The CD's accompanying booklet is excellent and consists of many pages of narrative by Bob about his life, background, musical activities, and so on, as well as commentary on each of the tunes. Producer Mark Wilson also contributes an informative afterward. One wonders whether it wouldn't have been better to have given us Bob primarily in the more intimate musical settings, perhaps including three or four tracks of the square dances to round out the perspective - or, alternatively, to have made two separate albums. I must hasten to add, however, that not everyone may be bothered by this combination of formats. I recommend Got a Little Home to Go To to anyone interested in old-time fiddling and dance music, especially that of the Ozarks.
Brief reviews follow below.
These two locally produced cassettes were made to satisfy the urgent requests of local dancers for recordings of Bob's square dance music - the first in 1993 and the second in 1997. As I'm not a square-dancer myself, I have to admit to liking the second cassette better. Inevitably, a recording of a concert band more is likely to bear repeated listening than that of a dance band - it has, after all, been made for that purpose. In her excellent article on Holt, Julie Heningan mentiones that Bob plays faster than his father's generation of Ozarks fiddlers - and both he and Alvie advance reasons for why this may be the case. Certainly, Bob can play at a fierce pace when he needs to, though without loosing the music on the way - and this is reflected to some extent on the dance band tape.