Steve Bransford, Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

Chattahoochee Folk Festival
Held in Columbus, GA between 1979 and 1984. Organized by Fred Fussell.

Georgia Grassroots Festival
Held in Columbus 1976-1977. Organized by George Mitchell. Tracks by Lower Chattahoochee artists:"Jews Harp Jump" by James 'Tip' Neal and "The Dog" by Golden Bailey.

Fort Valley State College Folk Festival
Fort Valley State College in Perry County held a Ham and Egg show beginning in 1915. By 1937 an arts festival had begun, and, in 1940, a folk music festival was launched. As Bruce Bastin notes, the magnitude of this event is hard to appreciate: there has never been a comparable example of a black folk music festival run entirely by blacks. W.C. Handy attended the festival in 1944, praising the musicians for "making a new form of music in their own tradition without the influence of radio or records" (Source: Bruce Bastin's Red River Blues, page 74). Gradually, the coordinators allowed for more modern secular numbers to filter into festivals, including songs by Lightning Hopkins and Little Walter, but, in the early fifties, Fort Valley students began to ridicule the folk musicians, so much so that some of the musicians refused to attend. The festival was shut down in 1954. (Note: This festival was held in Perry County, slightly outside the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, but it's likely that some Lower Chattahoochee musicians performed at it. Even if no Lower Chattahoochee musicians performed at it, the Fort Valley Festival is still incredibly important because it was the first festival in the South to feature blues music and was organized entirely by African Americans.)

National Downhome Blues Festival
Held at the Moonshadow in Atlanta, Georgia 1984; Festival Coordinator: George Mitchell; Associate Coordinator: David Evans.

Buck Dancing
"The term 'buck' is traceable to the West Indies, where Africans used the words 'po bockarau', or 'buccaneer,' to refer to rowdy sailors. Eventually the term came to describe Irish immigrant sailors whose jig dance was known as 'the buck.'" (Source: www.dance-teacher.com)

Buck dancing was popularized in America by minstrel performers in the nineteenth century.

"The old-style African-American buck dance consists essentially of a stamp and slip of the weight-bearing foot backward, often with an incidental toe bounce, with the body leaning forward." (from The International Encyclopedia of Dance)

Fife and Drum Music
"...as early as the seventeenth century blacks may have 'picked up' the skills of fife and drum playing from the militia units in New England and the Middle Colonies...During the eighteenth century there are numerous reports of black fifers and drummers." (from David Evans' "Black Fife and Drum Music in Mississippi")

"Thomas Jefferson's slaves formed a fife-and-drum team as their contribution to the War of Independence...Indeed, blacks had often been assigned to play military music in early America; one document tells of a black fife-and-drum corps playing for a Confederate regiment." (from Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began)

Audio:

In Red River Blues, Bruce Bastin provides some excellent information about the Georgia Fife and Drum Group: "Perhaps Mitchell's most interesting discovery was the presence of a fife-and-drum tradition in the country between Waverly Hall and Talbotton, northeast of Columbus. Until recently it was assumed that the tradition of fife-and-drum music was uniquely that of north Mississippi around Senatobia...The similarities of the music of the Senatobia and Waverly Hall groups hints that the music was probably more widespread than appreciated....The Georgia fife-and-drum group was essentially a family band comprising J.W. Jones on bamboo cane fife and his brother James on kettle drum, with the bass drum played by either a younger brother, Willie C. Jones, or a cousin, Floyd Bussey."

Bruce Bastin notes the wide influence of records in Nothing But the Blues: "The traditional folk pattern of passing on music to a younger set was to be enhanced by pure fortuity of circumstance, traditional folk music could be recorded and their records heard by thousands of others, miles away from the home of the recording artist. This enabled a rapid dissemination of music that otherwise could have come only from the slow passage of itinerant artists or the even slower projection of the music from generation to generation."

WCLS and WRBL out of Columbus, Georgia were two prominent blues radio stations from the 1950s through the 1970s that broadcast through the Lower Chatahoochee region. Today, WOKS AM is the only radio station in Columbus with a daily blues programming.