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In August 1927 the Carter Family drove all day to Bristol, Virginia - Maybelle heavily pregnant, bouncing over rutted roads in a Model T that A.P. Carter had to repair two or three times on the way. At that first session they recorded “The Storms Are on the Ocean” - one of four Child ballads they would record in all, songs already three or four centuries old when they got to them. The songwriting credit on the record reads A.P. Carter.
Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock,” for the next installment of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic.
The Carter Family and Songwriting Credit
Dave insists the book is not a history of folk music. Nate’s reply is that he is going to use it as one anyway, and Dave’s counter is the best line in the episode: that’s because you made it a history.
The credit question is where it starts. Traditional songs were fair game, because who is going to argue with you? And A.P. and Ralph Peer took the publishing between them, A.P. earning half a penny a record. Dave’s version of learning this is perfect: at fourteen he owned Physical Graffiti, heard “In My Time of Dying” credited to Led Zeppelin, then bought the first Bob Dylan album and found the same song on it, more than a decade earlier. How did Dylan record a Led Zeppelin song in 1962 and not credit them? The answer, in both cases, was royalties.
What makes the Carters worth all this is that they were not raw. Dave’s comparison: the labels realized hillbilly music was the next big thing and started holding open auditions in city after city, so imagine a record company in 1977 calling an open audition for punk bands - and in walks the Moody Blues.
Everyone else is doing anarchy in the hills of Appalachia and the Carters arrive with arrangements. Sara could stop a valley: people would walk across entire valleys if they heard she was singing on her porch on a Sunday afternoon. Maybelle was a great guitarist. And A.P.’s song-hunting partner was Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who went out collecting with him and taught Maybelle a good deal about picking.
Swinging a Child Ballad
Then the tradition goes somewhere nobody expected. In 1938 Maxine Sullivan, fresh from a hit with “Loch Lomond,” recorded a swing-jazz “Barbara Allen”; it was “Loch Lomond” she sang in the 1939 film St. Louis Blues. Dave has to correct Nate mid-conversation - “Loch Lomond” is a traditional Scottish song, not a Child ballad - and that correction is the point: most of these singers could not tell a Child ballad from any other old song, and cheerfully mixed them. “Barbara Allen” is probably the most recorded Child ballad of them all, with the possible exception of “Scarborough Fair,” and what sells Sullivan’s version is a single line: “young man, I think you’re dying,” which she delivers with everything she has.
Across the Atlantic there is Phil Tanner, a Welsh pub singer in his seventies who sang English songs, whose wife ran the pub, and who was “discovered” at a local sing-song and brought to London - where he made the car stop outside Buckingham Palace so he could sing the national anthem at it. The BBC broadcast him in 1949, the letters poured in, and when they went back to Wales to record his whole show they brought a stack of blank discs and ran out, because Phil simply kept going. He died six months later, Britain’s first folk star.
The collectors turn out to be as strange as the singers. Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp’s former assistant, came over to run a summer school at Massachusetts Agricultural College and gave herself a spare month for fieldwork - Montreal, Ontario, Nova Scotia, then a steamer to Newfoundland, armed with pen, paper and a typewriter and flatly refusing to record anybody. She came back with eight or nine local variants nobody had heard anywhere else, of “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” “The Unquiet Grave,” “Matty Groves,” “Long Lankin.” Nate’s phrase for the whole enterprise is a hall of mirrors: collectors would find a singer with a marvelous repertoire and then be disappointed to learn he had a college degree, which disqualified him as genuine folk.
John Jacob Niles was a collector before he was a singer, writing down nursery rhymes and riddles as a child, and set on his course by hearing someone sing “Lord Bateman” while he was out with a surveying party in eastern Kentucky. Then there is his voice. Dave’s first encounter with it was a Newport recording he assumed was playing at the wrong speed, and it took him three listens to decide he did not hate it. Nate is blunter - to modern ears it sounds like caterwauling until you listen closely and realize the man is singing, in a register nobody knew was available. There is also a rumor, which Nate has not heard before, that Niles developed it by singing to dolphins.
And then Burl Ives, who arrives as the safest, blandest pop-folk performer imaginable and leaves with the most complicated legacy of anyone here. He stuck with folk music when an NYU professor told him they did not want any of that around here, and he became a genuine star doing it. He also named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee - the exact opposite of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, who were persecuted for refusing. Dave’s claim is that Ives, more than anyone else in this story, encapsulates what happened to American traditional music after the war.
There is a good argument in the middle of all this about whether the Child ballads belong to America at all. Woody Guthrie barely touched them, and Dave thinks he knows why: they would not serve the work. Guthrie was an entertainer, but also an advocate, and a murder ballad was not going to help. Dave’s answer to Nate’s skepticism is the thesis of the whole series - the ballads may have been written in Europe five centuries earlier, but they lived more vital lives here, particularly in the South, than they ever did in England or Scotland. They are a foundation stone of Americana. Nate concedes the point.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* The Carter Family, “The Storms Are on the Ocean” (Victor, 1927)
* Maxine Sullivan, “Barbara Allen” - the swing version, from the 1939
film St. Louis Blues.
* John Jacob Niles, “The Wife of Usher’s Well”
* Burl Ives, “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife”
This episode originally dropped in 2025.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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