Almeda Riddle-Granny Riddle's Songs & Ballads

Readers of this blog know that i love american traditional singing and that Granny Riddle is one of the greatest traditional singer of all time. So here's another Almeda Riddle lp for you, after the one i posted last year (Go here). The previous lp was entirely devoted to the Hymns and religious songs that made a big part in Almeda's repertoire but this one includes her versions of well-known traditional ballads and songs, with also a few religious ones. So you'll hear her renditions of "Frog went a courtin", "Tom Sherman's Barroom" (known also as "The unfortunate Rake", "St James Hospital"), "Poor Wayfaring stranger", "Barbara Allen", "Texas Rangers", "The Oxford Girl", "The water is wide" etc...

Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD HERE

Great Big Yam Potatoes (Anglo-American fiddle music from Mississippi)

Here's a great old-time fiddle lp presenting field recordings made for the Library of Congress in 1939. You'll hear the music of 10 old-time fiddlers from Mississippi playing in a beautiful archaic southern syle. On many tracks, the fiddlers are accompanied by someone beating straws on the fiddle neck, an old way of providing a back-up rhythm to fiddle music.

I made a pdf file of the 16-page booklet that goes with the lp, with many photographs, notes on the musicians and the tunes they played and some musical annotations.

Enjoy!

Download here (zip file of the lp cut in MP3 tracks with pdf of the booklet)