Post by Peter J RossBwahahahahahahahahahaha!
Since when did the /Spot the Dog/ books contain essays?
I'm pretty flexible on what I might call an essay, I reckon.
I might even call /this/ an "essay" although it isn't really, it is really more of an interview, but I read it and want to archive it, since one of the subjects, Henry Parker, just passed away yesterday:
http://appalachian.alt.groups.com.ru/107087-Re_Columbus_Stockade_Blues_newspaper_writeup
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It's "Columbus Stockade Blues," a song beloved by generations of folk
musicians, country singers and bluegrass pickers. The song is a hard luck story. There's a man behind bars, and there's
a woman he can't be with. And maybe, to top it all off, she doesn't
even want to be with him. "Go and leave me, if you wish to," he tells
her. "In your heart you love some other. Leave me, darlin', I don't
mind."
"Columbus Stockade Blues" made famous the unlikely Columbus-based duo
who first recorded it, Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton. Darby gave the
song its weathered, world-weary voice. Tarlton played a slide guitar
in the background, adding a sound that was certainly no stranger to
black blues music but was practically unheard of in white country
songs until then. Tom Darby was born in Columbus in 1884. He was a farmhand and picked up other odd jobs as he could, finger-picking music on his guitar more
or less as a hobby. Jimmie Tarlton, a drifter and son of South Carolina sharecroppers, was eight years Darby's junior. He'd already seen much of the country, traveling with his guitar and buskin' music on sidewalks when he ended
up in Columbus, in 1927.
"For whatever reason, they both claimed they wrote it, and that right
there is probably what drove the wedge between them personally," said
Henry Parker, a Columbus guitarist who befriended an elderly Jimmie
Tarlton when Parker was in his 20s.
Parker thinks they should've simply shared the credit and moved on.
"Look, you both were on it, so why not just let it be a
collaboration?" he said. "Whoever wrote it, it wouldn't have been the
song it was without Jimmie Tarlton playing slide, and I'll have to
give Mr. Tom Darby the credit too, 'cause he sang very well on that
song.
"So that was a collaboration all the way around. It was two
instruments and two voices. They can't get away from that," Parker
said.
Parker met the elderly Tarlton in the mid-1970s, when the former star
and his wife were living in a Phenix City housing project. Tarlton
didn't even have a guitar, so Parker gave him his.
Darby and Tarlton died eight years apart: Darby in 1971 and Tarlton in 1979. They're both buried in Riverdale Cemetery on Victory Drive. -Brad Barnes
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And so it goes...