True enough Ann. My people call it old timey and Mountain Music and Appalacian and I have heard it called traditional. Most of the fiddle tunes we still play fall into this catagory as well, as they date back a hundred years or more.

Since bluegrbutt artists recorded it for the movie, bluegrbutt got a shot in the arm even though the songs are not exactly bluegrbutt! Bluegrbutt comes and goes among the mainstream about every 25 years or so. It will fade just to come back again in about 20 years :)

What was in the movie just touches the edges of this old music. For instance "Oh rest" was done in a traditional acapello vain, but old "4 note" singing was not even touched! Guess the people that remembered how are all dead now. I was 6 or 7 and maybe 8 the last time we went into the mountains to a little church to hear a "4note" singing. That would have been in the mid fifties! Those singers were very old then. "4 note" may be gone forever. But at the time the movie was set in, it would have still been very popular.

If that had been in the movie, it would have been "bluegrbutt" as well LOL! Course some of that stuff was pure traditional black blues. "I'm in the jail house now" is a good example. Recorded in 1910 by an old black guitar player from Mississippi named Blind Blake :)

But as Goose Creek once said, "Man don't live on cornbread alone!".

C YA

Mitch

-- "Come by and sit a spell with me at www.volstate.net-~mitch "