hoke displayed a jazzy side, including clarinet and a jazzy guitar break on his version of Georgia Jubilee. Well done cousin, but it just does not seem up to the playing on Land of Jazz, plus the guitar itself sounds so different than on the Land of Jazz.

The 1919 sheet music is keyed in Bb, but the first two recordings, by Marion Harris and Billy Murray (both 1919) were sung in E, both had the ragtime feel, as does this recent version by the Peachtime Ragtime Society Orchestra in Eb. The Lowe Stokes version is in F, showing some level of expertise on both fiddle and guitar. While a standard jazz key, F is somewhat uncommon for country fiddle, though not as uncommon as Bb! [The one tune So I still vote for Bechtel!]

Here is some biographic information on Lowe Stokes from Document Records, they have a great catalog!

Lowe Stokes may be best known for his fiddling skills as a member of Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, after he joined the hillbilly supergroup in 1927.

Stokes was a bit of a rabble-rouser and ended up in some sticky situations – like the time his bow hand was pretty much shot off in the heat of an argument with a still operator. Losing a hand might seem like a pretty serious fiddling handicap, but frequent fellow Skillet Licker Bert Layne was a shade-tree mechanic and reportedly crafted a temporary hook device (as seen in the picture) so Stokes could keep on fiddlin’. Later photos indicate that he likely had a prosthetic hand fitted to hold the bow. Lowe Stokes was shot at least twice and stabbed once in his touring days, and Layne said that he learned to use that hook like a weapon.

Like fellow Skillet Licker fiddler Clayton McMichen, Stokes’ side projects and musical tastes tended to drift into the realm of string jazz, in what might be described as a hillbilly take on the music of 1920-30’s jazz greats Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang. In October 1928, Lowe Stokes and His North Georgians recorded the quite remarkable “Take Me to the Land of Jazz.” Some sources speculate that the guitar solo belongs to 1920’s Atlanta-based jazz guitarist Perry Bechtel, but others say the improv picking belongs to one of country music’s first flat-pickers, Hoke Rice, especially since he recorded and played with Stokes before and after this session. Either way, the recording is proof that some of the 1920’s Georgia hillbilly acts had much wider musical tastes and skills than commonly known.

If you prefer the pure joy of straight-up hillbilly fiddle novelty tunes, the North Georgians’ “Wish I Had Stayed in the Wagon Yard,” recorded in Atlanta in November 1929, is about as fun as it gets. [Both tracks are available in the Document Records Store for individual digital download and on Document CD 8045]

The recording operations like the Skillet Lickers and the other old time groups were “the side” operations for these musicians, recording units that never ever played anywhere together but the recoirding studios, playing music that the recording industry saw as old time music when each really yearned, especially McMichen really were doing the “old time music” for the money and to answer the dictates of the recording studio, and wished to play more jazz and pop oriented music if they had the chance. It is quite important to realize how many of these bands were purely studio recording bands who never played outside the recording studio and played different music when they had the chance or when they were not in the studio.

It is pretty much the opposite of the general assumption, the recording studios wanted what they saw as “old time” as opposed to the more pop oriented or jazz influenced music many of these folks especially the younger ones wanted to play, or saw as the avenue for them, So many of them in fact had fairly “progressive” aspirations and feel about the music they made which conflicted with the record company people from totally outside the music world they lived in who wanted “product” that they could market as old time.

Chattanooga News (where Lowe lived) reported that Lowe’s hand was mistaking shot off while on a hunting trip with his brother on Christmas day down in Cartesville, GA. News also stated that a Boyd Chapman, a local mechanic rigged up the “contraption” in the pic so he could fiddle in a May 1931 fiddlers contest in Chattanooga.

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So, whaddya think? Hoke or Perry?