Old-Time Fiddle Tunes And Songs From North Georgia
Decades before rock & roll, the Skillet Lickers blasted through raucous old-time romps that still sound as fresh and edgy as they must've sounded back in the 1920s, when they emerged as hillbilly music's leading artist. Fiddles endlessly blaze and soar over dance calls and raw, down-home hollers while Riley Puckett's guitar work keeps it all anchored. Puckett was probably the first star guitarist of old-time music and his unique, single-string style of rhythm guitar--harmonically fluid but rhythmically adventurous--proved essential to the development of bluegrass, not only for early rhythm guitarists, but later on for lead flat-pickers likeDoc Watson, who enhanced it and moved it to the foreground. The songs, from "Soldier's Joy" to "Cackling Hen" to "Dixie" to "Leather Breeches," fiddlers' standards even then, remain so today thanks in large part to these historic recordings.--Marc Greilsamer