"Fiddlin'" Джон Карсон: Пионер кантри-музыки

American singer songwriter

"Fiddlin'" John Carson (March 23, 1868 – December 11, 1949) was an American old time fiddler and singer who recorded what is widely considered to be the first country music song featuring vocals and lyrics.

Carson was born near McCaysville in Fannin County, Georgia. He moved to Cobb County in his youth. His father worked as a section foreman for the Western and Atlantic Railroad Company. In his teens, Carson learned to play the fiddle, using an old Stradivari copy violin brought from Ireland in the early 18th century. In his teens, he worked as a racehorse jockey. In 1911, Carson's family moved to Cabbagetown, Georgia, and he and his children began working for the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. Three years later, in 1914, the workers of the cotton mill went on strike for their right to form a union, and Carson had nothing else to do but to perform for a living in the streets of North Atlanta. The convicted killer, Leo Frank, was lynched. On April 1, 1913, Carson performed at the first annual "Georgia Old Time Fiddlers' Convention", held at the Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta, where he came in fourth. But between 1914 and 1922, he was proclaimed "Champion Fiddler of Georgia" seven times.

In early June 1923, Polk C. Brockman, an Atlanta furniture store owner, who had been instrumental in the distribution of records for Okeh Records, went to New York City to work out a new business deal with Okeh Records. Later, in New York, he was asked if he knew of any artist in Atlanta that could justify a recording trip to Georgia. Brockman promised to return with an answer. A few days later, he was watching a movie followed by a silent newsreel at the Palace Theater in Times Square. The newsreel contained footage of Carson from an old time fiddler's contest in Virginia. Brockman wrote in his notebook: "Record Fiddlin' John Carson". On June 19, 1923, Carson made his recording debut in an empty building on Nassau Street in Atlanta, cutting two sides, "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going To Crow." Brockman told researchers in the 1960s that Peer had disliked the singing style of Carson and described it "pluperfect awful", but Peer was persuaded by Brockman to press five hundred copies for him to distribute. (Peer's biographer, Barry Mazor, argues that Peer's dissatisfaction concerned the technical quality of the recording, rather than the music, and that Peer was keen to make more recordings of Carson in New York.) The recording was immediately sold out from the stage of the next Fiddler's convention on July 13, 1923. Carson ceased recording temporarily in 1931 but resumed in 1934, now for the Victor label. Between 1923 and 1931, Carson recorded almost 150 songs, mostly together with the "Virginia Reelers" or his daughter Rosa Lee Carson, who performed with him as Moonshine Kate. Carson's final recordings were done in Camden, New Jersey, for Bluebird Records. In 1935, Carson made a trip to Hollywood, as movie producers were eyeing him as their next big movie star. Along with Rosa Lee, he was to appear in a film called The Mountain Stillers, though this never came to pass. He wrote more than 150 songs in his life, but only nine were ever copyrighted. Carson was involved in several copyright issues with both Okeh Records and other musicians during his active career. He died in 1949 in Atlanta, Georgia, holding his fiddle in his arms, and is buried in Sylvester Cemetery in the East Atlanta neighborhood of Atlanta, where surviving friends and family play music at his grave each year around the anniversary of his birth.

Carson referred to the Ku Klux Klan in "There Ain't No Bugs on Me" ("The night was dark and driz'ly an' the air was full of sleet / m' ol' man join'd the Klu Klux an' ma she lost 'er sheet") and was a regular at Ku Klux Klan rallies. His "Ballad of Little Mary Phagan" helped to exacerbate the anti semitism that was a major factor in the lynching of Mary's accused murderer, Leo Frank. Carson made light of the evolution controversy in "There Ain't No Bugs on Me" when he said: "monkeys swing by the end o' thar tail an' jump from tree to tree thar may be monkey in some o' you guys, but thar ain't no monkey in me".