Yeah ... I just can't enjoy that kind of thing ......

That's how they sounded....Nice beards though!

Outside of that one stumpkicker linked (and several others like it) there's some interesting (and weird) stuff in that playlist, and some good performers (Merle Travis - with an all girl band, Dorothy Dandridge, Hoagy Carmichel and others). Some nice guitars too. Here's one for you, Old Scratch: youtu.be/zo69AyBLI9g?is=R2dAhXFqKHMIh6EL
Carson Robison was very influential in the NYC "old time" recording business in NYC in the 1920's as a songwriter, singer, guitarist and whistler. I think he's playing his namesake guitar here.
Some obscure songs too "Going to the Barndance Tonight" became the theme song for Don Messer's TV shows, Lani McIntyre's "Hawaiian War Chant" was later recorded by the Ventures, and I remember Martin, Bogan and Armstong singing "They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree."
Some very strange ones too. Dorothy Dandridge singing "Cow Cow Boogie" in a Cotton Club style review but set in an all black Western saloon, and a very strange medley of "Oh! Susannah" by the Charioteers that ends with a cakewalk straight out of a 1900 Edison film.
Not in the playlist, but there are one or more early "soundies" of Jimmy Rodgers too, so they're not all useless.
Plus, the new generation of YouTube "influencers" (like Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber) are now presenting some of this stuff as "rare" documentary footage that illustrates their startling "new truths."

They’re a bit like YouTube shorts. Some pretty great musicians are represented there. The costumes are sometimes a bit hokey, but they’re tame compared to the sequined abominations of the 60s and 70s. The exaggerated beards, accents, overalls, and mannerisms were supposed to be humorous, something I think a lot of people seem to have forgotten. Jack Benny had segments in that style on his show. In those days, performers were still not that far removed from vaudeville, and some of them had had successful careers in that style that they translated into further success on the silver screen.

Old Scratch - Here's one as corny as they come, except the singer, Cindy Walker, wrote "Blue Canadian Rockies" for Gene Autry, and many other hits, including this one: youtu.be/zAAYvm04WnI?is=hZXL18ZhWB5C76Zw
A lot of the performers in these films were active on the West coast (naturally) and well known at the time. Fun to see some of them.

Love 'em desperately!

There are three key links in this thread. The posters of these bits of content are a repository of esoteric media. I thought actual surgery videos were the craziest YouTube content. Not so! Someone must be bulk-digitizing old films. Or it must be easier now, than it once was. Early sixties local advertising commercials that were thought to be disposable? Think again. Wow!

Thinking about it more, I find it rather odd that the Hollywood depiction of rural music is described as hokey as though the original form wasn’t itself pretty hokey. I agree that the costumes and accents are over the top, but that seems to me to be the point—it’s all about entertainment. Old Time and country band music is really not that different. People easily forget that the people who made the early recordings often wore all kinds of costumes themselves. Just look at pictures of the Hillbillies or Eck Robertson. Apart from the visual aspect, performers used skits, banter, and their instruments to convey a sense of entertaining humor. These things were an important part of the tradition. Since the days of the original Old Time recordings, many bands and players have incorporated elements into their own personas. Some modern Old Time bands have copied the mannerisms outright to maintain the sense of showmanship and many players still wear stage costumes. In Bluegrass, there’s a bit of this as well; a lot of bands once copied the look of the early Bluegrass pioneers, although now a new stage costume has become popular among younger players: plaid/flannel shirts with jeans and trucker style hats. Country became even more of a stage show as it got more commercial. Earlier country stars leaned into the Western wear, with lots of fringe and cowboy hats, then it went into the Liberace era of bright colors and sequins. In more recent times, it has leaned into copying the style of rock bands.

With all that in mind, I don’t really see how the Hollywood version is any more ridiculous than what everyone was and is doing.

There seems to me to be a desire among some fans of traditional music to put it on a pedestal by calling it an art form and treating it with a humorless seriousness that drains it of all its entertainment. The showmanship of the performers is carefully ignored and the eccentricities of every player are, instead of quirks in their style, treated as essential elements of playing (“it’s not out of tune, it’s deliberate ‘colorful’ intonation,” or “it’s not a thin and scratchy tone, it’s ‘raw’ and ‘authentic’ rural homespun back porch music,” etc.).

The objections to commercial depictions, especially on the silver screen, seem to be rooted in a sense of resentment against musicians who are perceived as outsiders “stealing” the music of the rural hearth and using it to make money. That might be an argument worth considering were it not for the fact that most of the people who originally made Old Time recordings were doing something very similar, and a lot of the nostalgia in the style was deliberately engineered by the record companies that recorded and promoted it. It’s also a bit disingenuous for fans of the music to complain about the music being stolen, when so many of them found the music through commercial recordings and didn’t learn the style through “immersion” as rural players in whatever form of playing they imagine was original. This is one of the elephants in the room for Old Time music—too many of its fans cringe at the word “entertainment” and have gone so far to make their own playing unentertaining that they’ve succeeded and driven countless people away from the genre.

When I watch this stuff, I feel the same way I do watching blackface performance. Which is to say, not entirely comfortable. That's just me, I suppose.

quote:

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Originally posted by Old Scratch

When I watch this stuff, I feel the same way I do watching blackface performance. Which is to say, not entirely comfortable. That's just me, I suppose.

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Naw. Hillbillies can call themselves Hillbillies. But you can't call them Hillbillies. And that's as far as I can take this train before it jumps the tracks.