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	BARBECUE ANY OLD TIME Blues From The Pit 1927–1942 Old Hat CD-1008 If you think barbecue and blues are inseparable today, you should have been around in the 1930s. It was a time when recordings were finally blowing sheet music away as the primary means of selling music. And it was a time when barbecue joints were replacing occasional family and community gatherings as the primary venue in the South for smoked meats, as pointed out in this CD’s liner notes by Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Museum of the New South in Charlotte NC. One of the results of the confluence of these two developments is the 24 tracks by various musicians compiled on Barbecue Any Old Time: Blues from the Pit 1927-1942. —John Morthland, Full Custom Gospel BBQ, September 2011 READ COMPLETE REVIEW This album is meaty and smokin' "Barbecue Any Old Time" has 24 songs about meat. A few years back, Marshall Wyatt was perusing the used compact discs at Reader's Corner in Raleigh - something he does often, as a record collector and record-label magnate. Wyatt came across a compilation with a song by Teddy "Big Boy" Edwards, a Depression-era blues singer. Called "Who Did You Give My Barbecue To? - Part 1," it was a captivating little banjo-blues number from 1934. That inspired Wyatt's newest album, songs about barbecue. The just-released "*Barbecue Any Old Time: Blues From the Pit - 1927-1942" (Old Hat Records) offers two dozen succulent songs about the beloved Southern fare. — David Menconi The News & Observer / The Charlotte Observer September 2011 READ COMPLETE REVIEW* 5 out of 5 stars - Good and Greasy! "You gotta love it. Two dozen vintage blues, boogie and jazz songs about yummy, greasy barbecue, with plenty of thinly-veiled sexual metaphors about "good meat" getting stolen, sold, or given away to "some other guy." A lot of the songs also express a genuine love of barbecue itself -- either way, there's are really fun songs. Included are some of the best blues singers of the 1920s and '30s, folks like Lucille Bogan, Bo Carter, Brownie McGhee, Memphis Minnie, Tiny Parnham, Georgia White -- along with a bunch of more obscure artists who throw themselves into the music with equal delight. Among my favorites are Savannah Churchill's "Fat Meat Is Good Meat," singing the praises of those with a little bounce on their bones, and Bogus Ben Covington's "I Heard The Voice Of A Pork Chop," a kooky tune where he goes to great length to explain why chicken isn't ideal for barbecue, but pig meat is. A great collection... aside from the novelty value, these are also great old-fashioned blues songs, with catchy melodies and great musicianship. A very fun record with the usual high quality audio and scholarship as other Old Hat releases... Highly recommended!" –Joe Sixpack, Slipcue, September 2011

	GASTONIA GALLOP: Cotton Mill Songs & Hillbilly Blues Piedmont Textile Workers On Record Gaston County, North Carolina 1927–1931 Old Hat CD-1007 “In the 1920s, Gastonia and the smaller towns of North Carolina’s Gaston County were thronged with a hundred textile mills. Part-time musicians, drawn from their farms and fastnesses by the prospect of jobs as comber or doffer, formed string bands to play for community events, updating their repertoire to match their new urban life. This pocket of early country music activity is comprehensively unzipped in a compilation of 24 tracks from 1927-31: blackly humorous commentaries by David McCarn like ‘Poor Man, Rich Man’ and ‘Serves ’Em Fine’ – anticipating Woody Guthrie by a decade – interwoven by the Carolina Twins’ uptown strut and the Three ’Baccer Tags’ barbershop smut, and a bright thread of older banjo songs by Wilmer Watts and The Lonely Eagles. Old Hat Records do this sort of thing uncommonly well.” *—Tony Russell, Mojo, March 2010* “The collection is the the first CD celebrating the artistry of Gaston's largely forgotten music scene — a hillbilly Jazz Age that laid the foundation for modern country music.” –Joe DePriest, The Charlotte Observer, December 7, 2009 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “There's a sense of unforced, non self-aware history-making from these rural inventors of early country music. It's a really solid set of tunes and another fantastic release from Old Hat...” –Jay Hinman, High Water Everywhere, January 11, 2010 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “These musicians, who played at picnics, square dances, fiddling contests and union meetings, headed out of Gaston County to Memphis, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina or Johnson City in Tennessee to make records which eighty years later are the precursor of country music and give us an insight into the life, hopes, fears and musical traditions of working people in America’s textile industry.” –Tony Burke, Blues & Rhythm, March 2010 READ COMPLETE REVIEW

	IN THE PINES: Tar Heel Folk Songs & Fiddle Tunes Old-Time Music of North Carolina 1926–1936 Old Hat CD-1006 "In the Pines, which collects songs from the ’20s and ’30s, also shows Southerners wrestling with a fading Dixie as well as with encroaching industrialization into the rural South... The songs on In the Pines present North Carolina as a place desperately clinging to its regional identity in the face of homogenization, urbanization, and growing New Deal nationalism.” –David Dunlap, Jr.,*Washington City Paper, September 26-October 2, 2008* READ COMPLETE REVIEW “At the time of writing, I’ve been listening to this CD for about two weeks and you’d need a crow bar to remove it from my player! In The Pines is a classic album of the very finest old-time music that I can’t praise enough.” –Ken Smith, Red Lick Records, December 2008 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “The level of artistry is consistently high, enough so that you’ll wonder why several of these treasures have remained hidden for so long... Probably the greatest surprise is the lovely “Sweet Freedom” by the Nance Family, a 1931 reading of the anti-slavery anthem that first was immortalized in the Civil War of the 1860s and memorably revived in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Hearing an abolitionist song performed by Depression-era Southern whites is a gentle reminder of the complex social attitudes that characterize the American racial experience.” –Dick Spottswood, The Old-Time Herald, February-March 2009 READ COMPLETE REVIEW

	GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937 Old Hat CD-1005 Groundbreaking Collection of 48 Songs from the Old, Weird America. Five Stars “Fans of Nick Tosches’ Emmett Miller biography, Where Dead Voices Gather, will lap up this extraordinary snapshot of an America that is still shrouded in shadow. Featuring local and travelling musicians to draw the crowds, medicine shows provided one of the prime sources of entertainment for non-city dwellers. Good For What Ails You supplants the Harry Smith collections by surveying the people’s music of the day, some of which sounds like nothing you have heard before. Whether it’s home-made guitar, surreal hoedowns, blackface raps, or just “overdriven folk music,” they’re all here. And the photo of Johnny Watson (Daddy Stovepipe), ready to rock with his harmonica brace, top hat and shiny shoes, is worth the price of admission by itself.” *—Jon Savage, Mojo, December 2005* “This one’s a real doozy! In fact, it’s probably the single most impressive, historically important Americana/old-timey album to come out in the last few years... The material is musically and thematically riveting, and endlessly surprising. So what are you waiting for? This is one of the best records of the year, by far.” —Lawrence Kay, Slipcue, October 2005 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “Marshall Wyatt’s wonderful and impeccably researched 72-page booklet, chockablock with priceless photos, medicine show history, and artist biographies, provides a base of gravitas to the craziest collection of old-time music since Harry Smith’s Anthology.” —Jon Pankake, The Old-Time Herald, March 2006 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “Good For What Ails You dishes up primordial soup... Never have the roots of modern music been more amply defined than they are on these two CDs... Monumental. The best reissue of the year!” —Will Bedard, Ugly Things #24, Summer 2006 READ COMPLETE REVIEW

	DOWN IN THE BASEMENT Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s 1926-1937 Old Hat RCD-1004 “The record up for discussion here is Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s, an absolutely phenomenal, nearly Smithsonian-worthy anthology of old tunes... Everything fits gorgeously, and the record as a whole is an intimate experience, one that feels virtually first-hand. —Matt Wellins, Dusted Magazine, September 19, 2003 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “The Bussard experience is well-documented, but it’s remarkable how ably Down in the Basement conveys it in a portable package. ..As hard as it strives to capture the fetishism of the collector, Down in the Basement is also a whiz-bang bunch of tunes.” *–Glenn Dixon, Washington City Paper, September 5, 2003* READ COMPLETE REVIEW

	FOLKS, HE SURE DO PULL SOME BOW! Vintage Fiddle Music 1927-1935 Old Hat CD-1003 “Black fiddlers typically played with more vibrato and a rougher, fuller, more hornlike tone than their white counterparts; they could be more fearless, even rash, about venturing into the upper register, and their bowing patterns seemed less predictable. In uptempo pieces, their headlong attack sounded unlike the white fiddlers’ rhythmic flow, and their slow blues had a lonesomeness entirely different from the lonesomeness of the white mountain fiddlers’ modal drone... These are master musicians whose voices shouldn’t be lost.” —David Gates, Newsweek, March 29, 2001 READ COMPLETE REVIEW

	VIOLIN, SING THE BLUES FOR ME African-American Fiddlers 1926-1949 Old Hat CD-1002 “It’s one of those revelatory, lovingly produced compilations that makes one ask, ‘Why didn’t someone think of this before?’ and then exclaim. ‘Damn, This is great stuff!’” —Chris Morris, Billboard, June 19, 1999 READ COMPLETE REVIEW “This is as entertaining a collection of American folk music as you’ll find, and the producer Marshall Wyatt has assembled a diverse group of artists, obscure and well-known. He wisely eschews a chronological approach to the material in favor of sequencing it so that you can just throw it on the album anywhere and enjoy it.” —Ed Ward, The New York Times, October 17, 1999 READ COMPLETE REVIEW LISTEN TO REVIEW ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (NPR RADIO ARCHIVE)

	MUSIC FROM THE LOST PROVINCES Old-Time Stringbands from Ashe County, North Carolina & Vicinity 1927-1931 Old Hat CD-1001 “This is a terrific collection... Followers of the New Lost City Ramblers should be particularly delighted to find both a general model for much of that group’s early fiddle-banjo-guitar sound and the source of such oddball tunes as the Woodie Brothers’ woeful ‘Likes Likker Better Than Me’” —Mark Greenberg, Sing Out!, Summer 1999 READ COMPLETE REVIEW