Bessie Jones with Hobart Smith, Ed Young, and friends: Reg'lar, Rolling Under (1959)

Bessie Jones, lead vocal, with Nat Rahmings, drum; Hobart Smith, banjo; Ed Young, fife; and John Davis, Henry Morrison, Albert Ramsay, and Emma Ramsay, vocals. Recorded by Alan Lomax in Williamsburg, Virginia. April 28, 1959. From "Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea," one of five albums commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip. Released in 2010 digitally by Global Jukebox (GJ 1001) and on LP by Mississippi Records (MR 057). Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip ended in October of 1959, but by April of the next year Alan was back recording in the South, this time in the capacity of music supervisor to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's film, Music of Williamsburg. The aim was to recreate the sound of African American music as it might have been heard in Colonial Williamsburg, and, according to a strikingly progressive 1962 press release from the Foundation, "to portray the important contributions of the Negro race to the nation's heritage." Lomax assembled a novel cast, comprised of many musicians he'd recorded several months earlier, and drawn from disparate locales. Ed Young came north from Como, Mississippi, to provide the necessary fife-blowing. Hobart Smith traveled east from Saltville, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with his four-string banjo and a clawhammer technique learned, in part, from an African American. Nat Rahmings, a Bahamian drummer and drum-maker, was brought in from Miami. And the Georgia Sea Island Singers were the vocal group at the ensemble's core. After filming was completed, Lomax wrote, the "musicians stayed on for what turned out to be a day of extraordinary music-making and musical cross-fertilization." Alan had turned up this tune years before, having gone looking for the oldest published black dance songs in Virginia----its references to the drinking gourd evince its slavery-time origin----and he taught it to the group. "I cannot swear to the authenticity of this reconstructed material," Lomax continued. "But the musically conservative Sea Island singers gave it their enthusiastic approval." The Foundation approved of it too, and featured it in the film.