Metro Pulse/Music/Roane County Ramblers

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What:
A Roane County Ramblers Retrospective with Tom McCarroll, Tammie McCarroll-Burroughs and Luke Brandon

When:
Saturday, Feb. 22, 8 p.m.

Where:
Laurel Theatre

Cost:
$8 general admission, $6 Jubilee Community Arts members, $7 seniors, $4 children 6-12

Offspring of the Roane County Ramblers will commemorate their music

by Joe Tarr

In 1928, four musicians from Roane County traveled to Johnson City and cut four songs for Columbia records. In the next year or so, they would record 12 more songs before fading into obscurity, the way so many string bands of that time did.

The four men—fiddler "Uncle Jimmy" McCarroll, guitarist Luke Brandon, mandolin player John Kelly and banjoist Howard Wyatt—went by the name Roane County Ramblers. Although they never achieved the fame of contemporaries like the Skillet Lickers, the songs they recorded made a big impression on quite a few music fans. Released nationally, their records are now collectors' items.

"It's the most cogent, highly charged hillbilly dance music ever recorded. If I could listen to one dance tune again, it'd have to be by the Roane County Ramblers," says Bob Fulcher, a folklorist and banjo player, who has documented traditional folk music in Tennessee. "Nobody burned it like the Roane County Ramblers and Jimmy McCarroll."

The Ramblers were performing at the birth of the recording industry, when music and culture were about to undergo seismic transformations. And although their music is impossible to duplicate today, they passed much of what they knew to their offspring.

This weekend, two of their children and one of their grandchildren will pay tribute to the Roane County Ramblers at the Laurel Theatre.

Jimmy McCarroll's son, fiddler Tom McCarroll, and his granddaughter, guitarist Tammie McCarroll-Burroughs, will play several songs together. And Luke Brandon's son, Luke, will also play. They will also play original recordings from the Ramblers and show pictures and a brief video.

The younger Luke Brandon actually played with the original Ramblers. He was born in 1928 and his father gave him a ukulele to play. He performed with the group at age 6. He went on to become a successful sessions musician in Nashville, working with Cowboy Copas and Don Gibson.

Both Tom McCarroll and his daughter also started playing instruments at young ages.

McCarroll-Burroughs started playing mandolin at age 4 and moved onto guitar when she got big enough to hold one. She learned a lot of chords from her grandfather, who died in 1985 at the age of 93.

McCarroll-Burroughs was quite fond of her grandfather, who was a coal miner and later a farmer. "He had 13 grandchildren, and I was the only one of the 13 that picked up an instrument," she says. "He and I were big buddies. He also helped teach me play the guitar.

"By the time I was 6 or 7 years old, we were playing musical gigs together," she says. An early career highlight came when the family band had a cameo in the Ingrid Bergman film, A Walk In the Spring Rain, when McCarroll-Burroughs was 9.

Jimmy McCarroll didn't achieve the fame as a fiddler that some his contemporaries did.

"[The Roane County Ramblers] didn't get the reputation as the Skillet Lickers did," says Fulcher, who will host this concert. "But there are people all over the country...who sort of stand in awe of Jimmy McCarroll because his fiddle style is not one that can be as easily adopted as some of the other fiddlers of that generation."

McCarroll's fiddling was filled with "wild soaring moments," Fulcher says. "He could make you jump off a cliff, man. He was a charged up fiddler and always doing something interesting and different."

McCarroll says her grandfather had a story-telling aspect to him. "He had this wonderful piece called 'The Fox Hunt.' It was just a story he made up that he told through the fiddle. You could hear the hound dog baying after the fox through the fiddle, you could hear the mule in the barn, you could hear the hinges on the door squeaking," she says.

McCarroll was also known as a great entertainer, who could do some acrobatic tricks on banjo and guitar, playing behind his back or with one hand in his pocket. Tom McCarroll, now 75, doesn't play quite the way his dad did. "His son has a lot of it in him. But nobody can do it exactly like Jimmy McCarroll," Fulcher says.

Perhaps the elder McCarroll's most famous composition is "Southern No. 111," which is about the train line that ran from Knoxville to Danville, Kty., passing not far from where the Ramblers lived. It was later recorded J. E. Mainer.

There are a number of other Roane County Rambler songs that McCarroll-Burroughs is fond of and eager to play. One of those is "Green River March," a song written by her great-great grandmother, about the removal of the Cherokee Indians from the area. "Every time I hear the song, I picture it in my mind what those folks must have felt watching those people being marched out of the country," she says. "According to my grandmother's story, [my great-great grandmother] was part Cherokee. That's about all we know. She got to stay because she was only part Cherokee. But folks she knew were being removed. She wrote that and passed it on to my grandfather."

When she married, McCarroll-Burroughs "inherited" two grandsons from her husband.

"I'm now trying to pass on the tradition to them," she says.