[Renfro Valley Bluegrass Festival]

A series of performances at the Renfro Valley Bluegrass Festival in Kentucky.

00:20Copy video clip URL The first song performed by Charlie Monroe with his band. “I Know My Lord’s Gonna Lead Me Out.” 

03:10Copy video clip URL Second song, an upbeat instrumental. Charlie requests “Give us somethin’ in the Key of A, James.”

05:23Copy video clip URL Monroe starts to say goodbye until the crowd starts yelling for him to sing “one more.” He relents and introduces a final song saying that it’s “a favorite of mine”: “I’m Old Kentucky Bound.”

08:16Copy video clip URL Emcee Doug Green thanks Charlie Monroe as Monroe exits, and brings out Charlie Moore. Moore introduces his first song. 

09:07Copy video clip URL First song, a fast-moving, upbeat love song called “Your Love Is Like a Flower.”

11:05Copy video clip URL Banter about records for sale and introducing the next song, a song they wrote “about an old boy that they had up in court in Anderson County, South Carolina for none support a while back. They’d had him up several times before and the judge got tired of him coming up before him so many times and he says, ‘Son, I’m gonna see to it from now on that your wife gets $30 every week.’ The old boy says, ‘That’s pretty good of you judge. I’ll try to slip her a few dollars… myself.’ He didn’t do it. He ended up on what we call the ‘chain gang.’ We wrote this song, it’s called ‘The 90 Day Blues.'”

11:58Copy video clip URL Second song, “90 Day Blues.”

14:03Copy video clip URL Moore introduces the band: Danny Proctor on bass, Curly Lambert on mandolin, Ben Green on guitar, Warren Blair on fiddle. 

16:10Copy video clip URL Third song, a high-speed instrumental called “The Orange Blossom Special”

18:50Copy video clip URL Chubby Wise joins the band, playing fiddle for an instrumental joined mid-way. “That’s one of the old favorites. I like that. Thank you.”

19:55Copy video clip URL Chubby’s first song, a waltz that he “helped to put together. I wrote the melody on this and our buddy Clyde Moody wrote the words on it. It turned out to be kind of a standard country waltz. I feel pretty sure you’ve heard it”: “Shenandoah Waltz.” Moore sings while Wise plays lead fiddle. 

22:00Copy video clip URL Second song, the words written by Butterball Paige, that Wise has “rearranged into a bluegrass style”: “The Convict and the Rose.”

24:54Copy video clip URL Wise introduces the third song by telling his band, “Let’s pep it up a little bit. Give me key of D, boys!”, a short instrumental called “8th of January”

26:08Copy video clip URL Wise: “Well, it’s hymn time and I’ve had a request to do a thing I played here once, or might be twice I don’t know, but as long as you folks enjoy ’em and ask for ’em, that’s just how many times I’ll play ’em. ‘Cuz I love to play the old hymns and this is one more that I had out on the Stoneway Label.” He points out the van selling records “just by the welfare Cadillac” and jokes, “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t need the money myself. Lord, I got enough money… to last me the rest of my life. Yeah, providin’ I die before breakfast.”

27:00Copy video clip URL Fourth song, “Precious Memories”

29:23Copy video clip URL Wise introduces the next song, “I’ve got some friends that live next door to us there in the motel, Mr. and Mrs. Powell. And boy he asked me to do something that I ain’t tried to play in 100 years…. Silver Thread Among the Gold? Silver Thread Among the Gold!”

29:54Copy video clip URL Fifth song, “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” 

31:09Copy video clip URL “One of our most requested numbers whenever we’re at the bluegrass festival and I’m very grateful because this record has been very good to me. Put a few beans in the pot.”: “Maiden’s Prayer

33:47Copy video clip URL Wise exits, thanked by Charlie Moore. “He put the blues in bluegrass music there.”

33:55Copy video clip URL Emcee Doug Green introduces Mike Seeger

34:53Copy video clip URL Seeger’s first song, a driving, tongue-twister children’s song played solo on banjo, Uncle Dave Macon’s “Cumberland Mountain Deer Chase.”

37:46Copy video clip URL Seeger’s second song, played solo on “the old time fiddle” with “open G tuning.” It’s “the kind of tune you win a fiddle contest with in West Virginia. Wilson Douglas and French Carter would win. I just learned from those two men. I wouldn’t win one in West Virginia”: “Foggy Mountain.”

40:31Copy video clip URL Introduction to Seeger’s third song, an “old blues song” that he learned from a musician in Harlan County, KY. 

41:53Copy video clip URL Seeger’s third song, “There’s Coming a Time When Your Woman Won’t Need No Man.”

45:09Copy video clip URL A “special request,” from Seeger’s son, “one of the oldest of old songs

45:58Copy video clip URL Seeger’s fourth song, a melancholy murder ballad played solo on guitar, “Johnson Jickson.” (This appears to be “Jickson Johnson,” a version of the English folk song “Two Butchers.”)

48:44Copy video clip URL Seeger talks about the festival as an “old time music reunion” that’s a new idea that he hopes will grow quickly, “because there’s lots of different kinds of old time music within country music, and I think that it’s the kind of music that has a long lasting value to it.” He thanks Mac Wiseman and Hal Smith for making the festival happen. 

49:33Copy video clip URL Seeger’s final song, an instrumental played solo on autoharp, “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps.”

40:55Copy video clip URL Emcee Doug Green introduces “one of those living legends I was talking about earlier,” who began recording before the advent of electric microphones, Cliff Carlisle.

52:00Copy video clip URL Carlisle comes out on stage. “That Mike Seeger was out here, plays all them instruments, I hope that some major record company will find that boy and pick him up and give him a chance on a major label. He deserves it.” He strums his slide guitar and exclaims “Where’s my songs?!” before realizing that his music stand is right behind him. 

53:40Copy video clip URL Carlisle introduces his first song with “Well here I go with another ‘un!” It’s a version of “Brakeman’s Blues,” which he first recorded with Jimmie Rodgers in 1930. 

56:05Copy video clip URL Carlisle heckles a young boy in the audience for being skinny. He says he wants to warn the children to “be careful. You see, I’m well packed. I’m not skinny. Now I don’t have to die the death of a skinny man. So be careful that you don’t stay skinny all your life and die the death of a skinny man, ‘cuz that is the most horrible death anybody ever died. It’s bad!” He tells a joke about a man who was so skinny that he fell in between the boards on a bridge and choked to death. 

58:45Copy video clip URL Carlisle sings his second son, a jokey blues song called “Skinny Man’s Blues.”

60:25Copy video clip URL Broadside TV identification card: “Getting Back to the People.” The voiceover acknowledges the cable TV stations it serves, naming Warner Cable in Kingsport and Irwin, Tennessee, “Thank you for helping us grow!”