Brian Harnetty, American Winter (Atavistic)

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Berea College in Kentucky houses a collection of seventy-five years´ worth of audio ephemera made throughout its Appalachian hinterland. When it finally opened its archives to researchers, Brian Harnetty was one of the first through the door. Combing through the tapes, radio broadcasts and oral histories, he wove together a people´s history of the region, holding it all together by seemingly improvising on the piano (and occasionally bringing in harmonium, glockenspiel, banjo, toy piano and zither).

The only performer whose name has a remonte chance of ringing a bell outside the immediate area is Arthur Godfrey, once the biggest star of American radio, singing "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" to soap-opera organ accompaniment. (Originally a patriotic ditty penned in response to Pearl Harbor, today it is mocked for its unbridled jingoism.) The rest of this saga belongs to the comman man and woman.

"The Renfro Valley Barn Dance" promises a cozy, homey evening to its radio audience courtesy of the good folks at the Keystone Steel and Wire Company. People now probably only remembered by their relatives and small regional ensembles like The Pinex Merrymakers and The Girls of the Golden West sing songs handed down through the years still green with the moss of Ireland from whence they came. While one murder ballad is being sung plaintively, an elderly gentleman recounts the story of a real killing - or was it just a bad dream?

World history intrudes now and again, reporting live from Washington, DC, on "the nation´s greatest peacetime lottery" - the FDR administration draft - and other war news, enhancing the current-day listener´s imaginary sense of "being there".

Much of the material sung is typical and wretched fare, like a scrap of "Pretty Polly", one of the region´s most internationally famous murder ballads which came to be a staple of the urban folk scene of the early sixties. The music reflects the hard-scrabble lives of these farmers and miners but is offset by casual chatter from the recording sessions, usually quite upbeat banter that perhaps reveals more about the culture than the songs themselves.

One interviewer asks a fellow about a funeral he attended as a boy and gets a rather macabre tale about guarding a casket out in the rain while the loquacious preacher indoors churns on and on. The story is in fact an object lesson in respect and neighbourliness.

The editing effort must have been herculian and exhausting and the result is an object lesson in itself - in restraint. American Winter is only forty-five minutes long.

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