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That sort of backwoods folk fiddle playing is all but extinct now. Once upon a time in the Appalachias and Ozarks if locals had some free time the men would play violins and the women would play pianos. No electronic entertainment in those days, so everybody knew how to play a musical instrument. When settlers went to California they kept their violins even after tossing out most everything else in the desert. The town of Fiddletown, California, was so named because the miners all kept their violins and would fiddle every chance they got, and visitors to the town noted how the air was always full of fiddle playing.
The story of that song also mimics old Appalachian/Ozarkian folk legends about the Devil appearing to men and offering "gifts" in exchange for their souls. Sometimes the areas where major roads crossed, or "crossroads", were considered portals to Hell and legends abounded of travelers being met with "black dogs" that turned into Satan who then would make his offer.
Yes, @Jumpback, there was quite a bit of intersectioning between black and white folk legends and music, even during the height of Jim Crow starting in 1898 with the destruction of the black ghetto in Wilmington, North Carolina, and lasting until the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. It was a time when a black man could be lynched simply for crossing the wrong set of railroad tracks, but blacks listened to white artists and white kids hacked headphones into record player circuits to play black blues records.
By the early 50s there was so much interest in black music that had become known as "rock and roll" among white kids that record company bosses started searching for a white man who could sing like a black man. The winner of the search was a young white guy from Tupelo, Mississippi, named Elvis Presley.
Any chance we can let this thread continue as a tribute to the late Charlie Daniels instead of a lesson on music?It is completely true that record company bosses gave Elvis black recordings to remake in the form of “Hound Dog” and “That’s Alright”
But Chuck Berry had a completely opposite take on this, playing country music to black audiences to the point where he got ridiculed for being a black hillbilly, until the black audiences realized that this music was actually fun to dance to
Chuck Berry - Wikipedia
“The band played blues and ballads as well as country. Berry wrote, "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it."”
So two of the earliest Rock and Roll hits were a white guy (Elvis) singing a black song, and Chuck Berry’s heavy reinterpretation of a country song into making “Maybelline”
Chuck Berry, who was probably a lot more of an influence on groups like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones was, more or less, a country musician despite being black.
Any chance we can let this thread continue as a tribute to the late Charlie Daniels instead of a lesson on music?