Old Time Southern Black String Band Music

June 1, 2006

Title: Old Time Southern Black String Band Music
Artists: Butch Cage and Willie B. Thomas
Label: Arhoolie 
Catalog No.: CD 9045
Date: 2006

Butch Cage and Willie B. Thomas were the sons of sharecroppers in Zachary, Louisiana and known by locals as a hot fiddle and guitar combo in the 1950s. Towards the end of that decade, LSU folklorist Harry Oster approached the men to make some recordings—by 1960, they were playing the Newport Folk Festival. The music of Cage and Thomas is hard to categorize—despite the region and instrumentation, there is not as much of the Cajun or Zydeco sound as one might expect. Oster called Cage “a great representative of the now virtually extinct 19^th century fiddle tradition.”

Inspired by a series of religious visions, Thomas was a freelance preacher, but his guitar repertoire included not only spirituals, but blues, mountain music and popular songs. Cage and Thomas made a type of music that mostly fell between the cracks of recorded history, and this CD exemplifies the diversity of sounds that have abounded in Louisiana. It makes you wonder how many styles of Louisiana music went unrecorded and are now lost to us.

Posted by Mack Hagood   

 

 

 

Filed under: Blues, Folk and Country