Rounder is preparing to release a compilation project of John Hartford’s music on September 22.

Entitled, Good’le Days: Essential Recordings, the new CD is part of Rounder’s budget-minded Perfect 10 Series, each of which includes ten tracks from an important Rounder artist. They show the selling price online as $7.99.

How would you like to pick just ten tracks to represent the music of such a legend? Well, here’s what Ken Irwin and Marian Levy came up with…

• Skippin’ in the Mississippi Dew
  
• Gum Tree Canoe
  
• Gentle on My Mind
  
• Lorena
  
• In Tall Buildings
  
• The Vamp from Back in the Goddle Days
  
• Wrong Road Again
• Good Old Electric Washing Machine — circa 1943
  
• Take Me Back to My Mississippi River Home
  
• Old Time River Man

The tracks were taken from recordings Hartford did for the Flying Fish label between 1976 and 1989. They include featured performances from guest artists and frequent Hartford collaborators Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Mark O’Conner, Roy Huskey Jr., Benny Martin, Norman Blake, Vassar Clements and Tut Taylor.

Sarah Hagerman has a a great interview with Tut Taylor up on the Steam Powered Preservation Society web site.

Entitled Snapshots, Tapes and Broken Strings, the article includes a career overview of the noted resonator guitarist who has performed and recorded with John Hartford, Norman Blake, and Clarence and Roland White. Hagerman also touches on Tut’s reputation as a luthier and his association with George Gruhn and Randy Wood.

She also covers the time when Tut teamed up with Hartford, Blake and Vassar Clements to create one of the seminal albums in the history of Americana folks music, John Hartford’s Aereo-plane in 1971.

In the midst of this thriving Nashville scene, Hartford, Blake and Clements decided to form a band – The Aereo-plain Band. The resulting album, Aereo-plain, was a ground breaking record. Steering old time traditions down a freewheeling river, with four great musicians at the helm (who were joined by Randy Scruggs on electric bass in the studio), the album organically and lovingly re-examined Americana with quirkiness and warmth, dancing over the boundary lines between heritage and evolution. Often the best things come when you don’t force them, and the work they did on Aereo-plain is certainly evidence of that, still sounding juicy today when that needle hits the vinyl. The relaxed demeanor of the project was inspired by Hartford’s hands-off bandleader approach.

“John was a creative person,” Taylor describes. “He was creative in writing, I don’t know how many books he wrote, but he did write some books. Creative in his music, completely different. He had more rhythm in his soul than any person I’ve ever known. And he was a very free spirited individual. When we got The Aereo-plain Band together, he just told us to play what we felt – if we felt like playing a song to play, if we didn’t feel like playing, not to play. If we wanted to create something or add something to the song, we had liberty to do that. So I think that was one of the reasons that The Aero-plain Band CD has over the years become such sought after music. Because actually, [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we broke the barrier, we broke the mold. What we were playing was different than anything anybody else had ever played. It was a forerunner of the so-called newgrass movement. We didn’t know that then, that was not in our attention.”

“When all four of us got together we kind of played off of each other,” he continues. “One of us inspired the other and would inform another to play better or to play different or to be inventive, to just let the bars down and go for it. [Hartford] was very enjoyable to work with and it was a great experience. The only sad thing about it, he recorded back then on Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers never did push the album, it never got out there in the marketplace like it should have been. But even then, over the years it’s gained a lot of notoriety.”

Read the full piece at spps.org.

About a month ago, banjoist Jayme Stone put together a special concert tribute to John Hartford, held at the Little Schoolhouse in the Pines in Salina, CO.

Hartford, of course, was both a celebrated songwriter and a genre-shattering live performer who dominated the bluegrass and folk festival circuit in the late 1970s and 1980s. His live show was almost always done solo with John switching between banjo and fiddle to accompany his distinctive baritone voice – with percusion provided by his amplified, non-stop clog dancing.

Stone’s concert outside Boulder on May 22 focused on the great songs Hartford has written, and some traditional songs he recorded. He was joined by Rich Zimmerman on mandolin and vocals, Ryan Drickey on fiddle and vocals, Brad Murphy on guitar, Ian Hutchison on bass, and KC Groves on vocals.

Audio from the show is available for free download from the Steam Powered Preservation Society.

Here’s a taste… the band playing what is surely Hartford’s most popular and successful song.

Photojournalist Phil Zimmerman has released a book of his photos taken during the early days of the bluegrass festival era. Bluegrass Time: A Musician’s Photographs of the Early Days of Bluegrass Festivals contains 95 photos taken between 1972 and 1984 in a 64 page book.

The perspective of the book focuses on the time when a new generation of musicians were taking bluegrass in new directions while many of the early pioneers were still active – and performing on the same festivals.

Phil has kindly agreed to allow us to display several images from the book.

     In addition to these, he includes photos of first generation heroes Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Lester Flatt, Don Reno, Curly Ray Cline, Kenny Baker, Tex Logan, the Lilly Brothers, Don Stover, Buddy Spicher, Paul Warren, and Joe Stuart.Representing the new blood are shots of the Country Gentlemen, J. D. Crowe and the New South, Sam Bush and New Grass Revival, Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Doyle Lawson, Tony Trischka, Marty Stuart, Bela Fleck, Emmylou Harris, Frank Wakefield, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Bill Keith, Vassar Clements, and Butch Robins.

Bluegrass Time includes a foreword by Rhonda Vincent, an introduction by bluegrass historian Fred Bartenstein, and extensive captions about the performers featured in the book. It is available in softcover for $25 from Phil’s web site, where you can also see several more images from the book.

The publication of the book coincides with the opening of a year-long exhibition of full size original prints at the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, KY. There are 52 prints in this solo exhibition, all of which Mr. Zimmerman has donated to the museum’s permanent collection.