Thirty years before some fiddlers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia started recording a new genre of music called “hillbilly,” a Creole of color from the Seventh Ward of New Orleans named Louis Vasnier (1858–1902) beat them to the punch. Recorded in 1891, “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” is the most raucous version of a song that, better known as “Johnson’s Old...
This May, you can hear what only a handful of people have ever heard: the oldest recordings of banjo songs in existence, played by an African American veteran of the minstrel stage, Charles A. Asbury. 4 Banjo Songs, 1891-1897 presents four of the rarest wax cylinders in a beautiful vinyl package. It is a seven-inch 45-rpm disc in a gatefold sleeve, with...